4 / Heteronomy and Its Discontents
“Minzu Regional Autonomy” in Xinjiang
By 1950, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ruled in Xinjiang, the vast region in the northwest corner of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The Uygurs, Turkic-speaking Muslims who today number roughly eight million, claim Xinjiang as their historical homeland; Chinese officials have long considered it part of China. In the 1940s, CCP theorists proposed a system of regional autonomy to give Uygurs (and other non-Han peoples) control over their own affairs, while not compromising China’s sovereignty. Though the Party claimed that the establishment of Xinjiang as a “Uygur Autonomous Region” gave Uygurs unprecedented political sway in the territory they had historically occupied, in fact it minimized their political influence in a number of ways. The chapter documents both the initial structure and the historical development of the system of regional autonomy in Xinjiang and shows how it has diminished, rather than augmented, the Uygurs’ say over their individual and collective lives.
In particular, the chapter demonstrates the success of one of the more obscure intentions of this policy of regional autonomy. To counter Uygur claims that Xinjiang belonged to them, Chinese officials in the Republican period (1911–1949) announced that thirteen different groups, including the Han, had long occupied the territory. After the Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949, CCP administrators adopted this stance instrumentally. In assigning to each of the originally recognized thirteen groups representation in the government and control over some part of the territory, the Party intended to create divisions among the peoples of Xinjiang, thereby setting them up for co-optation by the Chinese state. In this aim it succeeded. There are now substantial antipathies within and among the various non-Han groups, so that the government need not fear a concerted effort by all groups to fight for independence. Yet the tactic also isolated and alienated the Uygurs, still the largest group. In the last two decades, Uygurs have waged numerous protests, peaceful and violent, against the system of autonomy and its attendant ills. The Chinese government has proclaimed Xinjiang peaceful and its inhabitants happy; it has vaunted Xinjiang and the system by which it is governed as a model for the world. Yet episodes of popular protest and violence over the last two decades call this depiction into question. I argue that the system of administration itself, rather than placating popular dissatisfaction with CCP rule, has instead exacerbated it.
HETERONOMY
The Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) was established with great fanfare in October 1955. While, in principle, the Uygurs thereby received title to the entire territory, in reality, they were confronted with a condominium of nested autonomies. The Uygurs occupied a patchwork of lands in the east and south, and they were divided and surrounded by lands assigned to the Mongols, Kazakhs, Hui, Kirghiz, and others. This division of the territory had taken place in a series of steps begun in 1953, and it presented the Uygurs with a fait accompli at the time of the XUAR’s establishment.
The division of Xinjiang into a number of smaller autonomies was a stroke of administrative genius. In parceling out various “subautonomies,” the CCP simultaneously satisfied two goals:to reinforce the idea that Xinjiang belonged to thirteen different minzu1 and to counterbalance the overwhelming political and demographic weight of the Uygurs.2 The political and material interests of each of the other recognized groups were therefore, to a certain extent, aligned with the central government and against the Uygurs. By the end of 1954, more than 50 percent of the area of the (then) province3 had been allotted to autonomous townships, districts, counties, and prefectures. In fifteen out of the twenty-seven units established, the titular minzu constituted less than 50 percent of the population; in Tacheng and Emin County Autonomous Districts, the titular minzu (Daghuor and Mongol) made up, respectively, less than 17 percent and 12 percent of the population. Bayinguoleng, which comprises nearly one third of Xinjiang’s area, was designated a Mongol autonomous prefecture, though Mongols constituted only 35 percent of the prefecture’s population.4 In a recent officially sponsored study of minzu relations in Xinjiang, analysts Mao Yongfu and Li Ling noted that
Kirghiz, Tajik, and other minzu, despite the small size of their populations, nevertheless have their own autonomous prefectures and counties; in those areas, they belong to the self-governing minzu. By contrast, in [those places] the Uygurs have once again become non-self-governing minzu. . . . This is something we must look into diligently.5
Map 4.1 Autonomous Prefectures in Xinjiang
The authors’ apparent surprise at this situation is disingenuous in the extreme; the order of establishment of the autonomies demonstrates that this had been precisely the intention forty years before. But the passage begs the question, in what sense are the various minzu “self-governing”?
One cannot read three sentences into any official text on minzu regional autonomy (minzu quyu zizhi) without encountering the boilerplate expression “dang jia zuo zhu” (masters of their own house), which is what the system of autonomy advocated by theorists and enacted by the CCP since 1949 supposedly makes the non-Han peoples.6 In Xinjiang, the purpose of this system has not been to make the non-Han masters of their own house but rather to keep them in the house. The granting of Uygur influence over affairs in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has taken a back seat to the consolidation of CCP control, as well as to the crushing of any movements advocating independence or even the more modest goal of “real autonomy.”
A Taiwanese analyst, critical of particular policies but still favoring the retention of Xinjiang in China, evaluates the system succinctly:
The leaders of the autonomous regions are essentially all deputed or appointed by the CCP authorities and have a firm grip on power. The system is called “self -government” [zizhi], but in reality it is “we are in charge” [yi wo wei zhu]. At this point, to force separation would not be easy.7
This is not an idle potshot from across the Straits. In a document for internal circulation promulgated in the mid-1990s, CCP strategists used the same phrase in advocating changes in Xinjiang policies: “We must firmly adhere to the principle that we are in charge [and we allow only what is] advantageous to us.”8
The expression “dang jia zuo zhu” supposedly captures the world-historical privileges minzu enjoy under the PRC’s current system. Though advertised as providing autonomy—that is, self-government—to the Uygurs and others in Xinjiang, the system in fact enacts heteronomy, or rule by others.9 Maintaining publicly that power stems from the people, the CCP leadership has always taken pains to extend authority from the top down and has therefore given no quarter to power organized locally. Officials have regarded the Uygurs, as a group, to be politically untrustworthy and have therefore allotted very little power to them.10 The Party leadership has selected and promoted Uygurs to exercise power only in a fashion consonant with CCP goals, and it has reserved the decisive authority at virtually all levels for trusted Han, who have been imported from posts in China proper. In administrative terms, this is a frankly colonial apparatus.
This system of rule has failed to serve the Uygurs in a variety of ways. If Uygurs truly did rule themselves with minimal interference from the central government, local dissatisfaction and anti-Party agitation would be hard to understand and merit little sympathy. Given that the Uygurs are ruled by Han on instructions from the center, that same unrest is quite comprehensible.
Yet political disenfranchisement and economic exploitation are only two of the causes of popular unrest. Cultural pressures, status hierarchies, and ingrained prejudice have proven just as powerful as more obvious forms of oppression in motivating activism. Nor is exploitation or inequality the sole criterion for understanding discontent. Beyond the tangible and measurable goods of daily economic life, intangibles, such as self-respect and a sense of belonging, which cannot (or cannot easily) be measured, nevertheless figure powerfully in popular evaluations of governance.
For the remainder of this chapter, I first discuss Communist Party rule over Xinjiang and the Uygurs since 1949, then analyze Uygur responses to that rule. I attempt to illuminate Chinese minzu policies (minzu zhengce) through a careful reading of the policy texts themselves in order to shed light on what problems Chinese officials believe they confront and what they hope to accomplish. At different times over the last five decades specialists on “minzu problems” have officially pinned their hopes on cultural tolerance, pressure to assimilate, or indoctrination in socialist internationalism to draw Uygurs more firmly into the Chinese fold. For most of that period, the same officials have privately relied upon military force and Han immigration to suppress and then submerge Uygur resentment.
MINZU POLICIES: CHRONOLOGY, 1949–2000
Limited space prevents the recounting of political events in Xinjiang prior to 1949. Two features of the social climate of the Republican period must be noted, however, as they figured prominently in Communist Party leaders’ calculations of strategy. Anti-Han sentiment was deep and widespread among Uygurs, partly as a consequence of decades of harsh, exploitative rule by Han warlords and local officials. At the same time, collective anti-Han sentiment that might have drawn Uygurs and other Turkic peoples (principally Kazakh, Kirghiz, and Tajik) together was counterbalanced by religious, political, and cultural differences of long duration. Turkic peoples had cooperated several times in the twentieth century to establish independent governments—for example, in the Turkish Islamic Republic of Eastern Turkistan (TIRET) of 1933–34, which controlled the southern third of the region from Kashgar, and in the Eastern Turkistan Republic (ETR) of 1944–49, which governed the northwest from Gulja. Yet those governments covered only part of the vast territory of what is today Xinjiang, and they fell apart as much from internal disagreements as from external attacks.11 Anti-Han sentiment posed a challenge to CCP strategists, but antagonisms within the Turkic population provided an opportunity to pit groups against one another and thus to manage that challenge.
Following the “peaceful liberation” of Xinjiang in 1949, the Party demobilized thousands of Nationalist (Guomindang) and People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers and redeployed them on paramilitary farms (later called the Production and Construction Corps, or PCC)12 throughout the province. Having installed a tractable leadership headed by the Tatar Burhan Shāhidi and the Uygur Sāypidin (Saifudin) Āzizi, the Party set about establishing policies for managing non-Han groups.
A generation ago, Donald McMillen captured the central dilemma confronting Xinjiang’s rulers. On the one hand, out of security considerations, the Party had to develop policies that respected the Uygurs’ (and others’) cultural and religious differences—though not, McMillen adds parenthetically, “their right of self-determination”—to avoid provoking popular antagonism. On the other hand, nation-building concerns led to policies such as forced Han immigration and language reforms “designed to undercut gradually the very ethnic and cultural uniqueness which the Party outwardly promised to safeguard. . . .” The ultimate aim was assimilation. According to McMillen, the path chosen by Wang Enmao, who by 1965 was both military commander and first party secretary of Xinjiang, was “to maintain actively the facade of regional autonomy for [the various minzu] . . . while at the same time adopting measures that would gradually [make] them, and the territory they inhabited, unquestionably Chinese.”13
In the early 1950s, these policies were relatively tolerant. The CCP strategy of the “united front” (tongyi zhanxian) counseled the establishment of links with “progressive members” of social and religious elites, which in turn required minimal interference with business, religious practice, or social norms. The Party did, however, gradually take control of religious institutions through the China Islamic Association, as well as through the confiscation of mosque lands and the forcible replacement of religious courts with “People’s Courts.”14
In the same period, the Party dealt uncompromisingly with separatists and those who tried to use religion to stir resistance to Communist authority.15 CCP leaders also inveighed against the evil of “Han chauvinism”: “Han cadres were told to respect the customs and habits of the minorities . . . and to listen to the opinions of their non-Han counterparts.”16 That there would still be official criticisms of (to say nothing of Uygur complaints about) Han chauvinism three and four decades later indicates the message had little effect. There was an obvious tension between placing Han in charge and then telling them not to be arrogant.
By the mid-1950s, as Mao pressed regional leaders to make more sweeping economic changes throughout the country in the so-called socialist tide, the Xinjiang leadership faced resistance to such initiatives. Collectivization required antagonizing the “progressive elites” with which the Party had previously cooperated, and, as would happen many more times, the attempt to mobilize the exploited classes (mostly peasants, in this overwhelmingly agrarian region) against the elites instead drove many Uygurs and others together against the Party. In China proper, Mao invited criticism of CCP policies from the masses in the 1956 Hundred Flowers campaign; the vehemence and volume of the resulting protest shocked the leadership, which then unleashed the Antirightist movement in 1957 to silence the opposition. In Xinjiang, the Antirightist movement quickly turned into an “anti–local nationalist” movement targeting those who allegedly sought to “rule Xinjiang as an independent country” or resist CCP rule. Particularly irksome to Party officials were voices condemning PCC soldier-farmers as “Han colonialists.” Faced with such challenges, the Party reinforced its efforts to mobilize class against minzu interest.17
Mao’s radical Great Leap Forward, begun in 1958, led in Xinjiang to calls for rapid cultural homogenization to accompany and facilitate the Leap. This naturally meant much reduced tolerance for difference. Ethnicity itself became an “obstacle to progress.” The Party stepped up attacks on Islam and other “backward customs.”18
As is widely known, the policies of the Great Leap Forward, in combination with bad weather and the central government’s ill-chosen decision to export grain to meet its debts to the Soviet Union, brought on a terrible famine. Party leaders temporarily prevailed on Mao to restore a more moderate economic course, producing a Thermidor in the early 1960s. The government’s cultural policies in Xinjiang relaxed during this period, as calls for tolerance replaced the earlier emphasis on speedy assimilation.
There were, however, complicating factors. In addition to the Party-mandated population flows, vast numbers of people fleeing famine in the interior of China proper ended up in Xinjiang, driving Han immigration to over eight hundred thousand per annum, its highest level ever, in both 1959 and 1960.19 Many of the refugees were welcomed on PCC farms, provoking increased resentment by Uygurs and others. In 1962, over sixty thousand Uygurs and Kazakhs fled across the border into the Soviet Union, prodded by exasperation with CCP policies and pulled by ceaseless radio propaganda advertising the far superior living conditions on the Soviet side of the border. The central government was already grappling with the Sino-Soviet split. Soviet consular officials had apparently connived in this mass exodus by passing out travel papers that had already been prepared. The flight of so many posed for Xinjiang and central-government officials the frightening prospect of hostile former citizens receiving military training, then assisting in the cause of “Soviet social imperialism” by helping to take Xinjiang by force. In response, the government sealed the border and forcibly relocated thousands of families away from the border zone.20
Minzu policies changed course again in the mid-1960s, with the advent of the Socialist Education campaign and then the Cultural Revolution. Officials appointed to the Cultural Revolutionary Small Group (which replaced the XUAR Party Committee for several years), as well as the initially mostly Han Red Guards, harbored extreme intolerance of cultural difference. In the interior, Red Guards answered their leaders’ exhortation to “destroy the four olds” by burning books and paintings, smashing temples, and the like. In Xinjiang (as in Tibet and other non-Han regions), they targeted non-Han culture; difference was once again seen as backwardness. They destroyed mosques, forced many religious leaders and ordinary Muslims to raise pigs, and frightened the various Turkic peoples into shedding their habitual clothes, adornments, scarves, and hats and donning Mao suits.21
The punishments Cultural Revolutionaries visited on intellectuals betrayed particular truculence toward Uygur culture: the famous linguist Ibrahim Mutte’i was tortured by having the huge volumes of a multilingual dictionary he had helped edit (with full CCP support at the time) dropped on his head.22 Ordinary citizens were not exempt. My informants23 described witnessing men being shaved in the streets, for even beards were interpreted as signs of defiance. A Kazakh woman raising a towheaded Uygur boy dyed his hair black and shaved his eyebrows to avoid persecution. Uygurs meeting each other in the street learned to initiate every greeting with “Long live Chairman Mao” (in Chinese).24
Hard-line policies reached their extreme in the Cultural Revolution. After Mao’s death and the arrest of the “Gang of Four,” Party leaders faced a crisis. The Cultural Revolution had alienated a large segment of the population in China proper and in Xinjiang as well. Resentment was particularly grave among Uygurs and other non-Han people, for whom it had been not merely a political and social assault but a cultural one. To continue the hard-line policies seemed destined to provoke increasing discontent and thus instability. But more tolerant policies, by allowing cultural exploration, freer religious practice, and so forth, might similarly provide opportunities for individuals and autonomous organizations to exploit. Consequently, policies have charted a zigzagging but narrow course between openness and control since then.
In 1980 one of the younger leaders in the Party Central Committee pressed vigorously for openness. Hu Yaobang, soon to be promoted to the post of secretary general, traveled to Tibet to investigate local conditions. He reportedly came back horrified at the poverty of the region. To remedy Tibet’s situation he advocated “genuine autonomy, economic policies suited to local needs . . . the revival of cultural, educational and scientific projects and the phased transfer to the interior of Han officials.” He made similar proposals for Xinjiang in July 1980. At the time, Hu thought Xinjiang presented less of a separatist threat (and was thus perhaps of slightly lesser concern) than Tibet because it lacked exiled religious or political leaders like the Dalai Lama and had no “overseas support” for independence.25
Held responsible for the increasing student and popular demonstrations of 1986, Hu Yaobang was purged in 1987. Former Xinjiang military commander Wang Zhen, who had fought openly with Hu over his proposed changes, now scrapped the more accommodating policies promulgated under Hu’s influence. A Han official siding with Wang is reported to have said, “You give them autonomy and they will only turn around and create an East Turkistan.” The official was disgusted with a proposal to send Han back to China proper and insisted that only “hard-liners like Wang Zhen” could keep Xinjiang stable.26
The conservative leadership of Xinjiang initially sought to block the implementation of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms there, fearing that they would destabilize the region. To many, the pace of the reforms that did come was frustratingly slow. People would still joke wryly in the mid-1990s that although the interior had wholeheartedly embraced capitalism, socialism was still being pursued, if not realized, in Xinjiang. Nevertheless, by 1992 the XUAR leadership had come to an agreement that reform was inevitable. In that year, the popular Uygur official Isma’il Āhmād announced that, responding to the call for reform and openness, the central government would cede more autonomy to Xinjiang. This would include “power [to approve] projects of foreign trade, border control and administrative management.” The reporter covering the story interpreted this also as an attempt to counter the appeal of separatists, particularly in the face of the Soviet Union’s collapse and a March 1992 bus bombing in Urumqi attributed to Uygur secessionists.27
But the Party complemented the loosening of economic policy with political tightening, something that has remained true through 2000. Two central components of that tightening have been the yearly “strike hard” (yan da) campaigns and the periodic attempts to shore up central-government control in each locality under the rubric of “comprehensive management” (zonghe zhili).28 A number of my informants received orders from their work units to take part in comprehensive-management activities in 1997, as the Party fretted about the return of Hong Kong to mainland control. One ardently anticommunist man told me he was simply informed a week in advance that he would be traveling to southern Xinjiang to spend two months singing the praises of the CCP. He was to go from house to house within “suspect” villages, chaperoned by two Han to make sure he passed the right message, patiently correcting people’s misconceptions and erroneous political views. It was, he said to me, like being forced to eat a steaming plateful of pork. Another informant told of being sent more regularly on short trips to areas around Urumqi, again without any choice in the matter. Interviews with a third informant revealed that the strategy did not involve surveillance and propaganda alone. A doctor, she was dispatched for several months (with little warning and no choice) to several poor rural areas to treat patients and pass on the Party line while doing so.29
Not content to limit its efforts at control to domestic policies, the Party has also gone on an international offensive since soon after the Soviet breakup. It has pressured the other members of the “Shanghai Five” (Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Russia, and Tajikistan), as well as Turkey, to crack down on Uygur separatists who are active within their own territories, even demanding (often successfully) the extradition to China of suspected separatists.30
POPULATION
One of the Party’s most effective tactics for “managing” the Uygurs has been, in effect, to pass the responsibility on to another group. Government-sponsored immigration of Han into the region has been a central component of CCP policy in Xinjiang. Between 1950 and 1978, the Party cajoled, induced, or ordered several million Han to move to Xinjiang, many to the PCC farms.31 This increased the Han proportion of the population from roughly 5 percent in 1950 to over 40 percent in 1978. But while moving Han into Xinjiang was relatively easy in the pre-1978 period, making them stay after that time became increasingly difficult.
One of the first major disturbances in Xinjiang in the period after the Cultural Revolution involved Han agitating to return to China proper. During the Cultural Revolution, many Han youths had been “rusticated,” or “sent down” (xiafang), from Shanghai and other major urban centers. Some had already returned home clandestinely, discovering to their dismay that the local authorities were unprepared to find them jobs or housing; their residence permits had been permanently transferred to Xinjiang. In February 1979, Han youths unwilling to return to Xinjiang and other “remote” areas rioted in Shanghai. In late 1980, thousands of resettled Shanghai youths in the town of Aqsu demonstrated to protest both local conditions and the government’s refusal to allow them to return home. The Party responded by dispatching former regional military leader Wang Zhen to stifle the disturbance; Wang “requested” that local units improve conditions for young Han settlers, and he increased propaganda stressing how important the youths were to countering Soviet designs on the region. Nevertheless, emigration topped immigration for the first time the following year.32
The 1990s saw a new wave of immigrants pour into Xinjiang on their own initiative. This was the result of a combination of market forces, state policies that modestly favored the western half of China, and the declining significance of the hukou, or household registration. Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms had enabled farmers to lease land, individuals to strike out in private businesses, and underemployed rural and urban workers to seek jobs in new enterprises. Though both geography and central policies initially encouraged migration to the coastal regions, by the early 1990s, the government had announced favorable land-lease rates and tax abatements in the interior—the so-called west-leaning policies—and labor and capital were being lured to the west. Finally, the burgeoning markets in food, land, and labor had greatly diminished the power of the household-registration system, which tended to fix people in one place. The combined effects were plain to see in the thousands of simply dressed, heavily burdened people pouring out of the Urumqi train station each day, drawn by rumors of land and jobs in the “great northwest.”
The Party’s newest concern is the scarcity of the most desirable kinds of immigrants: educated youths, technical workers, and committed, politically reliable cadres. It has tried a variety of stratagems to remedy those deficiencies, including subsidies to college graduates willing to immigrate and temporary “swaps” of cadres from the Chinese heartland with cadres in Xinjiang. Perhaps most strikingly, the Party announced quietly in April 2000 that it was reassigning one hundred demobilized army officers from China proper to head local CCP branches responsible for “political, legal, military, and recruitment affairs.”33 There is no doubt that the Party also pins high hopes on its 2000 “Go West” initiative (xibu da kaifa), which will pump billions of yuan into infrastructural improvements and business ventures in Xinjiang and neighboring regions, to attract Han immigrants of all types in large numbers.
THE PRODUCTION AND CONSTRUCTION CORPS
The redeployment of demobilized Guomindang and Red Army soldiers in the PCC produced a subtler compartmentalization of sovereignty than that effected by the division of Xinjiang into a number of subregional autonomies. PCC units that were set up along the margins of “troubled” regions, along key road and rail lines, and around transportation hubs enabled the government to control traffic and isolate regions with very modest manpower. Heavy concentrations of PCC farms in Kashgar, Aqsu, and Kumul districts further diluted or counterbalanced the overwhelmingly Uygur population in those regions. Though the PCC was billed as a force to protect Chinese sovereignty in sensitive border regions, the pattern of deployment of PCC units makes plain that defense against foreign invasions was never the principal concern of planners. The concern of first importance was and would continue to be to counteract Uygur agitation for an independent Xinjiang.
The ethnic complexion of the PCC underscores this point. Official historical accounts of the dynastic era refer repeatedly to the “concerted actions of the various minzu to repel imperialist incursions,” implying always that the Uygurs and others felt loyalty to “China.” Though the Party retrospectively trusts the historical loyalty of the non-Han peoples, since 1949 it has left nothing to chance. The efficacy of the PCC is not predicated on further cooperation among minzu groups. It has been overwhelmingly Han since its establishment and even today has roughly 90 percent Han membership. We should note that the PCC was not only completely insulated from local control, it was not even subordinated to the national farming or military bureaucracies; rather, it had its own ministry in Beijing.
Population figures may give an idea of the weight of the organization in Xinjiang. In 1974, the PCC membership reached 2.26 million, or one-fifth of the total population of Xinjiang; this was two-fifths of the Han population in Xinjiang. By 1994, the organization had apparently shrunk somewhat: in that year, the PCC claimed 2.22 million members, of whom 1.96 million, or 88.3 percent, were Han. Han members of the PCC thus constituted 35 percent of the total Han population in 1994.34
The compartmentalization of sovereignty in Xinjiang has given the non-Uygur populations a stake in the status quo. Leaving aside all logistical and military issues, which decisively favor the PLA, were the Uygurs to join together to demand independence tomorrow, they would be opposed not only by the nearly 7 million Han but also by the other Turkic, Xibo, and Mongol groups.
The Party has further co-opted the nondominant groups into the current system through a targeted recruitment that mirrors and reinforces the effects of the territorial compartmentalization. By insisting on a sort of Noah’s ark principle, in which each political organ must include members of all or most of the thirteen “indigenous” minzu, the system dilutes the already meager influence of the Uygurs and gives other groups disproportionate authority in the system.
In these and other ways, the CCP has pursued an effective balancing strategy that pits the Uygurs against other groups. On several occasions, I saw Kazakh policemen exploiting the modest amount of power they enjoyed to make trouble for Uygurs. The Uygurs in those encounters complained that such treatment was typical. Many Uygurs pointed out that Kazakhs have since 1991 taunted them by saying, “We have our own country and you don’t.” I witnessed several brawls between Kazakhs and Uygurs in the college dormitory where I lived. One brawl pitted several dozen Uygurs with chains, metal bars, and stones against a roomful of Kazakhs; it ended only when police intervened.
CADRE RECRUITMENT
Without doubt, the Communist Party has successfully co-opted many Uygurs, as it has members of the smaller groups. Through careful selection, training, and promotion of loyal Uygur cadres, the CCP has added substantial numbers of Uygurs to the government without compromising its policy-making autonomy. Uygurs in regional and local government are frequently called upon to announce the Party’s unpopular policies, thereby blunting the criticism that Han alone rule the region. The recruitment has followed a familiar pattern.
By mid-1961, more than 85 percent of county magistrates and deputy magistrates were non-Han; more than half of the commissioners and deputies at district, prefectural, and regional levels were non-Han. Yet according to McMillen, “The key departments and organs of Xinjiang administration . . . largely remained in the hands of Han CCP members. . . .” Moreover, every government organ and enterprise from the regional level down had a Party official, “normally a Han,” who exercised real control. In October 1965, non-Han comprised 106,000 of 190,000 cadres, or 55.8 percent of the total. However, a closer look at these figures reveals a decided imbalance in distribution: fewer than 10 percent of non-Han cadres were leaders at the county level or above.35
Those numbers would drop dramatically during the Cultural Revolution. A 1985 text presenting the “overall situation” in Xinjiang informs us that over 99,000 of the 106,000 non-Han cadres received damning political “labels” and were dismissed from their positions between 1966 and 1976. By the end of 1983, nearly 100,000 non-Han cadres, now considered to have been “wrongly labeled,” had been reinstated. Their return to official positions and the quickened selection and training of minority candidates for office brought the number of minority cadres up to 181,860, a substantial increase. On the other hand, the text does not cite the percentage figure for 1985 and neglects to inform the reader that despite this vast increase in raw numbers, the percentage of non-Han cadres actually had fallen over ten points, to 43.1 percent. Instead, the text ends on a positive note: after the latest elections, the heads of five autonomous prefectures and the capital, Urumqi, as well as the standing committee of the Xinjiang People’s Congress, were all members of minority ethnicities.36
Even in the era of reforms that began with the downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976, the pattern of non-Han recruitment has been as important as the quantity. One source observes that while there are substantial numbers of Uygurs in both low-level and high-level offices, they are very seriously underrepresented at the middle levels.37 One can draw two inferences from this. First, if the premise of proportional representation is that people belonging to a particular group will be particularly attuned to the needs and aspirations of that group and can therefore work to represent those interests, the configuration in Xinjiang structurally attenuates any representation of Uygur interests at the middle level, making it harder for messages to reach the top level. Second, if we assume (probably not entirely correctly) a model in which officials at each level are recruited from the pool of leaders at the lower level, then the talent pool of mid-level leaders is far too small to enable selection of especially talented leaders for the top level; we can infer that the top leaders are not promoted through the system on the basis of talent but take accelerated trips to the top because of their tractability. In one of the few studies of elite recruitment in Xinjiang, Stanley Toops has attributed the speedy ascents of key Uygur leaders to their contacts:Tömür Dawamät rose as a protégé of Wang Enmao, and Isma’il Āhmād with the support of his patron Sāypidin.38 We do well to remember that Sāypidin had attained top positions because of his support for and identification with the “Han-dominated Party (and its policies).”39
While trotting out a long series of figures on non-Han officials at various levels of government, books that vaunt the system of self-government delicately sidestep the core figure: non-Han Party committee heads are still exceedingly scarce after two decades of reform. Indeed, the percentage of non-Han Party members remains far below the non-Han proportion of the population. In 1987, only 38.4 percent of Party members in Xinjiang were non-Han, though non-Han comprised over 60 percent of the population. And far from increasing, these numbers have only fallen since then. In 1994, the percentage of non-Han Party members had decreased to 36.7 percent.40 To be sure, there are at least two plausible explanations for the low proportions. One is that Han leaders systematically exclude non-Han from the Party. The other is that many non-Han view the Party with antipathy and therefore choose not to join even if invited. Both explanations are consistent with the premise of a Party that is at best indifferent, and at worst hostile, to non-Han interests. My interviews support both conclusions, though the former more strongly than the latter: Uygurs widely believe that as a group, they face discrimination by the Party, and some Uygurs told me privately they had no wish to associate with it.
Uygurs are well aware of recruitment policies. Every year, the class of several dozen Han students learning Uygur at university (among the lowest scorers on college-entrance exams, most are reluctant Uygur-language majors) travel to a Uygur area in the countryside for their practicum, in which they build language skills and learn about living conditions at first hand. Musing on this phenomenon, one rural cadre said ironically that “in the future, these people will be leaders and Party secretaries” [bular kālgūsidā bashliq, shujiy], so that local governments must always take pains with the practicum arrangements.41
Recruitment policies have in a sense dovetailed neatly with the policy on immigration. The Party has clearly hoped that the more Han there are in the province, the less difficult it will be to justify Han predominance in government. Han I interviewed universally approved of recruitment patterns. All Uygurs willing to discuss the matter strongly objected, arguing that the system of recruitment specifically and intentionally deprives Uygurs of the power to exercise any conceivable autonomy.
CULTURE, LITERATURE, HISTORY
On consolidating his authority in 1978, Deng Xiaoping announced a new era by calling for new openness to cultural exploration. In the interior this elicited a wide variety of cultural products, from “scar literature” (shanghen wenxue), to cinema, to Democracy Wall musings. In Xinjiang, Uygur authors began to write novels, essays, and poetry. Themes that had previously been forbidden and perspectives that would have been harshly punished only a few years before cautiously appeared in print. Works exploring the past and conjuring a politicized collective identity—which Justin Rudelson, following Richard Fox, called “nationalist ideology”42—poured forth in the several oases. Over the decade of the 1980s, for example, the poet Turghun Almas wrote a number of historical articles and books claiming (often rather creatively) that the Uygurs had a long history as a “nation” and had established many independent states. Officials initially tolerated these heterodox writings, either from inattention or out of confidence in Deng’s wisdom.
As with so many other facets of minzu policies, this changed after the Baren incident of April 1990, in which several dozen armed Uygurs laid siege to a police station and demanded the end of CCP rule in Xinjiang. A huge rally in Urumqi in 1991 criticized Almas and unnamed others for fanning the flames of Uygur separatism and promulgated a message of renewed control. The leadership of several presses was shuffled, as in the case of the Kashgar Youth Press, or replaced wholesale, as was the editorial board of the journal Kashgar Literature. Since that time, censors have read submissions to journals with close scrutiny; a code indicating the subeditor responsible for each article is affixed to the bottom of the article for quick reference. Novel manuscripts face strict barriers to publication. Even works already published in Chinese, such as the novels of Zhang Xianliang, have been turned down for translation out of fear, in one would-be translator’s words, of the “social effects.”43 Some Uygur intellectuals complain that nothing of quality gets through and that what is published is virtually worthless. The reform-era novels of Abdurehim Ötkür are rare exceptions in receiving great popular acclaim.
Other forms of popular culture also face censorship. Films confront even more stringent limits than texts. Uygur actors must perform in Mandarin, the films are vetted by Han censors, and only then can they be redubbed in Uygur for popular consumption. Audio tapes, whether of poetry or music, meet similar obstacles. It has often happened that allegorical works with hidden or ambiguous messages, and perhaps even works to which listeners attribute meanings not originally intended by their authors, have passed the censors, circulated widely, and then been banned for having “unhealthy social effects.” This was true, for instance, of a two-volume collection of Ötkür’s poems that had previously been published legally but was released as dramatic recordings after his death in 1995; of an anthology of poems (discussed below) with potentially subversive meanings distributed in 1993; and of a long poem titled Dehqan bolmaq täs (It’s hard to be a peasant). A number of famous Uygur musicians have produced tapes with songs they were later forbidden to perform in public.
In sum, the limits placed on Uygur cultural production have convinced Uygurs from various walks of life that the Party will not allow them to speak freely or speak the truth. These people therefore conclude that the Party has much to hide. Once again, the atmosphere of suspicious rancor adds depth to every metaphor, so that readers and listeners attribute extra weight to the subtlest signs of dissent. Where criticism is forbidden, every heretical remark is a triumph.
LANGUAGE
If officials worried from the first about what Uygurs might write or say in popular media, they initially promised broad tolerance toward the language itself. Here, I first consider language planning and script reform and then turn to language use policies. The Party made language planning one of the centerpieces of its minzu policies. Officially, each minzu had the right to develop or reform its own language; at the same time, the Party announced right away its intention to propagate Chinese as the national language. In the early 1950s, Han anthropologists and linguists traveled to non–Chinese speaking regions to document languages and to develop scripts for those peoples that lacked them in order to pave the way for socialist modernization.44 Uygur and the other Turkic languages in Central Asia claimed sophisticated literatures, which had for centuries been written with a modified Arabic script. From an official perspective, the Turkic languages presented two problems: First, Turkic speakers in no way regarded their languages as inferior to Chinese and thus could not be persuaded that attaining modernity entailed shedding their own languages in favor of the latter. Second, as the script of the Koran, Arabic was invested with a religious significance that posed an obstacle to the antireligious aims of the Party. A third problem emerged as the growing rift with the Soviet Union dashed hopes of socialist internationalism and the Chinese government pursued more strongly nationalist policies: the Turkic languages had no regard for political boundaries and thus linked peoples the CCP wanted to separate.
In the mid-1950s, with Soviet guidance, regional leaders mandated a change from Arabic to Cyrillic script for all the Turkic languages, apparently aiming thereby both to enable Turkic peoples to “learn modern science” and to diminish the influence of Islam by making old religious texts illegible to new generations of students.45
Some ambitious planners looked beyond script reform to the wholesale scrapping of the Turkic languages. One of the key elements of the Great Leap Forward in Xinjiang was a call to abandon non-Chinese languages as obstacles to modernization. It soon became clear to provincial leaders, however, that wholesale linguistic conversion would require much more time than expected. Makers of language policy began a program to eliminate foreign (i.e., Russian) loan words in the Turkic languages and to replace them with Chinese terms. The push for all non-Han people to learn Chinese was dropped by the midpoint of the Leap in favor of a new slogan: “Mutual study.”46 Though it would be raised repeatedly in ensuing decades, the slogan never had much effect. For one thing, after the initial fervor of the first Han “volunteers” died down, and as successive waves of far less willing immigrants entered the region, most Han had no interest in learning “local” languages.
Between 1960 and 1962, in direct response to the Sino-Soviet split, language policy again took an abrupt turn. Officials now implemented a change in the script from Cyrillic to Roman, once again with a double goal, though this time to sever textual links to the Central Asian peoples and as part of a longer-term plan to initiate fusion with (romanized) Chinese.47
It was during the early Cultural Revolution that Uygurs and Kazakhs replaced the standard greeting “Salam aläykum,” now regarded as tainted with religious flavor, with the plainer “Yaxshimusiz” or “Jaqsimusiz” [How are you], translated directly from the Chinese salutation “Ni hao.” Language planners pressed for more: one of the oddest products of the Cultural Revolution was a new “hybrid language” consisting of Chinese lexical items—principally slogans and political terms—with Uygur grammatical endings. Though at the time, it flourished in newspapers, at rallies, and in the language of activists, this hybrid ultimately proved infertile and died out by the late 1970s.48 Soon enough, the script reforms were abandoned as well. Though the Party had proclaimed the conversion to Roman script as permanent, it reinstated the Arabic script in 1980 as part of its bid to regain the loyalties of those alienated by the Cultural Revolution.49
Policies on language use would seem, in principle, to provide more latitude for compromise than those on economics, governance, and even culture. The Party initially fulfilled its promise of broad linguistic tolerance. Since the establishment of the Uygur Autonomous Region in 1955, Xinjiang has had two official languages—Uygur and Chinese. In the first decade, Uygur could be heard in government bodies, all documents were translated, and (many) Han officials endeavored to learn some Uygur. Han college students studied Uygur as a required course. But the campaigns of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution banished the previous linguistic tolerance. The great mass of Han immigrants, too, altered the language map of the region. By the mid-1970s, the Han population had nearly reached parity with that of the Uygurs. New immigrants had little inclination to learn Uygur, nor did the government press them to do so. In the early 1990s, there was for a time a Uygur-language program called A Sentence a Week, pitched to offer ordinary Han minimal familiarity with daily Uygur speech. Though well received at the time, it has since been dropped.
Previous minicampaigns to bring about mutual language study had come to virtually nothing. In 1986, an article in the Xinjiang Daily discussed mutual language study in a manner that made the objective clear. While the title suggested that “all minzu should study each others’ language,” the intent was unmistakably to emphasize the Uygurs’ learning Chinese. Former Uygur Autonomous Region chairman Wang Enmao, then-chairman Song Hanliang, the Kazakh leader Janabil, and several others visited a hospital and an elementary school in Zepu County—both were chosen as “minzu-unity model work units”—to inspect the state of “minzu unity” there. After interviewing a number of bilingual workers, Wang announced happily: “Han study Uygur, Uygurs study Han. Excellent! I will learn from you!”50 Without announcing it directly, the article conveyed the message that some languages are more equal than others. The Han doctors speaking Uygur were given five lines, while the non-Han doctors speaking Chinese received sixteen lines. Wang’s ceremonial comment suggested the emptiness of the encounter.51
A Chinese report analyzing data collected from a cooperative Chinese-Canadian study of language use offers the following national statistics: in the early 1990s, there were slightly more than one million bilingual Han and roughly twenty-seven thousand bilingual Uygurs. This gave Han and Uygurs among the lowest incidence of bilingualism of any minzu in the country, 0.11 percent and 0.45 percent respectively. Unfortunately, this document does not offer regional breakdowns of these figures, so while the figure for Uygurs is certain to include almost exclusively residents of Xinjiang, the Han figure must cover every region of China. We could speculate that at a maximum, one-third of all bilingual Han in the country live in Xinjiang. Even this improbably high proportion would indicate a rate of Han bilingualism in Xinjiang of less than 6 percent.52 It goes without saying that the data collected in this case can be accorded only impressionistic significance, particularly given the well-known imprecision built into surveys of language use.
By 1995, the government was deeply dissatisfied with the state of Chinese instruction in primarily Uygur areas. The mid-1990s saw renewed emphasis on a long-brewing initiative, the plan to induce all Uygurs to learn Chinese. At a major conference, Uygur Autonomous Region leaders complained of the deplorable level of Chinese competence among Uygurs and demanded urgent measures to rectify it.53 Though the official slogan “Equal competence in Chinese and minority languages” [Min Han jiantong]54 suggested that both Han and non-Han would be held to the same standards, it did not work out that way. A new campaign to train cadres in all work units to be bilingual was announced with much fanfare in early 1997. Although two volumes of a Chinese-language textbook for non-Han were published immediately, months later, only one of the projected two volumes of a Uygur-language textbook for Han had been published.55
Even more telling, in a recent volume of essays titled Language Contact and Influence,56 eleven of the twelve chapters address Chinese-language use among non-Han people (all but one of those chapters relating to the Uygurs). The twelfth, titled “An Investigation of Attitudes toward the Bilingual System in the XUAR,” seems at first to promise a balanced perspective. The author begins by noting that given a Uygur population of 7.1 million and a Han population of 5.6 million, “Uygur and Chinese have both become commonly used languages of social intercourse.” Yet we learn a page later that the population interviewed consisted of 136 Uygurs, 32 Kazakhs, and 2 Kirghiz. The author offers, among the rationales for selecting this “target population,” the principle that “compared with Han, minority peoples are more sensitive to the bilingualism question.” A likelier reason is that Han are not pressed to become bilingual in school. As he acknowledges, “Because of the single-minded pursuit of grade advancement and for many other kinds of reasons, the minority-language classes that were once established in Chinese-language schools have all been eliminated.” And despite a series of tendentious questions that telegraphed the officials’ intention to push Chinese-language study on non-Han (but not minority-language study on Han), 45.9 percent of those polled managed to get across that “Han comrades do not learn Uygur well.”57
Purely from a state-building perspective, in the interest of bureaucratic, educational, and social efficiency, forcing Uygurs to learn Chinese makes good sense. It is, indeed, the national language of China. Yet if we recall once again that the agreement governing the incorporation of the XUAR specifically stipulated language equality and remind ourselves that Xinjiang is not simply “another province in China” but an autonomous region, we must acknowledge that the current one-sided campaign contravenes the spirit of the XUAR charter.
A report on conditions in southern Xinjiang declares that minority cadres and ordinary minority people are “basically satisfied”—which could be read as not completely content58—with the linguistic environment in the XUAR’s Party Committee, People’s Congress, and government. However, the report goes on to say that in some offices at XUAR department (ting) and bureau (ju) levels, as well as in some district (diqu) offices, “it is impossible to maintain written communications in both Mandarin and minority languages, and they do not provide translators for meetings. . . . This prevents minority cadres from putting their capabilities to good use.”59 This passage directly conveys the relative importance of the two languages: it is the non-Han cadres, not their Han counterparts, who are discommoded by the lack of translators.
RELIGION
In the journal of the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, which is widely read by policy makers, a recent article warning of the dangers of illegal religious belief succinctly expressed the challenge officials believe they face: for minzu for whom religious belief is essentially coextensive with group identity, “the believing masses consider attitudes toward their religion to be attitudes toward themselves.”60
While government control of religion has noticeably relaxed in many areas of the PRC (on the Dai in Yunnan, on the Hui in the north and southwest,61 and to some extent, on the Tibetans in Tibet as well), Xinjiang is not one of them. To be sure, the Party did loosen control of religion in Xinjiang in the early 1980s as part of its overture to the Uygurs and others after the antireligious excesses of the Cultural Revolution. A great number of mosques were rebuilt and new ones constructed as well. Many villages had increased resources as a consequence of the agricultural reforms of the early Deng era, and many of those communities decided to build mosques with the new wealth.
But after the 1990 Baren incident, and in response to the shocking collapse of the Soviet Union (which brought about the independence of the Central Asian states), the government reversed its previous policy of tolerance. Officials prosecuted “illegal religious activities,” defrocking suspect clerics, breaking up unauthorized scripture schools (mädräsa), and halting the construction of mosques. In 1991, 10 percent of roughly twenty-five thousand clerics examined by officials were stripped of their positions.62 After a decade of turning a blind eye to mosque building, officials felt that construction had exceeded acceptable limits. In Akto County (where Baren is located), in 1990, officials closed fifty mosques judged to be “superfluous” and cancelled the construction of one hundred more, out of fear that religion was getting out of control.63
A 1995 propaganda text from Kashgar complained of “indiscriminate construction of mosques”: in 1995 Kashgar District had some ninety-six hundred, “already enough to satisfy the needs of normal religious practice by the believing masses.” Certain religious personnel, the text warned, engaged in wanton building with the excuse that the number of religious sites was inadequate. Even worse, “some religious personnel, without seeking approval, have set up their own Koran study schools and study classes, or have taken on talip [religious pupils].” According to the text, there were more than four thousand talip in the district.64 The source of the writers’ alarm was clearly the role such groups were playing in the politics of neighboring Central Asian states.
The constitution maintains, and textbooks on religious policy repeat, that every citizen has two freedoms with respect to religious belief: the freedom to believe or not to believe. Yet the Party has for years been sensitive to the threat of religion to Party authority and even more grave, the role of religion in dividing populations, even providing a breeding ground for ideas of Uygur independence. Its chosen strategy has been to protect the freedom of people not to believe and “dilute religious consciousness” in the population.65 The principal aim of official policy in securing both freedoms, as every textbook explains, is to make religion a “personal matter” (sishi); but this is, of course, a recipe for eliminating the avenues by which religion is transmitted throughout society and across generations. The “privatization” of Islam, in turn, serves the larger project of reducing the distinct (and oppositional) identities of Uygurs and other Turkic Muslims.
To that end, the Party has placed special emphasis on eliminating the pull of religion on two groups: Party members and students. Resurgent religiosity among cadres and pupils has been a matter of growing concern. Since 1978, large numbers of Uygur and other Muslim Party officials have become religiously observant. Though the constitution guarantees the two freedoms described above, Party cadres and students are now openly denied the right to believe. The following passage provides a classic example of power overwhelming principle:
Ordinary citizens are permitted two freedoms. Though Party members are also citizens, they are first of all members of the party of the proletariat and therefore enjoy only one freedom—the freedom not to believe—and absolutely do not enjoy the freedom to believe. They cannot have feet in two boats.66
The presentation of the requirement to be atheist as a single, compulsory “freedom” gives some flavor of the normative regime citizens in Xinjiang still face.
While in theory, students are also citizens, they are now also limited to the single freedom. Official explanations stress both the crucial importance of education to the prosperity of the nation and the importance of allowing youths to make a free, “scientific” choice to believe or not to believe, once old enough to choose. For example,
youths and children are in the growing-up stage; their worldviews have not yet formed. They lack scientific knowledge and life experience. They cannot yet make responsible and scientific choices appropriate to their goals. To irrigate the minds of immature youths with religious thought is to allow someone to impose belief in a particular religion on them.67
The author fails to point out that to prevent youths from practicing religion and others from teaching them about it is to allow another agent to impose unbelief. But intervention has by no means stopped there. Post-Baren policies that prosecuted religious activity and expressly forbade the teaching of religion on school campuses were judged insufficient. Party strategists decided to go one step further and make classes in atheism mandatory.
An Amnesty International report on Xinjiang claims that the CCP began the “Education in Atheism” campaign in 1997.68 A textbook I purchased in Kashgar demonstrates that it began much earlier. The text of the book makes clear that students no longer enjoy “freedom of religious belief.” The fifth lesson is devoted entirely to the bald assertion that “teenagers must become atheists.”69 When I bought the text, a Uygur man who was delighted to see that a foreigner could read the language opened the book to identify it. As soon as he saw its contents, he raised his eyes to mine and moaned, “No!” Even antireligious intellectuals, who are critical of the conservatizing influence of Islam on Uygurs, criticize the Party even more stridently for persecuting the religious.
Students at Xinjiang University were fully aware of the increasing stringency of official policy. They told me privately that many classmates continue to perform five prayers (namaz) a day and participate secretly in study groups. But the costs of doing so were readily apparent. In spring of 1997, at the entrance to the campus computer building, a series of posters with gaudy vermilion stamps indicated that six students from Hotan had been arrested for attending religious study groups and that they had received substantial prison sentences.
Because the Party has worked so hard to reduce the believing proportion of the population or, at minimum, to keep it constant, officials have shown considerable concern in the 1990s about the spread of Wahhabism in southern Xinjiang.70 This strict and politically charged form of Islam is popular among those who were previously alienated by the conservative, traditionalist Islam the Party supported. Thus, Wahhabism threatens to reverse the trend of a shrinking and, more important, increasingly politically irrelevant religious population. Investigations by the United Front Department in Hotan District determined that of 81 Wahhabist imams, 61 had “good attitudes” (biaoxian hao), 11 were neutral, and 9 had bad attitudes; of those 9, 3 had committed “errors of political stance.” An investigation of 319 Wahhabist talip determined that 249 had good attitudes and 70 had bad attitudes. In addition to fearing doctrinal disputes (historically, Wahhabists have held the view that those who practice Islam improperly are not true Muslims and may be killed), Party officials worry about proselytizing. Some suggest that the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress, widely hailed as the meeting at which Deng Xiaoping initiated economic reforms, opened the way for problems by underscoring the freedom to join different religious sects. They argue that it “provided Wahhabism with policies favorable to its propagation.” Those same persons warn of the specific concern that Wahhabists seek to wrest control of mosques from “patriotic clerics with traditional [religious] views.”71
PREFERENTIAL POLICIES
Barry Sautman has argued that the so-called preferential policies (youhui zhengce) governing family planning, education, job hiring, and cadre recruitment leave Uygurs better off than they would otherwise have been.72 Viewed from the perspective of China as a whole, this argument is uncontroversial: Uygurs can have more children, enter college with lower examination scores, find jobs in state-owned enterprises with fewer qualifications, and join some government bodies more easily than their Han counterparts in Xinjiang. But Xinjiang is not simply another province of China, and the fate of Uygurs there should not be judged according to national standards.
Indeed, as Sautman often acknowledges, the preferential policies fail to address the real inequalities between Han and Uygurs. Though the autonomous regions were “ostensibly established to create a sense of territorial proprietorship for their autochthonous peoples,”73 in Xinjiang, Uygurs are less likely to go to high school and college, are less urban, are poorer, and have fewer job prospects than Han. The disparities are particularly acute in the oil industry and in private enterprises, where official quotas have no sway. This means that Uygurs are all but excluded from the most dynamic and profitable sectors, and thus the gap will widen with economic growth.
Nor should we assume that having political representation is the same as having political influence. Sautman suggests that preferential recruitment into officialdom has given some Uygurs political power, but he also says that Uygur officials “may increasingly abandon their quiescence and seek additional preferential policies” and that “it would not be surprising . . . if they were to become more vocal over economic and social issues.”74 Minor officials I interviewed suggested that these possibilities are still remote. They still fear punishment for speaking out. And ordinary Uygurs complained that there is precious little evidence of Uygur officials advancing Uygur causes with any success.
The case of Isma’il Āhmād is instructive. Made a Party secretary in 1973, political commissar of the Xinjiang Military Region in 1975, and chairman of the Uygur Autonomous Region in 1979, he was dismissed from office in December 1985, ostensibly as part of a drive to reduce the average age of the leadership corps, and replaced by Tömür Dawamät. The dismissal provoked a demonstration by Uygur students at Xinjiang University, who boycotted classes in protest; some five thousand marched on the government offices in Urumqi demanding (among other things) that Isma’il be restored to his position. Perhaps because of the protest, Isma’il was appointed head of the national Minzu Affairs Commission.75 In 1996, several Uygur informants, still angry about these events a decade later, shared with me the widespread view that he had been “kicked upstairs” to a relatively powerless post in Beijing after pressing too vociferously for policy changes in Xinjiang.
Finally, specialists on minzu problems appear to argue that it has not been possible to transfer the powers of self-government and decision making to the minority peoples themselves, as called for under the policy of regional autonomy. While cadre recruitment since 1980 has brought about a quantitative change in minzu representation, it has not effected a qualitative change. Despite nearly fifty years of special treatment and twenty years of reform, Uygurs and other non-Han in Xinjiang experience heteronomy, not autonomy.
RELATIONS BETWEEN THE UYGURS AND THE GOVERNMENT
In the modern era, southern Xinjiang has been a troubled [duoshi] region. The reasons are admittedly complex, and the most evident tendency has been minzu separatism. Minzu separatists use religion to stir up trouble in minzu relations and harm minzu unity; drawing lines according to minzu and religion, they openly clamor for the expulsion of “infidels.” The local masses [minzu unspecified] feel that in the fifties and sixties, and even until the end of the seventies, minzu relations were good. After 1979, a new atmosphere prevailed: Minzu relations became tense, and Han commonly experienced a “feeling of being unsafe.” The minority peoples also felt “unsettled”; they felt they were frequently “being labeled” or were “not being trusted”; they felt that Han had all the power, while they served as gofers and flunkeys. The Han lived in the city, their lives a class above those of the minorities. Feelings were brittle on both sides, making cooperation very difficult.76
Since 1979, then, relations between the Uygurs and the Han have worsened, according to this analysis, and accounts of violent conflicts in both the foreign and domestic media would seem to support this conclusion. The report goes on to express the view (common among Han) that reformera policies are to blame.
However, a closer look suggests that there are at least three alternative explanations: First, the deterioration of relations might be only apparent—a consequence of changes in reporting. Friction and conflict seldom appeared in newspaper and radio reports before 1979 because of official policy, but the openness ushered in by Deng’s reforms extended to the media, as well as to other cultural realms. If this is the case, Uygur-Han relations need not have changed because they were already hostile long before Deng gained power. Nor need the level of violence have risen, only the level of reporting such incidents. Second, there were resentments long before 1979, but political and military repression kept them in check. The looser political controls unleashed pent-up frustrations. If this is the case, there was increased conflict, but it was the result not of worsening relations but of other factors. Third, some combination of immigration, discrimination, widening inequalities, and other factors aggravated relations that were already made fragile by the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Only in this case does the record of much more frequent conflicts after 1979 accurately reflect increasingly antagonistic relations between the Uygurs and the Han.
My interviews with Uygurs suggest that the true situation was a combination of the second and third scenarios. Though not conclusive (because they rely on fallible memory and may be colored by present concerns), the testimonials of Uygurs indicate a growing resentment of the government beginning in the 1960s, which was due to both Han immigration and the Cultural Revolution. There was widespread agreement among my informants, however, that the economic reforms did further harm to the relationship. Many informants also cited the ferocity with which the government has greeted Uygur proposals of any sort, be they bold calls for independence or modest requests for employment and the distribution of oil profits.
Today, relations between the government and the Uygurs are poor. We might divide the evidence of this into three categories: planned acts of violence, riots and demonstrations, and ordinary resentment. The implications of each are different.
Bombings, assassinations, and other planned acts of violence are one indication of dissatisfaction, but they are by nature the work of small, marginal groups. This is true both in the simplistic sense that small groups commit them and in the more complex sense that because the government so energetically seeks out and destroys such groups, the numbers of those that engage in such behavior are limited: many have been jailed and some executed. The frequent prosecution of such groups and the individuals that belong to them has undoubtedly deterred others from following their example. Bombings and assassinations have occurred in 1990, 1992, and 1997.
Demonstrations and riots indicate broader-based discontent. Large student demonstrations in Urumqi in 1986 and 1989 in many ways resembled those in the Chinese heartland, though many of the issues they raised bore more directly on regional issues: immigration, atomic-bomb testing, unemployment, the suppression of religion, and the lack of substantive autonomy. In 1989, there was a mass demonstration against the publication of Sexual customs (Xing fengsu), a mass-market book that likened Muslim minarets and burial mounds to genitalia and insinuated that the pilgrimage to Mecca resembled an orgy.77 The protest against this book posed a greater threat because Uygurs, Kazakhs, Hui, and other Muslims participated jointly. The Baren incident of 1990, the Hotan riot of 1995, and the Gulja incident of 1997 demonstrate a depth of animosity toward the government sufficient to mobilize large numbers. These episodes are more profound indicators of popular sentiments because of the greater numbers of participants and because spontaneous outbursts indicate long-brewing and widespread tensions.
The third category of evidence for the poor relations between the government and the Uygurs is the grumbling and myriad acts of “everyday resistance” committed by ordinary Uygurs. Many individuals who would not dare to commit violence or join in overt collective action nevertheless express dissatisfaction and defy the ruling regime in small ways. I have written extensively about such quiet defiance elsewhere, suggesting that the majority of the Uygur population engages in one form or other of everyday resistance.78 The volume and the content of this kind of resistance by ordinary Uygurs indicate great dissatisfaction with the government. Here, I include a single example of literary dissent that reached a wide and appreciative Uygur audience.
A poem from a recent audiotaped anthology, Pighan, contains language and imagery that is at once carefully abstract and unmistakably critical of the Han regime. The text on the tape jacket notes carefully that “the bulk of these works were written during the periods when the reactionary KMT [Guomindang] government and the Gang of Four were committing acts of oppression.” The purpose of preparing the tape, it continues, is “to help us not forget our people and the past [ötmüsh] and to sing the praises of the contemporary period after the Third Plenum.”79 Such placatory language initially enabled the tape to pass the censors.
For many years, a statue of a PLA soldier stood in a park near Beimen in Urumqi. It commemorated the army’s “peaceful liberation of Xinjiang.” The poem below responds to that statue. Originally published in the Uygur-language edition of the Ürümchi kechlik gäziti (Urumqi evening news), it was banned after censors learned of the poem’s target.80
Häykäl
Bir häykäl turuptu baghda tik tänha,
üstidä yepincha, qolida yaraq.
män uni tonattim; tonumidi u,
chünki u egizdä, män pästä biraq.
ikkimiz uchrashqan pada baqqanda.
däl mushu mäydanda kerip käng
quchaq.
bügün u ötüptu, törgä bir özi
män pästä qaptimän chaqqanda
yangaq.
“Ayrilmas qoshmaq biz”—digining
qäni?
äjäba untughaq bop qalding qandaq.
ming äpsus ichidä turimän baghda
közümdin ot yänip—bilipla biraq.
Statue
A statue stands in the park, tall and alone,
a cloak on his shoulders, in his hand a weapon.
I recognize him, but he doesn’t know me
because he is up high, while I’m down low.
The two of us met when there was work to be done;
on this very field we embraced each other with open arms.
Today, he alone takes the seat of honor and enjoys all the fruits,
while I’m left standing empty-handed at the base.
Where, now, are your fine words: “We’re inseparable twins”?
Could it be that you have become forgetful?
I stand in the park, immured in a thousand regrets,
my eyes on fire—if only I’d known.
The poem employs the solitary statue and its position relative to the narrator as a metaphor for Han-Uygur relations. It crystallizes the popular Uygur perception of a social reality in which Han are elevated and celebrated, while Uygurs are left below and behind. Originally, when there was work to be done—the liberation of the region from the KMT and the economic development of the region—the two cooperated. Since then, only the Han have enjoyed the benefits. The phrase “inseparable twins” alludes to one of a panoply of rhetorical flourishes conceived by propagandists to express a familial relationship between the two groups. It mocks the slogan “the two inseparables” (liang ge libukai) promoted by the government in the 1980s.81 The soldier does not recognize or refuses to acknowledge the narrator because the latter is below him. Claiming the seat of honor for himself and savoring the fruits (walnuts, actually)82 that are symbolic of the rich resources of Xinjiang, the soldier thus simultaneously betrays Uygur hospitality and the CCP’s claim that it has made everyone better off. The scornful reference to forgetfulness substitutes for a more direct accusation of hypocrisy. What the narrator regrets in the final lines is clearly the Uygurs’ cooperation with PLA soldiers. He unmistakably implies another choice was possible at the time. Nowhere is the soldier directly described as PLA, nor is the statue identified. Although the censors initially missed the reference, Uygurs did not, and after the government discovered this, the tape was suppressed and the statue quietly removed.
Uygurs deeply resent the presence of Han in Xinjiang, as well as the government they regard as the proxy of those Han. One can find a litany of Uygur complaints by visiting Internet sites maintained by dissidents in Europe and the United States. But privileged dissidents and intellectuals living beyond the reach of the Chinese state are not the only ones to complain. It is possible to hear similar complaints from people living in Xinjiang right now, the fear of speaking out notwithstanding.
Doctors are angry at what they consider extraordinarily high rates of cancer, not only in towns surrounding the Lop Nor nuclear test site but also in areas affected by pesticides and other chemical pollutants; two different doctors told me that statistics on morbidity are either not collected or kept secret. I interviewed lawyers who are angry that the national “law on autonomy” has not been answered by the passage of statutes in the autonomous regions. Many professors and other teachers are furious that history must be cut to fit a Chinese nationalist mold, that literature must be published and interpreted according to Chinese nationalist principles, and that at the college level, “modern subjects,” such as math and science, must be taught in Chinese (even by Uygur teachers), while classes in Uygur cover only language and literature. Businessmen complain about the favoritism shown PCC enterprises and Han corporations from the interior. Officials complain bitterly at being passed over for promotion because of suspicions that they are politically unreliable or lack skills. Students bemoan discrimination in job recruitment.
But dissatisfaction reaches far beyond the educated and professional classes. Shop workers, restaurant staff, farmers, and factory workers speak of a similar range of issues: oil and mineral extraction without adequate compensation (there is a widespread, though farfetched, belief that the revenue from taxes on oil production alone would make every Uygur rich for years to come), family-planning policies, and past and continued Han immigration. Farmers complain that PCC farms and urbanization have drained the water table, making farming increasingly costly and difficult. Nearly all my informants complained about the suppression of religious activities they consider integral to Uygur social and cultural life. Even those Uygurs who distanced themselves from radicalism fumed quietly about the network of spies and traitors (xayin) who not only betray separatist plots but inform on those who express reasonable gripes. There is a widely held view among Uygurs that the government systematically lies about every issue that matters. It is this climate of deep and pervasive suspicion that gives wing to every rumor and lends credence to even farfetched complaints.
Only a few of my informants openly voiced a wish for independence.83 The desire for “real autonomy,” or even a system of autonomy that lives up to the original promises of the Party, is near universal. Without conducting an opinion survey or popular plebiscite, it is very hard to say whether a majority of Uygurs support independence, and such measures are obviously impossible at present.
CONCLUSION
The CCP has not only claimed domestically that its policies for managing the minority peoples have proven successful. It now vaunts them as a model for other countries to follow, boasting that it has solved the “minzu question.” Yet the study of minzu relations in Xinjiang quoted several times above clearly articulates the mixture of confidence and apprehension with which Party analysts view developments in Xinjiang. The key passage is worth quoting at length:
What people with relatively strong minzu consciousness really care about is not “separatism,” but the vigorous development of Xinjiang and the carrying on and promotion of minzu culture. It is precisely on this score that our past work efforts were insufficient.
All we need to do is serve the various minzu in Xinjiang heart and soul, take economic development as the crux, lift up the economy, lift up education, and do a good job with United Front work and minzu religion work. In that case, no matter how minzu separatism roils the place, no matter how much enemy forces exert themselves, they will not be able to create a real threat for us. Time and opportunity favor us. Only the development and progress of Xinjiang and the collective prosperity of all the minzu can truly weaken minzu consciousness, help strengthen the cohesiveness of China’s minzu, and aid the unification of the motherland.84
I have emphasized the key phrase “weaken minzu consciousness” to underscore a constant theme in Chinese writing on Xinjiang, one familiar to scholars of ethnic separatist movements around the world. The state hopes to weaken not minzu consciousness in general but one particular kind: the group consciousness of Uygurs. It hopes simultaneously to strengthen the minzu consciousness of Uygurs as “Chinese,” which would enhance the cohesiveness of the imagined “Chinese nation.”
Neither the original system of minzu regional autonomy nor its subsequent modifications have enabled the Party to achieve this aim in Xinjiang. The system has not made Uygurs “masters of their own house.” It has kept them in the house, but it has not made them any happier to be there.
I argued at the beginning of this chapter that Party officials intended the policy of minzu regional autonomy to satisfy two goals. One was to preserve the territorial integrity of the Chinese state. The other was to reverse a legacy of oppression by giving non-Han control over their own affairs—as long as that control did not conflict with the broader policy aims of the Party-state. In other words, the system was intended to defuse the non-Han peoples’ potential dissatisfaction with being ruled by a Han state. The chapter has chronicled the military and demographic steps officials took to counter the threat of Xinjiang’s separation. The presence of a vast, well-armed military and an enormous and growing Han immigrant population essentially neutralize that threat.
The remainder of the chapter illustrates that having satisfied the first goal, Party officials have shown less and less enthusiasm for, and at times decisively repudiated, the second. The system of cadre and Party recruitment has not ensured the dominance of Uygurs and others over affairs in Xinjiang, nor has it even given them representation proportional to their populations. By installing Han first party secretaries at all levels, and by promoting tractable Uygur officials, the Party leadership has ensured that the concerns of Beijing hold sway in political deliberations. And generous early promises about cultural latitude have given way to the tight restriction of publications, performances, and religious observations. Officials today have little patience with the most obvious and basic expression of Uygur autonomy, language use.
Thus, the dominant sense among even those Uygurs who were once sympathetic to the CCP project is that of betrayal. The land has been firmly occupied by the military and the PCC; the region has been flooded with Han, who have enjoyed disproportionate benefits from economic development to date and will almost certainly continue to do so in the future; and most fear that the Uygur culture that was once guaranteed protection is destined to disappear. Instead of inducing Uygurs to shed their collective identity in favor of a broader identification with the Chinese people, the CCP’s policies have alienated them and strengthened their separate identity.
NOTES
1. I join with a number of scholars in preferring to leave the Chinese word minzu untranslated. Dictionaries offer, variously, “ethnic group,” “nationality,” and “nation” as translations. Because these English terms carry such different political connotations, and because in Chinese the term is functionally ambiguous, I intentionally leave the term unresolved.
2. In 1955, the 3.2 million Uygurs comprised roughly 73 percent of the total population (5.11 million) of Xinjiang, according to official statistics.
3. Xinjiang was made a province in 1884 and would remain one until 1955, when the XUAR was established.
4. To be sure, the Mongols had faced similarly flagrant gerrymandering in their own “home districts” long before 1949, and they would see the shape of their “autonomous region” manipulated several times in the post-1949 period. When the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region was founded in 1947, the Han were already the majority population.
5. Mao and Li, “Nanjiang san dizhou,” 173.
6. One dictionary of Chinese idioms explains that it means the subject “has a leadership position in politics or has the power to make decisions.” The illustrative example shows that working people, particularly proletarians, have attained this position in New China. That this idiom is allotted to the “state politics” section of the dictionary demonstrates, as does the example, that it has been completely claimed by the state for rhetorical purposes. In a response to an earlier talk from which this chapter has grown, James Seymour objected with justification that “jia” denotes family, rather than physical abode. Since my concern is with connotations and implications, I stand by my usage.
7. Long, “Cong Yining shijian,” 24. Throughout this chapter, I use the terms “self-government” and “autonomy” interchangeably to translate zizhi. I do this both from stylistic concerns and to underscore the etymological origins of the term. As I point out below, the term “autonomy” is glossed in English dictionaries as “self-government.”
8. Zhang, “Xinjiang jiefang yilai,” 362.
9. All discussions of ethnically segmented rule introduce the thorny issue of identity. In the service of parsimony, this chapter will sidestep the important relationship between identity formation and politics. Important recent work has illuminated the role of the state in constituting ethnic and other identities (for examples, see the works of Dru Gladney and Justin Jon Rudelson on the Uygurs; Jonathan N. Lipman and Gladney on the Hui; Pamela Crossley on the Manchus; and Mark Beissinger, Rogers Brubaker, Ronald Suny, and Yuri Slezkine on groups in the Soviet Union). In contrast to the work on the Soviet Union, that on China has not explored the political implications so fully. That is, it has not specifically analyzed the political consequences of the state’s substantial role in constituting minzu as such. See Bovingdon, “Strangers.”
10. Though there are substantial populations of Kazakhs, Hui, and other non-Han peoples in Xinjiang, this chapter focuses primarily on the Uygurs. The principal justifications for this narrow focus are (1) that having been identified (or invented) as a group by a Soviet ethnology conference in the 1920s (see Gladney, “Ethnogenesis of the Uighur,” and Rudelson, Oasis Identities, 149), the Uygurs constituted nearly three-quarters of the population when the CCP won control of the province in 1949, and (2) that my research concentrated on the Uygur population. It is reasonable to fear that on the basis of conditions in post-Soviet Central Asia, should the Uygurs ever establish their own state, non-Uygurs within their borders would not be much better off than they are now (and might be a good deal worse off).
11. See Benson, Ili Rebellion, and Forbes, Warlords and Muslims.
12. PCC units were also established in Mongolia and the other “border” regions; all but those in Xinjiang were subsequently disbanded. See Dreyer, “PLA and Regionalism”; Esposito, “China’s West”; McMillen, Communist Power, “Xinjiang and the Production and Construction Corps,” and “Xinjiang and Wang Enmao”; and Seymour, “Xinjiang’s Production and Construction Corps.”
13. McMillen, Communist Power, 128–29.
14. Ibid., 113–14.
15. Ibid.; Dreyer, China’s Forty Millions, 94.
16. McMillen, Communist Power, 115.
17. Ibid., 116, 117; Dreyer, China’s Forty Millions, 150–57.
18. Dreyer, China’s Forty Millions, 157–63; McMillen, Communist Power, 118.
19. See Hannum and Yu, “Ethnic Stratification,” 324.
20. Dreyer, China’s Forty Millions, 169–70; McMillen, Communist Power, 120–23.
21. Author interview, Urumqi, 23 October 1996.
22. William C. Clark, “Ibrahim’s Story,” 17.
23. Over the course of twenty-two months of field research in Xinjiang between 1994 and 1997 I conducted unstructured interviews with more than 160 individuals, among them 95 Uygurs, 50 Han, and a small number of Xibo, Hui, Uzbeks, Mongols, and Kazakhs. I interviewed Uygurs and Uzbeks in Uygur, the others in Mandarin. My informants included clerks, service workers, students, teachers, professors, lawyers, businesspeople, office workers, police, bureaucrats, editors, reporters, writers, and farmers. The group was weighted heavily toward educated urbanites aged nineteen to fifty. As a young male, I had easier access to men than to women, and men therefore constitute roughly two-thirds of my interview sample. Groups underrepresented among my informants include farmers and very religious people.
24. Author interviews, Urumqi, 10 October 1996, 1 April 1997.
25. Dillon, “Xinjiang,” 4.
26. This passage quotes from and paraphrases ibid.
27. Cheong, “‘More Autonomy.’”
28. The first “strike hard” campaign took place in 1983. Each campaign is a national endeavor in which the police make an all-out effort to round up thousands of suspected criminals within a few months. The suspects face accelerated trials, and for those convicted, summary executions at the end. While strike hard campaigns have generally aimed at capturing “conventional” criminals, in Xinjiang and Tibet they have also targeted so-called splittists.
In its narrow sense, according to a dictionary of new Chinese terms, “comprehensive management” refers to “comprehensive administrative measures taken to resolve problems of social order. Comprehensive management takes place under the unified leadership of the various levels of the Party and government and relies on society’s strength, fully using political, economic, ideological, educational, cultural, administrative, legal, and other measures to attack evil trends, crimes, illegality, and breaches of discipline; it [involves] propagandizing socialist spiritual civilization and provides a stable and harmonious social environment for reform and socialist modernization” (Wen, Wang, and Li, Dangdai xin ciyu, 676).
29. Antiseparatist propaganda activities have continued. See “China Reports Popular Support” and Hewitt, “China Clampdown.”
30. See Human Rights Watch, “China: Human Rights Concerns.”
31. Exact figures are hard to come by, and statistics are notoriously unreliable. Using statistical yearbooks and census data, Emily Hannum and Yu Xie have compiled a chart of Xinjiang’s immigration and emigration between 1954 and 1985. It shows that at the same time as hundreds of thousands of migrants flowed in—502,000 in 1954, over 800,000 in both 1959 and 1960, and never fewer than 250,000 in any year—similar but smaller numbers flowed out. Only between 1981 and 1985 (where the data stop) did the numbers of emigrants exceed immigrants. See Hannum and Yu, “Ethnic Stratification,” 324. For reasons that would take too long to explain here, it is understood that virtually none of the migrants were Uygurs or other Turkic peoples.
32. McMillen, “Xinjiang and Wang Enmao,” 574–76.
33. Agence France-Presse, “China to Deploy Demobilized Officers.”
34. It is highly likely that a substantial proportion of the remaining 11.7 percent were not native to Xinjiang. The CCP typically conflates all 55 ethnic-minority groups in China into one large non-Han group for the purpose of statistical analysis. This blurs the distinctions between groups and serves to inflate the figures to prove a high degree of indigenous control. Thus, a fully assimilated Bai or Manchu serving in Urumqi or Gulja counts as a minzu cadre. This is one of many subtler practices reviled by Uygur intellectuals.
35. McMillen, Communist Power, 48.
36. XUAR Gaikuang Bianxiezu, ed. Xinjiang Weiwuer Zizhiqu gaikuang.
37. The figures indicated “a definite Han predominance on the upper and middle-level Party committees in the region” (McMillen, Communist Power, 75–6). Guo Zhengli concurs: The real situation of non-Han cadre recruitment is “quite uneven; its principal manifestation is the scarcity of non-Han core cadres (gugan ganbu) at the county level and above” (Guo, Zhongguo tese, 89).
38. Toops, “Recent Uygur Leaders,” 95. Toops analyses the career trajectories of a number of high-level Uygur officials.
39. McMillen, Communist Power, 80. I am grateful to Jay Dautcher for a particularly fruitful discussion of this matter.
40. XUAR Difangzhi Bianzuan Weiyuanhui, Xinjiang nianjian, 1988, 72, and XUAR Difangzhi Bianzuan Weiyuanhui, Xinjiang nianjian, 1995, 66.
41. Author interview, village outside Kumul, 7 May 1997.
42. See Rudelson, Oasis Identities.
43. Author interview, December 1966. Zhang Xianliang is a highly successful experimental writer whose novel Half of Man Is Woman received popular and critical acclaim. Much of Zhang’s work has been published since the end of the Cultural Revolution, and it insinuates that chaotic Party politics ruined the lives of countless Chinese. The point, my informant told me contemptuously, was that themes considered safe for Han audiences were still thought too dangerous for Uygurs to encounter.
44. Underlying these ostensibly altruistic gestures was a grand long-term plan to fuse all the languages together into a single socialist tongue via the pinyin romanization scheme developed for Chinese. See Seybolt and Chiang, Language Reform.
45. These paragraphs draw on Wei Cuiyi’s thorough analysis of the politics of script changes in Xinjiang. See Wei, “Historical Survey.”
46. Dreyer, China’s Forty Millions, 178–79.
47. McMillen, Communist Power, 119–20; Dreyer, China’s Forty Millions, 180–82. See also Ma, “Relationship.”
48. Author interview, Urumqi, 21 June 1996.
49. McMillen, “Xinjiang and Wang,” 574–77.
50. The expression “I will learn from you” [Xiang ni xuexi] has become purely phatic from ritualized use. But the idea of “mutual study,” here already highlighted in 1986, prefigures the later formulation “the two inseparables” (liangge libukai).
51. “Wang Enmao.”
52. See Guo, Zhongguo shuangyu renkou goucheng. I arrived at the 6 percent figure by dividing 330,000 (roughly one-third of the million or so bilingual Han nationwide) into 5.5 million (the Han population of Xinjiang). This is, of course, a purely speculative figure. On the other hand, the number of bilingual Uygurs seems inconceivably low and casts further doubt on the reliability of the statistics. The problem may lie with an overly restrictive definition of “bilingual.” The title of the original Chinese-Canadian study, back-translated into English, is The World’s Literary Languages: An Outline of Degree and Manner of Use, vol. 4, China. The author’s surname is McConnell (?) (Maikekangnaier), and it was published in 1955.
53. Author interview with a conference participant, Urumqi, 30 April 1997.
54. Wurlig Borchigud notes that a similar slogan, “Meng Han jiantong,” was deployed in Inner Mongolia from 1958. See Borchigud, “Impact of Urban Ethnic Education,” 289. My guess is that the slogan was originally promulgated much earlier in Xinjiang but not initially pushed so hard; the drastically different population ratios in the two regions may explain the gap in timing.
55. The two textbooks were Hanyu duben (A Chinese reader), vols. 1 and 2, and Weiyu duben (A Uygur reader), vol. 1, both published by Xinjiang Qingshaonian Chubanshe in March 1997. Volume 2 of Weiyu duben had not come out by July 1997, when I left Xinjiang; subsequent inquiries revealed it still had not appeared a year later. This, despite the fact that two much shorter textbooks were made available in February 1997, when the XUAR Minzu Language and Script Work Committee (Yuweihui) published Uygurchä sözliridin jümlü (Five hundred sentences of daily conversation in Uygur) and Hanyu richang huihua 500 ju (Five hundred sentences of daily conversation in Chinese).
56. Xu, Yuyan de jiechu.
57. Liao, “Dui Xinjiang Weiwu’er Zizhiqu,” 407, 408, 411. One finds, for example, questions beginning “Since Chinese is the national language . . .” and “Since Chinese is one of the languages used in the UN . . . .”
58. Indeed, a former official in the Urumqi city government, for instance, reported widespread anger that all business was expected to be conducted in Chinese.
59. Yin and Mao, Xinjiang minzu, 157.
60. Liu, “Feifa zongjiao huodong,” 67.
61. On the southwest, see Hansen, Lessons in Being Chinese; information on the Islamic communities comes from a personal communication with Jacqueline Armijo-Hussein.
62. Harris, “Xinjiang,” 120–21.
63. Dillon, “Xinjiang,” 29.
64. Kashi Xiwei Xuanchuan Bu, Fandui minzu fenlie, 37.
65. Yin and Mao, Xinjiang minzu, 233.
66. XUAR Party Committee Propaganda Bureau Report, 52; emphasis added.
67. Luo, Zongjiao, 171; emphasis added.
68. Amnesty International. “People’s Republic of China,” n. 52.
69. The book (Ma, Li, Li, and Zhang, Ate’izm) had a print run of at least seventy-nine thousand volumes. The introduction indicates that it was originally written in Chinese in 1991 in response to calls from the Fifteenth Plenum of the Third XUAR Party Congress to deal with the threat of minzu “splittism” and was translated into Uygur within six months. It was prepared for use in political-study classes at the high-school level.
70. Wahhabism originated in Saudi Arabia and is the officially sponsored form of Islam there; it has spread widely in Central Asia in recent years. For a discussion of Saudi-funded mädräsäs in Pakistan, Xinjiang’s neighbor to the southwest and one likely source of Wahhabist influence, see Nasr, “Rise of Sunni Militancy,” 139–80.
71. Yin and Mao, Xinjiang minzu, 160–61, 163; the term biaoxian, familiar to students of Chinese politics, is difficult to render into English. Technically, it refers not to attitude but to “expression” of attitude. Those with good biaoxian are regarded as more reliable by Party functionaries, and individuals with particularly good biaoxian are rewarded with promotions and other perks. See Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism.
72. Sautman, “Preferential Policies.”
73. Ibid., 101.
74. Ibid., 99.
75. Toops, “Recent Uygur,” 85–86.
76. Yin and Mao, Xinjiang minzu, 173–74.
77. See Gladney, Muslim Chinese, 2–3; and Xu, “Pingxi ‘5–19.’”
78. Bovingdon, “Strangers.”
79. Pighan: Tallanghan she’irlar (Wail: Selected poems). N.p.: Shinjang Ünsin Näshriyati, n.d. Although the tape jacket offers no copyright date, the ISRC number indicates it was released in 1993.
80. Cristina Cesaro, personal communication. I am most grateful for the information.
81. Short for “the Han are inseparable from the minority peoples, and the minority peoples are inseparable from the Han.” The expression was first raised in the CCP Central Committee in July 1981; it “quickly received the support and welcome of the broad ranks of cadres and masses of every minzu throughout the country, and in short order was accepted by everyone,” according to a primer on minzu theory and practice (XUAR Minzu Shiwu Weiyuanhui and XUAR Laodong Ting, Minzu lilun, 61). One might just as well translate libukai as “cannot leave.” In an exoteric rendering of the slogan, “do without” better conveys the meaning, but the phrase also implies that the minority peoples—for instance, the Uygurs—cannot leave the Han in the sense that they cannot establish an independent country.
82. The passage has an embedded set phrase: “Pada baqqanda dost iduq/ yangaq chaqqanda ayrilduq” [literally, We were friends when pasturing the animals, but when the walnuts were cracked, we separated; figuratively, You were happy to have me help with the work, but when it came time to enjoy the spoils, you wanted nothing to do with me]. The first and second parts of the phrase are separated by two lines in the poem.
83. I hasten to add once again that given the sanctions against voicing such sentiments even in private, the fact that only a few people expressed them is hardly diagnostic.
84. Yin and Mao, Xinjiang minzu, 254; emphasis added.