We are so accustomed to seeing “China” as it is now configured on maps that it is easy to forget how new this geographic entity is. The last ethnic Chinese dynasty, the Ming, was spatially less than half as large as the People's Republic of China (PRC). There has been too little study of how the other countries came to be, and remain, part of China. After all, when most international empires collapse, their constituent nations go their own way—as witnessed by those from the Romans to the Soviet Union. And yet after the Qing Empire (and later the Republic of China) collapsed, the western half of what became the PRC found itself part of a revived empire.
In Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State, Justin Jacobs seeks to explain this anomaly with regard to one such nation, the former Eastern Turkestan (never quite a “country,” but almost never really Chinese), now known as China's “New Frontier,” or Xinjiang. The result of his efforts is the go-to book for an understanding of twentieth-century Xinjiang.
Before the communist revolution, no regime ever tried to substantially integrate such places into China. The Manchus were adamant that China was just one of several constituent nations comprising their empire, of the sort that Karen Barkey depicted (in another context) as an “empire of difference.”Footnote 1 What later happened during the Republican period is the subject of the bulk of this book, though two chapters address the communist period, where the emphasis is on interethnic social relations and the activities of Turkic exiles.
Although Xinjiang was designated a “province” in 1884, Jacobs explains how that became, under Yang Zengxin (governor, 1912–28), largely a fiction. Yang insisted that Xinjiang be treated differently from the Han central plains. Jacobs connects this reality with the fact that the communist government terminated Xinjiang's provincial status in 1955, declaring it an autonomous region and “thus effectively restoring the early Qing distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ domains” (p. 25). The logic is interesting, but one might say that the new reality was close to what the late Qing sought to realize, and far removed from the autonomy that Yang insisted on maintaining.
Jacobs has used a wide variety of sources, from Chinese (mainland and Taiwan) to Uighur, Russian, and Western. The result, as is the case with all reputable scholars of the area, has inevitably been “about as far as possible from the ‘official line’ of the Chinese government” (p. 15). It is likely that a scholar can come out with only one such book before having the Chinese welcome mat withdrawn.
Just when we thought that the spelling of PRC ethnonyms had become standardized, Jacobs insists on spelling Uyghur as “Uighur,” and Kazakh as “Kazak.” While there is no right and wrong in these matters, nothing is gained by orthographic pluralism.
The book suffers from some odd omissions. One is the origin of the ethnonym “Uyghurs,” who are simply mentioned as “newly christened.” It was the Soviets who were responsible, and not anyone in Xinjiang, where the Chinese usually referred to them by the unflattering term “Turban Heads” (chantou 纏頭). These people were named after, but are not to be confused with, the unrelated Turkic Uyghurs (Ouïgours, huihe 回紇) of the eighth and ninth centuries CE. A second omission is the authentic First Eastern Turkestan Republic in Southern Xinjiang (1933–34), which is virtually unmentioned. In the index, such Turkistani efforts in the south seem to be conflated with the otherwise excellent discussion of the Second (“Three Districts”) Eastern Turkistan Republic in the northwest, largely a creation of the Soviets.
The “front-story” of the communists’ mid-century rejection of the notion of self-determination for ethnic minorities or granting them a republic within the People's Republic is well told. What is missing is the backstory—the promise in the communists’ previous (1931) state constitution that the various minzu (nationalities) were entitled to complete independence if they wanted it. (Article 40: “ …一直承認到各弱小民族有同中國脫離，自己成立獨立的國家的權利.”) Thus, we have the answer to the question that Jacobs raises and does not really answer: “why Beijing decided to territorialize its own version of ‘autonomy’” (p. 180). Surely the answer is that, having constitutionalized an unlimited right of self-determination, it was seen as necessary to retain at least a fig leaf of that. Thus came the establishment of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which, Jacobs rightly notes, would mean “autonomy” but only as an empty principle, with eventually not even a Uyghur majority (p. 174).
Another subject where Jacobs loses focus is the failed effort to modernize the culture of Xinjiang's Muslim peoples—the movement known as jadid. (The term does not appear in the index, though the general subject is alluded to here and there.) It was not just a matter of nationalism, but rather involved the transformation of political and economic institutions. Jadid prevailed briefly in the two short-lived eastern Turkestani republics, but the provincial Chinese warlords were otherwise able to stifle it in favor of traditional Islamic culture of the unreconstructed but compliant (to China) imams. Had jadidism not been suppressed, the subsequent history of Eastern Turkestan might have been very different.
But this nicely conceived, thoroughly researched, thoughtful, and well-written book is a must-read for anyone interested in ethnicity in China.
