Judd Kinzley's Natural Resources and the New Frontier presents a timely argument about the central role that resource extraction plays in state-building in modern Xinjiang. It is part of a new wave of scholarship that attends to the material dimensions of the region's history, in contrast to the longstanding focus on identity. Kinzley argues that, by historicizing spatial patterns of institutional and economic development, we can understand how persistent inequalities between Han-dominated northern Xinjiang and Uyghur-majority southern Xinjiang emerged (pp. 16–17).
This inequality is to a significant degree the result of a longstanding pattern of state-led development: First, a China-based power or Xinjiang's regional government experiences a financial crisis. State actors plan to exploit Xinjiang's mineral wealth, which they perennially imagine to be a panacea for economic woes. However, these actors lack the capacity to create the infrastructure necessary to harness those resources, so they employ Russian (later Soviet) experts. In exchange, Chinese officials sign away mineral rights or take out a loan from the Russian company or Soviet state. However, the foreign experts create an apparatus to extract the mineral wealth directly to Russia, minimizing the benefit to the Chinese side. State-building and settlement follow the patterns of resource extraction, leading to the high concentration of investment in a small area that is minimally integrated with its surroundings. Poor infrastructure starves the state of revenue, denies the benefits of development to the majority, and ultimately precipitates another financial crisis, at which point the cycle begins anew. Periodic state-building leaves accretions of institutions, knowledge, and infrastructure—or “layers”—that limit the possibilities of the next cycle of abortive development. This cycle repeated several times between the 1890s and the 1960s, making it the central dynamic of Xinjiang's modern economic development.
Kinzley argues that this “arterial” extraction of oil and nonferrous metals was and remains more central to the creation of modern Xinjiang than the decentralized agricultural reclamation projects that we tend to associate with Chinese rule (p. 11). State planners did not distribute resource exploitation evenly across the region but built an apparatus to extract it from specific sites to distant industrial centers. As such, it is important to emphasize, as Kinzley does, that this mineral story centers around northern Xinjiang, while the agricultural history is primarily that of the oasis-ringed south. The book only makes one serious sojourn south of the Tianshan Mountains during the fascinating episode of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61), in which mostly Uyghur people were obliged to set up their own atmospheric distillation cauldrons and refine oil at home. From this account, the Great Leap Forward appears to be the moment that finally extended the state's knowledge of Xinjiang into the Uyghur homeland and demonstrated the Chinese capacity to exploit resources there, albeit briefly and along the paths laid by Russian and Soviet surveyors. Kinzley's account therefore leads us to reconsider our scholarly geographies: are these sites of development part of “Xinjiang” as a region, or islands in a contested archipelago of Sino-Soviet development, perhaps more akin to parts of Manchuria than to Kashgar?
The critical factor throughout this account is money: until the Chinese state could invest in infrastructure, its grandiose plans to exploit the region's mineral wealth ultimately served the Soviet “informal empire,” dominance and extraction without formal political control (p. 13). That began to change in the 1950s, when the Soviets reoriented Xinjiang's oil to Chinese domestic use, and then in the 1960s with the closing of Sino-Soviet trade. Nevertheless, it took until the 1990s for China to build the capacity to integrate the region through infrastructure. Indeed, Kinzley's narrative suggests that today's One Belt One Road project is actualizing the pipeline dreams of the 1890s. That being the case, more attention to the spectacular and aspirational aspects of infrastructure may be warranted, as decades of planning were motivated not just by the availability of resources, but by the illusion of oil's potential to bring about “instantaneous modernization” (p. 126).
Natural Resources and the New Frontier does not live up to its promise to tell history “on the ground” (p. 6). With the exception of a single teamster (p. 132), the book's sources consist of plans concocted at the top of the government hierarchy, travelers’ accounts, and surveyors’ reports. Where plans were actually enacted, their ramifications are expressed in terms of the data the state collected, not the experiences of those who toiled to realize them. If the Xinjiang state was “uneven, lumpy” (p. 17), as Kinzley argues very effectively, we need to consider the limitations and possibilities of the archive such a state produced.
Kinzley has undertaken impressive archival research, including documents from both Russia and the famously inaccessible Xinjiang archive. His account takes an accepted fact of Xinjiang history, that the region was essentially a Soviet colony, and explicates the vicissitudes of that relationship and its consequences for the region's long-term development. Kinzley's material-centered argument not only is a critical intervention in the Xinjiang scholarship, but should be of interest to scholars of resources and state-building anywhere. It would be an accessible addition to graduate reading lists on infrastructure, empire, or modern China.
