David Tobin is an international relations expert, but his new book, Securing China's Northwest Frontier, does not reflect the empirical or state-centered perspectives that dominate this field, especially in the United States. Rather, Tobin draws inspiration from the Copenhagen School of International Relations’ human-centric approach, and he engages theories that cross disciplinary boundaries, including those from postcolonial studies, gender studies, philosophy, and anthropology.
The book's central argument is that a multidimensional narrative of security defines state policies in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), but that very narrative has also been the main driver of insecurity in this northwest region of the People's Republic of China (PRC). This argument is not exclusively about state security, as is often assumed in the fields of international relations and security studies, but instead about perceptions of human security, particularly as they relate to the formation and maintenance of identities of inclusion and exclusion associated with the Chinese nation, its Han majority, and its Uyghur minority populations.
Additionally, Tobin's research methodology is a departure from conventional approaches in international relations, relying primarily on discourse analysis, in-depth interviews, and participant observation, which are more associated with anthropology and cultural studies than with political science. This cross-disciplinary approach is both refreshing and provocative, especially coming from an early career scholar in his first book.
This is a dense book that at times feels like it is trying to do too much theoretically, but there are some distinct advantages to this theoretical density. Most prominently, it embraces the complexity of how identities are produced through narratives of security and insecurity in the PRC. While Tobin recognizes the power of state propaganda to produce such narratives, he also stresses that citizens interpret and rearticulate this propaganda from their own positions, altering its impact on their identities as Chinese, Han, and Uyghur. By taking this “top-down” and “bottom-up” approach to identity formation, the book illuminates much about the PRC's ideologies and the ambiguous position of the XUAR in them, as well as how Uyghurs and Han in this region view themselves and each other.
Perhaps the book's most provocative and important argument is that one cannot fully comprehend China as either a state or a nation without a thorough understanding of the country's peripheries, and particularly the special meaning that the XUAR holds for the ideal of modern China. Contradictorily, the state defines this region as having always been a part of China, yet simultaneously as a constant frontier holding foreign enemies at bay and inhabited by barbarians who must be pacified. In this context, the state's drive to control the region and integrate it into a unified China plays a critical role in Chinese nation building and in resurrecting China's mythic greatness as a civilization. As Tobin suggests, “Xinjiang's marginality . . . is central to the constitution of a superior and attractive Zhonghua Minzu [Chinese nation]” (p. 85).
If the XUAR plays a special role in the PRC's nation-building project, it obviously follows that this nation-building project helps shape policy and identities in the XUAR, a process that Tobin examines throughout the book. For him, the ongoing struggle to build a Chinese nation involves the intersection of multiple overlapping and contradictory ideologies and historical narratives, namely, a Han-centric Marxism that anticipates the withering away of all non-Han nations, China's myth of 5,000 years of unbroken civilization, and a deep-seated Han ethnonationalism (pp. 190, 230). In the XUAR, these overlapping ideologies also intersect with the narrative of China's century of national humiliation at the hands of Western imperialists, which Tobin suggests fosters the state's portrayal of Uyghurs as an ambiguous “inside/outside” threat to the Chinese nation, always prone to manipulation by external enemies (pp. 113–15). While these different visions of the Chinese nation at times clash, they all imagine Uyghurs as part of that nation only if they have shed their cultural uniqueness. In Tobin's words, “competing drives to incorporate Uyghurs into Chinese civilization (culturalism), develop minority minzu (transformative socialism), and place Han at the center (chauvinism) all co-exist in tension toward the same goal of absorbing or eliminating Uyghur culture to make China great again” (p. 190).
This argument provides one explanation why the PRC has forged a campaign to violently eradicate Uyghur culture in the XUAR, including through “reeducation” mass internment camps, since 2017. For Tobin, this cultural genocide has long been inherent in the project of modern Chinese nation building and its relationship to the XUAR and Uyghurs. However, it is noteworthy that the time and place of Tobin's fieldwork made these attributes of the PRC's nation building particularly visible. Tobin conducted his field research in the XUAR's capital city of Urumqi only months after the July 2009 ethnic riots engulfed this city. As a result, his work is particularly valuable for its documentation and analysis of the impact of those riots on Uyghurs and Han in the city, as well as the state's response to them.
As part of that state response, Tobin witnessed a mass public education effort promoting “ethnic unity,” to which both Uyghurs and Han of all ages were subjected in the aftermath of the riots. In doing in-depth interviews with a small selection of Uyghurs and Han about this “ethnic unity” campaign, he finds that neither group is convinced about the state narrative. Uyghurs view it as an attempt to destroy and absorb their culture and identity, and Han, especially those working-class representatives he interviews, believe it is an attempt to placate a disobedient and violent Uyghur population. Thus, the state promotion of “ethnic unity” creates a sense of insecurity within both groups that only hardens their differences and puts them on a collision course. As Tobin puts it, “Party-State performances of Chinese-ness have the opposite effect of their stated intention because Uyghurs and Han re-perform its narratives of timelessness and civilization to articulate immutable difference” (p. 191).
Overall, this book is an important contribution to understanding the Chinese state's ambiguous relationship with the XUAR and how its Han-centric nation-building project has led the state to treat Uyghurs and other native peoples of the XUAR as an existential threat to the PRC and its global ambitions. Tobin makes a strong case that this has more to do with how the PRC views itself than anything related to the actions or behavior of Uyghurs. As Tobin notes of the present campaign of cultural genocide in the region, its “paradoxical combination of targeting a people as external security threats to Chinese identity and converting them into that identity perpetuates the tensions between inclusion and exclusion at the heart of Zhonghua Minzu” (p. 238). Importantly for Tobin, these tensions are not unique to the Chinese nation, but are perhaps endemic to the transformation of colonial empires into modern nation-states around the world. What is unique to the context of the China is that the PRC has never confronted its imperial legacy as have other former empires, seeking instead to portray itself exclusively as a victim rather than also a perpetrator of colonialism. While international scholarship has generally demonstrated a similar inability to confront this imperial legacy in China, Tobin's book is one of several recent texts that does. As the final sentence notes, “adopting colonial techniques of targeting particular ethnic groups and isolating them as threats in camps have viscerally collapsed narrative binaries between violent, colonial West and peaceful, anti-colonial China” (p. 243).
Overall, this book is a dense read and may disappoint the uninformed seeking to grasp easy answers as to why the PRC is actively engaged in erasing the Uyghur people as a nation today. It may also disappoint those seeking to understand the experiences of all Uyghurs inside China, given that its research was limited to the city of Urumqi, where experiences differ significantly from those in Uyghur-majority towns and cities in the region. However, these are not the aims of this book, which is really more about China than about Uyghurs, and it is Tobin's perspective on China as a nation that is truly innovative.
This book should be required reading for anybody who studies modern China because it offers a perspective on the PRC's nation-building endeavor from the margins, stressing that without this perspective, one's conceptualization of modern China is woefully incomplete. From the margins, many of the contradictions in PRC policy suddenly make sense: why it acts like a colonizing state when it declares support for decolonization around the world; why the Han have become an invisible racial category akin to white in Europe and the Americas, despite the state's alleged antiracist ideology; and how PRC assertions of aggressive strength globally emerge from a deep-seated fear of insecurity that blurs the boundaries between external and internal challenges.
