Introduction: Lost between Uyghur Dissent and Chinese Student Protest
On December 12, 1985, thousands of Uyghur university students gathered at People's Square in downtown Ürümchi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in far western China. The students marched through the city, shouted slogans, and demanded to meet with government officials to convey their grievances. They were motivated to protest by several recently announced unpopular policy decisions, but also by long-standing grievances related to the Chinese Party-state's governance of their homeland. In the following weeks, the protests escalated into an unprecedented nationwide Uyghur student political movement. Uyghurs studying in other cities in Xinjiang as well as in Beijing, Nanjing, and Shanghai took to the streets. Most notably in Ürümchi and Beijing, high-level Party-state officials held a series of meetings with students to discuss their concerns. Uyghur students debated vigorously with officials about minority educational rights, the effects of nuclear testing, and how political decisions were made—among other issues. Despite these discussions, however, the students’ demands were dismissed and they were told to return to their lives as dutiful students. Uyghur students mobilized again in 1987–88, frustrated with the lack of progress in reforming Uyghur education and with racist slogans spoken and written around Xinjiang University's campus.
Following the December 1985 protests, top officials organized Xinjiang's first ever symposium on “Marxist ethnicity theory” and published responses to the students in the flagship regional newspaper. The newspaper published responses again after protests in 1988, drawing on the principles formulated two years prior. Together, these responses signify a critical reconsideration of the basic assumptions guiding ethnicity policy and the reasons for interethnic strife in the region since Deng Xiaoping rose to power in 1978. Regional theorists and decision makers decided that the liberal reform program of the early 1980s, which emphasized increased non-Han political inclusion and promised greater non-Han autonomy in the People's Republic of China (PRC) system—promoted most fervently by Deng's apparent successor, Hu Yaobang—had gone too far.
In the 1990s, Ma Dazheng (Reference Dazheng2002, 52), a highly influential Chinese scholar of China's borderlands, described the December 1985 movement as the “largest” and “most widespread” in Xinjiang “since liberation.” Another Xinjiang-based Chinese scholar wrote that it was “regarded by the regional government as ‘the most serious political event since the 1949 liberation of Xinjiang, even considering the Great Cultural Revolution’” (Yuan Reference Yuan1990, 71). And yet, these events have garnered little attention in Western studies of Uyghur dissent and Chinese student protest. There is general unawareness of their nationwide scope and connectedness, no consensus on what issues the protests were about, little sense of their lasting significance and legacy, and sometimes even simply when the events took place is confused (Becquelin Reference Becquelin2000, 66; Bovingdon Reference Bovingdon2010, 8, 119–20; Clarke Reference Clarke2007, 66–68; Millward Reference Millward2021, 275; Tobin Reference Tobin2020, 99). Most worryingly, some scholars have uncritically repeated later Chinese characterizations of the protests as an essentially separatist movement, stating inaccurately that the students marched “in support of the independence of Xinjiang” (Lai Reference Lai, Chung and Lam2010, 75; see also Han Reference Han2013, 52; Dillon Reference Dillon2004, 60).
Why have scholars researching Uyghur dissent and Chinese student activism overlooked these Uyghur student movements? Sometimes, populations, often ethnic or religious minorities, become so associated with a certain mode of dissent or conflict narrative that we forget to step back and consider how different things were at different points in time. The Chinese Party-state has effectively devolved the history of Uyghur dissent into a simple, linear story of decades of escalating Uyghur violence, religiosity, and extremism, accelerating in 1990 and running through to the late 2010s, until the Party-state told itself that it had no choice but to construct a vast system of internment camps to finally solve the “problem” of Uyghur “extremism” through the coercive reeducation of hundreds of thousands of internees. Hemmed in by this teleology, Western scholarship of Uyghur dissent has largely been content to stay within these three decades, preoccupied with either studying Uyghur violence and “extremism” or critically analyzing the Party-state's crude narrative rather than wander into the empirical wilderness outside of it.
A second tendency can be seen in how people often treat minority groups as peripheral or exceptional to the main historical narratives of a nation's dominant group. The Uyghurs occupy one such equivocal position in the Han-centric histories of China. Despite recent efforts from scholars of Xinjiang studies and the broader China studies field to “normalize” Xinjiang in China's historical narratives, there still remain the repercussions of a tradition of scholars treating the history of Uyghurs and Xinjiang as self-contained subjects or, more simply, as beyond their purview (Thum et al. Reference Thum, Jacobs, Cliff, Brophy, Kim and Kobi2018, 12). Research on post-Mao student movements has reflected this attitude. For example, when one researcher living in Beijing in 1985 wrote a report on the student protests he encountered late in that year, he waved aside the December protests by Uyghur students, stating simply that they were “of a different nature” to the Han student protests that merited attention (Chang Reference Chang1986, 31).
The nationwide mass mobilizations in 1989 that ended with the Beijing massacre on June 4 is one topic for which scholars have begun the process of de-emphasizing and diversifying the conventional Han-centric narrative. As one recent history seeking to do just that observed, histories of those events tend to “overemphasize Han men” and “treat non-Han struggles for autonomy as peripheral” (Brown Reference Brown2021, xv). But the unyielding grip that 1989 has on both scholarly and popular imaginations of the Chinese democratic movements of the 1980s is itself an obstacle. As evidenced by the Uyghur mobilizations covered here—and also by similar ones like in Inner Mongolia in 1981 (Jankowiak Reference Jankowiak1988)—an understanding of how non-Han groups sought to influence their futures in China's post-1978 reform era will not be achieved through issuing ever-more comprehensive or inclusive retellings of 1989. Nor is it a matter of just working backward and building out the prehistory of 1989, as if all roads conveniently lead to that year. And yet, at the same time, these Uyghur student movements ought not be stigmatized as only part of an Uyghur story, instead of the broader Chinese story of post-Mao democratic movements in which 1989 is indeed pivotal.
By providing a detailed microhistory of Uyghur student mobilization in the 1980s, this article aims to correct for these tendencies. It treats the Uyghur student movements on their own terms while also integrating them into the broader politics of contention in post-Mao China. It shows that while non-Han groups have often been disadvantaged, there have been important differences over time in how the state has treated them and how they have made use of the space they have to express their views. The intent is to emphasize the complicated chronologies, unexpected intertwinements, and diverse possibilities borne out of China's political landscape in the 1980s.
To do this, I take the reader through four sections. The first explains my methodology and provides a brief overview of the politics of ethnicity in Xinjiang's recent history. The second, relying on original oral history interviews, reconstructs Uyghur student life and the course of the December 1985 Uyghur student movement. By centering Uyghur perspectives and experiences, I argue that the university functioned as a social, intellectual, and political space that provided structures for student political mobilization and allowed Uyghurs to develop their ethno-national identity through shared grievance building. In many countries where students played roles in national independence movements, they occupied an “established place in the society's political mythology” such that their activism became a “‘normal’ part of the political system” (Altbach Reference Altbach1989, 100). In China, it was through student activities on Beijing's campuses during the anti-imperialist political and intellectual May 4th Movement in 1919 that first established the “political category” of the student as a “stable and circumscribed position to be occupied” (Lanza Reference Lanza2008, 571). I show that this “political category”—even more than sixty years later—offered a way for Uyghurs to engage with the PRC political system and press the promise of their greater inclusion.
The third section explores how, like other Chinese student movements in the 1980s, Uyghur student mobilizations provoked essential questions about the limits of post-Mao reform. I argue that these Uyghur student movements proved to be critical turning points in the erosion of Hu Yaobang's accommodationist policies, changing how the Party-state diagnosed the reasons for Xinjiang's instability, justified Xinjiang's material exploitation for the rest of China's benefit, and delimited Uyghur political participation. The fourth section compares the hegemonic discourse produced by Chinese scholars writing about the student movements around the turn of the twenty-first century to its social memory among Uyghurs living outside China.
Methods and Background
Sources and Methodology: Oral History and Textual Hegemony
To reconstruct December 1985 and its aftermath, I began by collecting all extant and available textual accounts of the student movement, such as private and public written memoirs, speeches, research by Chinese scholars, and newspaper articles. The foundation, though, is more than fifty hours of original oral history interviews that I conducted between 2016 and 2022 with eleven participants and witnesses of the December 1985 protests, all Uyghur students or teachers who left for North America or Europe in the 1990s (see appendix). Interviews were digitally recorded and conducted in English (six), Chinese (four), and Uyghur (one) or a combination of those languages. Roughly half were conducted in person, half remotely. Some names and personal details have been changed to protect identities.
My first interview was with Nurmemet (Nuri) Musabay in 2016. I expanded from his network to find others connected to the events. Some did not define themselves as activists or make it publicly known they had participated. My goal was to capture the participants’ different perspectives on the movement and to more inclusively represent the national Uyghur student body in 1985. My identity as a white American man played a facilitating role: I was seen as a geopolitical and ideological ally, and I was not suspected of being affiliated with the Chinese government.
The best reason to turn to oral histories is that it allows us to center Uyghur subjectivity, which has been erased from existing retellings of the movement. So far, “knowledge” of the student movement has been monopolized by a hegemonic class of Chinese borderlands scholars writing on behalf of and for the consumption of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) around the turn of the twenty-first century—in response to what the Party perceived as increased Uyghur “extremism.” One American scholar of Xinjiang observed that post-1990 “official representations” of Uyghur dissent retroactively paint all past Uyghur protests as separatist or extreme (Bovingdon Reference Bovingdon2010, 119). Yet, little work has been done to uncover Uyghur representations of these events. This post-1990 Chinese scholarship sometimes confirms my interviewees’ claims and at other times flatly contradicts them. But what it never does is offer any sense of what Uyghurs themselves “wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did.” I hope that through the shared authority of oral history a “cross section of the subjectivity” of the Uyghur student finally materializes, suggesting one method to help decolonize Uyghur history (Portelli Reference Portelli, Perks and Thomson2006, 36).
Zooming Out: “Ultra-Leftist Errors” and the “Accommodationist” 1980s
Since the PRC's establishment in 1949, Xinjiang's politics have been subjected to a capricious back and forth over whether the reasons for interethnic conflict in the region were primarily a result of “Han chauvinism” or “local nationalism,” or some combination thereof. The Party has long used these two terms to theorize the mutual discrimination between Han and non-Han people, as well as to explain non-Han resistance to the Party's policies. Party cadres for most of the 1950s believed the main reason for ethnic disunity was “Han chauvinism,” whereby Han rulers in the past “had exploited less advanced peoples, retarding their social and economic development and creating enmity between the nationalities” (Weiner Reference Weiner2020, 16). Cadres simultaneously criticized “local nationalism”—a broad term used to refer to antagonism toward Han people, “parochial attitudes” among non-Han people, or explicit separatism. In the 1950s, Party leaders interpreted most expressions of “local nationalism” as understandable responses to past exploitation by Han rulers and the “residual chauvinism” displayed by arrogant and imperious Han cadres who applied the Party's goals for socialist transformation without accommodating local conditions (Weiner Reference Weiner2020, 75–76; Wu Reference Wu, Brown and Johnson2015, 308).
Nevertheless, first during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 and again during the Cultural Revolution, the leftward lurch of the Party reversed this interpretation: local nationalism was suspected as the main cause of ethnic disunity (Wu Reference Wu, Brown and Johnson2015, 318). What were previously considered preconditions for bringing socialist transformation to non-Han areas like Xinjiang—such as cooperating with Indigenous elites, cultural pluralism, and gradual implementation of socialist reforms—“became politically untenable positions” (Millward Reference Millward2021, 269). During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), Han cadres and Red Guards from outside Xinjiang attacked non-Han customs and beliefs that deviated from the Maoist norm as “backward, feudal, bourgeois, and local-nationalist” (Millward Reference Millward2021, 266). By the end of Mao's rule, there was deep interethnic discord (Millward Reference Millward2021, 269–70).
After Deng came to power in 1978, Party leadership again reversed course and blamed Han chauvinism as the cause of ethnic disunity, singling it out as one of the “ultra-leftist” errors of the Cultural Revolution. Hu Yaobang's tour of Tibet in 1980 and Deng's tour of Xinjiang in 1981 were key to this development. Hu was “shocked” at the poverty and degraded interethnic relations he witnessed (Millward Reference Millward2021, 272). Hu—whose reforms eventually made him many conservative enemies and whose death in 1989 was crucial in galvanizing the Tiananmen student protesters—responded by implementing a variety of reforms in non-Han autonomous regions.
Moreover, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (Bingtuan), a huge Han-migrant-populated paramilitary-economic institution, was so deeply embroiled in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution that Xinjiang's economy was “among the worst in the entire country” by 1975 (Zhu Reference Peimin2000, 314). Economic development was taken to be the headwaters from which all other policy goals—including interethnic stability—flowed. Hu developed a six-point policy, which included “fully” implementing ethnic autonomy in Tibet such that Tibetans were the “masters of their own lives,” respecting the special characteristics of Tibet when improving its economy, and transferring Chinese cadres “back to the interior” (Yao Reference Wang and Barnett1994, 285–89). Hu told the regional leadership in Tibet to stop “worrying” about whether they were really pursuing socialism, religious growth, and the possibility of another major rebellion (Wang Reference Wang and Barnett2011, 99–100). These policies were also applied to Xinjiang and were reportedly well received by non-Han people (Ruan Reference Ruan1992, 17). Some Han cadres resisted Hu's program. One Han official from the Central Party School, who later moved to the United States, recalled how, during his visit to Xinjiang in the early 1980s, a local Han cadre said to him,
When Hu Yaobang's “six-point” program came around, Tibet and Xinjiang really got out of hand. We were almost ran out! Hu Yaobang doesn't know shit . . . what is this “full autonomy” . . . if you give this to them, they'll just turn it into their East Turkestan. Hu Yaobang wanted to make Han cadres go back to inner China [eastern China] . . . this is like selling off part of the nation! (Ruan Reference Ruan1992, 18)
In the cultural realm, Uyghurs experienced a “conspicuous cultural revival,” including “institutionalized promotion of mother tongue education, ethnic crafts and material culture, and research into Uyghur history, culture and literature” (Bellér-Hann Reference Bellér-Hann2020, 155). Deng brought back Wang Enmao—a figure of singular importance in Xinjiang's modern history, as he was the top Party official in Xinjiang from 1952 until he was purged during the Cultural Revolution—and empowered him to reverse Xinjiang's condition. Harking back to the rhetoric of the early 1950s, a 1980 commentary by Chinese scholars captured the ascendant reformist position:
[W]e must not underestimate the trauma and lingering poison left by the extreme left line on national unity . . . This is because, in history, the Han ruling class has long oppressed ethnic minorities . . . Han chauvinism is still the central mistake in ethnic relations today, it is the main obstacle in implementing ethnic policy and achieving ethnic unity. (Zhongguo Minzu 1980, 11)
For these reasons, scholars tend to emphasize that 1980s Xinjiang was a quiet “period of accommodation” (Roberts Reference Roberts2020, 25) marked by “reduced tension . . . between Uyghur society and Chinese state” (Castets Reference Castets2003, 9). However, some generalists drawn to the region's restive reputation have concluded from this that “political mobilizations in Xinjiang during the 1980s were quite sporadic and limited in scale. It was in the 1990s when political movements, often violent in nature, gradually spread throughout the region” (Han Reference Han2013, 52). These assumptions are compounded by (and further compound) the fact that little is even known about Uyghur mobilizations before 1990 (Millward Reference Millward2021, 316).
Remembering December 1985
Zooming In: Politics of the Quotidian and Campus Social Structures in Ürümchi, Early 1980s
Uyghur student activism began with what a recent scholar of Beijing's May 4th Movement of 1919 calls the “politics of the quotidian”: with students’ daily social lives, their relationship to their city, their organizations, their classrooms and dormitories, and their campus (Lanza Reference Lanza2008, 571–72). Foundational to this was the wider reopening of universities after the Cultural Revolution, which allowed for Uyghur “educational pilgrimages” to the regional capital, Ürümchi (Bovingdon Reference Bovingdon2010, 14). By 1985, there were 17,000 students at Ürümchi's eight universities, roughly half of whom were classified as non-Han (Wulumuqishi difangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui bianjishi 1987, 184–89). The concentration of so many students softened Xinjiang's ethno-geographic divides—the most prominent being the north–south divide defined by the Tian Shan mountain range, which runs east–west. Students from different, often distant, regions suddenly found themselves sharing dorms, classrooms, and social circles.
For students not from Ürümchi, like Mehmet Tohti (a Xinjiang University biology major) and Kalbinur (a Xinjiang University journalism major), the educational pilgrimage to Ürümchi was one of startling contrasts:
Mehmet: I was so surprised how open and modern Ürümchi was. No one wore the doppa in Ürümchi; they wore Russian style hats and the women wore miniskirts. I could not even get around the city, because I did not know Chinese . . . As someone from the south, I felt very traditional. But I had friends from Kargilik at the university and that helped.Footnote 1
Kalbinur: There were a lot of khitay [insulting slang for Han people] there. For example, in our class all the people who had studied in Ürümchi, their Chinese was very good. But the rest of us, like us from Ghulja, we did not really understand it.Footnote 2
Yurtdash (collocal or hometown) networks provided an important structure to social life. For example, Kalbinur gravitated toward her Ghuljiliq (someone from Ghulja) friends at Xinjiang University.Footnote 3 It was often through such networks that parties were organized and mutual aid was given. These yurtdash networks also bound together students at different universities, creating citywide social networks based on hometown ties.
Another social and informational network was constituted by the administrative structures of the university. Xinjiang University, for example, required each class from each academic department (e.g., the history class graduating in 1988) to vote on and elect a class leader (banzhang, or sinip bashliqi in Uyghur) whose job was to liaise with university administration and represent the class. Nurmemet (Nuri) Musabay was elected banzhang of the physics class of 1987 every year.
Nuri: As banzhang I represented about thirty people. I was supposed to record who in my class did not show up to meetings. I couldn't punish people, but I could report them to the political instructor [zhidaoyuan]. I could report who went to parties, who drank alcohol.
Interviewer: Did you often report people?
Nuri: No, no. [laughing] I led the parties!Footnote 4
A side effect of this structure, however, was that it created a node-based network, centered around trusted banzhang, that quickly and easily disseminated information—official or otherwise—between classes and departments.
A third noteworthy aspect of social life at Xinjiang University was the pervasiveness of both institutionalized and self-enforced ethnic segregation. In the late 1970s, Han and non-Han students initially lived together in the same dorm rooms at Xinjiang University, but by 1985 non-Han and Han students had separate classes, dormitories, course materials, cafeterias, and social lives.Footnote 5
Mehmet: I had no Chinese friends, no Chinese teachers. Uyghurs were in Uyghur classes with Uyghur materials and same for Chinese. We were in the same building, but always different classes . . . The lab experiments were at different times, too. In fact, even my Chinese [language] teacher was a Manchu.Footnote 6
Another form of segregation occurred along gender lines, though this form was much more porous: Uyghur men and women lived in different dormitories, but they often socialized together.
Dormitories and classrooms were described as lightly surveilled spaces where students could talk more freely. Nuri recalled that one math teacher had a habit of turning algebraic formulas into political statements, asking students, if A + B – C = D, where D is the government's goal of “ethnic unity and harmony,” A + B are Xinjiang's resources, and C is a train taking those resources into eastern China, how is it possible to end up with D?Footnote 7 Kutluk Almas, a first-year Chinese instructor at Xinjiang University in 1985, recalled similar conversations with students:
Kutluk: In private or in between classes we would talk with students about democratic issues like these family planning policies and abortions are not right or the nuclear tests are wrong, these kinds of things.Footnote 8
The 1980s university was often the first time and place in which my interviewees encountered Uyghur historical and ethno-national literature.Footnote 9 The Uyghur-language Journal of Xinjiang University published work by Uyghur nationalist scholars.Footnote 10 Meanwhile, medieval works of Turkic literature were enshrined within the Uyghur canon. Small groups of students would break away at parties to discuss what they had read.
Interviewer: What would you discuss?
Nuri: Why we lost, what we did wrong in history, how we became a part of China. We would start with Apaq Khoja because he was the first to bring foreigners into the region. We hated him. We would talk about Yaʿqūb Beg and why he lost [Kashgaria] to the Chinese. Why didn't he make an agreement with Russia or with the British to get aid in Nepal? You cannot fight both Russia and China.Footnote 11
Amid this reacquaintance with the Uyghur past, Xinjiang University allowed Uyghur students to form university-sponsored culture clubs (Rozinisa 2013). These clubs invited well-known Uyghur intellectuals to give lectures, recite poetry, and perform music.
Nuri: I remember when [Abdurehim] Ötkür [a popular literary figure] came to give a speech. A Chinese author had written a poem describing the Tian Shan mountain range as being like a white flag. Ötkür was angry at this and so he wrote a poem saying the Tian Shan was not a white flag and that the Uyghur people had defeated enemies for thousands of years. He reminded us Alexander the Great could not pass the Tian Shan. Abdushukur Muhammat'imin [a professor of Uyghur literature at Xinjiang University] told us what was going on in the rest of the world. He had been to Soviet Central Asia and he described their lives and how they were republics, not autonomous regions. Of course, he couldn't say we should be a republic like them, but he made it sound like their lives were better—like better education, no discrimination, own parliament, own president, own flag. He also told us the rest of the world has been to the moon and we still use donkey carts.Footnote 12
In short, the university was a space where they learned about and consolidated their ethno-national identity, deliberated historical and contemporary grievances, and developed broad networks that facilitated political mobilization. Uyghur students began to think about what it meant to be Uyghur not just in Kashgar, Ürümchi, or Ghulja, but in Xinjiang, in China, and in the world. In this way, students constructed a set of problems which all Uyghurs seemed to be facing.
A Series of Outrages: Fall Semester 1985
A series of five events occurred in the fall of 1985 that motivated Uyghur students to mobilize. The first of these was a campaign for educational reform in mid-November organized by the Xinjiang University Student Union. A senior student named Mijit was a mediator between the government and student sides. Nuri remembered Mijit as a well-connected Party member and high-ranking member of the national Communist Youth League (the youth branch of the CCP). Students voiced concerns about issues like not being able to study at the graduate level in Uyghur, not being able to study abroad, and the inferiority of Uyghur-language materials.Footnote 13
Second, in late November, there were eyewitness accounts that a train had arrived in Ürümchi carrying Han prisoners from eastern China. Indeed, a People's Daily article from May 8, 1985, reported that from 1983 onward, Bingtuan in the traditionally Uyghur Tarim Basin in southern Xinjiang received criminals from eastern China to use as labor. The third event was the abrupt and unannounced replacement of the chairman of the regional government, Ismail Amat, with the less-liked Tomur Dawamat in early December. Many students considered him to be an “illiterate peasant” compared with Song Hanliang, a well-educated engineer who replaced Wang Enmao as the top Party official in Xinjiang in October. Students understood this to mean the CCP wanted a “puppet,” as “he [Tomur Dawamat] did not have the intellectual capacity or background to make good decisions.”Footnote 14
My interviewees were less unified in their assessments of which of the following precipitated student mobilization. Nuri was convinced that it was a rumor that the government was considering implementing coercive family planning policies for non-Han peoples (Bovingdon Reference Bovingdon2010, 58). Mehmet, however, pointed to the sudden death of Mijit on December 9 during a dinner at literature professor Abdushukur Muhammat'imin's house following official celebrations of the December 9th Movement. The December 9th Movement holds a special place in the pantheon of political movements in the PRC, organized as it was by students in Beijing in 1935 who were angered by the Nationalist government's unwillingness to direct all their energies against Japanese aggression. Though some today believe Mijit was assassinated, Nuri argued against this, reasoning that Mijit was a high-ranking Communist Youth League member and would have been a steadfast ally to the CCP. He claimed no one at the time thought he was murdered.Footnote 15
Evening, December 11: Deliberating Grievances and Organizing at Xinjiang University
On December 11, about forty students—including Nuri and Mehmet—gathered at a large, newly built dormitory on Xinjiang University's campus. Students debated and formalized their grievances as well as determined the timing and method of protest. Together, they developed six grievances, which remained consistent across my interviewees, contemporaneous newspaper reporting, memoirs, and even some later accounts from Chinese scholars. The first was that Xinjiang should have true or full autonomy, including calls for popular election of the regional governor. Second, they demanded there should be no more nuclear testing in Lop Nur in southeastern Xinjiang. A freshman biology major at Xinjiang University went to Lop Nur in 1985 and reported back to campus about the “seriousness of nuclear pollution and birth defects” there, reinforcing fears about nuclear testing already held by students from southern Xinjiang (Xia Reference Xia1992, 14).Footnote 16
The third grievance focused on excessive Han migration to Xinjiang. At one point, a student yelled out that they should add “Khitay go home” to the list, which others deemed “too provocative.”Footnote 17 Fourth, students rejected proposed birth limit policies for non-Han people, which Han people were already subject to. Fifth, students demanded that Uyghur education should be more equal to Han education in quality and opportunity. Sixth, the students demanded that the government should take measures to protect Xinjiang's environment and natural resources. Indeed, one Chinese researcher in 1983 concluded of the state's efforts to tame and develop Xinjiang's ecology for Bingtuan farms, “[D]eserts have not been transformed into fertile fields, but fertile fields into deserts” (quoted in Hoppe Reference Hoppe and Glaeser1987, 67). Anything to do with religion might seem conspicuously absent. Most students—as was true for Uyghur intellectuals throughout the twentieth century—were secular, and there was no sense that religion was being suppressed. Finally, students decided that the manner of their protest would be to convene at People's Square and take their demands to the regional CCP headquarters at 8 a.m. “Xinjiang time” the following day. Many locals informally adhere to this time, which is two hours behind nationwide “Beijing time.”
Other non-Han peoples leveraged student subjectivities in articulating the grievances that have come to define post-Mao ethnopolitics. One of the earliest of any student movements documented after the Mao-Deng transition occurred in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR) in 1981. Mongolian students’ demands partially reflected Mongolian concerns, such as how particular native grasslands ought to be managed and anger about unresolved injustices of the Cultural Revolution (which was particularly factional and violent in IMAR). But, like the Uyghur students, Mongolian students were also concerned about what they viewed as the interconnected issues of Han migration, environmental degradation, valuable natural resources being sent out of their region, and non-Han representation in the government. Notably, neither movement questioned the “legitimacy of the central government” (Jankowiak Reference Jankowiak1988, 280).
The night of December 11 was remembered as extremely cold, so students divided their preparatory labor by gender. Male students determined that they were better suited to bear the cold and go to Ürümchi's other universities to notify their friends (often yurtdash) about their plans.Footnote 18 Meanwhile, female students thought it would be prudent to make flyers with all six demands, which they produced by hand through the night.Footnote 19 Two interviewees at different universities confirmed that they were unaware of the protest until students from Xinjiang University went to their campuses on December 11.Footnote 20
Morning, December 12: Leaving Campus
Structural factors like ethnic segregation, yurtdash and banzhang networks, and the existence of nonsurveilled spaces were crucial, but contingencies factored in, too. For example, someone tipped off the Xinjiang University administration during the night of December 11. Teachers were sent to wake up male students early in the morning, in a bid to preempt their plans. Students were told to eat at the cafeteria and then go directly to class.
Nuri: This was actually good for us, because a lot of people on campus still did not know our plans. After the teachers woke everyone up, this was kind of like a fire alarm, people were curious what was going on and then they learned about our idea. But at that point, we were thinking about how we should go to People's Square . . . We then noticed there were no girls on campus. How shameful it would be if the girls went and we didn't!Footnote 21
According to Kalbinur, the women were not woken up or blocked from leaving campus. Women from Xinjiang University were among the first groups to arrive at People's Square. Kalbinur explained that despite this, many female students thought “women were inferior to men” and so “should follow them.” She said moreover female students were wary of political activity, as they cared about getting a job in Ürümchi after graduation—they did not want to return “to the counties.”Footnote 22 The determination of young Uyghur women to initiate the protest shamed Uyghur men to follow through.
Day, December 12: People's Square and the March
By mid-morning, People's Square was packed with thousands of students from seven of Ürümchi's universities. My interviewees speculate there were 10,000 to 15,000 students; later Chinese sources claim “approximately” 2,000 (Ma Reference Dazheng2002, 51; Zhu, Chen, and Yang Reference Zhu, Chen and Yang2004, 217). The students, however, had no plan and merely “hoped someone from the government would come out and ask what we wanted.”Footnote 23
Umit: We seemed to be the fourth university to arrive at the square. But we didn't have anything, I mean, we had no experience. The students encouraged us saying, “Oh, Shifan Daxue [Normal University], welcome, welcome!” There were several thousand students there. Then the Medical University came. When the Agricultural University came they brought two big posters where they had written “Oppose family planning policies” and “Oppose nuclear testing.” They were really prepared.Footnote 24
With no initial government response, students decided to begin marching through the city and shout their demands. Both Nuri and Mehmet recalled that the most extreme slogan they encountered was “Khitay go home!”—though they disagreed whether students or nonstudents shouted it. This and similar slogans would later be used as critical evidence by Chinese scholars to paint the student movement as fundamentally separatist in nature.
Having returned to People's Square in the afternoon, the students were confronted by a line of policemen and soldiers, who retreated when the students rushed forward and broke a glass door.
Mehmet: Eventually high-level officials came out and said they wanted to meet with our leaders. But like I said we didn't have any leaders. So eventually I looked at Nuri, he looked at me, we nodded and we walked toward the doors of the headquarters. Three other students we did not know followed us.Footnote 25
The five volunteer representatives made an agreement with regional officials to have a meeting on December 14. The students indicated that if the government did not uphold their end of the bargain, they would protest on December 19.
December 14, 19: Debating at Regional CCP Headquarters and the Second Protest
Each of the seven universities sent representatives to the December 14 meeting, including Nuri, Mehmet, Tursun (Xinjiang Petroleum University), and Umit (Xinjiang Normal University). Given the array of universities, hometowns, and academic disciplines represented, the students possessed a formidable array of technical and local knowledge.
Tursun: I was the first one to speak. I introduced who I was and actually Song Hanliang knew who I was and praised me [Tursun had invented a special kind of oil drill]. I don't really remember exactly what I said . . .
Nuri: He asked them, “How do you choose the leader of Xinjiang?” The government answered saying Beijing chose the nominees and then local parliament decidesFootnote 26 . . . Then Janabil [the regional deputy secretary, a Kazakh] mentioned Seypidin [Azizi, an influential Soviet-educated Uyghur PRC politician], who they had chosen, and said how he had done very well. But then he did something wrong and so they sent him to Beijing. Then he said Ismail Amat had done very well, and so we sent him to Beijing. Well, at that moment Maynur [a female history major] asked a question: “What kind of place is Beijing? Seypidin went to be punished, but Ismail Amat went to be promoted?” We all laughed and were encouraged with her bravery.
Tursun: We really thought they cared. They were listening very earnestly, even Song Hanliang.Footnote 27
After discussing educational reform, officials asked the students to present their next topic.
Nuri: Someone from the Agricultural University stood up and explained that nuclear testing was affecting crops. And someone from the Medical University said it was affecting people's health and disease . . . but they just denied it all and said they only did nuclear tests when the wind was going from west to east, so if there was any damage it would have gone to inner China. We just laughed. How stupid did they think we were?Footnote 28
The meeting ended late at night when officials stated nuclear testing was non-negotiable and that they would reschedule to continue talks.
As promised, there was a second, smaller, meeting on December 19, though officials “didn't give us [students] much opportunity to speak . . . we were still firm though and we laid out our demands.”Footnote 29 Dissatisfied with the reduced scope of this meeting, there was another march the same day. Soon after, parents received letters warning their children not to go against government policies and compared the student activities to the Cultural Revolution.Footnote 30 During the march on December 12, Uyghur bystanders had also asked the students (perhaps jokingly) if the Cultural Revolution had “started again.”Footnote 31 Officials often invoked the return of Cultural Revolution politics when confronting student movements in the post-Mao period, including at Tiananmen.
Beyond Ürümchi
In the following weeks, Uyghur students protested in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, and elsewhere in Xinjiang. The December 22 Beijing protest was picked up by Western, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong news agencies. Almost all characterized it as principally an “anti-nuclear protest,” some alleging that it was the first in China. According to these reports, Beijing students followed the Ürümchi script: several hundred Uyghur students from different universities in Beijing marched to Tiananmen Square and then gathered in front of Zhongnanhai, the central headquarters of the CCP, where they presented officials a petition with the same six demands. In an early example of Uyghurs enlisting foreign media to publicize their grievances, one student even “telephoned a Western news bureau” to tell them they were inspired by the Ürümchi protests (Burns Reference Burns1985). Students and officials held discussions that caused several hundred Uyghur students to “storm out in anger” (Irish Times 1985).
The last of the December 1985 Uyghur protests occurred in Shanghai on December 26, involving about 80 to 100 students. Tomaris Altay, one of the few Uyghurs admitted to a university in Shanghai, did not know about the protests in other cities until a classmate tapped her on the shoulder at the cafeteria and told her about their plans. Tomaris saw the protest as a Xinjiang protest and tried to mobilize all of her classmates from Xinjiang, not just Uyghurs. Issues like nuclear radiation, she reasoned, affected everyone.Footnote 32 Only a few non-Uyghur students decided to go, all of which were non-Han. The students gathered in People's Square and marched along Nanjing Road, passing the famous Friendship Hotel where they knew foreign reporters stayed.Footnote 33 They delivered the list of six grievances to an official at Shanghai's Xinjiang Affairs office, who said he would relay the list.
Tomaris: We received no punishment. They asked us though who was the leader, who planned this protest. We said “No, we came to this conclusion on our own, by ourselves.” So we all said we have no leader, no organizer.Footnote 34
I have not been able to locate detailed textual or living records of the protests that occurred elsewhere in Xinjiang, though Chinese scholars claim they occurred. They also claim that forty students protested in Nanjing (Zhu et al. Reference Zhu, Chen and Yang2004, 217).
Student Protest Traditions
Student Purity
Scholars have long noted how China's Han student protesters of the 1980s self-consciously adopted for themselves the vanguard role that educated youths first played in “all the great mass movements” of China's Republican period (Wasserstrom Reference Wasserstrom1991, 126). Umit Hamit thought that knowledge of these historical movements helped Uyghur students imagine and model their own movement.Footnote 35 Aziz Isa Elkun, a high school student in 1985 and not eyewitness to the protest, claims “a great deal of students . . . believed that their protest was similar to the Chinese ‘May 4th New Cultural Movement’” (Rozinisa 2013). Others, though familiar with these historical movements, were reluctant to make such connections, insisting theirs was an Uyghur movement. Still, even they rearticulated the same sense of civic responsibility, intellectual authority, elitism, and political subjectivity that Han students arrogated to themselves throughout the twentieth century.
Mehmet: We felt as students it was our responsibility to do these things. These people [Uyghur shopkeepers and onlookers on December 12] see injustices in their daily life, but their small businesses were a new thing and they were just busy making money. They couldn't worry about politics, but we could. Besides, most didn't understand what was going on or how to put it in perspective.Footnote 36
In the widespread student protests that began in Hefei in 1986–87, Han students attempted to police the “purity” of their movement as a student movement for strategic and symbolic reasons (Wright Reference Wright, Weiss and Espinall2012, 49–50). Even in the protests of 1989, which did not strictly involve students, students sometimes distanced themselves from workers to prevent spoiling the “purity” of their movement (Brown Reference Brown2021, 53). Nuri explained that they knew to do the same from observing previous protests by Uyghur nonstudents. During the march, they pushed away nonstudent bystanders who attempted to join.Footnote 37 Uyghur students in Beijing also knew the “government would have taken stronger measures” against nonstudents (Liang Reference Renshu1986, 26). There were some rumors Uyghur factory workers wanted to join the follow-up December 19 protest, though that never materialized (Isa Reference Isa2001).
Their efforts to portray their movement as inside-the-system were not in vain. Ürümchi's Public Security Bureau reportedly stated that it “took no coercive measures against the students”; another official said the students “offered some reasonable opinions on various government policies” (Liang Reference Renshu1986, 26; Globe and Mail 1986). In Ürümchi, some of those deemed organizers were put on a watch list and followed by political officers for several weeks; some later received what they considered poorer job placements after graduating.Footnote 38 Only after 1989–90 did their prior activism retroactively render them dangerous elements.
Anniversary Protests, Han Contemporaries, and Roads to 1989?
Throughout the fall of 1985—coincident with the anniversary of Japan's September 1931 invasion of Manchuria and then the December 9th Movement's fiftieth anniversary—Han students in Beijing and other major cities protested against “Japanese militarism” and Japanese consumer goods. Students progressed to protesting corruption, inflation, and even called for “greater political freedom.” They also demanded educational reform and met with officials in different cities (Mann Reference Mann1985). Much reporting of the December 1985 Uyghur protest in Beijing actually interpreted it as part of this ongoing Han student activity, describing it as “the latest in a series” (South China Morning Post 1985).
On December 7, 1985, more than 1,000 university students in Ürümchi attended the official fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of the December 9th Movement—perhaps part of a broader attempt to ensure that anniversary celebrations elsewhere did not also spiral into protests (Mann Reference Mann1985). A regional leader proclaimed that students must “carry forward the glorious tradition of the December 9th Movement” and should “become youths of a new period with no remorse when facing the times” (Urumqi Xinjiang Regional Service 1985). Tellingly, student activists behind the original December 9th Movement in 1935 marched a six-point petition directly to Party (KMT) headquarters—just as Uyghur students did fifty years later.
The nationwide Han student protests that began in Hefei in late 1986 and spread throughout the country into 1987 are better known because they led to the downfall of Hu Yaobang, who was ousted by conservatives who blamed him for the unrest. They are also retrospectively interpreted as “prefiguring” the 1989 protests and so are often put at the beginning of Tiananmen chronologies (Wright Reference Wright, Weiss and Espinall2012, 26; Brown Reference Brown2021, xx). However, pre-1989 non-Han mobilizations also need to be incorporated into this national story. The Mongolian student movements in 1981 and the Uyghur student movements in 1985 were as much democratic movements by Mongolians, by Uyghurs looking for a channel to shape their own lives within the PRC system—and not merely rigid, ethnocentric Mongolian and Uyghur movements for self-rule. They assumed for themselves the political subjectivity granted students in the modern Chinese political tradition; they demanded educational reform; they expressed frustration with slow to resolve social problems; and they called for political leadership that better reflected their communities—without calling for a new system entirely. Uyghur students used “democracy” and “minzhu zhuyi” (“democracy” in Mandarin) when discussing their grievances and as slogans during the marches.Footnote 39 Nuri said students understood the terms broadly, as a “general kind of freedom,” and not as a specific reference to Western liberal democracy.Footnote 40 Han student movements throughout the latter half of the 1980s can be characterized in much the same ways, including their appeals to a vague “democracy” (Kwong Reference Kwong1988, 980).
Consider, furthermore, how it apparently remains unknown that Wu'er Kaixi—the famous Uyghur student leader of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989—actually witnessed the Uyghur student protests of December 1985 as a high school student in Ürümchi.Footnote 41 He also only went to study in Beijing because “he wanted to train to become a teacher in order to return to Xinjiang and help raise the educational level of his people”—one of the core grievances of Uyghur students (Gladney Reference Gladney1991, 295).
Though such connections are interesting to make, a fuller composite picture of student activism in the 1980s is needed such that the events of 1989 are more constituent parts and less a predetermined destination. Some Uyghurs, for example, do indeed remember the nationwide protests in 1989 as potentially liberatory and connect them to their own activism (Brown Reference Brown2021, 167).Footnote 42 However, many interviewees claimed that, even at the time, they saw the protests of 1989 as Han movements and plainly refused to connect it to their own activism. Tiananmen Square may have been the momentous exclamation point at the end of the 1980s, but a heady decade of student political activism—whose many important early chapters were written in China's peripheries and not its center—preceded it.
The Limits of Reform
“Some People Think”: The Party Responds
From February to June 1986, the flagship regional newspaper, Xinjiang Daily, published a dozen articles that Chinese journalism scholar Mao Yinghui claimed were a direct “theoretical response” to the students’ grievances. Though the newspaper did not explicitly mention the protests, Mao alleged this was the “first time in history” the newspaper responded to public negative criticisms of minority policy in such a fashion (Mao Reference Yinghui2010, 183). The responses undermined key assumptions behind Hu's reformist program.
The February 28 article was directed at the students’ demands for “true” regional ethnic autonomy, a promise which to many appeared to have been renewed by Hu Yaobang's reforms and Deng's statements in 1980–81 (Deng Reference Xiaoping and Liu1980, 201). Instead, the article said:
An autonomous region is regional autonomy based on the area where minority groups reside, it is not the ‘autonomy of an ethnicity’ separated from a defined place . . . Some people believe the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to be an autonomous region of the Uyghurs. This is very one-sided and incorrect . . . Earlier, in 1957, Zhou Enlai clearly spoke about this problem . . . “We do not approve of using this name ‘Uyghurstan.’ Xinjiang does not just have Uyghurs, it also has twelve other ethnic groups. We cannot make thirteen ethnicities into thirteen -istans . . . The hat [maozi 帽子] it [Xinjiang] will wear is Uyghur . . . and other ethnicities will all equally wear this hat.”
When considering what to officially name Xinjiang, Mao Zedong himself countenanced that ethnic regional autonomy needed to be granted to ethnic groups and not merely the political boundaries of the regions. On behalf of Mao in 1955, Xi Zhongxun (Xi Jinping's father) asked Seypidin Azizi what he thought about calling Xinjiang the “Xinjiang Autonomous Region.” He responded saying, “Autonomy is not given to mountains and rivers. It is given to particular nationalities. Thus it is called ‘regional national autonomy.’” Mao responded in agreement, and so Xinjiang was officially named the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Azizi Reference Azizi1995). However, conceding this logic would naturally justify the students’ demands. On one hand, Party theorists had to admit that it was called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region because Uyghurs were by far the largest ethnic group in the region. But, on the other, they had to trivialize the connection between Uyghurs and Xinjiang, just as Zhou Enlai had to in (August) 1957. After Hu and Deng renewed promises to “truly implement ethnic regional autonomy” in 1980–81, to claim that “Uyghur” was just a meaningless “hat” that Xinjiang wore was an unconvincing compromise that did little to resolve the Party's long-vacillating incoherence in how it conceptualized the political power that Uyghur people would have in Xinjiang.
The May 9 article equated students’ concerns about Han migration to opposing “reform and opening”—Deng's market-based economic reforms and modernization programs:
[S]ome people vehemently oppose Xinjiang's reform and opening. For example, along with economic development, people with many types of talents and skills from inner China have come to Xinjiang to help build the economy . . . But they criticize those people as being rural drifters or unregistered migrants. But they are not rural drifters, they are nothing else other than skilled laborers coming from inner China to Xinjiang to improve the economy under our new circumstances.
Beijing-based regimes controlling Xinjiang dating back to the Qing dynasty have seen Han migration as a tool to develop and secure the region. Han people migrated to Xinjiang throughout the Mao period (1949–76) to labor on Bingtuan farms, to flee famines, or to be rusticated as youths. Correspondingly, the Han share of the population in Xinjiang went from 9.5 percent (479,000) in 1954 to nearly 40 percent (more than 5.3 million) in 1984 (Yuan Reference Yuan1990, 58). Students’ grievances about Han migration and the imbalances it wrought were not new either. In the 1950s, Uyghur workers and cadres felt “excluded from the economic boom taking place right in [their] own backyard,” calling Han migration a “natural disaster” (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2016, 191–92). The essential dilemma, appearing here again three decades later, was that the “more Beijing developed Xinjiang . . . the harder it became to camouflage the Han presence” and maintain the “pretense” that Uyghurs had an autonomous region to themselves (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2016, 190).
What is new here, though, is how the Party-state attempted to resolve this contradiction in the context of “reform and opening.” Previously, assimilationist attitudes toward non-Han peoples and the posing of local nationalism as the principal threat to stability correlated with leftward turns in the Party, such as during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution. Theorists in the 1980s, however, could no longer predicate such policies on attacking local elites, exploitative landlords, and capitalists as they could under Mao. This is why the author of the May 9 article warned that “closing the big door” on Han migration would actually signify a “return to a ‘leftist’ closed economy.” During former president Jimmy Carter's visit to Beijing in 1987, Deng—who never unanimously concurred with the extent of Hu's reforms—showed this thinking soon informed the Party-state's approach to all non-Han areas: “If there are more Han people there [minority autonomous regions], it would be beneficial to the local people's economy. That's not a bad thing” (Zhu Reference Peimin2004, 8). In other words, the economic development of non-Han peoples and regions was no longer taken to be something non-Han peoples could ever achieve themselves, or through accommodating their “special characteristics.”
Amid the publication of these articles, in April 1986, Wang Enmao (then holding an important position in Beijing) concluded that the student movement demonstrated the existence of local nationalism, even separatism:
Some people oppose even bringing up local nationalism, believing that to do so is too “leftist.” This viewpoint is wrong. We want that there is no local nationalism, but it objectively exists . . . People who think about East Turkestan are not many, the numbers are few. But its insidious influence is not small, especially toward some people in higher education . . . Write articles, speak reasonably—don't shout slogans. (Zhonggong xinjiang weierzizhiqu weiyuanhui dangyanjiushi 2005, 297–98).
This marks a stark repudiation of the post-Mao reformers who reacted against the “leftist” excesses of the Cultural Revolution by emphasizing the damage done by Han chauvinism and downplaying local nationalism.
Finally, regional officials held an academic symposium on “Marxist ethnicity theory” in the summer of 1986—the first ever in Xinjiang—attended by officials from all over China, including central departments in Beijing. The closing speech by Janabil, Xinjiang's regional deputy secretary, indicated that the student protests had instigated fundamental debates among attendees about the reasons for ethnic disunity: “Some people say there is no such thing as ‘local nationalism’ at all and that we should take the two words themselves out of the dictionary. Also some people say local nationalism is a product of the left. I think all of this does not fit with reality” (Janabil 1986, 6–7). In short, the early summer of 1986 marked the Party-state's earliest turn toward its later consensus that “its cultural accommodation of the 1980s and 1990s [was] a cause of unrest, rather than a solution to it” (Dwyer Reference Dwyer2005, xi). From this perspective, some of the earliest cracks in Hu Yaobang's liberal program—even Hu's position itself—began to form not at China's center, but at its edges.
The June 15, 1988 Student Protest and “Ethnic Separatism Is Xinjiang's Central Danger”
The Uyghur student protest on June 15, 1988, has also received short shrift, usually described as mainly a reaction to “racist graffiti on a toilet door” (Bovingdon Reference Bovingdon2010, 179). Chinese scholars and the recollections of an organizer, however, date the beginning of the protest to the activity of the Student Union of Science and Culture at Xinjiang University in December 1987. According to a student leader and current president of the World Uyghur Congress, Dolkun Isa, their goal was to “promote literacy on a mass scale” (Isa Reference Isa2001). Ma Dazheng (Reference Dazheng2002, 53) described the student union as a front to “sow ethnic discord.” Students traveled around Xinjiang in the spring and summer of 1988 to give literature and culture lessons while documenting the poor conditions of Uyghur education. Students created public photo exhibitions juxtaposing dilapidated non-Han schools with new high-rise Han schools (Ma Reference Dazheng2002, 53–54). Soon after, Isa recalled, the university administration indicated that they might put Han and Uyghur students in the same dorm rooms. It was only then that Uyghur students encountered racist slogans. Students followed a familiar script: they sent representatives from various universities to meet with government officials, who rejected their concerns. Then, on June 15, the students marched (Isa Reference Isa2001).Footnote 43
In response to the protest, Xinjiang Daily published eight front-page editorials, all based on the original twelve articles from 1986.Footnote 44 Mao claims this was the first time after the Cultural Revolution that front-page editorials sought to “refute negative remarks” on ethnicity issues, indicating that it was the direct opinion of Xinjiang's Party Committee (the 1986 articles appeared on the fourth page) (Mao Reference Yinghui2010, 187). In an interview in the 2000s, editors for Xinjiang Daily in the 1980s underlined the significance of the students’ slogans:
The “eight theories” were written in response to some wrong ideas in the student movement. Without those slogans there would be no “eight theories” . . . Since then, there have been no commentaries with such impact. Most of them repeat the views of the “eight theories,” including the comments on the “7-5 Incident” [the July 2009 Ürümchi riots]. (Mao Reference Yinghui2010, 188)Footnote 45
One of the “eight theories” claimed that Xinjiang's resources were, by definition, the nation's resources and belonged equally to all ethnicities. Marxist theory was rhetorically central: Han migration to Xinjiang was legitimate because the “praxis” of history showed that Xinjiang could only develop through the cooperation of all ethnic groups. These “eight theories” became “the guidance material for cadres and masses to study the Party's ethnic policy,” showing that the student movement defined many of the contentious issues that have come to constitute post-Mao ethnopolitics in Xinjiang (Mao Reference Yinghui2010, 188). Indeed, one of the “most alarming” incidences of Uyghur antistate violence, the Baren Incident of April 1990, reportedly began when Uyghur men were discussing “nuclear tests, the extension of family planning to Uyghurs, and the exploitation of Xinjiang's resources for use in the interior” (Bovingdon Reference Bovingdon2010, 123–24).
One Chinese scholar later wrote that it was specifically the Uyghur student movements of 1985 and 1988 that led Wang Enmao to conclude that “the main danger in Xinjiang comes from ethnic separatism’” (Zhu Reference Peimin2000, 388). Events elsewhere though clearly also played a part. After unrest in Lhasa, Tibet, in September 1987, Xinjiang Daily published remarks from Wang (October 13), who encouraged vigilance against ethnic separatism. At another meeting about the ongoing Lhasa crisis in May 1988, Wang stated unequivocally for the first time that “ethnic separatism is Xinjiang's central danger” (Wang Reference Enmao1997, 430; Zhonggong xinjiang weierzizhiqu weiyuanhui dangyanjiushi 2005, 357).
The Politics of Memory
The “12–12 Incident”/“Independence in Their Hearts”
In response to perceived rising Uyghur violence in the 1990s, the Party-state sponsored a flurry of research about the history of instability in Xinjiang and of Uyghur separatism—a framing that assumes the very continuity, connectedness, and existence of such a phenomenon to be true (Bovingdon Reference Bovingdon2010, 20). The work of Ma Dazheng (Reference Dazheng2002, 1–5) garnered special attention from the highest-ranking Xinjiang officials. Ma's report (produced in the mid-1990s) on what Chinese officialdom has come to call the “12–12 Incident” (December 12) begins by accurately listing most of the students’ nonseparatist slogans, like “Oppose those who say they support the regional autonomy of ethnic groups, but do not do so in practice!” and “Oppose nuclear testing in Xinjiang!” However, he follows this by writing that it was nonetheless planned by unnamed “separatists behind the scenes.” He claims that anti-Han and separatist “clamoring” appeared throughout Xinjiang “at the same time” as the student protests, citing slogans like “Cut the railroad connecting Xinjiang with China!” Therefore, even though he distinguishes the supposed separatist slogans from the student slogans, he nonetheless collapses them all into a single incident that “harmed the unity of the nation” (Ma Reference Dazheng2002, 51–52). Regardless, “separatist” organizations had no bearing on how my interviewees narrated their student activism.
Other Chinese scholars, writing several years after Ma, claimed explicitly that the students chanted both separatist and nonseparatist slogans and gave equal weight to both, though still admitting that “the behind-the-scenes plotters have still not been thoroughly ascertained” (Zhu, Chen, and Yang Reference Zhu, Chen and Yang2004, 217). Xu Yuqi (Reference Yuqi1999, 110) uses perhaps the strongest language, describing how a shadowy, organized group of unknown separatists secretly plotted “chaos” by misleading “ignorant and easily excitable” students to shout only separatist slogans like “Xinjiang independence forever!” These descriptions have misled Anglophone scholars citing them to write out the students’ six demands and their efforts to define their own movement entirely—reinscribing the Party-state's designation of the movement as fundamentally “separatist” (Dillon Reference Dillon2004, 60; Han Reference Han2013, 52).
Participants have occasionally policed the boundaries of their movement from encroachment by other Uyghur activists. On one Uyghur online forum, a user claimed that the students in December 1985 used the term “East Turkestan” in their demands, as if the students held aspirations for an independent Uyghur state. Another user, claiming to have seen the protests, chastised this user, saying that this was wrong and that they used the term “Xinjiang” at the time (Guest 2014). Today, some influential Uyghur activists consider the 1985 and 1988 protests as a unified “Uyghur democracy movement” and frame their contemporary activism as a continuation of their student activism in the 1980s (Isa Reference Isa2001). The legacy of this movement, and their roles in it, are kept alive through various anniversary commemorations, press releases, and the sharing of memoirs (Musabay 2005; Rozinisa 2013; World Uyghur Congress Reference Congress2018).
It is more difficult to assess its legacy within Xinjiang. Aziz Isa Elkun heard vaguely about the movement as a high school student in December 1985. In the summer of 1986, his friend who attended a university in Ürümchi came home for summer vacation and gave him a flyer with the six grievances. On the first anniversary of the movement, Aziz and several friends put up a poster listing the grievances at their school (another Chinese political tradition) and ended it with a call to “commemorate the December 12th Student Movement.”Footnote 46
Complicating any process of interpreting past incidences of Uyghur dissent is the development of an awkward conundrum, the twin tautologies of Uyghur dissent, wherein both Uyghur exiles and the Chinese Party-state have converged on the belief that all past Uyghur political mobilizations were—if not explicit, then subliminal—stepping stones to an Uyghur national consciousness and separatist intent. Though not representative of all of my interviewees, Kutluk Almas, the young Mandarin professor at Xinjiang University in 1985, now holds this perspective today:
Kutluk: From all the movements, from 1949 to today, so long as Uyghurs did it, whether it is student movements or cultural and historical holidays, whether it is writers or workers, it is all for opposing ethnic discrimination. Though the forms are all different, the essence is the same: independence . . . Those two student movements, their form and slogans were different, but their essence and larger meaning are the same . . . Independence was always in their hearts.Footnote 47
As evidenced in official portrayals of past Uyghur dissent and responses to ongoing Uyghur dissent, the Party-state has been all too eager to agree. Both sides are motivated to sink together diverse incidents of Uyghur protest, weighted by the shared belief that all Uyghur dissent must always truly express, deep down, the “independence in their hearts.”
In the end, my interviewees’ nostalgia for the 1980s extended beyond the feelings anyone would have for their time in college. It was a time that marked their own personal political awakenings and the alternative routes that the 1980s retrospectively seemed to offer, for them personally and for Uyghurs. It was for many a “‘Golden Period’ . . . remember[ed] for the hope it provided for a different future and a different China” (Roberts Reference Roberts2020, 52). Certainly, from the perspective of my interviewees at least, the last month of 1985 stands out as the highest peak to which Uyghur hopes for a greater say in their own lives were raised.
Appendix: Interviewees
Nurmemet (Nuri) Musabay, male, Xinjiang University (Artush, childhood in Ghulja) (Kalbinur's husband)
Kalbinur, female, Xinjiang University (Ghulja) (Nuri's wife)
Umit Hamit, male, Xinjiang Normal University (Ghulja)
Tursun Nurdun, male, Xinjiang Petroleum University (Karamay)
Mehmet Tohti, male, Xinjiang University (Kargilik)
Dolkun Isa, male, Xinjiang University (Aksu)
Erkin Altay, male, a university in Shanghai (southern Xinjiang)
Tomaris Altay, female, a university in Shanghai (northern Xinjiang)
Aziz Isa Elkun, male, high school student (Yéngichimen)
Kutluk Almas, male, English professor, Xinjiang University (Ürümchi)
Anonymous, female, Xinjiang University
Note: Some names and identifying information have been altered or excluded at the request of the interviewee.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank everyone who helped me in the development of this article, especially Emily Baum, Carol Benedict, Darren Byler, James Millward, Susan Morrissey, Gulnisa Nazarova, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, and others who have asked to remain unnamed. I am deeply appreciative of the Journal of Asian Studies editors and anonymous reviewers—their astute comments and feedback greatly improved the article. Lastly, I am, above all, thankful to my interviewees and their willingness to share their memories and life stories with me. All translations (unless noted) and errors are the author's alone.
Author Bio
Brian Spivey is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine.
