Xinjiang in the Twenty-First Century

Islam, Ethnicity and Resistance

Michael Dillon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317608806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

There has been a significant increase in the twenty-first century in the frequency and intensity of violent incidents in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the far northwest province of China, where the Uyghurs, the Turkic-speaking Muslim people who historically constituted the majority population, feel themselves displaced and discriminated against by the growing in-migration of Han Chinese. The book explores the continuing unrest in Xinjiang. It focuses in particular on the major violence of July 2009 in the city of Urumqi, on repression and the practice of Islam in southern Xinjiang, and on the policy of the Chinese Communist Party which has used the rhetoric of the "War on Terror" to justify its repression in terms which it hopes will gain sympathy from the international community. The book relates these particular points to the development of China-Uyghur relations more broadly in the longer historical perspective, and concludes by discussing how the situation is likely to unfold in future.

Part 1
Deep roots of the Xinjiang conflict

1
Turkic Muslims and the Chinese state

Centuries of conflict

The argument that motivates and informs this book, as set out in the Introduction, is that the ongoing violence in Xinjiang, beginning with the 2009 disturbances in Urumqi, is only the most recent phase of a protracted conflict that has deep historical roots. It is not simply a clash between contemporary Muslim Uyghurs and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); neither is it a conflict created or stimulated purely by hostile external forces in an otherwise peaceful Xinjiang, which is how it is portrayed by the government in Beijing. From this it must follow that the twenty-first century conflict can only be understood in the context of its antecedents, a context that is firmly fixed in the memory of Uyghurs and to a lesser extent of those Han Chinese who have been involved in Xinjiang. To support this reasoning more historical detail is necessary.

As has been argued, disputes about the control of the territory of Xinjiang and how the non-Chinese Muslim population should be governed can easily be traced back several decades to the Republican Period when China was ruled by the Nationalist Guomindang; warlords – sometimes nominally or in reality allied to the Nationalists – ruled Xinjiang and a powerful ethnic and nationalist movement of Muslim Uyghurs against Chinese rule led to the establishment of two short-lived but influential opposition regimes in Xinjiang. The first of these was the Turkic Islamic Republic of Eastern Turkestan that was established in Kashgar in 1933–4 by Uyghurs but only lasted a few months. The second was the Eastern Turkestan Republic, created in the north-west of Xinjiang in the three districts of Ili, Tarbagatay and Altai, with its capital in the city of Ghulja (Yining). The Eastern Turkestan Republic of Ghulja was more enduring than the Kashgar regime and lasted from 1944 to 1949: it was also multi-ethnic, and its orientation was towards secular nationalism, under the influence of the Soviet Union. The Islamic component of the movement that produced the regime was acknowledged but was given less prominence. Chinese sources invariably refer to this period as the Three Districts Revolution (sanqu geming), preferring to avoid any reference to Eastern Turkestan for fear that even the mention of the name might excite separatist sentiment. Although neither of these regimes ever controlled the whole of Xinjiang, their subsequent influence has been vastly out of proportion to the authority that they exercised at the time. They still inspire Uyghur activists in the twentieth century who regard them as models for the independent Eastern Turkestan that they hope will one day become a reality.¹

The underlying causes of the present-day conflict can be traced even further back in the history of the region. In the eyes of the rulers of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), whose emperors and most powerful aristocrats and officials it should be noted were chiefly ethnic Manchu rather than Han Chinese, the Kashgar regime that was established in 1867 by Yakub Beg (1820–1877?) was a criminal rebellion against the legitimate authority of the empire. As far as Yakub Beg and his followers were concerned, their administration was a lawful emirate, ruling on the basis of Islamic jurisprudence. Moreover, the legitimacy of Yakub Beg’s government was underpinned by attaching it firmly to the tradition of Naqshbandi Sufi shaykhs who had exercised both spiritual and temporal authority over Kashgar and other parts of southern Xinjiang since the late seventeenth century.² Sufism in Xinjiang is not merely of antiquarian interest: it is a living tradition and it continues to exert enormous influence across the entire Uyghur community. It is rarely discussed openly in Xinjiang because of the threat that it is perceived to pose to the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, but Naqsbandi Sufism and the governments backed by it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the deep-rooted if obscure inspiration for the religious component of Uyghur resistance in the twenty-first century.

The deep roots of Sufism in Xinjiang

The Uyghurs are too often treated as if they are a people in the margins of Chinese history. Like the Tibetans and the Mongols, they have their own history, much of it written in their own Turkic language but that is not readily available in Xinjiang, particularly if it diverges from official Chinese accounts. The religious element in Uyghur history is particularly important as it distinguishes them clearly from most Chinese. Manichean and Buddhist influences predominated in the earliest years but from the twelfth century onwards most of the Uyghurs were steadily Islamised through the work of missionaries from Central Asia and other parts of the Islamic world. The military conquest of the eastern part of Turkestan by the Sufis and political leaders associated with them consolidated the political authority of Islam.

After the fall of the Khanate of Saidiya, which ruled between 1514 and 1696, the region fell under the sway of the Khwajas, spiritual leaders of one of the powerful Islamic Sufi orders, the Naqshbandi. The Khwajas remained the only authority until a degree of Chinese rule was established in 1762.³ During the Khwaja period there was no single temporal power in the region and no unified government for the whole of what is now called Xinjiang. Separate hybrid religio-political administrations emerged, based on what were effectively city states, the most powerful of which were Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan. This political system was still in place when Xinjiang was incorporated into the Chinese empire by the military expeditions of the Manchu Qing court in the second half of the eighteenth century. Although its history from this time became even more closely entwined with the history of China, the independent narrative of Uyghur history remained important to local people. Soufisme et Politique entre Chine, Tibet et Turkestan, a study by Alexandre Papas, is an important contribution to the restoration or reconstruction of this independent history. It draws on hagiographies of the Sufi master Appaq Khoja (1626–94) and documents on the double lineage of Naqshbandi Sufis (Afqiyya and Ishaqiyya) that dominated Eastern Turkestan from the end of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. The documentation is drawn from a substantial corpus of little-known books and manuscripts in Persian and Uyghur, with supporting material in Uzbek and various European languages. The study of these sources has thrown new light on the political role played by the Naqshbandi Sufi orders in Yakand and Kashgar. Although hagiographies have severe limitations, they do provide evidence of the impact of Sufi organisations on social and political developments.

The ascendency of the Sufis as a temporal power can be dated to 1679 when Appaq Khoja, a Naqshbandi, and a descendant of the great shaykh of Samarkand, Makhdum-i Az’am (m.1542), took power in Kashgar. The Sufi Khwaja dynasty continued after the death of Appaq Khoja in 1694 and lasted until 1759. In that year, after a failed attempt at an insurrection against the new power of the Qing dynasty which was expanding into Central Asia, the final Khwaja rulers, Burhan al-Din Khwaja and his brother Jahan Khwaja, fled towards Badakhshan which at that time referred to a region that is now divided between Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

The mindset of the victorious Sufis in this remote area – on the eastern frontiers of the Islamic world then, as it is today – was that of conquering, militant proselytisers. As their hagiographies demonstrate they were motivated by their mission to convert the unbelievers of the region, particularly the ruling elite, and compel them to submit to Islam. In Kasghar, as the influence of Sufism evolved, the Sufi masters (ishan – a use by pious Sufis of the Persian word for ‘them’ to avoid taboo names) acquired power in a system that has been called ishanat and is a model of religious authority that is particular, although far from unique to, Central Asia. This system of mystical theocracy, in which political power was regarded as sacred, operated in two ways: either the Sufis took power directly, as was the case with the Naqshbandis of Kashgar and the Safavids of Iran, or the rulers subsequently transformed themselves into Sufi masters, which was the case with the Moghuls in their conquest of India. In either case the practical effect in government was that there was no real distinction between the terms ‘disciple’ and ‘subject’: the outcome was the sanctification (or consecration) of political power. This tradition, although seemingly archaic, has been preserved by the Sufi networks of Xinjiang into the modern era.⁴

Continuation of violent resistance after 1949

Resistance to Chinese rule, sometimes violent, continued after the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949 and established the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This conflict was essentially another phase of the enduring conflict by individuals and groups connected with, or inspired by, the pre-1949 independent regimes and by the religious traditions of the Naqshbandi Sufis. There were insurrections against the new government between 1949 and 1954, but this was followed by a hiatus until the Cultural Revolution when a period of intense separatist activity against the CCP was aided and abetted by some elements in the USSR: Moscow had been in dispute with Beijing over ideology and international political authority since the early 1960s and the two former Communist allies were by then adversaries and on the brink of war. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, as China reformed its economy and some of its political structures, there was an outbreak of violent protests in Xinjiang. These began in the 1980s and after the collapse of the neighbouring Soviet Union in 1991 the conflict was given a new lease of life.

Khotan, 1954

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) reached Xinjiang in September 1949 and by the spring of 1950 even the southern city of Kashgar was in their hands. The ‘peaceful liberation of Xinjiang’ was, as its name implies, accomplished with little opposition, but the presence of the CCP was regarded as a threat by the Uyghur secular and religious elite from the outset and organised resistance soon began in the region of Khotan, the ancient Islamic city state that lies east of Kashgar and south of the Taklamakan Desert. The nature of that resistance provides concrete evidence of the continuation of the authority of Naqshbandi Sufism into the era of the PRC.

The first major act of armed resistance to CCP control over Xinjiang after 1949 was an uprising in Khotan in December 1954 by a group led by Abdimit (Abdul Imit) who was described as a religious leader and was probably either a shaykh or a deputy (khalifa) in one of the Naqshbandi Sufi orders. His organisation was known to the Chinese authorities as the Emin group and was described by them as a Pan-Turkic organisation. Pan-Turkism, a political movement for the unity of speakers of all Turkic languages, and Pan-Islamism, the parallel religious movement, were viewed by the Chinese authorities as the major external threats to Xinjiang at the time. Muhammad Emin Bughra (1901–65, also Muhammad Amin Bughra), after whom the group of insurgents was unofficially named by the Chinese, was a literary scholar and journal editor who had been involved in both the uprising in Khotan in 1932–4 and the first independent Turkestan government in Kashgar. He was styled the ‘Emir of Khotan’ but when the city was captured by Hui (Dungan) troops commanded by Ma Hushan, he fled to Afghanistan. He had only been a peripheral figure in the failed attempt to establish an independent administration in Kashgar in the early 1930s and had remained in Khotan throughout the insurrection but, using his status as an Islamic scholar, he had lent his support to that regime. He was subsequently part of the coalition government that ruled part of north-western Xinjiang in 1946 and was a close colleague of another leader of the Uyghur independence movement, Isa Yusuf Alptekin. Emin finally left Xinjiang when the CCP took control in 1949 and settled in Turkey.⁵

Muhammad Emin Bughra had travelled from Afghanistan to Khotan on the eve of liberation in 1949 to organise pro-independence demonstrations against the PLA as it moved into Xinjiang. His supporters inside Xinjiang included Sufi shaykhs and other religious leaders, with whom he had long-standing connections; they met regularly to devise strategies for opposing the advance of the PLA. A meeting of pro-independence activists in September 1950 appointed leaders of the independence movements in the separate towns of southern Xinjiang, and it was decided that Khotan would be the first town to rise up against the Chinese occupation. This was an anxious period for the Uyghur nationalists. The CCP had begun to implement its policies of suppressing counter-revolutionaries; reducing rural land rents; opposing the authority of ‘local tyrants’ (powerful village heads); and the redistribution of agricultural land in the land reform programme. These policies were applied nationwide but that included Xinjiang: religious leaders in Xinjiang, some of whom had effective control over large waqf landholdings (land held in religious endowments) were natural targets for these campaigns.⁶

In the Khotan region there was considerable opposition to the creation of agricultural cooperatives which followed the land reform campaign. This resistance was exacerbated by the attitudes of lower-level Communist Party and government cadres who had been putting these policies into practice in an oppressive and heavy-handed manner. The discontent that this created provided fertile ground for an anti-Chinese rebellion. The rebellion was led by Abdimit, the Sufi shaykh from Khotan. In February 1954, Abdimit met Great Mullah Badredin, an active supporter of Muhammed Emin Bughra who had been imprisoned during the Campaign for the Suppression of Counter-Revolutionaries and had only recently been released. The campaign had been launched immediately after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China to identify and remove active opposition to the new regime. In May, the rebels set up the Committee for a Salām (peace) Government Alliance with Abdimit as Chairman. In June 1954, Abdimit travelled to Karakash (Moyu), Muhammad Emin’s original base; he conce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface and acknowledgments
• Political leaders of Xinjiang
• Introduction: Xinjiang and the dead hand of history
• PART 1 Deep roots of the Xinjiang conflict
• PART 2 Urumqi, Kashgar, Khotan: 2009–15
• PART 3 Conflict and resolution in Xinjiang: the Xi Jinping era
• Postscript: re-education camps
• Bibliography
• Index