China, Xinjiang and Central Asia

History, Transition and Crossborder Interaction into the 21st Century

Colin Mackerras, Michael Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415453172
• eBook ISBN: 9781134053865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Central Asia and Xinjiang – the far north-western province of China – are of increasing international importance. The United States, having established military bases in Central Asia after September 2001, has now become a force in what was previously predominantly a Russian sphere of influence; whilst China, Russia and Iran all continue to exert strong influence. These external, international influences have had a significant impact on local politics, with the overthrow of a long-standing regime in Kyrgyzstan, continued unrest and opposition to the current regime in Uzbekistan and the intensification of Chinese control in Xinjiang.

This book explores the effect of global and local dynamics across the region: global influences include the 'War on Terror' and international competition for energy resources; local dynamics include Islamic revival, Central Asian nationalism, drugs trafficking; economic development and integration. The authors argue that these multiple challenges, in fact, unite Xinjiang and Central Asia in a common struggle for identities and economic development.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the region's historical significance, the contemporary international forces which affect the region, and of current political, economic and cultural developments.

1
China, Xinjiang and Central Asia

‘Glocality’ in the year 2008

Donald H. McMillen

University of Southern Queensland, Australia

Introduction

The contributors to this volume are grateful to the Griffith Asia Institute for hosting the June 2006 Workshop on ‘Central Asia and Xinjiang into the twenty-first century’ that has led to the publication of these timely and thought-provoking essays. The participants, many of whom had travelled far to be in Australia, offered informed, indeed fascinating, insights focused on the relationship between developments in Xinjiang and China’s ties with the rest of Central Asia. In a broader sense, the proceedings touched on a range of significant global and international issues pertinent to that ‘region’, including recent views from Beijing, Moscow, Washington and Australia. In a more particular sense, and very correctly in my mind, they also critically delved into the more ‘local’ conditions of life, attitudes, history of events, and states’ policies that have had equally profound effects on the various peoples and players there. All of these were placed in the context of a number of important ‘transitions’ that are variously underway today.

One of the main points made in my opening address, and one that will be discussed in greater detail later, was the need for an analytical framework that would assist in the contextualization and assessment of the issues treated by Workshop contributors – and one that would provide overall coherence for this volume. I suggested that one such framework could be based on the notion of ‘glocality’. As it happened, just such a framework was consistently embedded in contributors’ essays and served our aims well. First, however, I believe it is appropriate to briefly discuss the generations of scholars, and others, who have written about this ‘Eurasian Outback’ as a backdrop to the essays that follow.

The earlier generations of Xinjiang/Central Asia scholars

To be honest, when the workshop organizers, Professor Colin Mackerras and Dr Michael Clarke, invited me to present the opening paper, I was a bit anxious. This was because I began my own research career some 35 years ago by focusing on the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to establish its power in Xinjiang and, thereafter, formulate ‘revolutionary re-integrationist’ policies that would create a post-Liberation Xinjiang that was truly an integral part of the new People’s Republic of China (PRC). I was fascinated by the fact that after 1949 the CCP had to deal with several ‘historical truths’, including that Xinjiang remained a rather remote, non-Han region along the Sino-Soviet border in Central Asia where complex ethnicities had become predominantly coloured by adherence to varieties of the Islamic faith. Indeed, these features were to have continuing impacts on Beijing’s efforts to exert Chinese rule and establish a communist ethos there. Much the same had previously been the case in Soviet Central Asia for the leadership in Moscow.

At that time, I also was drawn to the study of Xinjiang by the work of at least two previous generations of largely Western scholars, many of whom had ventured there to either uncover the mysteries of ‘Inner Asia’,¹ to fathom the ‘Great Games’² then being played out by a combination of exogenous and indigenous empires in that ‘Pivot (or Pawn?) of Asia’³ or, more simply, to tell ‘the story’ of Central Asia and Xinjiang.⁴ Many of my colleagues in the United States at that time were quizzical, if not sceptical, about the region’s importance – even when they knew where it was!

In my mind, the first lot of Central Asia and Xinjiang scholars composed the ‘Generation of Adventurers, Explorers and Romantics’ – even ‘Exoticists’; while the second was basically a ‘Generation of Traditional Geopoliticians’ who assessed the imperial ambitions of extra-regional powers in those novel Eurasian continental lands beyond the Great Wall where Silk Roads and oasis cultures were seen to predominate.

In any case, these first two generations of writers brought the distant domains of Central Asia and Xinjiang to the attention of outsiders. However, in my view, they wrote relatively little about the particularities of the peoples and places there, and when they did so it was usually from Euro- or Sino-centric perspectives. More recently, this prompted S. Frederick Starr to lament the fact that many earlier studies of Xinjiang (and Central Asia) set the precedent of being based on ‘hoary generalities and self-serving clichés’ in explaining these places and peoples – treatments he claims were a ‘tableau of exotica’ or works that treated them as ‘a crude geopolitical problem’.⁵ In his words concerning such writings on Xinjiang: ‘Bluntly, there is hardly any “fact” concerning Xinjiang [and, one might add, Central Asia] that is so solid, no source information that is so independent, and no analysis based on such overwhelming evidence that someone does not hotly contest its validity or meaning.’⁶

That aside, but perhaps on account of these reasons, I was attracted to study that region and its peoples, and my initial research led to the 1979 publication of Chinese Communist Power and Policy in Xinjiang, 1949–77, which explored the political integration of that ‘new frontier region’ into the nascent PRC. That volume was followed by a 1981 article in The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, entitled ‘Xinjiang and the Production and Construction Corps: A Han Organisation in a Non-Han Region’. Admittedly, I published these studies at a time when my own research, and that of the generation of Western scholars in that period, was largely framed by the ideological and geostrategic contexts of the then Cold War and, later, the development of the Sino-Soviet dispute.⁷ But this is not to say that no attempt was made by me, or others, to look ‘beyond ideology’ in undertaking such research and writing!

That notwithstanding, I would label that cohort of Western writers as scholars belonging to the ‘Generation of Ideologists and Academic Voyeurs’. As a then young American researcher, and like most of my contemporaries, I had no direct access to China, and certainly not to Xinjiang or Central Asia.⁸ I was therefore compelled to pursue ‘research’ about that region from a distance (largely from Taiwan and Hong Kong). Thus, my investigations were undertaken in a very ‘second-hand’ manner, adopting analytical methodologies that were subsequently labelled ‘Pekingology’ for such studies focused on ‘Red China’ (or ‘Kremlinology’ for those pertaining to the then Soviet Union).

I nonetheless feel very gratified that Gardner Bovingdon would refer to my earlier research in one of his more recent writings on Xinjiang as follows:

A generation ago, Donald McMillen captured the central dilemma confronting Xinjiang’s rulers [the CCP]. On the one hand, out of security considerations, the Party had to develop policies that respected the Uyghurs’ (and others’) cultural and religious differences – though not, McMillen adds parenthetically, ‘their right of self-determination’ – to avoid provoking popular antagonism. On the other hand, nation-building concerns led to policies such as forced Han immigration and language reforms ‘designed to undercut the very ethnic and cultural uniqueness which the Party outwardly promised to safeguard….’ The ultimate aim was assimilation. According to McMillen, the path chosen by Wang Enmao, who by 1965 was both military commander and first party secretary of Xinjiang, was ‘to maintain actively the façade of regional autonomy for [the various minzu] … while at the same time adopting measures that would gradually make them, and the territory they inhabited, unquestionably Chinese’.⁹

While I shall return to some of these themes later, as do many of the contributors in this volume, my point is that by the mid-1980s my own research interests shifted away from Xinjiang, and it has been over 20 years since I last studied or wrote about that place.¹⁰ Hence, in making the opening remarks at the 2006 Workshop, I felt a definite sense of going ‘back to the future’!

The newer generation of Xinjiang/Central Asia scholars

Nonetheless, I have remained fascinated by developments in Central Asia and Xinjiang and often have read, with much admiration, the more recent, and excellent, scholarship about these places and peoples by the latest generation of scholars. Most of them have had the good fortune to experience greater direct access to China and Xinjiang and the peoples there since the 1980s and to the places of ‘ethnic cousins’ in the post-Soviet states of Central Asia since the early 1990s. As a consequence of their ability to undertake such fieldwork there, they have obtained greater ‘ground truths’ about the region than I (or ‘my generation’) could have done earlier. Certainly, my own ‘academic voyeurism’ of the 1970s seems a far cry from today’s more open and globalized research environment – where ‘travel’ (both real and virtual) across borders into such places, combined with newer technologies, has nearly removed ‘curtains and walls’ for interested researchers and policy-makers. Moreover, the newer (hence, current) generation of scholars, both Western (‘exogenous’) and ‘Non-Western’ (‘indigenous’), also is frequently fluent not only in putonghua (or Russian) but also competent in at least one of the languages of the nationalities of that region.¹¹

Therefore, this more current scholarship fits into what I call the ‘Generation of Scholarly Visitors’. It is composed of exogenous micro-specialists who have the capacities to dissect Xinjiang, and Central Asian, lifestyles and relevant government approaches to political, economic and social management. Moreover, it also is a generation that now includes scholars indigenous to these places who have, to a considerable degree, stepped out from behind former ‘barriers and dispositions’ to more freely interact with their peers both locally and internation...

Table of contents

• Routledge Contemporary China Series
• Contents
• Figures and maps
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 China, Xinjiang and Central Asia
• 2 The ‘centrality’ of Central Asia in world history, 1700–2008
• 3 Positioning Xinjiang in Eurasian and Chinese history
• 4 ‘Failed States’ on the ‘Perilous Frontier’
• 5 Xinjiang and Central Asia Interdependency – not integration
• 6 Uyghurs in the Central Asian Republics
• 7 Xinjiang and Central Asia since 1990
• 8 Central Asia’s domestic stability in official Russian security thinking under Yeltsin and Putin
• 9 ‘Glocality’, ‘Silk Roads’ and new and little ‘great games’ in Xinjiang and Central Asia
• Index