Introduction. Narratives from Xinjiang: social and political significance

ABSTRACT

This special issue of ‘Voiced and Voiceless in Xinjiang’ explores the construction of historical and cultural narratives as a complex field of interaction between representatives of the state and minority elites in Chinese Central Asia, with a particular focus on the region known since 1955 as Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). It shows how narratives, situated in their broader social, political and economic contexts, have been used in diverse ways by various actors to achieve diverse purposes, ranging from communal cohesion to the legitimation of power among different groups at different times. Having briefly introduced the main historical context (leading to ongoing crisis in Xinjiang) and the state of the field, this Introduction discusses some common themes of the issue, including the interdependence of grand/master narratives (grand récits) and small narratives (petits récits) and the mediating role of the local knowledge elite, before outlining the individual contributions.

KEYWORDS:

• Xinjiang
• narrative
• minority
• elites

This special issue explores the construction of historical and cultural narratives as a complex field of interaction between representatives of the state and minority elites in Chinese Central Asia.¹ Our geographical focus is China’s far northwest, known since 1955 as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Incorporated into imperial China in the middle of the eighteenth century, this vast territory was at the heart of late nineteenth and early twentieth century imperial rivalries between Great Britain and Russia, known as the Great Game. Following the turbulence of the Republican Era, it became part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Within the framework of socialist minority policies, the XUAR is home to thirteen officially recognized ethnic groups. Due to large-scale immigration since the 1950s, numbers of Han Chinese are nowadays roughly comparable with those of the indigenous Uyghurs, each constituting approximately 40% of a total population of about 22 million. Minority rights promised in the early 1950s were not substantively realized during the high socialist period (late 1950s through 1970s), but the situation improved significantly in the cultural realm in the 1980s. From the mid-1990s neoliberal economic policies palpably increased inequality and ethnic discrimination, and transformations in both the domestic and international political landscape added to existing tensions between Uyghur communities and Chinese power holders, which were further exacerbated by repeat ‘strike hard’ policies. Mounting tension, increasingly imbued with ethnic and religious coloring, culminated violently on the streets of the regional capital Urumchi in July 2009. The state responded by building up a sophisticated high–tech surveillance system and, beginning in 2017, interning an estimated one-tenth of the Uyghur population and other Muslim minorities in political re-education camps. This is the immediate context of the articles gathered in this special issue.

Focus, distinctive features and significance

Our primary interest lies in the diverse uses of narratives by various actors, considered in their broader social context. We approach narrative construction as a social activity that gives meaning and coherence both to the everyday and the extraordinary by ordering events, institutions and ideas and embedding them in larger conceptual schemes. We explore narratives as constructed and contextually grounded, and as vehicles to achieve diverse goals ranging from communal cohesion to the legitimation of power. Many narratives lay claim to authenticity and ownership. All are prone to conflicts of interest and loyalties. They are scrutinized by our contributors with explicit reference to changing historical, ideological and moral frameworks. The selected case studies attend to multiple cross-cutting affiliations, discourses of belonging, and local practices and agency against the backdrop of shifting political circumstances.

Our special issue features original research by senior and younger researchers with backgrounds in the social sciences and the humanities. Most of the articles focus on the high socialist and reform periods (from 1949 onward), but three scrutinize legal texts and other primary sources from the Late Imperial and Republican eras (Mirsultan, Schluessel, Thum & Kashgary), while Baldauf reminds us of narrative continuities over the longue durée. The seven articles devoted to the Uyghurs start from the perspective of recent scholarship that places Uyghurs at the center of scholarly attention, rather than at the conceptual periphery of Central Asia or China.² Analyses of Chinese, Mongol, Sibe and Kazakh discourses (Lavička, Long, Sárközi, Salimjan) provide much-needed points of comparison. We are honored to also include Ingeborg Baldauf’s analysis of genealogy-making in the Chingiznāma-Oghuznāma Complex, which had enormous significance throughout the macro-region of Central Asia across the centuries. Inclusion of this article is also motivated by our wish to do justice to Xinjiang’s dual orientation: to the civilizational heritage of Central Asia on the one hand, and the Chinese polity on the other.³

State of the art

Scholarly output focusing on Xinjiang has significantly increased in recent decades, not least due to the region’s growing political significance. Many of these works have influenced our contributors, directly or indirectly. James Millward’s monograph and S. Frederick Starr’s edited volume remain indispensable as political histories.⁴ Recent studies by David Brophy and Ondřej Klimeš shed light on the emergence of Uyghur nationalism, while those by Gardner Bovingdon and Joanne Smith Finley explore contemporary Uyghur-Han relations and Uyghur identity.⁵

A significant body of literature addresses diverse forms of narrative construction across Central Asia, exemplified by Devin DeWeese’s monograph on Central Asian conversion legends.⁶ Paolo Sartori’s study of Islamic law in Central Asia is an important reference work for interpreting Islamic legal documents in pre-socialist Xinjiang.⁷ History-making as a contemporary social activity in Eurasia is thematized in Svetlana Jacquesson’s edited collection,⁸ while Kyrgyz and Kazakh genealogical narratives have been explored by, for example, David Gullette and David Sneath.⁹ Rian Thum’s study of the complex relationships between manuscripts, printed texts, shrine graffiti and pilgrimage represents a narrative turn in Xinjiang Studies.¹⁰ In their works on the Uyghur twelve muqam musical tradition, Rachel Harris and Nathan Light explore modern efforts to revise and canonize it.¹¹

The dominant role of the state and local knowledge elites looms large in most of our contributions. In the broader Central Asian context, Sophie Roche has drawn attention to Muslim intellectuals,¹² Laura Adams and contributors to the volume edited by Reeves, Rasanayagam and Beyer have recently explored the workings of the state,¹³ and Pauline Jones Luong and Justin Rudelson early on pointed to the significance of regional loyalties – a topic still relevant in both China and Central Asia.¹⁴

Methods and the narrative perspective

The multiplicity of perspectives taken by our contributors reflects their diverse academic backgrounds. While the juncture of history and anthropology is particularly prominent, other forms of cross-fertilization also enrich the analysis without compromising disciplinary standards. The full relevance of texts for local people can only be gauged through interviews and field research. Even in cases where fieldwork has not been possible, our authors build their analysis on an intimate familiarity with the local cultural context accessed through local languages.

Most of our authors follow Jean-François Lyotard’s suggestion to privilege local, small narratives (petits récits) over grand/master narratives (grand récits), regardless of whether these have been transmitted orally, or as manuscripts or printed texts, since local narratives have the capacity to open up hitherto unnoticed or unexplored angles.¹⁵ They enable the deconstruction of grand narratives, a better understanding of conflict (Schluessel), communal loyalties (Mirsultan) and shifting identity discourses and commitments toward the past that mobilize diverse cultural concepts and artefacts (Anonymous, Bellér-Hann, Freeman, Long, Salimjan, Sárközi, Steenberg). Eric Schluessel’s emphasis on quotidian concerns in the Kucha documents leads him to challenge a dominant scholarly paradigm.

Our contributions also demonstrate the interdependence of grand récits and petits récits. Civil law cases in republican Xinjiang speak to both Islamic legal practice and local custom (Mirsultan). Similarly, Uyghur publications on local history and customs relate to development, economic growth and state regulation as unquestionable values (Bellér-Hann, Steenberg). Ingeborg Baldauf’s analysis discerns the redefining of the grand narrative of Chinggisid descent through genealogical manipulation of small stories. At the other end of geographical and thematic spectrums, Thum and Kashgary’s Turkic Muslim protagonists in exile in Saudi-Arabia draw on debt-transfer documents and fictional works to construct their Turkestani identity in transnational space.

Small narratives demonstrate local concerns, experiences and agency, but it is the dialogical interaction between the small récits and the bigger, more encompassing narratives that hold the key to discerning transformations of traditions that at first sight appear to be organic and authentic representations of indigenous culture.¹⁶ Examples include the Uyghur and Mongol epic traditions (Anon., Long), Kazakh and Sibe genealogies, (Salimjan, Sárközi), Uyghur customs (Steenberg) and Uyghur identity narratives both in the homeland and in the diaspora (Bellér-Hann, Freeman, Thum & Kashgary). Sibe literati from east and west subordinate ethnonationalist aspirations to a more homogenized heritagization narrative (Sárközi), while Kazakh intellectuals construct genealogical knowledge in reaction to Mao’s assimilationist policies and ongoing colonial dispossession (Salimjan). The notion of narrative allows for alternative interpretations of the petits récits. Genre (Long), ethnographic knowledge (Steenberg), local history (Bellér-Hann, Freeman), genealogy and heritagization (Anon., Salimjan, Sárközi) can be approached in terms of actors’ agency, but also as objects of state control, manipulation and coercion.

The knowledge elite as mediator

Small narratives may emerge as constituent parts of a group’s orally transmitted cultural traditions, authored by bona fide scholars, traditional experts, socialist culture workers, hobby historians or others. Ordinary people may contribute to local cultural knowledge through anonymous oral tradition (Freeman), genealogy projects (Baldauf, Salimjan) and private letters (Thum & Kashgary). But in most cases, small narratives are mediated by indigenous knowledge elites whose texts are imbued with moral messages rooted in both religious and secular traditions and informed by ideologically driven assertions, ethnonationalist convictions and empirically grounded observations. These moral messages may appear to stand in structural opposition to the state’s hegemonic narrative, but they rarely constitute clear-cut binary oppositions: the same persons may participate in the production of both.

In Xinjiang, local literati are often integrated into state structures as culture workers, performing a careful balancing act between promoting subnational group loyalties and respecting the ideological requirements of the state (Bellér-Hann, Freeman, Long, Sárközi, Salimjan, Steenberg). This blurs the boundaries between state and society and fosters their mutual integration. Mongol intellectuals striving to construct a ‘correct’ representation of traditional culture (Long) are cultural brokers, as are the editors of Kazakh and Sibe genealogies (Salimjan, Sárközi). Uyghur ethnographers are explicitly depicted as bridge-builders between Uyghur society and the Chinese state, resisting assimilation while pushing for the modernization of Uyghur society (Steenberg). Uyghur intellectuals from northern Xinjiang who elevated Sadir Palwan to the ranks of a pan-Uyghur hero, reshaped his figure to fit the political mold of both Chinese and Soviet socialisms (Freeman). In her analysis of Chinggisid genealogical narratives Baldauf demonstrates that pre-modern literati engaged in textual practices to satisfy new legitimation requirements in fundamentally similar ways. Muslim legal experts in the Republican Era mediated Islamic law to meet local demands and bolster communal identity (Mirsultan). New generations of intellectuals under Chinese socialism also resorted to an assortment of textual strategies to adjust local discourse to new ideological requirements. In order to capture the nature of discursive influencing, our authors use diverse, but semantically overlapping concepts, including harmonization (Baldauf), accommodation (Bellér-Hann), integration (Steenberg) and cooperation (Long). This terminology of conciliation is appropriate for grasping moments of rupture, manipulation, filtering and other changes in the narratives, enabling our authors to do justice to subaltern attempts to negotiate subjecthood within and beyond the Chinese polity.

As all aspects of indigenous culture in Xinjiang started to come under ever stricter state control, local elites continued to perform cultural work as brokers and mediators. The heritagization of Uyghur musical and epic traditions has become caught up in an unequal tug-of-war between Uyghur intellectuals and the state’s engineering of minority culture. Members of the Uyghur literati continued to exercise agency until the situation escalated to the point where they could no longer prevent the violence that started to hollow out all authenticity from their cultural traditions (Anonymous). In recent years, widespread persecutions have dislocated Uyghur literati from their mediating role and turned the dialogical cooperative project into one of monological coercion.

The contributions

Ingeborg Baldauf’s contribution sets the scene for our special issue by drawing out the constructed nature of one of the most enduring Central Asian grand narratives – that of noble Chinggisid descent. For Baldauf, as for Salimjan and Sárközi, genealogy is a way of knowing: knowing one’s origins is a necessary prerequisite for making claims to both political dominance and communal loyalty. Small narratives are repeatedly reworked over many centuries, from Xinjiang across Central Asia to the Middle East, their authors and tradents blending factual, fictional and mythical elements to construct a narrative of descent that legitimates rule. This article serves as an appropriate reminder of the rich Central Asian cultural legacies of the Turkic speaking Muslim groups that still dominate Xinjiang and inform the present volume.

Like Baldauf’s, Eric Schluessel’s study is based on indigenous manuscripts, in his case dating from the late Qing and early Republican Eras (1877–1933) from Kucha. Seeking new explanations for a ‘rebellion’ in 1918, he shows how government officials and transregional merchants collaborated to expand agricultural production, putting unprecedented strain on land and water resources and jeopardizing the economic interests of the rentier Sufi lineage that controlled Kucha’s largest Islamic pious endowment (waqf). When the waqf’s custodian responded by imitating merchant techniques, violence ensued. Schluessel argues that the conflict, which the provincial leadership – and, consequently, later historians – described in terms of ethnicity and religion, should be re-framed in terms of its economic roots.

Situated in a similar spatial frame, Aysima Mirsultan focuses on legal conflict settlement in republican Kucha (1934–1949) on the basis of five Early Modern Uyghur documents, all relating to the same person – Faḍil Akhund, a village headman. He and members of his family engaged in a series of litigations and property transactions, including the sale of land and inheritance. Through a close reading of the documents, Mirsultan draws out a larger, coherent but still locally specific narrative. We gain insight into Faḍil’s personality, as well as his role as a village headman. Mirsultan’s analysis also illuminates broader societal and administrative changes at the local level, the normative management of gender and property relations, and the gradual penetration of Chinese state law into Islamic law.

Martin Lavička is also concerned with the legal realm, but the documents he examines are national and regional (Xinjiang) level laws on religious affairs, adopted and amended by the reform era Chinese state. Compared to other types of policy documents, Lavička argues, legal documents are less determined by short term political trends. Additions, omissions and other modifications to China’s religious affairs regulations may thus be taken as more reliable indicators of longer-term policy shifts and state intention than other texts. As the only contribution explicitly devoted to the Chinese state narrative at both the national level and specifically on Xinjiang, Lavička’s article provides much needed context for the following articles, which focus on indigenous narratives formed within the political order of the PRC.

The state also looms large in Ildikó Gyöngyvér Sárközi’s analysis of cultural knowledge production among one of Xinjiang’s smaller minority groups, the Sibe. Sárközi shows how Sibe genealogy writing, originally denigrated as superstition by the socialist state, was reinterpreted as heritage and became a cornerstone of Sibe communal identity. Sibe intellectuals mediated between local and global forces to adapt UNESCO’s world heritage discourse to Chinese political conditions. Thanks to their strategic reaction to shifts in state approaches to cultural preservation, they were successful in preserving what had appeared to be on the brink of extinction – but have been powerless to challenge the hegemony of the official Chinese heritage regime and its monopolization of genealogical knowledge.

A comparable appropriation of cultural tradition by the state and the local academic and cultural elite is discussed by Michael Long. His data derives from interviews with participants in a cultural project to collect, revise and publish the Jangar epic, prevalent among Xinjiang’s Oirat Mongols. While folk-artists in Xinjiang were encouraged to re-engage with past folk-practices, academics were entrusted with analyzing and preserving this heritage “scientifically’ and ‘correctly.’ The result was a unique Chinese-Mongol co-production featuring repeated state-controlled textualization and re-textualization of ritualized social performances of a predominantly oral art, which transformed it into authoritative ‘folk literature’ now recognized as an outstanding epic of the Mongol nationality and the Chinese nation.

As among the Sibe, genealogy writing is an important defining aspect of Kazakh group identity and constitutes the focus of Guldana Salimjan’s article. Collectively authored genealogies are forms of knowledge production in which the state, community, family, and individual actors all have a stake. Genealogy editors exercise creative agency in order to construct and perpetuate lineage identities, as well as Kazakhness, in an increasingly Sinicized space. In the reform era Kazakh genealogy writing was reworked in response to the assimilationist policies Kazakhs had experienced during the collectivized period and to ongoing colonial dispossession. The textual processes through which an indigenous cultural product was adapted to the requirements of the political environment resemble the codification of the Jangar epic.

Our anonymous contributor examines the ‘heritagization’ of Uyghur culture between 2008 and 2016, focusing on three interlinked Uyghur cultural traditions, muqam, mäshräp and dastan, which are ostensibly ‘safeguarded’ as UNESCO or national-level intangible cultural heritages. On the basis of these case studies, the author reveals how a great deal of Uyghur cultural heritage has been relegated to the status of ‘song and dance’ performances. She argues that the filtering, selection, commodification and de-contextualization involved in the process is not just detrimental for important aspects of the tradition (a problem also addressed by Long and Sárközi); it also alienates the owners of the heritage. Sinicization and appropriation of Uyghur traditions for political propagandizing does symbolic violence to Uyghur cultural heritage.

Joshua Freeman examines the posthumous fame and reputation of a historical figure, Sadir Palwan (c. 1796–1872) from northern Xinjiang, connecting him to the emergence of Uyghur national identity in a transborder space. A Muslim hero who fought the Qing overlords, Sadir’s exploits and reputation were repeatedly reshaped by Uyghur intellectuals to support Uyghur nation-building aspirations, while simultaneously complying with shifting political constraints imposed by the Soviet Union as well as by China. Sadir’s exemplariness was invoked to support the revolutionary, anti-feudal stance of both socialist states.

Similar themes are taken up by Ildikó Bellér-Hann, who investigates Uyghur identity discourses and history-making through the prism of narratives about subnational geographical entities and their inhabitants. Based on a close reading of three monographs produced in different phases of the reform period, Bellér-Hann demonstrates the perpetuation of Uyghur identity discourses and their simultaneous modification in response to socio-political fluctuations. She argues that shifting textual strategies demonstrate indigenous authors’ creativity in redefining the category ‘Uyghur’ both in relation to the past and to the present, while sensitively adapting to the twists and turns of a singularly Chinese régime d’historicité.

Rune Steenberg scrutinizes the development and continuous redefinition of the concept of Uyghur customs during the reform period. He argues that, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, ‘Uyghur customs’ was simultaneously conceptualized as a positive notion to be embraced and as a negatively connoted definition of tradition opposed to modernization. Uyghur intellectuals utilized the concept of ‘customs’ to promote Uyghur ethno-national identity and to propagate a Uyghur version of modernity. Following the 2009 Urumchi violence and ensuing deterioration of the political situation, however, state control was extended to hitherto untouched customs, many of which were banned or appropriated and Sinicized.

Like Freeman, Rian Thum and Huda Abdul Ghafour Amin Kashgary focus on transnational connectivities. Based on documentary evidence and oral tradition, they look at the story of one Uyghur family who left the Tarim Basin for Mecca and its environs, where they, along with other Turkic exiles from Central Asia, were known as ‘Turkistanis.’ The authors explore exiled Turkistanis’ self-identification, linking individual narratives to larger processes of community formation informed by the political experiences of different generations, as well as by historical narratives that range from localized histories to nationalist visions, and from family documents to fiction. The creative juxtapositions and interpretations of various actors lead to the construction of alternative narratives of communal identity.

The texts analyzed in this special issue mix and merge oral and written traditions and include published materials as well as manuscripts. Taken together, they present a long tradition of narrative legitimation and cultural ownership in Northwest China and Central Eurasia and highlight the mediating role of local elites, a topic that is very difficult to study ethnographically in contemporary Xinjiang.

The dramatic escalation of state violence in Xinjiang since 2016 lends our collection political topicality.¹⁷ Uyghur and Kazakh knowledge production as we knew and documented it in the decades prior to 2016 has come to a halt, while that of other minorities is also under threat. Many indigenous authors, scholars, publishers, and other culture workers have been sent to political re-education camps or to prison – including several of the individuals who feature in our articles.¹⁸ The proponents of minority group identity, always limited by political constraints, have been effectively silenced. For the time being at least, the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the region’s largest indigenous group, have been rendered all but voiceless.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Velux Fonden [111687, 2017–2020].

Notes on contributors

Ildikó Bellér-Hann

Ildikó Bellér-Hann is an associate professor of Turkic and Central Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. After completing her M.A. in Budapest, she obtained her doctoral and habilitation degrees from the University of Cambridge and the Humboldt University (Berlin) respectively. Her current research focuses on the role of historical narratives in identity construction among the Uyghurs of Xinjiang.

Rune Steenberg

Rune Steenberg is a postdoctoral researcher in the Sinophone Borderlands project at Palackỳ University, Olomouc, Czech Republic. He obtained his Ph.D. and M.A. from the Free University (Berlin). His research interests include kinship, border trade and local Uyghur ethnographies.

Aysima Mirsultan

Aysima Mirsultan is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen. She obtained her Ph.D. and M.A. from the Georg-August University of Göttingen, Germany and a B.A. from Xinjiang University, China. Her research interests span ancient and modern Turkic languages and Islamic law among the Uyghurs.

Notes

1. This volume emerged as a result of a major international workshop titled “Present Tense, Past Perfect? Narrative Constructions of Social Representations of Central Eurasia”. It took place at the University of Copenhagen on the 28–29 March 2019 (with the support of the Asian Dynamics Initiative), organized by the project ‘Between homogenization and fragmentation: textual practices as strategies of integration and identity maintenance among the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, China (20th–21st centuries)’ funded by the Velux Fonden (Denmark), grant no. 111687, 2017–2020. Velux Fonden has also supported the present special issue financially. We are grateful to Jun Sugawara who participated in the workshop, to Nathan Light and Ondřej Klimeš for their detailed comments on the articles and to Jane Caple for her meticulous language editing.

2. Bellér-Hann et al., Situating the Uyghurs; and Bellér-Hann, Schlyter and Sugawara, Kashgar Revisited.

3. Bellér-Hann et al., Situating the Uyghurs.

4. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads; and Starr, Xinjiang.

5. Brophy, Uyghur Nation; Bovingdon, The Uyghurs; Klimeš, Struggle by the Pen; and Smith Finley, The Art of Symbolic Resistance.

6. DeWeese, Islamization.

7. Sartori, Visions of Justice.

8. Jacquesson, History Making.

9. Gulette, Genealogical Construction; and Sneath, The Headless State.

10. Thum, Sacred Routes.

11. Harris, Making of a Musical Canon; and Light, Intimate Heritage.

12. Roche, Central Asian Intellectuals.

13. Reeves, Rasanayagam and Beyer, Ethnographies of the State; and Adams, The Spectacular State.

14. Jones Luong, Institutional Change; and Rudelson, Oasis Identities.

15. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition.

16. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination.

17. On state violence and recent developments see Smith Finley, “Securitization.”

18. Anderson, “How does Abdukerim Rahman Survive?”