Uyghurs Nationhood

       This essay is about the Turkish-speaking Muslim in Xinjiang, the Uyghurs and their history from the fall of the Qing in 1911 to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. A different approach, this essay did not purely took the perspectives from either current Uyghur nationalists scholars or Chinese scholars, but rather put the Uyghur people in the bigger history of Chinese and Russian revolutions, regional reforms, Sino-Russian diplomacies and the Islamic world. Through the eyes of different people inside and outside of Xinjiang, I would argue that Uyghur Diaspora in Central Asia created the idea of Uyghur nationhood, which was not widely accepted in Xinjiang and could explain the conflicts going on in Xinjiang today. Neither a national liberation struggle nor was it a victim of state-sponsored nation-building process, the Uyghur nationhood was nevertheless an independent product by the Uyghur people. It borrowed many ideas from the Stalinist notion of nationality, and was finally implemented by the People’s Republic of China after 1949.

       The four books differ greatly from each other. Jacobs and Thum’s book mainly focus on the history of the Uyghur people exclusively in Xinjiang, whereas Brophy and Klimes wrote about the influence of cross-border relations in between Russian Turkistan and Chinese Turkistan and also in between native Uyghurs and Uyghur diasporas. Both Brophy and Thum reject the idea that Uyghur nationhood was originally based on ethnic or racial lines or even religious lines. Uyghur people were initially Buddhism believers and only gradually converted to Islam as a result of both inter-tribe conflicts as well as growing Arab influences. In fact, according to Brophy, “Uyghur” was initially regarded as a distinct identity, different from the Muslims in the Tarim Basin, with historical ties tracing back to Chagatai Khanate and the Mongol Empire^[1].

       According to Klimes, the uniqueness of Uyghur people is undoubted given the fact that there was an incessant struggle against Chinese or Qing oppression. Ever since Qianlong emperor of Qing, Beijing failed to successfully incorporate the Muslim community into the integrated society. The Uyghur people cherished their Islamic identity, both as a symbol of civilization and a distinct way of life. When the Qing legacy was inherited by the later on Yang Zengxin and Jin Shuren government of Xinjiang, as both Jacobs and Klimes pointed out, this Islamic identity soon reminded the Uyghurs living in Xinjiang of the effort to seek independent statehood. Klimes’s work, nonetheless, is a perfect resistance literature instead of nationalism politics literature, since it did not really differentiate Uyghur from the other Muslims in China. With the seemingly deliberate omission of the Hui(Dungans), Klimes equates Uyghur with Chinese Muslims and thus gives more legitimacy for Uyghur to have an independent state for Muslims in China, giving an impression that the central Chinese government was always against Muslims living at the border and was always efficient on cracking down Muslim activities^[2].