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5. Chinese Turkestan: Xinjiang
- University of Hawai'i Press
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In this chapter, excerpted from the long book China’s Far West (1993), the late Doak Barnett describes his impressions of Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region from his 1988 trip and compares them to those of a similar trip undertaken in 1948—just before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. He notes especially the substantial urbanization of the region, the increase in proportion of Han Chinese, the increase in industrialization, and improvements in education, communication, and transportation. In the course of the chapter, Barnett also mentions several uprisings in Xinjiang, most notably the 1940s Ili uprising, putting them in the context of changing relations between China and the Soviet Union. He also mentions several aspects of China’s policies regarding ethnic minorities and, in passing, comments on the use of statistics in drawing conclusions about contemporary circumstances. Barnett’s focus is political economy, and he relies on interviews with high-ranking officials as well as very practiced observations. The book from which this chapter derives is a unique combination of journalism, scholarship, and personal experience produced by a man who, in his day, was one of the most senior China scholars—one whose entire life was involved with the quest to understand China and all its complexity. Xinjiang is the most northwestern of all China’s province-level units (see map. 5.1). It borders many of the most sensitive countries and regions with which China’s foreign relations must be considered: Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan as well as Tibet, Qinghai, and Gansu. Only loosely connected to China for the past two millennia, it was one of the corridors along which the Silk Road connected China with Central Asia, and its strategic importance has been long known. China’s power is more consolidated there now than at any time previously—because of many of the factors that Barnett enumerates—yet the political space separating the far west from the country’s administrative center is daunting.—Eds. 71 A. DOAK BARNETT 5 Chinese Turkestan Xinjiang map 5.1. Xinjiang. [3.141.47.221] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 10:01 GMT) Xinjiang is often translated into English as “New Dominion” (literally, xin means “new,” and jiang means “frontier” or “boundary”). However, I have always preferred Chinese Turkestan or Eastern Turkestan, the terms used for Xinjiang in many early Western writings. The last of China’s outlying areas to be incorporated into the Qing dynasty’s formal administrative system, Xinjiang was, historically, more associated with Central Asia than with China, and in many respects the atmosphere in parts of the region is still more Central Asian than Han Chinese. The area has had an extraordinarily colorful and turbulent history, and it is unquestionably a land of many superlatives. It is the largest provincial-level unit in China, and its territory—almost 620,000 square miles—is greater than that of the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and the recently united Germany combined. Within its area are some of the tallest mountains in China—and the world (most of them are in the Pamir, the Tian Shan, and Kunlun ranges). It also contains the lowest point in China (Turfan, which is well below sea level) and China’s largest desert (the Taklimakan). In ancient times, it was a crucial link on the Silk Road between China and the Roman world. During much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was a focal point for conflict between China and two competing imperial powers—Russia (later the Soviet Union) and Great Britain. Its position continues to be strategically very important: The region’s external borders touch four states that were part of the Soviet Union (Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan), Outer Mongolia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and internally it is adjacent to Gansu, Qinghai, and Tibet. Most of Xinjiang is virtually empty. Apart from the Ili region, in past centuries the small population was concentrated almost entirely in glacierfed oases, where deserts meet mountains. In recent years the population has grown rapidly, although it is still small for such an enormous area. When I visited Xinjiang in 1948, local officials estimated its population at that time to be about 4 million. Between the late 1940s and the late 1980s, the population rose to roughly 14 million. (It was 13.84 million in 1986.) The population has always been a complex mixture of ethnic groups; in recent centuries Turkic Muslim peoples have been predominant. In 1948, less than 6 percent of the population...