Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia by Eric Schluessel (review)

As its subtitle declares, Land of Strangers engages with the concept of the Confucian "civilizing project" to understand the incorporation of Xinjiang into China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644–1912), during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Schluessel's book, however, centers on the experiences of ordinary southern Xinjiang Muslims. Their daily lives were largely uninformed by nascent struggles of Uyghur protonationalism in conflict with a monolithic Chinese state—struggles that increasingly structure the narrative assumptions of current work on the region. The author wants to let his sources "speak for themselves, without a predetermined theoretical framework" to allow "their concerns to guide the research" (p. 222). Work on the territory that Schluessel sometimes calls "Xinjiang" and sometimes calls "East Turkestan" seems to bring out contradictory impulses in its historians. In this respect, Land of Strangers is no exception.

One of the central contradictions at issue is the degree to which the Qing project in Xinjiang—the empire's most restive borderland—can be understood as "colonial," in a Western nineteenth- or twentieth-century sense. Of equal import is the book's critical historicist approach to another project, "the genealogy of Uyghur ethnonational identity," that leads scholars "inexorably" to late Qing Xinjiang, mainly in the form of elite politics (p. 4). These two "persistent concerns" appear to guide the research agenda of Land of Strangers at least as much as any of those attributable to the ordinary East Turkestani Muslims—generally referred to as "Musulmans" in the text—of the late Qing (p. 216).

Schluessel covers the process of Muslim identity formation mainly as it responded to Qing imperial centralization pressures to convert the territory to full provincial status in 1884. The main narrative focus is the reconstruction of Xinjiang after the suppression of Ya'qub Beg and his emirate (1865–1877) by the famous Xiang 湘 (Hunan) Army—the throne's most effective force for quelling the period's numerous regional uprisings, including the Taiping 太平 (1850–1864). Chapter 1 covers the philosophical underpinnings of a civilizing project in Xinjiang's reconstruction under the tutelage of elite Hunanese statecraft (jingshi 经世) activists. Central to this project was an emphasis on sociomoral transformation in southern Xinjiang, which aimed at "civilizing" Muslims on the basis of conservative Confucian concepts of family relations, classically laid down as "ritual" (li 礼).

Chapter 2 provides a general summary of the project's futile implementation, which amounted to a destabilizing devolution of authority from center to locality and entrenched local interests inimical to provincial government. Instead of transforming Xinjiang into a Central Asian extension of China proper, the many statecraft expedients employed to impose idealized Han norms on a Muslim populace unintentionally exacerbated Xinjiang's unsettled and exceptional status within the empire. The ad hoc formation of an administrative zone of "exception" was most problematically exemplified by the extraordinary legal policy of execution on the spot (jiudi zhengfa 就地正法) without the normal confirmation by the emperor. In the process, state institutions proliferated, but they were not consolidated into a functional system. This conundrum was not resolved by a subsequent shift to more explicit "colonialist" policies that perpetuated and exploited Xinjiang's exceptional status. The withdrawal of state budgetary support in 1896, partly due to the overall fiscal weakness of the dynasty, officially acknowledged the failure of the Xiang Army's civilizing project.

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the Xiang Army's implementation of Muslim assimilation policies. The effects were not assimilation but instead reinforced boundaries between Muslim and Confucian values. These chapters rely much more heavily on a rich, mainly judicial, local archive from Turfan Prefecture. Although substantially Sinophone by its very nature, this archive contains extensive translations of the testimony of Muslim locals as petitioners or perpetrators. Chapter 3 specifically focuses on the social significance of translation embodied in tongchi (Chg., interpreters) as "skilled manipulators of cultural and linguistic difference...