Writing Uyghur Women Into the Chinese Nation

LEGIBLE CITIZENS: WRITING UYGHUR WOMEN INTO THE CHINESE NATION

Arianne Ekinci

A thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the History Department in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Chapel Hill 2019

Approved By:

Michael Tsin

Michelle King

Cemil Aydin

ABSTRACT Arianne Ekinci: Legible Citizens: Writing Uyghur Women into the Chinese Nation (Under the direction of Michael Tsin)

It’s common knowledge that the People’s Republic of China was established as a multi- ethnic state in 1949. But what did this actually mean for populations at the fringes of the new nation? This thesis uses sources from the popular press read against official publications to tease out the implications of state policies and examine exactly how the state intended to incorporate

Uyghur women into the Chinese nation, and how these new subjects were intended to embody the roles of woman, ethnic minority, and Chinese citizen. While official texts are repositories of ideals, texts from the popular press attempt to graph these ideals onto individual narratives. In this failure to perfectly accord personal encounters with CCP ideals, these authors create a narrative fissure in which it is possible to see the implications of official minority policy.

Focusing on three central stories from the popular press, this thesis probes into the assumptions held concerning the manifestation of Uyghur citizenship and the role of Uyghur women as subjects of the Chinese state as seen through intended relationships with Han women, Uyghur men, party apparati, the public eye, and civil law. What emerges through these readings is a clear case that, regardless of individual intentions, the PRC did not conceptualize Uyghur women as capable of obtaining citizenship on equal footing. Instead, Uyghur women were projected as fundamentally in need of external aid and tutelage from more advanced ethnicities. Uyghur women were granted access to the rights and opportunities allocated to citizens only through self-elected subjugation to the state. Their perpetuated adolescence and dependence on the

iii Chinese state served to consolidate the Chinese cultural-political core and justify Chinese state- led intervention and development in Xinjiang.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF MAPS ...... vi

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS...... vii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... viii

INTRODUCTION...... 1

Historical Frame and Historiography...... 3

Materials and Methods: Official Texts as Archival Documents...... 9

CHAPTER 1: READING UYGHUR WOMEN INTO HAN-CENTERED NARRATIVES.... 15

CHAPTER 2: IMPOVERISHED PEASANTS TO INSPIRED PROLETARIAT: THE MAKING OF MODEL MINORITIES UNDER STATE GAZE...... 25

CHAPTER 3: UYGHUR WOMEN IN A MEN’S WORLD ...... 33

CONCLUSION...... 44

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 52

v LIST OF MAPS

Map 1 - Dzhungaria and Altishahr in the 18th-Early 20th Centuries...... 5

Map 2 - Sites of Narrative: Kashgar, Maralbashi and Urumqi; Hotan and Hami; Ili...... 9

vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1 - “Xinjiang’s 7/1 Textile Factory’s Uyghur, Kazakh and other minority women workers study technology with the help of Han workers.” ...... 22

vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

PRC People’s Republic of China

CCP Chinese Communist Party

KMT Kuo Min Tang (Nationalist Party)

GMD Guo Min Dang (Nationalist Party; same at KMT)

ETR East Turkestan Republic (1933-1934)

SETR Second East Turkestan Republic (1944-1949)

viii

INTRODUCTION

In 1951, some 300 women “representing all regional ethnicities” in Xinjiang Province attended the first China Women’s Federation meeting in Urumqi. Their presence and the structure of this meeting was predicated on the assumptions that, not only were they all residents and citizens of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) governed by the Chinese Communist Party

(CCP), but that they were primarily identified through clearly delineated ethnic groups, that each ethnic group was on equal footing in relation to the state, and that, regardless of ethnic identification, they were all “Chinese” (Zhonghua) nationals.1 While Xinjiang had longstanding ties with various polities later writ into Chinese history, local Turkic Muslim inhabitants had historically neither thought of themselves as belonging to distinct populations defined along ethnic lines, nor viewed their communities as primarily oriented towards the Chinese state. 2,3

Traditionally, the region had been a transition zone and crossroads between multiple cultures and polities along the Silk Road. Oases south of the Tianshan mountains were sites of overlapping cultural, political and economic orientation while settlements to the north had strong ties to

Soviet Turkestan and had recently experimented with a Soviet-supported Turkic republic that

1 Hu Zhong 胡中, “Xinjiang ge zu fu nü zai wang qian jinzhe” 新疆各族妇女在前进着 [“Women of every ethnicity in Xinjiang striding forward”], Xin Zhongguo Funü 新中国妇女 23 (1951): 32-33. Party rosters from the period always delineate participants’ ethnicity (if not Han) and gender (if not male).

2 The PRC holds that every polity appearing in historical record occupying territory that was drawn inside the domain of the PRC in 1949 is part of “Chinese History”, regardless of cultural attributes of court or strong external political affiliations.

3 This paper uses “Turki” and “Turkic” when describing speakers of variants of the Turkic branch of languages in periods prior to the delineation of ethnic and national communities among this population.

1 had negotiated semi-sovereignty with the departed Nationalist (KMT) party. Thus, the new state’s claim that every member of these populations now held Chinese citizenship equal with all other citizens of China, and were under the exclusive purview of the government in Beijing, was a novel notion.

The foundations of this meeting beg the questions of what it meant for these women to be both an "ethnic minority” and a national subject in the new Chinese state; how individuals classified as non-majority were supposed to order and fulfill the roles of woman, ethnic individual and citizen, and how these peoples were intended to interpret and integrate their

“local” culture into their identity as national subjects. Official documents tell us how the

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) envision and present this new synthesis of identities, but not necessarily how state rhetoric played out in practice.

Though Uyghurs were the majority population in Xinjiang, Uyghur women were a

“quadrupaly marginalized” population as measured by their distance from the prototypical hearty

Han peasants often presented as the nation’s cultural core.4 As women they were supposedly marginalized within their own societies; as Muslim ethnic minorities and inhabitants of the fringes of former empire they resided at the physical and social margins of the Chinese state.

And yet this population was, within a few years of liberation, recast as an essential component of the Chinese nation.5 This thesis traces the route imagined for the integration of this population into the Chinese nation, using popularly published state-sanctioned texts to examine how Uyghur

4 According to the first official census of the PRC in 1953, Xinjiang had a total population of 4.87 million, comprised of 75% Uyghur, 6% Han Chinese, and 19% other Turkic Muslims and Hui (also called Dungans or Muslim Chinese). For a discussion of certain women as “doubly” marginalized subjects, see Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014) 6.

5 As all regions comprising the PRC were taken as comprising Chinese history, so every population within the new state was seen as essential components together comprising the Chinese nation; without Uyghurs, the nation would be lacking an essential component.

women were envisioned as embodying these layers of intended identity. While state-sanctioned texts cannot be assumed to accurately represent the lived experiences of Uyghur women, this study argues that the narrative fissure created through authorial attempts to graft individual encounters onto the “official stance” in popular press allows careful readers insight into how the state intended for policies to be carried out in practice, and implications for both the type of subjecthood offered Uyghur women and value of Uyghur women’s roles in creation of the new nation. What emerges are a set of assumptions about the nature of ethnic minority subjecthood and women’s place in the nation that is not written anywhere in official literature, but certainly begins to explain the unequal foundations of ethnic relations that continue to trouble the region today.

Historical Frame and Historiography

Up to the eve of 1949, China was no nation. During the Republican Period (1911-1949), the country to be was governed by a scattered assortment of warlords, local republics and soviets under tentative spheres of communist and nationalist power, and outposts of Japanese and Soviet rule. In the past, not only had dynasties with distinctly different cultural and regional origins ruled over the land that would become China, but they had differently imagined and organized the very disparate populations under their rule. While Xinjiang had technically come under Qing jurisdiction in the mid 1700s, the Manchus exercised a tentative power invested primarily in several garrison towns in the northern Dzungharian basin.6 South of the Tianshan mountains, in

6 In Northern Xinjiang, a region more directly ruled under the Qing, and populated by a mix of Mongols, Kazaks, Han, descendants of Qing bannermen, and a population of mixed-origin Turki brought to the region in the 18th Century known up until 1949 as ‘Taranchi’ and later incorporated into the ‘Uyghur’ population.

the Altishahr region,7 Qing officials loosely administered the oasis settlements through local nobility. Early scholarship based on Qing imperial archives traces the development of Qing garrison towns in the north, and the importance Chinese-Muslim trade in the Eastern towns of

Hami and Turpan, but all but ignore regions to the south and west, where Qing control was far weaker.8 Conversely, Rian Thum’s work on pilgrimage routes, sacred manuscripts, and the development of an Altishahr identity in the 18th-19th centuries barely mentions Qing officials or their government apparatuses. In her studies of the same period, Linda Benson highlights the strong exchanges of population between Kashgar and the Ferghana Valley, the power of cross- border trade in determining political relations and creating communities from mixed origin populations, and the messy understanding of borders and subjecthood exemplified by claims to extraterritoriality by Muslim locals holding foreign passports. 9 Recent legal, political and national histories advance the notion of vague frontiers with overlapping spheres of political obligations and the possibility of multiple subjecthoods in the pre-nation state period.10

7 Literally “Six-cities”, referring to the oasis cities ringing the Taklamakan Desert in Southern Xinjiang

8 Here, the “Muslims” were a mix of Turkic people and Hui. Hui in this period was used to refer both to Muslims in general, and to Muslims hailing from east of Xinjiang who probably had mixed Arab and Han blood and did not generally speak any dialect of Turki.

9 Generally Russian or British. See Laura Newby, The Empire and the Khanate: A Political History of Qing Relations With Khoqand C. 1760-1860 ( Leiden: Brill, 2005) 145.

10 See, for example Li Chen, Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018) and Matthew Mosca Frontier Policies to Foreign Politics: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). and the older Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1994).

Dzhungaria and Altishahr in the 18th-Early 20th Centuries

Recent scholarship undertaken by David Brophy and Ondrej Klimes has highlighted the use of longstanding routes of trade, education and pilgrimage linking Altishahr and Dzhungaria to

Turkistan, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, India and Afghanistan in facilitating the introduction of political and educational reforms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the early 1920s, Turki intellectuals were studying communism in Moscow, debating the boundaries of a Uyghur community in Almaty, studying in Jadidist Islamic reform schools or vocationally- oriented co-educational missionary schools, and serving Russian or British intelligence interests in Kashgar. Sedentary Turkic Muslim residents of Altishar and Dzhungaria – those who would be designated as ethnic Uyghurs in the PRC - were marked by different layers of affiliations and identities, just as their polities were not oriented towards a single source.

It was against this backdrop that distinct ethnic and regional identities began to emerge, as new actors influenced the redefining of in-groups.11 Previously, inhabitants of the region had

11 Specifically, the Soviet Union introduced the concept of definitive nations and ethnic nationalities within the nation, while proponents of Jadidism (reform Islam) hailing from Istanbul, Crimea and Bukhara introduced inter- regional Turkic identity using educational and trade networks previously used to support an intra-regional Muslim

called themselves “Locals” or “Muslims”, were generally known to the Qing government as

“Muslim” and to European explores as “Turki”.12 In 1921 a Turpani poet began calling himself

“Uyghur Child”, reviving the name of a 9th Century Buddhist empire with little probable link to the later-day inhabitants of the poet’s hometown. While this name was soon borrowed as a label that both described and produced the notion of a coherent population, there existed multiple and competing notions of “Uyghur” identity. At a Soviet-sponsored conference in Tashkent, attendees from Altishahr, Dzhungari, and emigres to the Almaty region debated over the boundaries of ethnicity along Stalinist principles: while some proposed that all Muslims in the region, Turki and Hui alike, be grouped under a single ethnic label, it was ultimately decided that sedentary Turkic Muslims in Eastern, or Chinese, Turkestan were comprised of two ethnic groups: the Taranchis, brought to Dzhungaria from various locales by the previous Dzhungarian

Mongol rulers, and the Uyghurs, a community encompassing all other sedentary Turkic Muslims

‘local’ to the region.13 The Taranchis and Uyghurs were later folded into a single classification.

The 1930s and 40s witnessed continuous splintering and reimaginations of political formations along the faultlines of affiliation. While CCP literature paints a picture of uniform (and uniformly oppressive) Chinese Nationalist (KMT) rule across Xinjiang during this period,

Xinjiang was not governed as a single entity, and certainly not by a single power. Two alternate,

Turki-governed states, appeared in this period: The Islamic Republic of East Turkestan (TIRET),

identity.

12 See Peter. Hopkirk, The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), Justin Jon Rudelson, Oasis identities: Uyghur nationalism along China’s Silk Road (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) and Albert Von Le Coq, Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

13 Though, as Laura Newby points out in The Empire and the Khanate, this probably included a significant population of people hailing from the Ferghana Valley who had settled in Altishahr in the 1800s, and should technically have been classified as “Uzbeks”. Newby, 36.

based in Khotan from 1933-4, and the East Turkestan Republic (ETR) seated in Yili, the later of which, if CCP literature is to be taken at face value, was a socially progressive proto-communist people’s government.14 While the KMT held a power-base in Urumqi after 1928, rule outside this base was largely reliant on alliances, first with Hui warlord Ma Zhongying who helped them defeat TIRET, then with the CCP until the 1942 split, and finally with the ETR from 1944-1949.

The KMT capitulated to the CCP in 1949, with many of the same central figures retaining their regional posts. Following the disappearance of ETR leadership onboard a flight enroute to talks in Beijing, the CCP was able to step into a relative power vacuum and establish control over the region between 1950 and 1952. Originally named “Xinjiang Province”, the region was redesignated “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” in 1955, but remained almost entirely under central state control. Since its inception in 1921, the CCP had been predominately a

Sinophone party led by individuals who identified themselves as Han Chinese, and was sometimes [mis]labeled “the Han People’s Party” by Turki locals.15 In 1952, the new state set about classifying its entire population by ethnicity. While inhabitants of other border regions were subject to scrutiny against Stalin’s four principles of nationality and repeated visits by trained ethnographers, in Xinjiang the PRC seems to have borrowed categories directly from the

14 Many former ERT activists were easily folded into the Communist government, which relied on their extensive local networks for promulgation of CCP campaigns.

15 For a history of the development and nuances of Han identity, see Justin Jacobs, Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016) and Thomas Mullaney, James Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Armand Vanden Bussche, eds. Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Though understood by the state as a single ethnic group, Han is an “umbrella term” for populations with wildly different cultural pasts and spoken dialects united by their affiliation with past central states and their use of the written Chinese language.

USSR, creating mirror population groups on both sides of the border.16,17 The PRC treated each ethnic population as a singular, historically isolated group, enjoying direct relationships exclusively with the state, and equal relationships with all other ethnic populations, as if each ethnic community was a single spoke on a bike wheel, connected only through the hub of the

[Han-dominated] state. Gone were the messy layers of population and identity of the late Qing and Republican periods.

Within half of a century, Xinjiang had evolved from a crossroads at the edge of empire(s) to a land of multiple political possibilities, to supposed integration into a nation-state among nation- states, one small space in a world where every inch could be contained and claimed under government gaze. Many scholars have cast the PRC’s early years as a period of nation-building.

However, literature produced by the Uyghur diaspora, particularly from scholars and former political figures who established a new base in Turkey, argue that the CCP’s reign in Xinjiang is characteristic of political aggression and colonialism.

Unfortunately, there are few, if any, existent texts providing an unmediated view of Uyghur women’s incorporation into the Chinese Nation or variegated experiences of citizenship and community construction. Available texts concerned with the lives and experiences of Uyghur women in the early PRC are, as far as we know, state-produced, state-sponsored, and state- approved texts, and primarily Chinese-language texts. As Thomas Mullaney has pointed out, the state was still forming a unified voice in the early PRC and different authors offered up multivocal experiences in their struggle to strike that perfect chord in aligning the reality about

16 See Thomas Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011) for a description of this process.

17 Rian Thum, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) 175.

which they wrote with centralized state ideals.18 However, these authors all had the state in mind as their ultimate audience, and knew that they wrote under its ever-watchful eye. Literature not subject to state view did not exist in the public sphere in the early PRC, and diaspora scholarship undertaken by those who fled Xinjiang in 1949 cannot be expected to cover experiences within the PRC.

Sites of Narrative: (1) Kashgar, Maralbashi and Urumqi, (2) Hotan and Hami, (3) Ili

Materials and Methods: Official Texts as Archival Documents

Any scholar working on Uyghur women in the early PRC is thus forced to work with compromised sources coming from a narrow selection of narratives aimed at specific, primarily public, audiences. Given the limitations of such materials, it should not be surprising that there is little historiography covering the region in this period. Most historians work in earlier periods, where they have access through Qing Dynasty, KMT, and foreign archives as well as locally-

18 Mullaney, 8.

produced religious manuscripts. Anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists have generally turned their gaze to the period following Reform and Opening in the 1980s, when foreign scholars were able to personally visit the region for research purposes. Only this later scholarship occasionally focuses on the experiences of Uyghur women.

As texts written about a subject in a language not their own and directed at an external audience can hardly expected to provide unmitigated insight into the subject’s experiences and inner life, this study does not inquire into the personal experiences of Uyghur women. Instead, this study works with available materials to re-create the system of underlying assumptions of state-employee authors. As has been demonstrated by work in imperial studies by scholars such as Ann Stoler, working with state-produced texts about a subject population can still be productive when text-appropriate questions are posed.19 Pieces written about Uyghurs for a

Chinese audience are not appropriate as a guide to the internal worlds of Uyghur women as their communities were incorporated into the Chinese state, but can be used to tease out the deeper layers of official understanding of the role of this population within society and state. While documents produced directly by the government, such as the 1963 Brief History and Introduction to the Uyghurs, provide a carefully composed overview of Uyghurs and their ideal relationship with the party and state, popular texts, such as those used for this paper, are sites of navigation between overarching ideals and individual lives.20 In their attempt to conform individual narratives to official framework, authors betray a fissure in the uniformity of state stance as they

19 See, for example, Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

20 Xinjiang Shaoshuminzu She Hui Lishi Diaocha Zu 新疆少数民族社会历史调查组 [Xinjiang Ethnic Minority Social History Survey Group], pinyin 维吾尔族简史简志合编 – 初稿 [Brief History and Introduction to the Uyghurs – Draft], (Beijing: Institute of Ethnology & Anthropology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 1963).

engage in the creation of experimental space where ideals are graphed on to individual bodies and state policies tested by real-world application.

Popular texts both inform audiences and draw on a set of assumed knowledge. Thus they can be read, by both the intended audience and later-day researchers, through employing personal, external and internal comparison and careful note of ommissions. For initial audiences, comparison first occurs at the level of individual experience. Would readers living through the grain shortage of 1958 believe accounts of bountiful harvests? Would illiterate Han women sold off as child-servants-cum-brides-to-be at the age of 8 believe that Uyghur women, “denied education and sold into marriage at the age of 12 or 13” shared a similar fate, or would they truly see themselves occupying the position of culturally superior “elder sibling”? The visual presentation of articles also explicitly elicits external comparison among stories. Articles featuring Uyghurs, whether in People’s Daily Newspaper or New Women of China or other

Chinese-language publications circulated across the state, were placed alongside articles featuring other ethnic minorities and Han populations in the interior. Unless these articles were physically cut out of the paper, it is unlikely they were ever read in isolation. Connection to - and comparison with - similar topics across the PRC is implied by the very presentation of text.

This manner of presentation compels audiences to read texts side by side, asking themselves both how statements about the lives of Uyghur women compare to those about Han, and how Uyghur women fit into the state as a whole. Internally, the texts display countless rifts and contradictions.

Authors oscillate between state stance and individual cases, attempting to reconcile, for example, the official view that Uyghur women were insufferably oppressed prior to liberation with instances of great freedom and movement, especially among early local activists. Texts are also rife with omissions, some of them conscious silences, such as the absence of mention of

everyday or large-scale opposition, and some omissions of ignorance, only elucidated through comparison with external accounts.21

Drawing upon these reading strategies, this paper uses popularly available sources from the early decades of CCP rule in Xinjiang to ask both how the party-state conceptualized Uyghur women as Chinese citizens, ethnic individuals, and gendered subjects in practice, and how the state communicates this relationship to a public audience. Three individual narratives from around the region are used as focal points for broader discussions in official texts and publicly published articles. These narratives include recollections of an early CCP advocate for women’s work and education in Kashgar and Maralbashi, an interview with a model performer employed by the Hotan Cultural Troup, and a newspaper article recounting the revolutionary turn and

“free” marriage of two Uyghur youth in Ili.22 All of these texts were published in Chinese- language newspapers or periodicals with open-access, nationwide circulation, and can be considered popular public texts. Popular texts in the PRC from this period exhibit strong traits of self-censorship and authorial awareness of how their work matches certain standards of socialist thought, as if the censor were gazing over the author’s shoulder as they picked up the pen.23

These texts are also highly concerned with instructing the public, with New Women of China journal (Zhong guo xin funü,中国新妇女) and People’s Daily newspaper (Ren min bao, 人民报) often used in adult literacy classes as material for both literary and socialist instruction.24 While

21 For example, early PRC writers do not seem to understand Islam as social practice, as they do not write about Islamic cultural practices in everyday life.

22 Also written Yili, Yining and Guljha.

23 Sei Jeong Chin, (2018) “Institutional Origins of the Media Censorship in China: The Making of the Socialist Media Censorship System in 1950s Shanghai”, Journal of Contemporary China, 27:114, 956-972, DOI: 10.1080/10670564.2018.1488108.

24 Wang Zheng “Creating a Socialist Feminist Cultural Front: "Women of China" (1949–1966), The China

one of the articles selected for this study is from a “niche” magazine (Folk Music) that would have circulated only within a specialist audience, both the last story and all auxiliary articles were published in People’s Daily, which was widely read in public, both in print and orally to

[often] captive audiences. The first story, which is set in the 1939-1942, is taken from two narratives in a 1980s collection of accounts of early communist activists in Kashgar.25 Though this particular narrative compilation was not published in the 1950s, its protagonist went on to head the editorial department of New Women of China in 1949, and thus not only set a precedent for standards and expectations concerning Han-Uyghur interactions, but also wielded great power in determining how audiences framed their understanding of minority women during this critical period. The other two stories were published in 1966 and 1952 respectively. These three texts were all selected for their comprehensive portrayal of the subject in a national media outlet, geographic representation, and for addressing a certain aspect of Uyghur women’s relationship with the state. Local media outlets were not used due to both archival constraints and this paper’s concern with the construction of Uyghurs as national citizens in inquiring into how this population were categorized, explained and justified to audiences largely outside of Xinjiang.

While the main articles come from different decades, all concern the formative years of CCP governance in Xinjiang and initial attempts at incorporating Uyghur women into the Chinese state. None of the texts selected represent outliers, and all are corroborated with numerous shorter newspaper articles and longer official documents from the early 1950s to mid 1960s.

Quarterly, No. 204: Gender in Flux: Agency and Its Limits in Contemporary China (December 2010), 835.

25 Michael Dillon consolidates and translates these two texts in “Educating girls and working with women: Wu Naijun in Kashgar and Maralbashi” in Xinjiang and the Expansion of Chinese Communist Power: Kashgar in the Early Twentieth Century, (London: Routledge, 2014), a volume comprised of compiled stories from the 1980s Chinese originals, albeit with a few discrepancies in the details.

Each of the three sections below focuses on a single central text that provides a space for reading into the negotiation between individual encounters and official accounts to examine one aspect of the new intended roles for Uyghur women within the state. Sections begin with a summary of the story written in language closely following that of the original texts. The texts have been paraphrased, rather than directly translated, for the sake of both space and clarity.

However, I have attempted to preserve the language of the original texts, with the exception of a few noted asides, and have not ‘rationalized’ or ‘updated’ the voice to match modern narrative standards.26 The intention of this practice is to convey not just the content of the original, but also the manner in which the original narrative is constructed, as the crux of this paper’s argument is directly related to the author’s mediation between official stance and particular encounters in the formation of public texts. Readers are invited to employ comparison in reading between the lines and simultaneously undertaking analysis of the original documents and interpretations offered in the analysis.

26 Paraphrasing of the original text is in italics while authorial notes are in plain text.

CHAPTER 1: READING UYGHUR WOMEN INTO HAN-CENTERED NARRATIVES

Recently returned from advanced study in Japan, 25-year-old Guangdong native Wu Naijun arrived in Kashgar in 1939 on her husband’s coattails. Before setting out from Yan’an, the young Chinese Communist Party member and Guangdong Women’s Teacher’s College graduate was tasked with covertly developing CCP organization in Southern Xinjiang.27 Upon arrival in

Xinjiang Wu Naijun set out to craft herself a position that would allow her to oversee cultural reform and social revolution via girl’s education, “undertaking education to spread the seeds of revolution”.28 After her husband, the deputy director of the Kashgar education bureau, ousted the ‘dissolute’ head teacher at the ethnically-mixed Chinese-medium Shule Girls Primary

School, Wu Naijun was instated in his stead. 29 She immediately embarked upon re-organizing the school structure (including designing new school buildings) and mobilizing her students in community-wide propaganda projects. To tackle widespread female illiteracy, Wu Naijun also established an evening school for Han peasants in Shule and for Uyghurs at Kashgar Regional

27 Sources equivocate as to whether she was given a formal role and salary at this time. Michael Dillon states that she was a “dependent,” in “Educating girls and working with women: Wu Naijun in Kashgar and Maralbashi” but a 1946 article entitled “Return to Yan’an” copied on a commemorative blog lists her alongside her husband as one of 31 party members originally dispatched to Xinjiang. Shi Liu Hao Liu 十六号楼， Hui dao Yan’an 回到延安 [Return to Yan’an]. 新浪博客, 8/19/2018. http://www.blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_dd9bf4ac0102y69o.html. No other copies of this article could be found.

28 Xia Weirong 夏维荣, Wu Naijun zai Kashi 伍乃菌在喀什 (Wu Naijun in Kashgar)（Kashi shi wenshi ziliao 喀什市文史资料 1, 1986）15.

29 It is not clear in some sources that this was her husband; Zhang notes that her husband was also known by this assumed literary name while in Xinjiang, but Dillon does not make this connection. See Zhang, 10.

15 Girls’ Primary School. She worked in the fields alongside her students’ families in order to gain their trust and convince them to continue supporting female education.

Wu Naijun was a pioneer, opening up unprecedented opportunities for women’s education and community involvement.30 [Overlooking non-CCP affiliated educational offerings in the pre-

PRC period], Wu Naijun saw local education to be of poor quality and in need of outsider- instigated improvement. Not only did “feudal” thinking prevent most families from sending their daughters to school, but those who did attend were often politically indifferent and held flippant attitudes towards education. Furthermore, school facilities were poor and the classes themselves badly organized. Clearly, no actual education could take place in such circumstances and no reform could be expected to arise from within such an environment.

Given the lack of other actors, Wu Naijun lifted the burden of instigating and overseeing reform onto her own shoulders. Students, teachers and community members alike were recruited into the Kashgar Women’s Association (later to become the Kashgar Branch of the province- wide Xinjiang Women’s Association) where she spent long hours coaching her disciples in subjects ranging from basic literacy to socialist politics and a woman’s call to community involvement. Herself childless, Wu Naijun both temporarily adopted a neglected Han girl from the school in Shule and “was regarded by many of the children as a surrogate mother”.31

Just as she’d secured her position in Kashgar, Wu Naijun’s husband was appointed County

Head in Maralbashi, a comparatively impoverished town located 300 kilomters across the

30 Zhang Yuansheng 张源生, “Kang Ri zhanzheng shiqi zai Kashi gongzuo de gongchandang

Yuan” 抗日战争时期在喀什输了工作的共产党员 [Communists Working in Kashgar during the war against Japan], (Kashgar: Kashi shi wenshi ziliao 喀什市文史资料 2, 1987), 23.

31 Xia, 18.

Taklamakan desert. Wu Naijun herself was not allocated any official duties, and again not provided a salary. Yet an overly-educated revolutionary could hardly sit at home. Within a year of relocation, Wu Naijun had established both a women’s association (which she chaired) and a series of handicraft cooperatives under the auspices of the Maralbashi Women’s Productive

Group, along with a weaving workshop located on the premises of the county administration.

According to later accounts, Wu Naijun saw her work in Maralbashi as addressing the everyday difficulties experienced by local women, including a lack of economic, physical and intellectual independence.32 In this underdeveloped town she demonstrated her economic acumen in identifying a market niche (high quality woven goods and clothes tailored to Han tastes), creating a production plan, pulling together the necessary resources, and organizing labor to meet production targets. Wu Naijun personally designed the cloth and clothes her workers weaved.

The group was both financially and culturally successful: the commodification of labor traditionally relegated to the home allowed women to obtain an unprecedented level of economic independence and, under Wu Naijun’s guidance, they participated in interethnic “cultural studies,” singing and dancing together (presumably in praise of the party and their newfound economic liberation).33 Their expansion in both cultural consciousness and disposable income raised these women’s status in home and community.

In April 1942 Wu Naijun traveled to Urumqi, where she represented women of Kashgar at the inaugural conference of the Xinjiang Women’s Association and showcased merchandise made by the Maralbashi Women’s Production Group at the affiliated exhibition. Wu Naijun’s

32 Echoed in later texts such as “Nanjiang funü kaishi jiexia miansha” 南疆妇女开始揭下面纱 [Southern Xinjiang women start to take off their veils], Renmin Ri Bao 人民日报 3 (5/14/1950).

33 See, for example, Zhao Tao Qi 赵涛祺, Xinjiang Weiwuerzizhiqu 新疆维吾尔自治区 (Xinjiang Autonomous Region), (Beijing: Tongsuguiwu Publishing 通俗贵物出版社, 1956) 7.

presence and reception at the meeting, and particularly the praise heaped on the handicrafts from the production group, can be read as recognition of her elevated status and approval of her accomplishments. Though soon after arrested during Sheng Shicai’s crackdown on communists, she reappeared on the political scene in 1949 as the head of education for the All-China

Women’s Federation and editor of the periodical Chinese Women (中国妇女), thus ensuring that the framework she had developed for interacting with and reforming local women became sanctioned by state expectations.34

Though it might seem strange to preface a study on Uyghur women in the early PRC with a pre-liberation story centered on a woman identified as ethnically Han, Wu Naijun’s narrative provides a framework for how the PRC constructed an understanding of Uyghurs vis-a-vis their interaction with Han state actors. To understand the role envisioned for Uyghur women, we should take the state’s perspective in looking at how approved accounts portrayed their interaction with the demographic core of the Chinese nation: Han Chinese.35 While Han had been a nominal part of the population in Xinjiang in the Republican years, comprising less than

2% of the population in Altishahr, the early PRC saw active promotion of Han migration into the region. The Han Chinese who interacted most frequently with the local population in this era were an upper stratum of technicians, managers and party cadres sent to reform the political

34 Narrative compiled from: Xia Weirong (early half of Wu Naijun’s time in Xinjiang) and Zhang Yuansheng (later half of Wu Naijun’s time in Kashgar). I was first directed to these sources through Michael Dillon, “Educating girls and working with women: Wu Naijun in Kashgar and Maralbashi” in.

35 For more in-depth discussion of what it meant to be “Han” in the early PRC, see Thomas Mullaney, James Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Armand Vanden Bussche, Eds. Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Wu Naijun was Cantonese, and thus herself on the margins of “Han-ness”, though her Han identity would have been fortified via interaction vis-à- vis definitively non-Han others, such as her Uyghur students.

landscape and develop industry, much as Wu Naijun and her husband had in the 1930s.36 Though set several years before liberation, Wu Naijun’s story portrays a paragon of Uyghur-Han interactions during the early years of Communist Rule. Her story also contains a number of elements replicated in like narratives meant to train readers in understanding the Uyghurs, and particularly Uyghur women, as existing within the nation vis-a-vis their interaction with Han cadres.

What then was the intended role of Han women in minority communities, and what was the ideal relationship between Han incomers and Uyghur locals? Through studying Wu Naijun’s case alongside early PRC regional handbooks and articles from People’s Daily covering the work of the Xinjiang Women’s Federation and newly established industrial enterprises, three main areas of involvement emerge: Han women as organizers; as instructors and mentors; and as feminists and advocates. Though most articles focus on an individual’s exhibition of a single trait, Wu Naijun, a veritable renaissance woman, embodies all three.

As an organizer, Wu Naijun is imbued with the authority to identify problems, develop an exact method of addressing the issue as she has framed it, and then mobilize resources to meet targets. This same pattern is repeated time and time again in a 1956 handbook on Xinjiang: Han experts go in, immediately identify problems, and come up with the solution exactly addressing the issue, whether this be related to water supply, animal husbandry, “economic backwardness” or intrafamilial affairs.37 The handbook concludes with a final chapter entitled “Go to Xinjiang!”

36 Though the bulk of this population was lesser-educated peasants, PLA soldiers, and Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps members, many of whom were demobilized KMT soldiers or refugees of the Shaanxi famine, these populations resided in relatively isolated ethnic enclaves.

37 See Zhao, 22.

encouraging Han technicians to voluntarily take up posts on the frontier. Importantly, these recent arrivals are given free rein to construct the framework for a dialogue assuming the inherent existence of identifiable problems and solution, and to determine both what constitutes a

“problem” and along which lines such problems should be analyzed and addressed. The approach that party representatives such as Wu Naijun employ assumes a dichotomy of problem and solution, which lays the foundation for a discourse of local ineptitude and leadership-driven development. Uyghurs cannot step up to the plate as leaders of development. In echoing earlier

Western colonial literature, Uyghurs (and particularly disenfranchised Uyghur women) are portrayed as static, a passive mass existing in the timeless realm of the native, incapable of precipitating action. 38 Conversely, the Han newcomers are portrayed not as members of Mao’s masses, but as active individuals: within one year a single Han cadre can revolutionize a town; within a month they can turn around production at a state factory.39

Wu Naijun herself is portrayed as possessing an almost superhuman skill set. Not only can she can teach multiple subjects and perform secretarial tasks, she can also organize propaganda campaigns, direct plays, earn accolades for leading performances, draw up architectural blueprints, mediate between obstinate husbands and entrepreneurial (but oppressed) wives and daughters, run a start-up, design clothing and market merchandise. Furthermore, she is successful in all of these ventures, and achieves her success while standing on her own two feet, relying only on intangible party support.40 Wu Naijun is there to direct the scenes, apparently without

38 See, for example, creation of the “timeless Khmer” in Penny Edwards, Cambodge: the cultivation of a nation, 1860-1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007) 252.

39 See Wan An 王安, “Xin hong shou qiao de nügong Li Nongjin” 心红手巧的女工李弄琴 (Revolutionary-hearted and skill-handed feamle worker Li Nongjin) Renmin Ri Bao人民日报 7 (4/3/1960).

40 And more tangible, but unmentioned, support from her husband, through whom she enjoys access to crucial

assistance. Instead, it is the natives who can do nothing with proficiency and need assistance in learning their roles.

Not all Han women are teachers in formal school settings like Wu Naijun, but they are primarily portrayed as instructors and mentors in their interactions with Uyghurs. The majority of young Han women employed by the new state factories in the 1950s are given supervisory positions, but the role of all Han women as instructors and mentors is repeatedly emphasized in party accounts. People’s Daily articles on the 7-1 Textile Factory in Urumqi specify that in

January of 1954 “some of the best Han women technical workers were specially chosen to help train 55 young ethnic minority women in textile technologies”.41 Subsequent articles confirm that “every Han worker recognized that training the ethnic workers was their honorable duty,”42 and “Han women workers take helping their younger sister43 ethnic colleagues as a very honorable duty, and they all hope to have the younger sister ethnic workers transferred to their work group. When the younger sister ethnic women workers are studying technology, the Han women workers very patiently explain the basics of operating the machines, even acting out the

power channels and resources.

41 “Xinjiangshen ge shaoshuminzu de nü changye jishu gongren zhengzai chengzhang” 新疆省各少数民族的女产业技术工人正在成长 [Female industrial workers of every ethnicity in Xinjiang Province are coming into their own] Renmin Ri Bao 人民日报 3 (3/11/1954).

42Xu Baosheng徐宝生, “Shenghuo zai Xinjiang Qiyi Mianfangzhichang de ge minzu gongrenmen”生活在新疆七一棉纺织厂的各民族工人们 [Workers of every ethnicity living in Xinjiang’s 7-1 Cotton Textile Factory] Renmin Ri Bao 人民日报2 (5/26/1954).

43 The literal phrase used is “兄弟民族” or “elder and younger brother ethnicity” which is also used when discussing exclusively female groups. The term, which is used in conjecture with “Han elder brother” implies both that ethnic minorities are ‘blood kin’ to Han, bound to one another in an unbreakable bond extending far beyond circumstance and time to include all minorities present and past in a cohesive Chinese National Family, and that ethnic minorities necessarily assume the inferior position of “younger brother”, and must acknowledge the wisdom and experiences of, and acquiesce to the directives of, their Han elder brothers.

motions, encouraging and helping them in studying the operations…Within a month, the ethnic women workers have already learned some basic machine operations.”44

“Xinjiang’s 7/1 Textile Factory’s Uyghur, Kazakh and other minority women workers study technology with the help of Han workers.”45

While overlooking longstanding local textile expertise, these narratives underscore an assumption that nothing can be learned from Uyghur women, save the non-productive arts of

“singing and dancing.”46 Furthermore, frequent relegation of Uyghur women to ‘domestic’

44 “Xinjiang Qiyi Mianfangzhichang ge zu nügong jiji xue jishu” 新疆七一棉纺织厂各族女工积极学技术 [Female workers of every ethnicity energetically studying technology in Xinjiang’s 7-1 Cotton Textile Factory] Renmin Ri Bao 2 (4/2/1954). These positive attitudes towards training Uyghur women are directly contradicted by Justin Jacobs, Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State (Seattle: University of Washington Press) 187.

45 Wu Chunzhan武纯展, “Feiyue qianjin de Xinjiang” 飞跃前进的新疆 [Xinjiang Leaping Forward] Renmin Ri Bao人民日报 9 (9/18/1959).

46 Even in the 1800s, Hotan especially was famed for its carpets, as was all of Altishahr for embroidery. Several cities in Altishahr were home to modernist and co-ed vocational schools in the early 1930s Reyihan (auth) and Tuohutibahai (trans) 热衣汗;托乎提巴海, “Shenghuo zai Maozedong de shidai” 生活在毛泽东时代 [Living in the Mao Zedong Era] Renmin Ri Bao人民日报4 (6/8/1950) and Xu Baosheng.

industries, inclusive of not just industrial textile production but also homemade handcrafts and

“sidework”, indicates application of a very different set of standards for Uyghur women than for

Han women of the interior. 47 Though decried as “feudal” in Shaanxi and other locales, engagement in work centered on the home was actually viewed as an improvement for Uyghur women. 48

Han women’s inevitably superior position vis-a-vis Uyghurs raises two questions: could

Uyghur women ever reach ‘adulthood’ and attain equal footing with their Han counterparts, or were they perpetually relegated to the role of “younger sister”? And were vanguard Chinese settlers in Xinjiang primarily colonists or feminists and revolutionaries? Were they, as feminist historian Wang Zheng claims, “socialist state feminists…striving towards their Communist goal of eliminating gender, class and ethnic inequalities in China” who therefore saw Uyghur women primarily as fellow females suffering under similar yokes? Or did they view this population as primarily a lower-status “non-Han other”?49 Was their primary goal to improve the situation of women universally, or to raise the status of Han women vis-à-vis the adolescent other?

As exemplified by Wu Naijun’s case, despite its rhetoric of gender equality, the party often did not place equal importance on men and women’s work. Interaction with minority women was one avenue that allowed Han Chinese women to build up a level of power and jurisdiction in a manner often denied to them within purely Han contexts, especially in relation to Han men.

47 For examples, see Hu Zhong, 32-33.

48 See Gail Hershatter’s discussion of “feudal” work in Chapter 2 “No one is home,” in Hershatter, The Gender of Memory, 32-64.

49 Wang Zheng, 837.

Regardless of her intentions as a feminist or revolutionary, Wu Naijun’s work elevated her status through positioning her as a leader and superior vis-a-vis Uyghur women. It is impossible to imagine a scenario in which these ethnic roles are switched. This same principle can be read writ large across the nation. As interpreted in these narratives, the state of Uyghurs served national interests in confirming the need for a core population holding superior cultural and scientific knowledge, and thus justifying Han incursion into the region. The positioning of Uyghur women as an oppressed population held captive by a society incapable of internally-driven reform served to prove the benevolence and aptitude of the party, its [Han Chinese] representatives, and the core population of Inner China from which they drew. In comparison to the portrayal of “feudal” and “backwards” minorities, the majority is silently painted as a standard for civilization. Ethnic others confirm Han superiority and consolidate the notion of a Han majority that is the standard for national culture, learning and advancement.50 The fundamental inequality of Han-Minority relations also makes it highly advantageous to claim Han ethnic status, and thus serves as a positive force for consolidation of a majority identity in disincentivizing populations on the fringes of Han culture – such as native Cantonese speakers like Wu Naijun – from attempting to carve out distinctive cultural identities.51

50 For further discussion of images of the colonized used to safeguard the colonizer’s cultural preeminence see Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 2.

51 See Kevin Carrico “Recentering China: the Cantonese in and beyond the Han”, James Liebold, “Searching for Han: early twentieth-century narratives of Chinese origins and development” and C. Patterson Gierschin “From subjects to Han: the rise of Han as Identity in nineteenth-century southwest China” in Mullaney, ed. Critical Han Studies for further discussion of how the delineation of minorities consolidated majority identity.

CHAPTER 2: IMPOVERISHED PEASANT TO INSPIRED PROLETARIAT: THE MAKING OF MODEL MINORITIES UNDER STATE GAZE

Watching a performance of the Hotan Cultural Team, you’ll find yourself swayed by the distinctive local songs and dance, emboldened by the freshness of the revolutionary tunes, drawn in by the evocative voice of the young Uyghur performer Shalamaiti. Her entire performance, will persuade you of the power of the party’s leadership, the exertion of the masses striving to revolutionize this beautiful land, and the fierce love held in the heart of every ethnicity in

Xinjiang for Chairman Mao that inspires them to strive ever onward.

Shalamaiti was born a nobody with no prospects. At the age of 9, on the eve of revolution, she was sent out to the fields as a shepherdess. She was never offered any chance of education.

At the age of 17 she (exactly how is never explained) joined the Hotan Cultural Team. Due to her lack of education, illiteracy, and understanding of Chinese, Shalamaiti at first struggled and was so dispirited she almost left the team. The life of a traveling performer was straught with difficulty: traversing mountains to tiny villages, trudging on only to hear someone say that she would never amount to much of a performer. But her teammates encouraged her, and the team leader gathered them into a study group to read Mao’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on

Literature and Art” emphasizing the importance of artistic production derived from and inspiring the lives of the common people. Shalamaiti’s eyes were opened: in old society a poor peasant girl like her could barely eke out a living at the level of a beast of burden.52 Becoming a

52 Literally “cow-horse life” (niu ma shenghuo, 牛马生活). Writing contrasting experiences pre and post liberation was subject to exaggeration in across China, and is not particular to Xinjiang or minority narratives.

25 performer was an impossibility, and this opportunity represented the party’s trust in her.

Shalamaiti determined to live up to that trust, and fulfill the needs of the masses. She practiced on her own when everyone else had gone to dinner, and gradually her performance improved.

Whenever she encountered difficulty Mao’s thoughts gave her the courage she needed to overcome obstacles and quiet her fear. She learned several dances, began to excel at singing, and taught herself to play two instruments. But the people needed more, needed fresh material that instilled revolutionary thought and love for the party into the very landscape of their existence. Working to surmount the hurdle of her own illiteracy, Shalamaiti began to compose her own tunes, singing snippets for her teammates and reworking them again and again until four songs featuring her beloved Hotan became party-perfect audience favorites. The transformation of “ordinary farmgirl” into such an exemplary performer, the author surmises, is clearly an impactful example of the power of Chairman Mao Thought to nourish those who drink from the party’s cup and give them the strength to realize their full potential.53

The entire interview is written in Chinese and published in a state-run Chinese periodical.

Shalamaiti’s voice comes to us through the art of translation, an act that goes unacknowledged by the author. Given the author’s anonymity (simply “a staff writer”), we cannot surmise who first made her story accessible to a Chinese-speaking audience. Regardless of who performed the initial act of interpretation, the journalist renders her speech legible to the larger Chinese- literate audience by writing her voice into the norms of state narrative. The text is peppered with

53 “Mao Zhuxi de sixiang buyu ta chengchang: Hetian zhuanchu wengongtuan Shalamaiti tongzhi fangwenji” 毛主席的思想哺育她成长:和田专区文工团沙拉买提同志访问记” [“Mao Zedong’s thoughts nurtured her growth: An Interview with Comrade Shalamaiti of Hetian Cultural Troupe”], Renmin Yinyue 人民音乐, 1 (1966): 12-13.

common Chinese phrases such as “life of beasts of burden”, an idiom used in this period to describe living standard prior to liberation.54 Even Shalamaiti herself is presented through the lens of linguistic interpretation through the equivocation of her Uyghur name with the nonsensical Chinese transliteration (沙拉买提, lit. “Salad-buy-raise”).55 Her identity prior to and outside of state structure is mentioned only in passing and given no distinct features. Uyghurs not seen by the state are not seen. Uyghurs portrayed are those in contact with the state and, particularly, servants to the state.

Likewise, Uyghur culture as discussed in popular publications is reduced to a secularized visible culture – singing, dancing, and colorful clothes. Of the hundreds of references to Uyghur culture in People’s Daily and other articles, these are almost exclusively the only specific aspects of Uyghur culture mentioned, and these traits are always presented without reference to Islam or deeper cultural influences.56 Of particular importance to the authors of these articles is how these cultural products are used in service of the state, either in expressions of gratitude to the party or to propagate party messages. Shalamaiti is a model because she demonstrates how these aspects of Uyghur culture can be appropriated in creating convincing party propaganda and thus advance the reach of the state. Notably, no other aspects of Uyghur culture – nothing that could make her seem fundamentally distinct, nothing that would be difficult to harness into labor for the state, and certainly no mention of the Sufi roots of Uyghur dance– is included in her

54 People’s Daily contains 129 articles employing this term, all contrasting life before and after liberation.

55 Due to transliteration, Uyghur names as they appear in Chinese texts are often quite different from the original, especially before standardization of transliterations. Where the original Uyghur name is clear, the original name, and not the transliteration, is used.

56 The 1963 Brief History also mentions poetry, but gives no examples of pre-PRC poems. Religion could be considered an aspect of Uyghur culture, but is often cast as a tool of the oppressive classes and a force repressing “true” folk culture.

narrative. While Islam was woven into the daily fabric of Uyghur life, structuring greetings, interpersonal relations, dress, cuisine, and speech, marking the passing of the hours and the shifting of the seasons, Shalamaiti’s artistic outpourings are notably secular. This is Uyghur culture cleaved from its religious heritage and repurposed for service to the state.

As writers cannot report on what they do not see, state-sanctioned sources have obvious limitations on the selection of characters and scope of narrative. Uyghur women who come into state-sanctioned narrative are Uyghur women under the state’s gaze. Numerous articles from the period reference the state’s desire to have Uyghur women rendered publicly visible. This process does not always entail stepping onto the stage, but certainly necessitates making oneself readable to state eyes and re-defining oneself via party structures. Looking back at Shalamaiti’s adolescence, we notice that her earlier occupation as a shepherdess rendered her invisible to state eyes and intractable by state organs. Her return to a life ordered under state eyes echoes earlier calls for the collectivization of Kazakh pastures, moving mobile (and volatile) populations into static organization. 57 Back in Altishahr, women are encouraged to both step over the threshold and unveil, stepping from dark to light, from obscurity to visibility – and legibility. One lengthy

1952 feature article in People’s Daily recounts the efforts of a Han party cadre in Hami actively interceding in minority family affairs to extract a young bride from the four walls of her in-law’s home, from under her mother-in-law’s control, and bring her into state-governed spaces. This young woman was not asked to be an active revolutionary, but merely to be present at local party

57 Most problems are recorded among the numerically smaller Kazak population. Following years of Kazak resistance to collectivization over 60,000 forced their way across the PRC-USSR border and fled to Soviet Kazakstan in 1962.

functions.58 Regardless of where or how they were concealed from state view (and thus state reach) minority women are meant to subject themselves to this gaze and allow their lives to be defined by state-devised social structures, such as work units or participation in study groups and political meetings.

Emphasis on the legibility of minorities is not new to the PRC. In the introduction to The Art of Ethnography: A Chinese “Miao Album”, Laura Hostetler claims that illustrated taxonomy albums of ethnic minorities in the Qing were used by the state for easy identification and control of subject populations.59 The manner of depicting these minorities positioned peripheral people hailing from disparate cultural traditions within a framework that was uniformly accessible to state actors and could be replicated with minor modifications for every people in the empire.

While lacking the same emphasis on illustration, the 1963 Brief History and Introduction to the

Uyghurs, similarly serves to bring Uyghurs into view under a set framework, presenting them in a format common across the volumes in a series introducing every ethnic minority in the Chinese state. The state’s imposition of such a knowledge system, and the accompanying assumption that this singular way of organizing individuals and cultivating knowledge of subject populations is applicable across the board, goes hand in hand with an underlying claim to exclusive access to modernity and modern knowledge production. As anthropologist Paige West has noted, colonial powers can create the symbolic landscape that allows them to benefit from a certain vision of

58 Yao Wen 姚文, “Cong fenjian jiu jiating dao hexie de xin jiating – ji Xinjiang yi ge huizu jiating de bianhua” 从封建旧家庭到和睦的新家庭——记新疆一个回族家庭的变化 (From an old feudal household t oto peaceful new household – changes in a Hui household in Xinjiang). Renmin Ri Bao人民日报3 (4/27/1952).

59 Hostetler, The Art of Ethnography: A Chinese “Miao Album”, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006) X.

correct development.60 Here, the Han-dominated party-state is both the embodiment of modernity and the means through which it is achieved or, as Sanjay Seth notes in analyzing

British knowledge production of subjects in India, “This knowledge is seen as ‘‘modern’’ not just in the sense that it is historically recent, but also because it is seen as part and parcel of modernity.”61 However, as Rian Thum and others have demonstrated, the population designated as Uyghurs in the PRC inhabited a world structured by both a distinctive value system and a disparate way of producing and approaching knowledge. 62 This method of rendering Uyghur women visible is then imposing not just an ideology and ideal reality on their subjects, but a fundamentally foreign framework for knowing them and categorizing their world.

Given its imperfections and incompatibility with the nebulous category of “Uyghur Culture”, why would women subject themselves to state gaze? Again, Shalamaiti’s case is illustrative.

Prior to subjecting herself to state gaze, Shalamaiti, like many young women of her era, is portrayed as barred from education or other opportunities. Forever sequestered in the darkness of a house, trapped behind a veil, or set upon the vast and empty plains, unliberated women were denied all possibility of personal advancement and community participation.63 As with the women liberated through their contact with Wu Naijun, opportunity is obtained only via establishment of a relationship with the state. Subjection to the state gaze is cast as the sole

60 Paige West, Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 6.

61 Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 183.

62 Rian Thum, 3, 160, 186.

63 See also Hu Zhong, 32.

means of tapping into these opportunities, the sole avenue of modernity. These opportunities are therefore cast not as the inalienable rights of all citizens, but contingent upon self-subjugation.

The natural response to the state’s bestowal of such unprecedented opportunities is naturally a “spontaneous” outpouring of gratitude and willingness to turn oneself into a vessel for the party’s message.64 However, published accounts of unbidden pro-party production must be taken with a grain of salt given the circumstances of their production. The early 1950s witnessed a professionalization and salarization of many lines of occupation, including art. By the mid-

1950s, artists were state cadres. While Brief History celebrates their newfound professional respect, artists were dependent on the state for continuation of that respect - and their material livelihood.65 The state, in turn, sanctioned certain voices and ensured the study and pursuit of official types of art, thus blurring the line between grateful beneficiaries of the state and dependent state employees. Colin Mackerras hails professionalization as “the single most important phenomenon to affect the performing arts of the minority nationalities since 1949,” observing that “the training system is tailor made to produce the new type of professionals and it tends to do so according to standards set down by the Han.”66 Model workers were both scouted out and intensively trained by the state, just as displays of love for the party and zeal for socialist development - giant carpets woven in anticipation of a visit from Chairman Mao, songs written by Shalamaiti, poetry commemorating liberation, and speeches given by model workers - were

64 Brief Introduction, 224.

65Ibid, 210.

66 Colin Mackerras, “Folksongs and Dances of China's Minority Nationalities: Policy, Tradition, and Professionalization,” Modern China Vol. 10, No. 2 (April, 1984): 219.

acts of careful state-supervised composition.67, 68 Model workers and performers were ordinary individuals transformed into localized vehicles for state ideology. The messages they shared were intended to seem more authentic arising ‘naturally’ from a member of the community.69

Importantly, once a woman had subjugated herself to state gaze, gained the benefits of collaboration, and made herself a vehicle for party propagation, she could not back down: by

1952, most state cadres were subject to a law prohibiting voluntary resignation.70 It’s uncertain whether Shalamaiti could have elected to leave the cultural troupe. Was her resolution to stick it out truly a personal choice and example of Mao-inspired determination, or was this decision made on her behalf by the troupe leader? Could she have ever self-elected to return to the fields and remove herself from state gaze?

The answer is most likely “no”, at least if Shalamaiti hoped to retain access to any of the resources she benefited from while an employee of the state. Under the new regime Uyghur women are assumed to exist along a finite spectrum: forward toward party-moderated modernity, obtained through submission to the state (and, as seen in Wu Naijun’s bibliography, imported state actors); or backwards into darkness and obscurity. Modern subjecthood is one predicated on self-elected subjugation.

67 For a detailed narrative of the process of training a model worker, see Chapter 8: “Model” in Hershatter, The Gender of Memory, 210-235.

68 For a list of other instances of supposedly spontaneous acts testifying to popular gratitude and love for the party, see Brief History, 224.

69 For further discussion of this point, see Hershatter, 213-14.

70 Deborah S. Davis, “Social Class Transformation in Urban China: Training, Hiring, and Promoting Urban Professionals and Managers after 1949” Modern China, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Jul., 2000), 262.

CHAPTER 3: UYGHUR WOMEN IN A MEN’S WORLD

As the mountains blaze red under last rays of sun, Maliyamu gallops across the Ili Valley hoping to reach her husband Muhemaiti (Muhammed) before dark, eager to share her good news: she’s just been transferred to his unit to study land reform! Long held apart, first by traditional society and then by their commitment to the communist party, they are finally to be united in domicile and daily dedication to the party.

Growing up in impoverished households tied to the same oppressive landlord, Maliyamu and

Muhammed have both built themselves impressive careers within the party. Maliyamu is the local Women’s Federation Representative, while Muhammed is Public Security Team leader for the farmer’s collective and leader of the production mutual aid team. He and Maliyamu were both activists in the rent reduction campaign and held their wedding in the rent reduction victory meeting.

In youth, the two were neighbors separated only by a wall. They played together, worked together, studied at the same school for two years, and fell in love. When Muhammed turned 16 he sold his labor to the landlord, and was often gone for months at a time. Maliyamu was 14; according to Uyghur customs, she had already reached marriageable age. Her mother, Rozihan, began to spend all her time worrying about finding her a suitable husband.

Maliyamu’s heart was as agitated as hot oil jumping on the griddle. As soon as Muhammed returned to their village for Nowruz (Spring Festival) she pleaded with him to find a way for the two of them to tie the knot. The next day he asked his father, Ruomaji, to intercede. Ruomaji put

33 together half his life’s savings into bride-price, and sent the matchmaker to ask for Maliyamu’s hand on behalf of his son.

Maliyamu’s father Lamahong had long understood that Muhammed was an intelligent and capable young man, and gave his consent to this union. But Rozihan looked down upon

Muhammed’s family for being too poor to own even a carpet, and coldly told Ruomaji off. How could she give away her only daughter to a family that couldn’t guarantee her material wellbeing?

After this, Maliyamu’s home was the site of constant discord. Rozihan wanted to find a son- in-law with better prospects, but her husband Lamahong hated the rich from the bottom of his heart. Several families asked for Maliyamu’s hand in marriage, but nothing came of it.

In 1950 the CCP and representatives of the PRC arrived in Ili. Once a laborer, Muhammed now became a partner. Even though he was still exploited by the landlord, he enjoyed more freedom than he had as a laborer, and he thought to himself: “After the Han people’s Party (at that time he still didn’t know it was the CCP) came, they’ve been good to the poor, this is certainly a just party.” He shared the news with Maliyamu, telling her that this change in circumstances would certainly allow them to finally wed.

When the CCP-led rent reduction team arrived in their village in November of 1951,

Muhammed and Maliyamu threw themselves into work, mobilizing young peasants and women to participate in work and study. They were so busy helping the new administration and organizing youth that, for the time being, they didn’t concern themselves with matters of the heart.

Following the anti-landlord struggle, the two youth joined the New Democratic Youth

League. Maliyamu became the first activist among women in her village. Endorsing her enthusiastic, earnest manner of handling affairs, the masses chose her to be the representative of

the women’s league. In order to undertake all her duties, she often left early and came back late, not thinking twice about her own affairs (or, apparently, her parents’ concern about their teenager gallivanting around the countryside).

After Muhammed joined the league he worked with even more enthusiasm. There wasn’t a single soul in the village who didn’t sing his praises. On the day he was selected to be head of the village farmer’s association Rozihan put three glutinous rice seeds in his bowl, signaling her acceptance of his proposal. Her husband laughed, saying, “What’s happened? It looks like you approve!”. Rozihan said with some unease, “In the past I was just another person born into poverty; whoever thought we could turn our lives around?”

After all parents had thus endorsed the union, Muhammed and Maliyamu decided to hold a new-style wedding at the rent reduction campaign victory meeting.

Ruomaji borrowed a wagon, and filled it with his share of the grain confiscated from the landlord, hoping to sell it in the city in order to purchase wedding gifts. On his way to the cart he ran into Muhammed who stopped him at once and demanded to know what he was doing.

Muhammed berated his parents, reminding them of party platitudes to sparingly use resources and focus on production. Father and son argued for some time, the father adamant that he could not collect a bride empty-handed any more than he could entertain guests with empty cupboards.

Having clearly memorized his share of party pamphlets, Muhammed retorted, “The government is calling for us to use the fruits of struggle [confiscated and re-distributed grain] for production, not to waste it. Weddings now don’t have to be like those in the past. The [1950]

Marriage Law stipulates that no bride price be required. If we squander all the grain, what will we plant in spring? His father stood before him speechless, finally turning around and returning the borrowed wagon.

Wedding preparations were also underway at Maliyamu’s house with Rozihan busy borrowing this from one family, that from another, preparing food for the guests to eat. When

Ruomaji sent over the wedding gifts, Rozihan looked despairingly at the small parcel, ripping it open and throwing it out on the street in rage when she noticed it contained only fabric for one set of clothes and a single pair of shoes. “Impossible! Who could ever be so cheap!” she wailed. Even her anti-bourgeoise husband was troubled. “This, this is unthinkable! I’ve lived this long and never see someone take a bride like this!” he muttered.

However, on the day of the wedding people crowded into the town center a full two hours before the ceremony began, squeezing into the doorframe, sitting on the courtyard wall, even climbing onto the roof. Muhammed and Maliyamu entered the first new-style wedding in their village bedecked in brilliant red flowers. Lamahong and his wife stepped onto the podium carrying a garland of flowers, saw the lively crowd before them, and broke out in smiles.

Rozihan stood up and said, with great emotion in her voice: “In my whole life, I’ve never been so happy as I am today. Our children’s affairs should be up to them to manage, and certainly shouldn’t be fettered by old regulations.” 71⁠

While the direct-narrative style of this story as printed in People’s Daily in 1952 certainly raises issues of translation, memory, and the imposition of “state speech”, it has been selected for this thesis for its treatment of two issues: Uyghur women and the law and Uyghur women in the company of Uyghur men. While these two relationships are discussed extensively in an abstract

71 Story from Ge Li 歌黎. “Yi dui Weiwuerzu qingnian nannü de ziyou jiehun” 一对维吾尔族青年男女的自由结婚 [A Young Uyghur Couple’s Independent Marriage]. Renmin Ribao 人民日报3 (10/22/1952)

manner in state-sanctioned literature, this article presents one of the only treatments of the subjects on an individual level.

Officially, Uyghur women are now subjects of state law in the PRC and rejoice in their newfound freedoms and protection under that law. What then does this law protect them from, and which laws in particular do they evoke? The 1963 Brief Introduction claims that the new laws protect Uyghur women from near-imprisonment within the house and, specifically, within forced marriages.⁠72 In short, the law protects them from familial authority and abuse of power by local notables who might strong-arm less fortunate families into selling off their daughters, as recounted in a 1950 article on women’s liberation in Altishahr.⁠73 Which law specifically is invoked is left unspoken, but these are clearly arenas affected by the 1950 Marriage Law, also mentioned by Muhammed, the protagonist of our story. An unwritten assumption is that, prior to

1950, Uyghur society suffered from a lack of basic legal protections, and that Islam itself, far from provisioning for individual protections, actually oppressed or ignored the natural rights of certain segments of society.

Maliyamu and Muhammed’s right to form a union was, from a legal standpoint, backed by the 1950 Marriage Law. Muhammed’s manner of invoking this law casts it as universally applicable to every union formed in the PRC, regardless of residence or ethnicity of the individuals. Interestingly, however, the law is invoked for a relatively minor matter and not to sanctify their union or force Rozihan to accept her daughter’s right to choose a marriage partner.

While Maliyamu and Muhammed clearly know their party lingo and are familiar with the

72 Brief History, 226.

73 “Nanjiang funü kaishi jiexia miansha” 南疆妇女开始揭下面纱 [Southern Xinjiang women start to take off their veils], Renmin Ri Bao 人民日报 3(5/14/1950).

contents of the Marriage Law, it is only Muhammed who invokes it - and then only to convince his father not to prepare lavish wedding gifts. Though Maliyamu technically could have used the law to force through her union with Muhammed, this would have created rupture between two generations within the family and likely encouraged her mother take an antagonistic stance against the party. That Maliyamu does not invoke the law, and that no party cadre appears on scene reminding her of her rights is actually in line with top-down instructions from the state to local cadres to not antagonize local populations in Xinjiang through overzealous reform. Studies of the Marriage Law in other regions similarly show that the state didn’t always uphold minority women’s claims concerning the law, especially when they feared resistance or violent repercussions.74⁠ The law is there, and known by local populations, but the state neither forces its application nor intercedes. Uyghur women are thus drawn into an indirect relationship with the law, and not exactly cast as full legal subjects.

If Uyghur women are not exactly subjects in that they don’t directly invoke the law, they are certainly active recipients and beneficiaries of the new standards - and the greatest beneficiaries are ones who actively propagate party rule. The extent to which an individual can derive benefits from their relationship with the state is dependent on the extent of that individual’s party devotion. Muhammed and Maliyamu both immediately realize what the CCP has to offer them, and in turn offer absolute allegiance to the party, even before they really understand what the party stands for. In becoming early leaders and advocates in their own communities they are able to capitalize upon the offerings of the new system, both professionally and personally. Having

74 Neil J. Diamant, “Pursuing Rights and Getting Justice on China's Ethnic Frontier, 1949-1966.” Law & Society Review Vol. 35, No. 4 (2001): 825.

witnessed the rise and fall of successive political parties over the preceding decades, Rozihan is comparatively more pragmatic in her initial distrust of yet another outsider-directed imposed political system. The younger generation, however, instinctively knows to place their future in the hands of this new party. To them it is obvious that the relatively unknown political body is more trustworthy and better serves the people than “old customs” (recent political possibilities, including an independent East Turkestan Republic, are left unmentioned).

Based on this instinct, Muhammed and Maliyamu throw themselves into work for the CCP, convincing scores of other youth and women of its self-evident truth. Though they initially recognized the party as a venue to pursue their own interests, their devotion to party work soon supersedes any prior commitments. But the compensation for such selfless devotion is not long in coming: within a year of helping the party pave a path into their community, the young couple is rewarded with exactly what they demonstrated themselves willing to sacrifice, or at least set on the back burner: their marriage.

At the same time, youth who buck convention seem to encounter no real danger to selves.

While Rozihan offers initial resistance, her opposition results only in verbal strife, and no actual threat to Maliyamu. On the contrary, Maliyamu is portrayed as enjoying unhindered freedom of mobility within both home and community as she carries out her duties for the CCP. The bulk of official texts tend to portray Uyghur families as feudally-minded and rather savage when speaking about the population in general (thus justifying the CCP’s intervention), and historical accounts across China reporting instances of violent backlash against women who exercise their new rights in marriage matters. However, this portrait of individual actors casts their freedom of choice as coming without significant negative consequences. The greatest challenge faced by

vanguard youth is not a murderous crowd or vengeful parents, but a recalcitrant mother stubbornly standing by old standards until convinced of the new.

During this ordeal, Muhammed is more vocally and politically active while Maliyamu is relegated to the role of “background activist”. Muhammed cultivates respect and leadership in the community at large; Maliyamu is admired for her tireless work among women. Likewise, most of the lines in this story are credited to Muhammed. Maliyamu either provides vocal confirmation of his ideas or silently acts out her role in the background, a mere shadow of her future spouse. Muhammed vocally reproaches his parents, but Maliyamu is irreproachable in speech. In quietly and steadfastly refusing to bow before old customs she demonstrates that the new woman need not upset established notions of femininity.

Emphasis on differentiated male and female roles is not unique to the young couple. An early

PRC article summarizing interviews with youth and Women’s Federation leaders from Xinjiang at a meeting in Beijing channels the admirable revolutionary spirit of the two male representatives from the youth league, spending nearly 900 characters recounting tales of their political exploits with the East Turkestan Republic (rebranded the proto-communist “Three

Districts Rebellion”) and early CCP. Not even half that length is given to “women’s issues”. The majority of text on this subject is given over to rehashing familiar tropes: under the KMT and feudal society Xinjiang women were subject to a life of hardship; women were sold into marriage, often at the young age of 12 or 13, and enjoyed little liberty in or out of the home.⁠75

The representative herself is painted as a pitiful subject greatly reliant on the state’s protection.

75 See Hu Zhong for an almost exact reiteration of these themes.

While she is lauded for her strength in participating in revolution, the author dwells on her struggle to raise two children after being abandoned by her husband.76 Men inspire audiences to revolution; women serve to remind readers of the poor conditions of the past and the strength that can be ignited within an individual via contact with the party. Men are leaders of the community; women are leaders of women’s groups. Men are productive; women, auxiliary. Men are logical; women, emotional. While, as has been noted by a number of feminist historians, ⁠ this gendered understanding of individuals’ basic roles in society in the early PRC is not unique to

Uyghurs. 77 What is unique is that the justification for CCP intervention is framed partially in terms of protecting women from supposedly feudal and patriarchal Uyghur society via establishing gender equality and ensuring women have a full range of liberties and opportunities.78⁠

Women, however, are seen as not quite full adults. Women’s liberation is categorized as parallel to the youth liberation in the article cited above. The portrayal of women, youth and ethnic minorities as equivalent (sub) categories appears throughout early People’s Daily and party archives. On official lists of representatives, only women or minority representatives are

76 From Bo Sheng 柏生, “Xinjiang de shaoshu minzu qingnian he funü – fang xibeige zu qingniang, funü canguantuan de xinjiang shaoshuminzu daibiao” 新疆的少数民族青年和妇女 ——访西北各族青年、妇女参观团的新疆少数民族代表 [Minority youth and women in Xinjiang – Interview Xinjiang representatives from the Northwest Youth and Women delegations] with Renmin Ri Bao人民日报3 (4/4/1950).

77 See, for example, Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past and “State of the Field: Women in China's Long Twentieth Century”, Wang Zheng, Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, and Tani Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism and Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism.

78 See, for example, “Southern Xinjiang women start to drop their veils”: “For countless years Uyghur women have passed their lives behind a veil, as if imprisoned. They didn’t exercise freedom over marriage, their own body, or their education” (“维吾尔族的妇女，多少年来一直在这一层面纱后过着牢狱一般的生活。她们没有婚姻、人身、教育的自由”).

noted; that the rest are Han and male is assumed.79 Other articles go to great lengths to emphasize minority and women’s participation in local governance, including every example of women being selected as street leaders, neighborhood heads, and even, in one community in

Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, county head.⁠80 However, what these examples underscore is not a revolution in gender equality, but the paucity of women in positions of general (not gendered) power, and the surprise at finding them there. As Gail Hershatter proclaims, “state policies on women's labor were on contradictory assumptions: Mao's statement that "anything a man can do women can also do" and the widely shared belief that women were suited for lighter and less-skilled tasks.”⁠ ⁠81

While the communist party saw itself as liberating women, it also asked them to step into a limited sphere, to accept working alongside and slightly in the shadow of men. On Youth of

China periodical covers featuring the trio of worker-soldier-peasant women, if present, were always portrayed as the peasant, and never as the soldier or worker. Across the board women were either absent from scenes of importance or relegated to an auxiliary role.⁠82 ⁠ This contradiction was recognized at the time by ethnically Han women of the interior. A vanguard group attempted to educate men in the true position of women in a socialist state via venues such as New Women of China magazine, which pushed images of women as liberators, revolutionaries

79 Anonymous,“Dihuashi liangwan yu ren jihui, huanyin zhongyan xibei fangwentuan”迪化市两万余人集会欢迎中央西北访问团 [20,000 gather in Dihua/Urumqi to welcome Central Party – Northwest delegation], Renmin Ri Bao人民日报 3 (9/19/1950).

80 Sailima Talifuwa 赛力玛·塔力甫瓦, “Xinjiang ge zu funü zhanqilaile” 新疆各族妇女站起来了[Women of every ethnicity stand up in Xinjiang], Renmin Ri Bao人民日报6 (21/9/1954)版

81 Hershatter, Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century, 1021.

82 Wang Zheng, “Creating a Socialist Feminist Cultural Front: "Women of China" (1949–1966)”, 847.

and agents of industry.⁠83 However, little of this trickled down to the Xinjiang countryside during the early years of the PRC. Uyghur women simply were not independent agents and leaders of liberation.

83 Ibid, 842, 847.

CONCLUSION

It is not that popular press contradicts official doctrine. To the contrary, the authors of the pieces here are clearly trying to accord particulars personally encountered with the all- encompassing ideals espoused by the state. This attempt to write individual stories into the state frame does, however, creates a narrative fissure in the seemingly choate shell of the official stance. Because individual encounters cannot seamlessly fit into an idealized framework, the author’s struggle to write the perfect narrative is visible, betraying the ideology driving certain assumptions, laying bare the ultimate implications of seemingly benign party policies. Through the author’s hand, the careful audience can understand the structure of beliefs necessary if party doctrine is to prevail.

The relationship between Uyghur women, Uyghur societies, Han women, and the Party-State that emerges through diverse readings of these texts suggests that the state took an approach that both straddles and evades the common binary of colonialism and nationalism, empire-building and state-building suggested by Chinese historiography. Uyghurs are incorporated into the state, but certainly not as equal partners. Exercise of power within the region is based off a parallel pair of unequal relations: between male and female, Han and minority. While some (or perhaps many) of the Han immigrants to the region may have been fervent believers in CCP-led liberation and development, and may have truly wished to “raise up” their Uyghur sisters, their authority to intercede, to teach, and to lead, is founded upon an assumption of fundamental inequality in ethnic relations. The understanding of the role of Uyghur women in the new state

44 that leaks through the texts used in this study calls for a new approach to the study of state- building that incorporates seemingly contradictory elements of inclusion and subjugation.

Instead, the preceding sections suggest a new modality of understanding ethnic and gendered subjects within the state: that of subservient nationalism within metropole-bound developmentalism. Subjects of subservient nationalism are extended an offer of citizenship predicated on admission of inferior status and submission to the state and state agents, and to a core national culture.

The ideal is that all individuals freely elect to collectively support the party and participate in the new state, propelled by their natural understanding of the party-state’s innate integrity and authority; and that every individual, and every ethnicity, enjoys a potentially parallel relationship with the state. As seen in the sections above, however, the state’s own portrayal of Uyghur women undermines the notions that individuals in this population were free to choose whether to enter into a relationship with the party-state, and that they then enjoyed a system of indifferent equality among ethnic peers and across gender. Uyghur women in the early PRC are given a single option of advancement seated within a system of social, political, ethnic and gender hierarchies. As such they are denied an unmediated path to either political enlightenment or basic civil rights.

Given the manner in which approved texts envision Uyghur women in the early PRC in terms of gender, ethnicity, and citizenship, neither established framework (nationalism and nation- building, or colonialism and empire-building) seems entirely appropriate for approaching

Uyghur history within the PRC. Official texts replete with references to learning from “Han

elder brothers” (and sisters) suggest fundamental inequality among ethnicities from core and periphery that would imply a colonial mentality. However, this is balanced by great effort to demonstrate the central government’s valuation of all ethnicities, with Uyghurs expected to play a role in state construction and Uyghur history written into national history. This emphasis would suggest development in Xinjiang to fall under the purview of nation-building, particularly as the central government is framing China as a nation among nations. As neither framework captures the complexity of the situation, perhaps it is best to use an approach that doesn’t view colonialism and nationalism as contradictory.

To claim official status within the nation and the benefits of citizenship, one must first bow before the state, acknowledging experience of deprivation in the past and dependence in the present. This acknowledgement is based on several assumptions that together negate the possibility of alternate modernities within Xinjiang: that there is a standard set of rights and liberties, and to which subjects did not formerly enjoy access; that women previously exercised no power within their homes and communities; and that there was neither impetus for change from within the community nor a group with an alternate source of power sufficient to enact change. Uyghur “culture” is distilled into the decorative arts: song, poetry, embroidery, dance, and the cultural impact of Islam is sidestepped altogether. While components of folk art may be used as mediums for political messages, they are not depicted as constitutive of manifestations of identity and the substance of civilization in themselves.

Likewise, the history of the short-lived ERT is co-opted into PRC history by casting the revolutionaries and their government as proto-communist and paving the path for the CCP.

Nobody imagines an alternate scenario where the plane carrying the heads of ERT government

doesn’t disappear mid-flight and these leaders do commence negotiations with Beijing, likely repeating an insistence on at least partial autonomy.

Instead, Uyghur women are painted as absolute victims lacking any agency. Writers use the languages of incarceration and infancy when depicting this population, denying them adult autonomy. Women are prisoners of their own homes, unable to step over their own thresholds at will, an imagery that implies male heads of household are the prison guards. Uyghur women featured in the most official narratives are often young women - women denied an education, women sold into marriage as child brides (always “at the age of 12 or 13”), women who become mothers while still children themselves. These repeated images evoke pity through stressing the helplessness of these subjects. Here, ethnicity and womanhood alike are painted as states of perpetual adolescence, and one is ethnic or female insofar as they are inferior, in need of protection and guidance.

If Uyghur women are powerless on their own, and have been stripped of their natural rights by male members of their own community, then recourse is found only externally. To borrow

Rochelle Terman’s language, Uyghur women are in a double bind: recognition of any imperfections within their community inherently invites Chinese intervention on the claim of liberating and protecting otherwise vulnerable subject.84 Acting out of duty and moral obligation then the PRC steps in, offering them access to rights and recognition as full members of society.

Rights and recognition are, however, not inherently due to every individual, as access to them is dependent on reliance on the state and accepting the state-writ terms of their reliance. Theirs is a liberation predicated on voluntary subjugation. Furthermore, as the language of liberation

84 Rochelle Terman, “Islamophobia, Feminism and the Politics of Critique.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 33, no. 2, (Mar. 2016), pp. 77–102, doi:10.1177/0263276415590236.

obliterates the possibility of other avenues to citizenship or claiming the rights of full nationals, the path of dependence and submission is the only avenue to citizenship. Particularly, Uyghur women are dependent on the agents of liberation: in their case, Han female cadres and party employees. As the author of “The Freely Marrying Couple” lets slip, Uyghurs identified the CCP early on as “the Han Chinese political party”, and associating the new state with Han Chinese power emanating from the interior.

The particular Han women Uyghur encounter are not a representative sample of Han women of the interior (or even, indeed, the peasant Han women of Xinjiang, with whom the Turkic populations have little contact). Whereas campaigns in Inner China were ‘liberating’ Han

Chinese women from illiteracy and confinement to the home, the Han women encountered by

Uyghur women have already left home, were [often] literate, and had acquired a certain degree of professional identity – an identity dependent in great part on their supervision of Uyghurs exhibiting ‘inferior’ qualities in all of these areas. In comparison to the immigrating class of skilled Han female cadres, Uyghur women are assumed to occupy a disadvantaged position. The relative positions of these populations along the spectrum of ‘development’, commonly divided into those who have something to teach (Han women) and those who have much to learn

(Uyghur women) is portrayed in this context not as derived from gendered, political or social circumstances, but as derived from fundamental differences between ethnic populations. When a female Han cadre assists implementation of reforms in the interior, texts talk of breaking the remnants of ‘feudal’ society and liberating women. When a female Han cadre undertakes the same role in Xinjiang, this is writ as an instance of “Han elder sisters” liberating her “Uyghur younger sisters” from Uyghur society, which is assumed to be feudal at its very foundation. The

“Han elder sister” is presumed to come from a socially advanced society already purged of all

unsavory elements. Thus relative power is ethnicized. Han women cadres, as representatives of the state, draw their authority through the relative subjugation of Uyghur women and demonstrate the state’s benevolent power through “lifting up” Uyghur women and doling out the rights associated with state participation. Han female cadres have power to determine the extent of liberties bestowed and exercise jurisdiction over defining the modes and expression of Uyghur women’s new role as “liberated” subjects. The later are thereby given liberation with limits, contingent on the extent they admit their own inferiority, accept Han instruction, and bare their personal and private lives before the state’s eyes.

The state’s total approach to Uyghur women in Xinjiang may be best described as following the principles of Metropole-Bound Developmentalism, which I define through the following characteristics: Assumption of the existence of a certain set of universal standards against which all social, cultural and civic practices may be measured, and a scientifically-determined system that can be implemented for obtaining rights; Existence of a supposedly disinterested (and thus morally superior) organization that is determined to undertake development in less fortunate areas, bestowing rights on populations incapable of acquiring rights via existing structures;

Existence of an organization that is economically superior, and has the power to initiate structural change; Organizational ability to tap a “higher” (skilled, educated, culturally liberal) core population capable of carrying out work; Notion of a binary between subjects being delivered rights and liberation, and those carrying out liberation and instructing subjects in their rights. In many ways, the approach taken on the ground to development and state-building in

Xinjiang is akin to that of the large internationally-funded aid programs developing in this same period. Wu Naijun is an early-generation capacity building consultant and program manager.

The analogy becomes quite clear once we recognize that the CCP is an economically, politically superior power capable of coming in and declaring the rules for development, an external organization claiming to be benefitting a backwards population. In Xinjiang, however, the organization claims exclusive domain over all subjects and territory, and is also interested in development of the region as it profits the metropole.

Though the CCP similarly claims to be undertaking regional development for the betterment of all subjects within, the PRC’s brand of developmentalism clearly takes the nation-states interests as central prerogative, hence the label metropole-bound development. Order in

Xinjiang serves the metropole’s border concerns, especially in regards to fraying relations with

India and the USSR after 1960. Xinjiang’s “undeveloped” and “empty” plains allow the region to act as a population valve for Inner China, particularly necessary after drought and famine devastated swathes of the countryside in nearby provinces during the civil war and war with

Japan. Tapping natural resources both brings financial benefit to the metropole, providing industries with necessary raw materials, and opens up countless positions for skilled Han workers. And last, the very organizational apparatus of development brings political, social and economic advantage unattainable in the interior to individual cadres. Both justification for and form of this system, however, are predicated on the notion that Han state workers are leading development and locals are the subject of development. For the Han-led PRC to enjoy continued sovereignty, borderland ethnic minority populations need to remain unequal subjects, receiving, and never leading, development. Uyghurs as a whole are subject to Han leadership, and Uyghur women specifically are placed within a dependent relationship with Han women. While Han women may be inferior in the interior – or even within their own households85 - the subjugation

85 For example, women, regardless of ethnicity, are granted fewer “work points” for undertaking the exact same work as men because it is assumed that they are physically weaker and therefore less productive. See Hershatter,

of Uyghur women allows Han women elevated status in a domain that does not threaten the gendered power structures of the state, and thus buttresses a notion that Han of both genders are culturally superior, reinforcing the idea of Han as cultural core vis-à-vis their ethnic counterparts.

To return to our opening scene, in 1951 the ethnic minority women attending the first ever

China Women’s Federation meeting in Urumqi are written as enacting the same aspects of relationship between ethnic minority women and the state as revealed in the three preceding sections. Called to voluntarily present themselves before the state, to make themselves legible to government eyes and re-define their identities within a CCP-provided framework, they are lauded for their work and recognized as exemplar Chinese citizens. For what exactly are they praised? For their willingness to accept state authority, to acknowledge the party’s right to read their lives. They too are citizens in a limited fashion, granted liberation only insofar as they accept the party-state’s jurisdiction and organizational authority undertaken by non-ethnic state actors.

The Gender of Memory, 130.

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