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 © 2019 Arianne Ekinci ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii 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