CHINA COLUMNS Afaq Khoja Mausoleum Reconstruction. Revolution and PC: @rcmar, Flickr.com. State Formation as Oasis Storytelling in Xinjiang Bilal Zenab AHMED Beijing has reacted to Uyghur spirituality o one can say that the world is and ethnic distinctiveness with a strongly ignoring Xinjiang. In October, at the assimilationist policy aimed at creating a new NAmerican Association of Christian kind of post-communist and post-Islamic society. Counselors, US Secretary of State Mike This essay examines the ways in which Uyghur Pompeo likened China’s treatment of over Islamic indigenous traditions have undergone a million Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang ‘creative destruction’ through pressure from Autonomous Region to George Orwell’s 1984 Beijing, and considers the potential for alternative (Reuters 2019). This was at the same time traditions, such as mythic storytelling, to that the Trump White House began placing form the basis for collective resistance. sanctions on Chinese governmental and business organisations involved with the now 26 MADE IN CHINA / 1, 2020 CHINA COLUMNS infamous reeducation camps in the region. Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan. Xinjiang has China has been condemned by representatives two distinct subregions: Dzungaria, which from over 20 countries, with the notable is north of the Tianshan Mountains, and the exceptions of Muslim-majority states that have Tarim Basin, which is largely a desert to its important trading relationships with Beijing south. The vast majority of Uyghurs live in such as Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, and Iraq the Tarim Basin, which has half a dozen major (The Guardian 2019; Shams 2019; Kerimkhanov cities on the edges of the Taklamakan Desert 2019; Zhen 2019; Calabrese 2019). (hence the Turkic name ‘Altishahr’, which Yet, in the current political climate, with the means ‘Six Cities’ and will be used in the United States and China engaged in a protracted possessive throughout this article as a synonym trade war and the War on Terror evolving into for indigeneity). After the Chinese Revolution rapidly-intensifying Islamophobia and the in 1949, ten ethnic groups were classified as use of concentration camps the world over, ‘Muslim’ minorities, including the Uyghurs in important details about Chinese objectives in Xinjiang. Xinjiang have been poorly discussed in mass Prior to the Qing Dynasty, the Altishahri media. Academics, journalists, and politicians economy prospered from complex trading are right in noting that Beijing is using the networks on the Silk Road, with merchant camps as a tool for social reengineering, in commerce reinforcing highly cosmopolitan and order to force Xinjiang’s ‘integration’ into the only loosely hierarchical readings of Central Chinese political and cultural mainstream. Asian Sufism that are difficult to assimilate into Nevertheless, this analysis, while correct, risks modern state institutions without alteration. overlooking long-term economic goals in the Following the Qing Dynasty’s conquest, local region, most notably Xinjiang’s importance rulers led frequent revolts against Beijing, to the Belt and Road Initiative, as well as the during a period of Chinese expansion, Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) existential population growth, and prosperity that would opposition to the ideological threat of Uyghur start to decline shortly before the Opium ethnic, cultural, and spiritual distinctiveness. Wars. It was the violent suppression of these Ultimately, what is often left out is that the revolts that began to shift ruling-class attitudes CCP’s social engineering appears to be creating towards Muslims in China, and Uyghurs in a new kind of post-communist and post- particular. The region’s Muslims were treated Islamic society in Xinjiang that will likely be with hostility during the Republican era (1911 on the cutting edge of similar pushes for mass to 1949), and particularly so due to continued surveillance and ethnic cleansing all over the violence from loyalist Muslim members of the world. Kuomintang, who fought in China’s western provinces throughout the 1950s (Jacobs 2016). Apart from its geopolitical significance, The New Frontier Xinjiang has been cultivated as a major food production centre in China, serving as the country’s second-largest pastureland First, it will be useful to give a brief overview (including major sheep farming and wool of Xinjiang. Xinjiang literally means ‘New production), and its largest growing base Border’ or ‘New Frontier’, and indicates a for cotton, hops, lavender, as well as other territory that was conquered by an expanding important crops. Xinjiang is also rich in Qing Dynasty in the 1760s. The region is energy resources, with the country’s largest about one sixth of China’s total land area and oil, natural gas, and coal reserves, in addition includes 5,600 kilometres of international to 130 different kinds of minerals. Many of borders with eight countries, including Russia, these resources are being exploited by the several former Soviet republics in Central Asia, bingtuan which is shorthand for the Xinjiang MADE IN CHINA / 1, 2020 27 CHINA COLUMNS Production and Development Corps (Yi 2019). post-Islamic society in Xinjiang that is driven While the bingtuan employs about 12 percent as much by technological advances as its own of Xinjiang’s population, its workforce is over conventional and managerial worldview. 80 percent Han Chinese. The bingtuan has been operating since 1954 as a paramilitary- development organisation, and directly reports Altishahri Integration to Beijing, rather than the local government. While its original objectives were to ensure the settlement of Han Chinese immigrants, to While Beijing often accuses Uyghur political change the province’s demographic balance, agitators of separatism (though it has steadily to maintain security internally and along updated this rhetoric to be more about ‘fighting international borders, and to project the power terrorism’ over the past 20 years), ‘separatism’ of the ‘centre’, the bingtuan has developed a as a term is very reductive and does not fit complex multi-sector economy based on food the complexity of Altishahri spiritual and and agriculture. The bingtuan also controls political thought. Indeed, its unique reading of important technological, cultural, health, Islam, legends, and history, reflects a dynamic and judicial infrastructure, and in many cases cosmopolitanism produced in part by Silk Road actually built it. merchant commerce that is often hard to define Many of today’s problems in Xinjiang for bureaucratic and managerial purposes. were severely exacerbated by Beijing’s Open This is largely the reason that ‘Islam’ often Up the West Campaign (西部大开发) in the means so many different things with respect to 1990s, which aimed to increase Han Chinese the Uyghurs. It is not common to hear Beijing, immigration to Xinjiang through a system of or workers in the bingtuan, label anything from economic and social incentives. It was in the language to ethnicity to diverse spiritual rituals 1990s that the CCP first began to promote as ‘Islamic’. Xinjiang is a unique context with moving to Xinjiang based on a rhetoric of multiple sources of Muslimness, and seemingly ethnic unity, national integrity and stability, ‘non-Islamic’ markers like the Turkic language religious activities being opposed to the state, that are nevertheless attached to Islam in and anti-separatism, among other things. The popular and institutional consciousness. Campaign resulted in huge wage and labour It is important to fully appreciate this gaps between Han Chinese and Uyghurs cosmology and understand it within the local and other local minorities, especially in the context rather than from the standpoint of professional and managerial class. Uneven conservative and statist ideologies—if only to access to state institutions and jobs created, avoid unintentionally reinforcing the CCP’s and then reinforced, spatial divisions in efforts to brand ‘Uyghur’ as a neatly bounded cities, worsening ethnic apartheid and gaps identity that is essentialised for administrative in living standards. Since the 1990s, China and bureaucratic ease. Indeed, even Uyghur has adopted a policy of ‘creative destruction’, exiles and political activists risk adopting the whereby it destroys cultural religious sites, language of separatism, nationalism, and even but also funds educational, religious, and Islamism, in a manner that reshapes local tourist infrastructure in order to integrate understandings of politics and struggle while the non-threatening remnants of ‘Altishahri’ sidelining a properly Altishahri approach. indigeneity. Global outcry has tended to focus Altishahri ideas about resistance are rooted on the more destructive parts of Beijing’s in a blend of Silk Road cultural traditions approach, for understandable reasons, but shaped by the active veneration of Sufi saints this ignores how the CCP is simultaneously and community-authored manuscripts. It is creating a new kind of post-communist and this tradition that China seeks to crush in 28 MADE IN CHINA / 1, 2020 CHINA COLUMNS Kashgar, a modern Uyghur residential area can be spotted through a partially demolished wall. PC: @choongching, Flickr.com. favour of ideas that are more compatible with when pilgrims go to the shrines, and remember a centrally-managed approach to religion these figures, they go over the historical record and identity. Altishahri resistance is heavily and meditate on the ‘higher’ values associated influenced by Sufi Naqshbandi Islamic