Elsevier Asian Studies Series. Waltham, MA: Chandos Publishing (an imprint of Elsevier), 2015. xxvii, 179 pp. (Illustrations, maps.) US$141.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-08-100387-9.
This study attempts to assess the causes and patterns of the surge in ethnic conflict between Uighur and Han in China over the past several years. The geographical backdrop is the far northwestern autonomous region of Xinjiang. The author, Rongxing Guo, head of the Regional Economics Committee at Peking University, also takes pains to draw linkages with the experiences and actions of Uighurs living in the inner provinces. Guo puts forth what he portrays as an innovative approach to analyzing the uptick in ethnic violence, one that combines the more familiar historical and social narrative with a less frequently attempted statistical analysis. The result is an often disjointed but occasionally bold study of the unique position of Xinjiang and its titular (though barely) majority Uighur ethnic group within China today.
Most readers are likely to be disappointed by the first half of the book, in which Guo provides a disparate collection of seemingly random anecdotes, summaries of published government reports, and chronologies of ethnic violence in Xinjiang over the past thirty years. It is not clear what the point of many of the author’s personal anecdotes are, other than to underscore the fact that the perception of the likelihood of imminent violence is assuming an ever larger profile in the daily consciousness of Han and Uighur residents in Xinjiang. Guo’s account of how he once learned from a Han friend of his how best to defend himself from a Uighur attack—punch him hard enough in the nose so as to draw blood, since “many Uyghurs are blood-sick” (xxvi)—may help to support a legitimate point in an anthropological report of ethnic relations in Xinjiang. In a study that concludes with policy proposals for how Beijing can best solve ethnic conflict in Xinjiang, however, it is irrelevant at best and offensive at worst.
Throughout his book, Guo evinces an uneasy mix of official government discourse and bold departures from the official line of the Chinese Communist Party. He routinely refers to Uighur “terrorists” without the use of quotation marks or any sort of linguistic qualification, and is prone to uncritical reproductions of official policy statements, such as a reference at one point to the state’s “massive, benevolent, and patriotic policy” (128) of encouraging wealthier coastal provinces to invest in poorer interior regions such as Xinjiang. And yet for a scholar currently affiliated with a Beijing policy outfit, Guo also frequently goes against the grain in his blunt acknowledgements that the PRC has since 1949 consistently failed to solve the problem of ethnic conflict in Xinjiang, and in many ways has adopted policies that have clearly exacerbated the root causes of Uighur discontent. If nothing else, the narrative portions of Guo’s study do effectively confirm what many media reports have increasingly suspected: since the 2013 Uighur car bombing incident at Tiananmen Square, the state has cracked down increasingly hard on areas of suspected Uighur dissent in Xinjiang, raising the specter of an ugly escalation in reciprocal reprisals and suppression.
For anyone lacking advanced training in mathematics, Guo’s statistical analysis in the second half of the book will likely be difficult if not impossible to follow. And yet, assuming his calculations are correct—a judgment this reviewer is unqualified to make—the conclusions he derives from this statistical analysis are far more interesting than those put forth in the narrative portion of his study. In short, Guo finds that among China’s officially recognized fifty-six ethnic groups, the Uighurs represent a rare statistical anomaly as one of the few minority groups whose residence in the inner provinces of the Han heartland does not contribute to a rise in interprovincial trade, in this case with Xinjiang. Guo explains this unexpected finding by reference to the controversial theory that conflict is more common within culturally, linguistically, and ethnically heterogeneous societies than it is within comparatively homogenous ones. Regardless of the validity of this theory, Guo takes it in an interesting direction. First, he claims that the Uighurs, as a Turkic-speaking, Muslim people of “Caucasoid” descent, are the most dissimilar of all China’s fifty-five minority groups when compared to the majority Han. Guo explicitly contrasts this with the Tibetans, who, as a Sino-Tibetan-speaking, Buddhist people of “Mongoloid” descent are supposedly much more similar to the Han, and thus able to better encourage economic exchange between Tibet and those inner provinces where Tibetans reside in large numbers.
Ultimately, Guo concludes that ethnic integration and mixing is not necessarily a good thing for China, especially between two population groups evincing such dramatic linguistic, religious, and cultural differences. The chief reason for this, according to Guo, is that the dramatic disparity in income equality seen among Uighur and Han communities in Xinjiang—blamed here on post-1949 economic investment strategies weighted heavily toward official state enterprises and the Han workers they employed—are likely to be interpreted by the less economically privileged group through an explicitly ethnic lens, thus giving rise to ethnic conflict and mutual economic distrust. Guo concludes his study with several policy recommendations. First, the state should attempt to reduce income inequality among Uighur and Han in Xinjiang, something that Guo doubts the state will be able to do. Failing that, Guo recommends that Beijing consider dividing Xinjiang into two smaller jurisdictional units, with the goal of providing the Uighurs with a relatively homogenous political unit of their own that could better reflect the “autonomous” moniker currently appended to the increasingly Han-dominated provincial-level unit of Xinjiang itself. As a final step, he even suggests granting this new autonomous Uighur jurisdiction—i.e., southern Xinjiang, or Altishahr—a political status akin to that which Hong Kong abides by.
Though Guo’s recommendations are unlikely to be adopted by Beijing, it is interesting to note the striking parallels they share with Chinese administrative strategies in Xinjiang from an earlier era. Like Yang Zengxin, the first Han governor of Xinjiang during the Republican era (1912–1949), Guo is advocating a policy of deliberate ethnic segregation as a means of lessening the likelihood of ethnic conflict. And like the Nationalist government of the 1940s, he is proposing the carving up of China’s largest provincial-level unit into various smaller jurisdictional units as a means of meeting demands for ethnic self-government. It seems that Xinjiang is still beset by the same problems, the same ever-present spectre of ethnic conflict, and the same policy proposals. Unfortunately, there is no reason to suspect that the Chinese central government will be any more successful in this endeavour today than it was in the last century.
Justin M. Jacobs
American University, Washington, DC, USA
pp. 327-329