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The Sibe are an immigrant group, Qing dynasty bannermen who made a three-year ‘long march’ from Manchuria in the 18th century to serve as a border garrison in the newly conquered Western Regions of the Qing Chinese empire. They preserved their military structure and a discrete identity in the multi-ethnic region of Xinjiang and are now officially recognised as an ethnic minority nationality under the People's Republic. They are known in China today as the last speakers of the Manchu language, and as preservers of their ancient traditions. This study of their music culture reveals not fossilised tradition but a shifting web of borrowings, assimilation, and retention. It is an informed account of culture and performance in the Chinese region of Xinjiang. The book approaches musical and ritual life in this ethnically diverse region through an understanding of society in terms of negotiation, practice, and performance. It explores the relations between shamanism, song, and notions of externality and danger, bringing recent theories on shamanism to bear on questions of the structural and affective powers of ritual music. The book focuses on the historical demands of identity, boundary maintenance, and creation among the Sibe, and on the role of musical performance in maintaining popular memory, and it discusses the impact of state policies of the Chinese Communist Party on village musical and ritual life. It draws on a wide range of Chinese, Sibe-Manchu language sources, and oral sources including musical recordings and interviews gathered in the course of fieldwork in Xinjiang.

This book describes and theorizes the experiences of Uyghur graduates of the “Xinjiang Class” national boarding school program. These experiences reveal how young, educated Uyghurs strategically and selectively embrace elements of the corporate Chinese “Zhonghua minzu” identity in order to stretch the boundaries of a collective Uyghur identity. More specifically, Xinjiang Class students establish cross-regional bonds with Uyghur classmates and non-Xinjiang Class Uyghurs in inner China (neidi) and transnational bonds based on shared faith with foreign Muslims living in Chinese cities. These networks activate and perpetuate a transregional and often transnational ethno-national identity that is regularly communicated through Islamic practice.

Despite more than a decade of rapid economic development, rising living standards, and large-scale improvements in infrastructure and services, China’s western borderlands are awash in a wave of ethnic unrest not seen since the 1950s. Through on-the-ground interviews and firsthand observations, the international experts in this volume create an invaluable record of the conflicts and protests as they have unfolded—the most extensive chronicle of events to date. The authors examine the factors driving the unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang and the political strategies used to suppress them. They also explain why certain areas have seen higher concentrations of ethnic-based violence than others. Essential reading for anyone struggling to understand the origins of unrest in contemporary Tibet and Xinjiang, this volume considers the role of propaganda and education as generators and sources of conflict. It links interethnic strife to economic growth and connects environmental degradation to increased instability. It captures the subtle difference between violence in urban Xinjiang and conflict in rural Tibet, with detailed portraits of everyday individuals caught among the pressures of politics, history, personal interest, and global movements with local resonance.

The experience of being Han in Xinjiang is part of the broader experience of migration and frontier settlement in PRC-era China. Drawing on analysis of history, biography, and social structure, Oil and Water dispels the notion that Han settlers in Xinjiang are homogenous, or that their interests necessarily align with those of the state. The book argues that it is more by default than by their own design that Han in Xinjiang are colonists, although colonists they are. Each of the core chapters has a strong biographical element, and is concerned with how formal and informal structures, agency, and chance interact to shape lives. Each chapter also focuses on one or more of the classic topics of sociological studies of China, including urbanization, the socialist-style work unit (danwei), state discourses and collective memory, social connections (guanxi), marriage and the family, and mass protest. From this socially-grounded and ethnographic perspective, the book illuminates key aspects of the relationship between China’s core area and Xinjiang-as-periphery. The “uncivilized periphery” remains essential to China’s national identity, and an integral part of Han settlers’ psychology. The frontier has been seen throughout history as simultaneously a place of exile and a place where liberation is possible, and that continues to be the case. Indeed, the search for freedom–of many different kinds–is what drives migration in contemporary times. Colonialism may be a metropolitan project, and somewhat abstract to elites in the metropole, but it is the superstructure of life for those on the periphery.

This book provides an examination of the Muslim notability (begs) and their development of capitalistic enterprises in Eastern Turkestan under the Qing Empire. The begs, the powerful organizers of trade, agriculture, and labor in the oases, needed the empire and its military as a patron of their capitalistic reorganization of the oasis agriculture and the expansion of their access to new markets and resources. The Qing needed the begs as the foundation of imperial security and as partners in revenue extraction from local agriculture and mining development constituencies. However, the capitalistic transformation of the oasis economy created socio-economic tensions between the begs and the rural villagers. From the latter’s ranks, resistance grew in the form of bandits and refugees fleeing into the mountains that surrounded the oases, where these people would amass to form outsider communities. These communities, under the leadership of Sufi holy men (khwaja), eventually engaged in over political action in the early 1800s, which culminated in war against the Qing state. The Qing fell in Central Asia in 1864, as this new crisis deepened after Opium War (1839-42). This book offers a new perspective on Qing imperial history, and also contributes to a revised narrative on the history of global capitalism and imperialism on a truly global scale, and in an interconnected fashion.

This book provides a new interpretive framework for Western archaeological expeditions along the Silk Road in northwestern China during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By placing the expeditions of Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot, Sven Hedin, and other explorers back within the original political, economic, cultural, and intellectual contexts of the late Qing and early Republican eras, the author challenges the longstanding assumption that coercion, deceit, and corruption were responsible for allowing Western archaeologists to remove so many cultural relics from China. This study concludes that the majority of people who interacted with the Western archaeologist in Xinjiang, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia made the conscious and willing decision to aid and abet his expedition in exchange for various forms of capital that were perceived to be of greater value than the objects he removed. In the decades after the 1911 revolution and World War I, however, the value of these compensations began to decrease as the value of the artifacts targeted by the archaeologist increased. As a result, a new generation of Westernized Chinese scholars began to criminalize the prior activities of Western archaeologists, who could no longer offer a form of compensation that exceeded the now priceless valuation projected onto the artifact within the newly imagined Chinese nation. This process of criminalization also played an influential role in formulating new ideas about cultural sovereignty that are still debated today.

This work offers a new resource-centered history of modern Xinjiang. The region, located on China's farthest western border, was shaped in the 20th century by not only Chinese officials, but also foreign powers, international markets, and autonomous local officials, each of whom were eager to stake their own claim to Xinjiang's rich resource wealth. Hoping to quickly and inexpensively exploit these resources, these various actors frequently built atop the efforts of their predecessors. This work reveals a new, transnational "layered" model of state formation that can be applied beyond Xinjiang to various Chinese border regions, including Manchuria, Taiwan, and Tibet. The larger framework can also apply beyond China, to contested, resource-rich border regions across the global south.

China's problem with terrorism has historically been considered an outgrowth of Beijing's efforts to integrate the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region into the People's Republic of China. Since the end of the Cold War, however, this internal dynamic has converged with an evolving external environment, stimulating the development of linkages between Uyghur separatism and terrorism and broader terrorist movements in Central Asia, South Asia and the Middle East. This book brings together some of the leading experts on Chinese terrorism, offering the first systematic, scholarly assessment of the country's approaches to this threat. Four areas of investigation are looked at: the scope and nature of terrorism in China and its connection with developments in other regions; the development of legislative measures to combat terrorism; the institutional evolution of China's counter-terrorism bureaucracy; and Beijing's counter-terrorism cooperation with international partners.