Up till now, the problem of Uyghur identity construction has been studied from an almost exclusively anthropological perspective. Little Western research has been done on the history of the Uyghur community in the Soviet Union during the period of national delimitation, and the process by which a re-invented ‘Uyghur’ identity was fostered among settled Turkicspeakers of East Turkestani origin. In this paper I have set out to trace some of the key events and debates which formed part of that process. In doing so I provide evidence that challenges certain aspects of the standard account of this period, in particular the role of the 1921 Tashkent conference. In 1921 the term ‘Uyghur’ was not used an ethnic designation, but as an umbrella term for various peoples with family roots in Eastern Turkestan. It was not until several years later that the term took its place beside other ethnonyms in the Soviet Union, provoking debate and opposition in the Soviet Uyghur press. This paper is largely based on the recently republished writings of leading Uyghur activists and journalists from the 1920s, and focuses on the role of the Uyghur Communist Abdulla Rozibaqiev. My paper attempts to demonstrate the importance of basing the study of Uyghur history on Uyghur language sources, rather than Russian or Chinese materials alone.
Perhaps no area of China-related scholarship has taken longer to recover from the access limitations of the mid-twentieth century than the study of Xinjiang. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the study of Xinjiang was so fashionable that it had a wide following in the Western popular press, where the region was better known as Chinese Central Asia, Chinese Turkistan, or Eastern Turkistan. When the turmoil of the Republican and Mao eras made the region almost entirely inaccessible to outsiders, the study of Xinjiang began a long sojourn in the Western academic wilderness. After all, the earlier interest had always been tinged with Orientalist travel fantasy and imperial desires that required scholarly boots on the ground.
While the early Chinese parliament has been criticised as an ineffective shield against warlord machinations, this article brackets the question of its institutional efficiency and instead treats the National Assembly in terms of the visions of China that were expressed in the process of its construction. Debates on electoral divisions and rules for non- Han regions allow insight into the competing principles by which such territories might be incorporated into the new Chinese nation, and show that the ‘Five Races’ vision of China provided a meaningful vocabulary for non- Han elites to press for a greater say in the nation’s institutions. Although the electoral system preserved the principle of aristocratic privilege in the case of the Mongols and Tibetans, such concessions to ethnic difference could not be applied in Xinjiang, which had had provincial status since the 1880s. To some Muslims, this betrayed the Republic’s promise of equality among the ‘Five Races’, prompting calls for dedicated Muslim representation in the parliament.
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