Refugees, Conscripts, and Constructors: Developmental Narratives and Subaltern Han in Xinjiang, China

Abstract

China’s frontier construction through the PRC era, involving the often-violent expansion of Han cultural and political space, has been undertaken primarily by subaltern Han people from rural areas of China. Female domestic labor has been essential to this colonial endeavor. The focus of the article is Han people associated with the organization that makes frontier construction its raison d’être, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, or bingtuan. More often pushed by circumstance than drawn by nationalistic fervor to settle on the backward frontier, these people and their offspring nevertheless became a significant part of the affective base of Han settlement in Xinjiang. By “affective base,” I mean that this (now multigenerational) population possess a sense of belonging in and of Xinjiang that bolsters the idea of Xinjiang as an integral part of China and challenges non-Han claims of exclusive moral ownership. The ultimate construction is achieved.

Homogenizing nationalists, budding fascists, and truculent exceptionalists: the end of world order in the Indo-Pacific

“…Tensions remained, however, with Xinjiang becoming a colonial project with millions of ‘peasant-soldiers’ dispatched as pioneer farmers and workers to the region, raising the Han ethnic presence in the region, which theretofore had been nominal, to approximately 40% (Castets 2003 , pp. 2–3; Anand 2019 ; Cliff 2020 ).…”