The Rise of Xinjiang Studies: AJASNew Author Forum

Abstract

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.

China–India Studies: Emergence, Development, and State of the Field

“…These include the networks involving the Jesuits who used Goa as the base for their activities in Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) China. Also lacking are analyses of the Islamic connections, especially those related to the Muslims of Xinjiang and Yunnan who made the pilgrimage to Mecca through either Calcutta or Bombay (Thum 2017, 2018). Similarly, the circulation of commodities and the movements between China and India triggered by the Dutch and the French presence in the region require more thorough investigation.…”

The December 12th Student Movement: Uyghur Student Protest in Reform-Era China

“…The Uyghurs occupy one such equivocal position in the Han-centric histories of China. Despite recent efforts from scholars of Xinjiang studies and the broader China studies field to “normalize” Xinjiang in China's historical narratives, there still remain the repercussions of a tradition of scholars treating the history of Uyghurs and Xinjiang as self-contained subjects or, more simply, as beyond their purview (Thum et al 2018, 12). Research on post-Mao student movements has reflected this attitude.…”