Uyghur History Flashcards
Between 1980 and 1990, the Uyghurs did what?
Built thousands of new mosques
Pilgrims began to visit shrines again
How did the Party partake in the reconstruction of the religious sphere in the 1980s?
Religious schools were established to supplement the state’s education
Even party members and cadres found space to practice their faith, though largely in private
What sort of literature was produced in the 80s?
- Explosion of publications in the Uyghur language
- Literary journals supported a wide range of Uyghur writing: old manuscript texts recovered by scholars for example, terse modernist poetry, short stories and plays by authors who had studied in the Soviet Union and memoirs
- Historical novels and biographical novels created a selective nostalgia
- By the end of the 1980s, Uyghurs had access to a rich body of texts that implied a glorious Uyghur nationalist heritage
What happened to the economy in the Reform era?
In the course of the 1980s, gross domestic product per capita jumped by 139 percent
- Little evidence in scholarship how this affected Uyghurs but it must have made a positive impact as small-scale mercantile activities became more permissible
The state continued to dominate the formal economy in Xinjiang, making up a larger share than the national average
What else became more visible during the reform era?
- Uyghur political action which eventually convinced PRC officials that Uyghur resistance posed a special threat
- reports of protests, sometime violent, were common from 1980 onward, and some of the protestors called for an independent Uyghuristan or Islamic state
What was the Baren uprising and why was it significant?
How did the government respond?
A 1990 uprising in Baren, a village near Kashgar where demonstrators (according to government sources) chanted Islamic slogans and attacked police with firearms and homemade bombs
The government viewed the Baren uprising as a sign that religious revival threatened CCP control of Xinjiang, and limited mosque construction and private religious education throughout the region
What event raised the question of Uyghur independence to a possible reality?
The fall of the Soviet Union and the formation of independent states such as Uzbekistan raised questions of potential independence for Uyghurs to new prominence and they were beginning to be seen as threats to the territorial integrity of the PRC, both in China and abroad
Why are the Tienanmen Protests relevant/
Because one of the most prominent student leaders of the 1989 protest was Urkesh, a Beijing-born Uyghur activist
How did the Uyghurs spread internationally?
- Uyghur exiles started durable communities in the Hejaz and Turkey during the mid-20th century
- IN the Reform era, Uyghurs reconnected with family members in these groups
- They also began consuming more cultural products from abroad, including American popular music, Bollywood films, Turkish foods, and religious texts from the Middle East and South Asia
What happened to Uyghur culture in the 1990s?
Despite the Chinese state’s increasing restriction of Uyghur speech, worship, and movement from the 1990s onward, Uyghurs incorporated external influences and elaborated new forms of ethnonational belonging
e.g.,
Shrine festivals that attracted thousands of pilgrims featured resuscitated traditions such as wrestling matches, historical recitations, and estatic Sufi dance
The pace of of Uyghur literary publication also increased further
importantly, some began to interpret these as supporting an independent Uyghur state - an idea that remerged as important political thought
What did Uyghurs do in the 90s to bring them closer to the Middle East?
Adopt foreign ideals of Islamic piety, which brought them more closely in line with modern cosmopolitan Islams centered on the Middle East
Transformation of the ways piety is expressed, concentrated in urban area
e.g., men growing beards and women wearing the hijiab or niqab
What are Uyghurs in Xinjiang now required to do?
- Require passes to travel
- Uyghur passports confiscated regionwide
- All cars ordered to be fitted with GPS tracking devices
- Residents required to turn in all electronic devices for police inspection
- All phones required to carry government spyware
- Checkpoints given elaborate new buildings, often equipped with facial recognition technology
How does the state operate in regards to Islam today? What measures do they take?
The state continue to operate on the assumption that less Islamic devotion will lead to greater state control
- Various Xinjiang governments (in some cases local, others provinicial) outlawed personal names deemed too Islamic
- Confiscated Qurans published before 2012
- Jailed anyone who taught the recitation of the Quran
- Banned public prayer
- Shut down the few remaining shrine festivals
- Accompanied with a shift toward assimilationist policies
What changes arose in the last decades of Qing rule?
- Efforts to integrate Xinjiang more tightly with the Chinese interior
- 1884, became a fully-fledged province
- The top positions of power in Xinjiang transferred from Manchu and Mongol bannermen to Chinese bureaucrats and soldiers
- New Chinese rulers attempted to assimilate Altishahris and Taranchis into Chinese culture by establishing Confucian schools and attempting to compel the local population to attend them
What power did Islam hold in the Qing empire?
- Many sought legal interventions from semiofficial Islamic judges and local notables
- Large swathes of both rural and urban land were controlled by Islamic charitable trusts, often associated with shrines
- Far more Altishahri and Taranchi students attended private elementary schools, called maktap, than the state Chinese schools
- Turki, Persian, and Arabic texts of all kinds - political, religious, historical, literary, and legal - were reproduced without state interference through the local manuscript tradition
