Representation and the misidentification of economic and ethnoreligious conflict in Republican Xinjiang

Abstract

ABSTRACT The era spanning the late Qing and early Republic of China (1877–1933) is regarded as a period of extensive change in East Turkestan (Xinjiang), Chinese Central Asia, particularly with regard to the emergence of modern Uyghur national identity, and therefore of ethnonational conflict. However, the tendency to focus on ethnic identity obscures other dimensions of conflict, among them the tensions that emerge during periods of rapid economic change. This article shows how violence in the oasis of Kucha in 1918 stemmed from conflict between two competing groups of landowners. However, systems of information-gathering within the provincial government and the representation of the events to the outside world promoted the idea that this violence stemmed instead from ethnic or religious difference and international conspiracy. Those power-holders advanced representations of the society they governed that were useful to their politics and, in turn, to modern Chinese politics as well.