Chapter 5 analyses the inclusion of Uyghurs in public performances of ethnic unity (minzu tuanjie 民族团结) and celebrations of traditional ethnic festivals of Han (Zhongqiu jie 中秋节) and Uyghurs (Roza Heyti روزاھېيىت). The first section analyses inclusion of Uyghurs through performances of minzu tuanjie in songs and political slogans that saturated Xinjiang’s public discourse following the 2009 violence. Ethnic inclusion in these texts is mutually constituted against existential threats of Uyghur identities to China. The second section analyses the hierarchical relationship between nation and ethnicity and between Han and Uyghurs in representations of different traditional festivals. Minority festivals are officially framed as private and ethnic while majority Han festivals are celebrated as nationally significant events for all minzu. Minzu tuanjie is ethnocentric and hierarchical because it offers inclusion contingent upon identification with Hanzu as superior and Uyghur identity as marginal. This chapter shows how the inclusion offered by nation-building in Xinjiang produces and reproduces Uyghur marginality and exclusion in contemporary China. Inclusion of Uyghurs in Zhonghua Minzu demands identification with hierarchical boundaries between Hanzu and shaoshu minzu, with the Han nucleus guiding the direction of history towards 'fusion' and disappearance of Uyghur identity.

Chapter 4 analyses how official identity and security discourses were performed in public politics following the July 2009 violence. This chapter uses participant-observations and discourse analysis of everyday security practices and political slogans to examine how hierarchical ethnic boundaries were performed in everyday politics and explanations of the violence. The first section shows how violence in Shaoguan against Uyghurs, which sparked the July 2009 violence, was officially designated an 'ordinary public order incident', unrelated to security. However, failure to punish perpetrators produced widespread Uyghur insecurity. The second section shows how subsequent violence by Uyghurs in July 2009 was framed as an existential identity-security threat. Violent ‘revenge’ by Han was conversely framed as 'operations' by 'comrades' for national security. The binarised, ethnocentric meanings attributed to violence ethnicise daily security practices of surveillance and patrols that target Uyghurs and produce insecurity. The final section shows how small-scale syringe attacks in July’s aftermath were officially represented as continuing existential threats. This narrative heightened Han insecurity, sparking protests for increased security and violence against Uyghurs. The chapter shows that the party-state exacerbates insecurity by securitising ethnocentric narratives of a Han-led nation under threat, excluding Uyghurs as sources of insecurity and activating ethnic stereotypes amongst Han.

Chapter 6 uses detailed, semi-structured interviews with Han and Uyghurs in Ürümchi on tuanjie narratives to analyse the effects of nation-building. The first section analyses how Uyghurs and getihu Han dismiss tuanjie as propaganda but deploy it to re-perform minzu as fixed identity boundaries. Han intellectuals conceptualised Zhonghua Minzu through ethnocentric culturalism that includes Xinjiang as a frontier. The second section explores how Han deploy official narratives of Xinjiang’s 'liberation', defining Hanzu through lineage and language. Han nationalists re-perform officially articulated boundaries between ‘Inner-China’ and ‘frontier’ as timeless while culturalists framed Han ethno-nationalists as impediments to nation-building. Nation-building narratives are challenged by different Han identities arguing for more or less inclusion of non-Han. The final section shows how Uyghurs re-perform ethnic boundaries demarcated by Chinese nation-building, articulating their identity as a Turkic group living in a Hanzu nation. Uyghurs refer to their inferiority in official discourse and daily experiences of ethnic discrimination to locate their Turkic and Islamic identities outside Zhonghua Minzu. The chapter shows that nation-building in Xinjiang is failing because its model of inclusion runs counter to daily experiences of ethnic boundaries and perpetuates tensions between Xinjiang’s inclusion as Chinese territory and cultural exclusion as a frontier.

Since the 2008 global financial crisis and US military interventions in the Middle East, China’s leaders consider themselves in an unparalleled strategic ‘window of opportunity’ under ‘new conditions’ of Western decline that could enable transformation of world order for centuries. China’s Leading public intellectuals draw attention to Western failures combined with China’s double-digit growth figures to argue the world has entered a ‘post-American century’. These politically influential thinkers believe China will be a ‘new type of superpower’ that rules by consent and attraction instead of ‘Western’ coercion and assimilation (Hu & Hu, ).* This optimism amongst Chinese elites and scholars has driven public debate in popular books and online commentary, culminating in Xi Jinping’s signature slogan of the ‘China Dream’ of the Great Revival (weida fuxing 伟大复兴) to become a ‘strong and prosperous nation’ (fuqiang daguo 富强大国) again. However, this optimism conceals deep pessimism at the heart of these debates that identity and insecurity on China’s ethnic peripheries could derail the Great Revival. While the 2008 Beijing Olympics slogan, ‘one-world-one-dream’, circulated across official media, riots and inter-ethnic violence exploded in Lhasa, Tibet. The 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was subsequently overshadowed by ethnically targeted violence between Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs and the Han ethnic majority. The events of July 2009 claimed at least 197 lives in Ürümchi, the capital city of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) (Xinhua, ). The violence sparked broad debates amongst China’s ethnic policy thinkers about the relationship between identity and national security. Wang Yang, Guangdong Party Committee Secretary, now head of the Central Committee’s Xinjiang Work Group, suggested that China must re-adjust its ethnic minority policies ‘or there will be further difficulties’ (Smith Finley, , p.78). This book analyses the social and political dynamics in Xinjiang that led to the turning point of 2009, culminating in a rethink of identity and security in China and ethnic policy shifts towards ‘fusion’ (jiaorong 交融).

The final chapter uses semi-structured interviews with Han and Uyghurs in Ürümchi to analyse their responses to official security narratives. The first section analyses how Han use official discourses of danger to securitise their own identities, defined through ethnicity, lineage, and language. Working-class and getihu Han deployed party-state discourses to articulate China as an ethnic Han nation under threat from Turkic-Islamic Uyghurs. Han intellectuals emphasise Uyghur inclusion in Chinese civilisation represents the real Zhonghua Minzu but without addressing the Han-centrism of this inclusion. The second section analyses how Uyghurs securitise identities and articulate China as an existential threat by re-performing official and unofficial Chinese narratives on Uyghur-ness. Uyghurs invert party-state discourses, articulating Han as part of a state-led cultural assimilation project through demographic and linguistic transformation. The Han-Uyghur ethnic boundary is redirected inwards between Uyghurs educated in Uyghur (minkaomin 民考民) and those ‘Sinicised’ by Mandarin-medium education (minkaohan 民考汉). Han and Uyghurs use tensions between inclusion and exclusion in official Zhonghua Minzu narratives to understand daily experiences of ethnic boundaries and articulate competing identity-security narratives. The chapter shows the party-state’s attempt to increase security by identifying China’s friends and eliminating enemies produces perpetual insecurity.

Why have some minority regions experienced more unrest than others and in more volatile ways in China’s reform era? Why have ethnic mobilization and violence occurred only in the two outer peripheral regions, Tibet and Xinjiang? This study examines these puzzles from the perspective of China’s twofold transition from empire to a modern nation state. That is, the integration of frontier regions into a nation state with predominantly ethnic Han Chinese. The first transition was from empire to the autonomous system in the socialist era. The second transition was from the socialist era (1949–78) to the reform era (1978–present).

This chapter continues with the argument that the built-in tensions of the autonomous system, or centralization and ethnicization, have intensified in the reform era, fueling key sources of ethnic strife in the TAR and Xinjiang. The driving force has been the state’s developmentalism as strategies of development and integration. Here centralization is manifested in top-down developmental models, either state economy or market expansion, while ethnicization is manifested in more state aid and preferential economic policies as well as their ethnicizing consequences. In the TAR’s case, state subsidies have sustained an “affirmative action” economy, resulting in dependency and questionable viability. In Xinjiang’s case, the undoing of the socialist economy has left behind ethnic members whose ascriptive endowments disadvantage them in the marketplace, resulting in ethnically based grievances. In both cases, developmentalism has pitted local minorities against inland migrants, fueling ethnic conflict. As remedies, the state resorts to aid programs, thus intensifying central drives as well as ethnic prerogatives.

This chapter focuses on education and language policies as sources of ethnic conflict in the reform era, focusing on Xinjiang where the problem has been most salient. Those sources of ethnic woes stem again from intensified tensions of the autonomous system, or the paradox of centralization and ethnicization. The driving force here is the state’s developmentalism in minority education: centralization inheres in the state’s expansion of higher education on the one hand and of bilingual education on the other, while ethnicization is manifest in the state’s intensified preferential policies to promote those goals. Expansion of higher and bilingual education for minorities aims at economic development and political integration. However, aided by preferential policies, this expansion has come up against the realities of the new market economy, which favors competitive skills and disadvantages minority students. Both processes – preferential policies for minority access to higher education but disadvantages for minority graduates in the market place – enhance ethnicization at the expense of integration.

This chapter focuses on the changing strategies of ethnic governance in China’s transition from empire to the modern nation state. That is, evolution from a maintenance-oriented strategy to a transformative strategy aimed at national integration in the socialist era. Pre-modern Chinese dynasties applied diverse and indirect rule over their extensive frontier regions. This “minimalist state” came under serious challenges in modern times when the idea of the nation state arrived. After late Qing and Republican failures at modern state building, the CCP completed the transition to a modern state by establishing a uniform and direct form of ethnic governance based in titular ethnic status. Known as the system of autonomous regions, the new system served to incorporate frontier regions but departed from pre-modern practices of diverse and de-ethnicized rule. The contradictions therein – promoting political integration but also ethno-territories to fit that goal – or centralization and ethnicization, created a second set of institutional dynamics for ethnic strife in contemporary times.

China’s transition to the nation state, on a deep level, is incomplete. Tibet and Xinjiang remain the peripheral holdouts. At the policy level, the demise of class universalism deprives the central state of the institutional principles of legitimate government to project universal legitimacy in the two historically least incorporated regions. At the institutional level, the autonomous system has nurtured key conditions for ethnic mobilization for these two groups: politicized identities and ethno-territories. Among the contextual factors responsible the Soviet dissolution – core ethnic regions, weakening of previous social contracts, and democratization – only the Tibetans and Uighurs possess core ethnic regions and were particularly disadvantaged by economic liberalization due to their distinct ascriptive features. The absence of democratization, along with China’s demographic/territorial core, precludes a breakaway by these two groups, but large state outlays suggest continuing challenges for national integration. Despite various reform platforms, socialist autonomy – compromising autonomy but distributional benefits – remains the prevailing vision under the current political leadership. In the international arena, ethnic strife places constraints on China’s security and foreign policy behavior as well as on its international reactions.

This chapter argues that the institutional dynamics of the autonomous system – centralization and ethnicization – have intensified in the reform era, fueling key sources of ethnic tensions in contemporary China. The driving force has been the decline of class universalism and the rise of identity politics. The chapter shows how these two developments were spurred by early post-Mao policies to redress the leftist excesses of the Mao era, including the “declassing” of minority policy, rehabilitation of former ethnic elites, exit of Han personnel, revival of religion, and accommodation of ethnic customs in law enforcement. These policies have affected the TAR and Xinjiang in particular because of the central government’s greater urgency and efforts to implement them in the two politically sensitive and centrifugal regions. Yet the very end of class universalism and the advent of identity politics have also made it harder for the central state to achieve its goal of better integration. Whereas class universalism was divisive intraethnically, pitting ethnic masses against small groups of ethnic aristocrats, identity politics is divisive interethnically, creating cleavages along ethnic lines.

This chapter continues with the argument that the built-in tensions of the autonomous system, namely centralization and ethnicization, have intensified in the reform era. The focus of this chapter is religious revival in Tibet and Xinjiang. Religion has been a volatile problem in the state’s relationship with the two outer peripheral regions, thanks to its crucial linkage to ethnic and cultural identity. This identity, in turn, can be linked to ethno-nationalism and even separatism. Heightened institutional tensions for ethnic strife have stemmed, on the one hand, from state sponsorship of religious revival, and on the other hand, from state curtailment of its unsanctioned growth. The alternatively facilitating and constraining roles of the state have intensified centralization as well as ethnicization in the religious development of Tibet and Xinjiang, or cycles of state facilitation/control of religion and ethnic backlash. Foremost among this backlash has been increased radicalization, from private madrassas, Wahhabism, “Arabianization,” and “terrorism” in the Uighur case, to self-immolation in the Tibetan case. These have in turn induced state crackdowns, including deradicalization camps.