by JOHN P. RUEHL
For over a decade, increasing international attention has been focused on China’s treatment of Xinjiang’s Uyghur population. While Beijing is wary of all forms of separatism—Hong Kong and Tibet being its other major concerns in this regard—maintaining an iron grip on Xinjiang is of utmost importance. The Xinjiang region’s natural resource deposits, strategic location in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which involves the creation of economic and trade corridors, and links to the physical defense of China are the most obvious reasons for China to want to keep a stronghold in the region. But the appeal of the Islamic and Turkic nationalism in Xinjiang has also highlighted the difficulty China faces in managing internal stability without upsetting the wider Islamic and Turkic worlds.
Xinjiang’s largely flat terrain made it a primary part of the historical Silk Road route. The region’s geography and proximity to numerous Eurasian cultures and civilizations have also made it a contested land for centuries, with competing narratives over its history and cultural traits. The name Xinjiang, for example, translates to “New Frontier” or “New Dominion” in Chinese, while Uyghur nationalists refer to the region as East Turkestan. Chinese scholars posit that Uyghurs are descended from nomadic Uyghurs from modern-day Mongolia and settled in Xinjiang in the ninth century (joining other groups, including the Han Chinese). Uyghur historians, on the other hand, tend to stress their Central Asian Turkic origins, with East Turkestan their historical homeland.
Regardless of the historical debate over the lineage of Uyghurs, a distinct Muslim and Turkic identity had emerged among portions of Xinjiang’s population in the 18th century when China’s Qing Dynasty reconquered the region. According to historical records, the Chinese campaign split the Uyghur population from the other Turkic groups of Central Asia, which later came under the control of the Russian Empire. Hostility toward Chinese rule in Xinjiang among Muslims from a variety of different cultural backgrounds culminated in the Dungan Revolt from 1862 to 1877, with rebels receiving support from both the Ottoman and British empires. Despite the successful Chinese suppression and pacification of Xinjiang afterward, nationalist sentiment grew within the Muslim-Turkic population, and the term Uyghur began to be used to describe much of the local Muslim-Turkic population around the Tarim Basin by the early 20th century.
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