Bones in the sand: The struggle to create Uighur nationalist ideologies in Xinjiang, China

This dissertation is a study of the Uighur intellectual elite's struggle to define their nationalist ideology. Since the Chinese government reforms of 1978 and especially after the official opening of Xinjiang to international tourism and trade in 1985, the Uighur intellectual elite has been given permission to explore their own history and to take an active role in the shaping of the Uighur national identity. By manipulating Uighur historiography the intellectuals have produced rival images of the Uighur identity, struggling with one another and with the Chinese state to define their nationalist ideology. The diverse conceptions of Uighur identity proposed by intellectuals employ different salient events and personages from the Uighur past to craft contending ideologies with a strong oasis bias corresponding to the intellectual's birthplace.; This strong oasis loyalty is part of an historical and geographical legacy of inter-oasis rivalry stretching back more than 1,000 years. To understand these rivalries, this study examines the powerful effect of Xinjiang's geography on the creation of diverse identities. The location of an oasis affects the local population's access to particular cross-border cultural, economic, and religious influences.; Historically, the large distances separating each oasis of Xinjiang effectively held them in isolation from one another. But even at the local oasis level, conceptions of Uighur identity vary according to the three major social groups, namely peasants, merchants, and intellectuals. Only by unraveling these social group conceptions is it possible to show that these local identities are differentially influenced by kinship, agricultural and economic specialization, inter-ethnic relations, religious practice, and foreign cultural influences.; This dissertation makes an important contribution to the understanding of why the local oasis identities in Xinjiang are so strong today, and by extension, why they have been so strong throughout the history of the region. It is these local oasis identities which pose the greatest challenge to the intellectual elite's struggles and experiments with alternative Uighur nationalist ideologies. The wide diversity of identities is eclipsing Uighur national aspirations and prevents the formulation of a coherent vision for the future.