Dissertation
"Go West, Young Han: Reclamation Corps and Armed Insurgency in China's Peripheral Regions"
Why did armed insurgency in Xinjiang emerge in the early 1980s, after over twenty years of military quiescence under communist rule? Contrary to existing studies that have emphasized contemporary events taking place outside of Xinjiang, such as the global rise of Islamism and China’s 1978 market reform, I propose to focus on a unique state-building strategy in the Maoist period that was used to address territorial threat in Xinjiang. The strategy was called the “reclamation corps,” an armed force of Han Chinese settlers that supplied their own food by reclaiming wasteland. I argue that the region’s twenty years of insulation from militarized anti-state violence can be attributed to the strategy’s success in deterring Xinjiang insurgents’ mobilization without competing for land and resources with the locals. The strategy was motivated by the Soviet threat of subversion through proxy Xinjiang fighters and enabled by the state’s ability to provide key production inputs to the Han settlers under centralized economy. Over time, however, securitization of the region both reduced the Soviet threat and prompted the state to decentralize control over the economy, making it increasingly difficult to justify and sustain the reclamation corps. The emergence of armed insurgency in the early 1980s followed from the state’s divestiture in the corps since the mid-1970s. Qualitative and quantitative evidence for this dissertation comes from my 12 month long ethnographic fieldwork in Xinjiang, interviews with 250 professionals and officials, and an original collection of 550 hitherto untapped historical gazetteers. The dissertation provides a new framework for understanding one of the most controversial ethnic policies in the world – China’s mass internment of Xinjiang’s Muslim population since 2016. It suggests that Beijing’s current policies in Xinjiang fell victim to the long-term erosion of a state-building strategy it had relied on for decades. Failing to anticipate the strategy’s endogenous decline, the Maoist regime had not seriously investing in alternative strategies such as cultural integration, creating a “counterinsurgent policy vacuum” for the current leadership where few options exist aside from security policies that simultaneously inflict gross human rights violations.
Why did armed insurgency in Xinjiang emerge in the early 1980s, after over twenty years of military quiescence under communist rule? Contrary to existing studies that have emphasized contemporary events taking place outside of Xinjiang, such as the global rise of Islamism and China’s 1978 market reform, I propose to focus on a unique state-building strategy in the Maoist period that was used to address territorial threat in Xinjiang. The strategy was called the “reclamation corps,” an armed force of Han Chinese settlers that supplied their own food by reclaiming wasteland. I argue that the region’s twenty years of insulation from militarized anti-state violence can be attributed to the strategy’s success in deterring Xinjiang insurgents’ mobilization without competing for land and resources with the locals. The strategy was motivated by the Soviet threat of subversion through proxy Xinjiang fighters and enabled by the state’s ability to provide key production inputs to the Han settlers under centralized economy. Over time, however, securitization of the region both reduced the Soviet threat and prompted the state to decentralize control over the economy, making it increasingly difficult to justify and sustain the reclamation corps. The emergence of armed insurgency in the early 1980s followed from the state’s divestiture in the corps since the mid-1970s. Qualitative and quantitative evidence for this dissertation comes from my 12 month long ethnographic fieldwork in Xinjiang, interviews with 250 professionals and officials, and an original collection of 550 hitherto untapped historical gazetteers. The dissertation provides a new framework for understanding one of the most controversial ethnic policies in the world – China’s mass internment of Xinjiang’s Muslim population since 2016. It suggests that Beijing’s current policies in Xinjiang fell victim to the long-term erosion of a state-building strategy it had relied on for decades. Failing to anticipate the strategy’s endogenous decline, the Maoist regime had not seriously investing in alternative strategies such as cultural integration, creating a “counterinsurgent policy vacuum” for the current leadership where few options exist aside from security policies that simultaneously inflict gross human rights violations.
