“Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia” by Eric Schluessel

Xinjiang, 1875 photo (Adolf Erazmovich Boiarskii, World Digital Library)

Throughout history, expansionist powers have attempted to integrate newly conquered territories through the imposition of their own language, laws, and moral codes. These “civilizing missions” have been a defining feature of most imperial projects, whether motivated by religious fervor, to facilitate trade or simply an honest belief in the cultural superiority of one’s own culture.

In Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia author Eric Schluessel explores the “civilizing mission” attempted in China’s western Xinjiang region immediately after its recovery by Qing Dynasty forces in the late 19th century. While the author acknowledges similarities with other colonial civilizing projects—most notably those of western European powers—he is quick to proclaim that this project was uniquely Chinese—springing from an intellectual Confucianist movement based in the country’s eastern Hunan province.

 

Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia, Eric Schluessel (Columbia University Press, October 2020)
Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia, Eric Schluessel (Columbia University Press, October 2020)

Buoyed by their success crushing the recent Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), a religiously-inspired rebellion which started in China’s south, an influential group of Hunan-ese soldier-intellectuals—known as the Xiang Army—sought to deploy the same strategies to defeat the Dungan Revolt (1862-1877), another religiously inspired rebellion started this time in China’s west.

The period of the revolt, led by Muslim leader Yaqub Beg was an unpopular one among the local population, characterized by high taxes and strict rule. Such was it that when Chinese rule returned, it was met with general support from most people—Muslim and non-Muslim alike. However, the returning Chinese forces sought not only to use military might to defeat the rebelling Muslims of the area but to embed traditional Confucian values within the people as part of the post-conflict reconstruction. Combining their perceived military and moral superiority, they aimed to both retake and remake Xinjiang.

The central figure of the Xiang Army was Zuo Zongtang, a Hunanese intellectual whose writings inspired both their thoughts and actions in relation to the “civilizing” of Xinjiang’s people. Zuo’s primary argument was that indirect rule over Xinjiang was financially and militarily untenable and that inner China’s long-term security and stability could only be assured by a systematic transformation of Xinjiang’s population into ‘morally upright’ people who could regulate themselves in accordance with Confucian principles.

This idea of a society governed by leaders who drew authority from their morality rather than their military might alone was a dramatic shift from traditional Chinese imperial statecraft.

Historically, Chinese empires were little concerned with the moral and spiritual substance of their subjects. In exchange for fealty and the payment of taxes, subjects were usually allowed a degree of autonomy with governance delegated to various local religious and bureaucratic leaders. The Qing Dynasty had been no different, relying for over a hundred years upon indirect rule in Xinjiang through local representatives.

Zuo argued that this failure to integrate the people of Xinjiang into the empire had allowed the Dungan Revolt to occur. Harmony and peace, he argued, required the assimilation of Xinjiang’s disparate people through their adoption of Chinese cultural norms—starting with the patriarchal Confucian family unit. The imperial state must reach down into the lowest levels—the individuals and families that were the building blocks of society. This would require the teaching and acculturation of Chinese conservative ideas of family, ritual and education.

However, unlike many other ‘mission civilisatrices’, this did not require nor even preference religious conversion. Their mission was less concerned with transforming “Uyghurs” into “Chinese” and more with turning Muslims into morally Confucian Muslims. The Xiang Army envisaged a cohort of educated Muslims in full possession of the good graces of Chinese culture, and able to fulfil their civilizing mission. However, as Land of Strangers reveals, what they got was a new class of gatekeepers able to manipulate both sides to their own ends.

 

As is often the case when an external ruler deputizes a cadre of elites to act as intermediaries, Xinjiang’s interpreter class quickly learned to leverage their unique role to wield power disproportionate to their official position. Tasked with aiding the Chinese implement their policy objectives and acting as a voice for those Muslims seeking to interact with the state, these interpreters became important gatekeepers. While they acted as a tool of communication, they also added an extra barrier between the government and court systems and the local population. They were able to use their special access to influence government decisions, accrue power and siphon off resources.

Schluessel draws on local government records in Chinese and Chaghatay to investigate the role played by the interpreters to administer the Qing civilizing mission and reveal its impact on the local population. Rather than large-scale policy and events, the book is more concerned with the quotidian experiences of cross-cultural life within Xinjiang after the collapse of the Dungan revolt—what the author refers to as “everyday politics”. This focus on the local level gives the book a great sense of time and place. Schluessel does an excellent job of following up individual cases to their final conclusion as best he can, allowing the reader to follow the twists and turns of the colorful personalities and local dramas that filled the Xinjiang courts.

However, it does raise the question of whether the book’s reliance on the official government archives inevitably amplifies the role of government in the lives of everyday people of Xinjiang. While it does allow the people to speak for themselves—through their pleadings to the government—it can only ever be an incomplete picture as we are less able to see the life of those existing with little or no contact with the formal structures of state power.

 

The book is at its most engaging when it uses these case studies to explore the role that gender and class played in one’s experience of imperial rule in Qing Dynasty Xinjiang. In fact, many of the local conflicts arise not as one might expect between Muslim and Chinese but rather between Chinese speakers (Muslim and non-Muslim) and non-Chinese speakers. The book reveals a more complicated picture of day-to-day life in late Qing Xinjiang. Often the Chinese poor were seen through the same prism as Muslims—uncivilized and needing to be saved from themselves. It is for this reason that the marriage of Muslim women to lower-class Chinese men was encouraged by the state under the belief that the resulting union would “civilize” both parties. When not purchased outright, Muslim women often found themselves coerced into marriage by government mandate or economic necessity. Land of Strangers is filled with tales of prostitution, human trafficking and the purchasing of brides across the Xinjiang borderlands. The tragedy of each case is only heightened by the transactional way that each case is presented in the records from which the author draws.

In the end, after a couple of decades, subsequent Qing administrators abandoned any ambition of “civilizing” the people of Xinjiang, reverting to the approach of treating Xinjiang as a territory most useful for resource extraction. The Xinjiang interpreter schools were closed—having produced little in the way of moral Confucian Muslims. In fact, documentary evidence records the interpreter class as widely regarded as, “corrupt, grasping officials who amassed fortunes by exploiting the boundary between the [governmental office] and the society outside.” It would be many decades later, perhaps even not until the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s that the Chinese state would once again attempt to change the moral life of the people of Xinjiang.

 

Given recent events in Xinjiang, with growing international scrutiny of the People’s Republic of China’s Uyghur education camps and efforts to “deradicalize” its populace, it would have been easy for the author to position Qing Dynasty assimilation efforts as the precursor to contemporary ones—drawing a straight line between the Xiang Army and Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party. However, while acknowledging their similarities, he reserves any comparisons for the book’s short afterword. Nonetheless, while the author may not have intended it, it is inevitable that the reader draws their own conclusions from the book about the Chinese state’s attitudes towards its Muslim subjects. As such, it is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the actions of the modern Chinese state to pacify Xinjiang through this same combination of force and cultural transformation first attempted by the Xiang Army one hundred and fifty years ago.


Dr Joshua Bird is an international development professional working across the Asia-Pacific and the author of Economic Development in China's Northwest: Entrepreneurship and identity along China’s multi-ethnic borderlands (Routledge, July 2017).