Imperial conquest and Central Asian identities
For over 2000 years nomad confederacies from Inner Eurasia, whether Huns, Turks, or Mongols, had invaded settled Outer Eurasian societies and then assimilated into them. Between the 16th and 18th centuries the pattern reversed. Outer Eurasian empires successfully invaded Inner Eurasia and brought their own cultures to their new subjects. This unit examines the slow encroachment of Qing Dynasty China and Imperial Russia into the khanates of Central Asia, focusing on how absorption into modernizing empires affected identity structures.
China expands west
1. The Manchus
In 1644 a new dynasty of emperors, the Qing, claimed the Mandate of Heaven in China. The Qing emperors were not ethnic Han Chinese, but Manchus, nomads living north of the Beijing region. They were descendants of the 12th century Jurchen rulers of northern China, whose language belonged to the Tungus branch of the Altaic family. Manchu tribes were distantly related to Mongols and Turks, although their closest relatives were other peoples of eastern Siberia, such as the Evenks and Nanai. Today the entire Tungusic language group is in danger of dying out. As foreign rulers, the Manchu founders consciously incorporated the practices of their Mongol predecessors into their military and state organizations. They married their children into the Mongol elite and began to write the Manchu language in Mongol script, which the Mongols themselves had borrowed from the Uyghurs in the early 13th century. The Manchus also borrowed Mongol techniques of exploiting Han subjects while keeping them at a safe distance, through separate and distinct language, ancestor worship, and dress, among other communal markers, and even took the Yuan Dynasty seal from the last descendent of Chingis Khan in the region. The Manchus used the luck of their position and their own skill to amass a great deal of power. Historian Peter Perdue puts it nicely: “The fluidity of institutional and personal identities, characteristic of the region, the mixing of peoples and ecologies and social structures, provided the cauldron in which innovative social formations could be brewed, which led to a military and social structure of irresistible force,” [Perdue, p. 124].
2. The Zunghars
The fall of the Zunghar Mongol confederacy highlights a key difference between traditional Inner Eurasian political structures and modern political structures. In the 18th century, Europe saw the rise of powerful, absolutist monarchies that could force disparate regions to work together. They unified legal, monetary, military and administrative systems, creating a basis for a common identity, which in turn was crucial for the formation of nation-states. The Han Chinese went through a similar process under the Ming and Qing dynasties. The polities of Central and Inner Asia, however, did not unify, for reasons that had as much to do with environmental conditions and mobile social structures as with political temperament. Impermanent political authority was a flexible and mobile system that had served Inner Eurasians well for millenia, but it could not match the new economic and military power of centralized states.
In the 1750s the Zunghar confederacy collapsed into warring factions. The weak point of all nomad confederacies was exposed on the death of a strong leader—in this case Galdan Tsering Khan (r. 1727–1745). Since nomad alliances were held together by personal authority rather than an impersonal legal and/or dynastic system, the death of one leader freed tribes to find another. This easily led to rivalries that cost the confederacy everything it had acquired under the previous leader. The Qing Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736–1795) took advantage of Zunghar fighting in 1755 to invade, capture one of the warring chiefs, and prepare to split the Zunghars into four, presumably more docile, Oirat tribes under the rule of separate khans. However, in 1756 another Zunghar chief, Amursana, first pledged loyalty to and then betrayed the Qianlong Emperor, hoping to win control of the entire confederacy himself [Millward, 2007, p. 95]. Amursana’s behavior was not new in the long history of nomad-Chinese struggles, but it called forth an unprecedented response from the Qianlong Emperor. He ordered his armies to completely exterminate the Zunghars: soldiers should kill all able-bodied Zunghar males, including surrendering teenagers, without mercy. The Qing commanders were also to disrupt food supplies to eliminate tribes through starvation. While there is evidence that some commanders were reluctant to carry out orders that went well beyond the bounds of traditional warfare, Russian observers near Zungharia reported cases of entire villages—men, women, and children—being massacred.
Qianlong deliberately destroyed the bases of Zunghar identity: survivors were enslaved and stripped of their tribal names, and their home territory was depopulated by the lethal combination of war, starvation and disease. Peter Perdue writes: “Zungharia was left as a blank social space, to be re-filled by a state-sponsored settlement movement of millions of Han Chinese peasants, Manchu bannermen, Turkestani oasis settlers, Hui, and others” [Perdue, p. 285. Full description of what he calls “ethnic genocide” pp. 282–287].
Altishahr becomes Xinjiang
Destroying the Zunghars led to Qing involvement with the Turkic tribes that had been under Zunghar control or had worked with the Zunghars in trade or military alliances. Qing commanders found two Turkic khojas, brothers, from Altishahar being kept in a Zunghar prison as political hostages. They gave the khojas freedom in exchange for loyalty, only to find that the khojas broke their oaths upon returning home and tried to restore the independence that their ancestors had lost almost 100 years before. Qing pursuit of these “renegades” took Chinese armies west of the Pamir/Tien Shan mountain barrier for the first time in 1000 years, into Turkic Central Asia. The rulers of Kokand, a rising power under the Uzbek Ming tribe, and Tashkent (at the time an independent city) bowed to superior Qing power, executed the khojas and turned over their remains to the emperor. The ruler of Kokand also pledged loyalty to the Qianlong Emperor, but this was a temporary and symbolic gesture, as the Qing were not interested in staying west of the mountains. Thus in 1759 the Turkic Muslims of Altishahr were incorporated into China [Newby, pp. 21–27].
The name “Xinjiang” means “new frontier” [Millward, 2007, p. 97], and in fact the Qing government did not make the region a formal province until 1884. For most of the 18th and 19th centuries the Chinese state had no policy to make the peoples of Xinjiang culturally Chinese (a process called “sinification”). Qing emperors controlled the region through military governors, keeping it administratively distinct from the rest of China. The garrison personnel were themselves widely diverse, including Mongol Oirats, Manchu bannermen, and Chinese Muslims (called Hui or Dungans) as well as Han Chinese. The state was more interested in extracting as much grain, silver, and cotton cloth as possible than in changing Turkic cultures. Economic and military control did entail the settlement of increasing numbers of Han Chinese in Xinjiang, but this was a slow process. The political position of Xinjiang Muslims after 1759 was similar to that of previous generations under the Zunghars.
The Qing did introduce some new methods of distinguishing between peoples. For example, Chinese criminal law specified exactly the kind and degree of punishment a criminal deserved based on the severity of his crime, the circumstances under which it was committed, and who he was. In the later 18th century Chinese police became convinced that Turkic Muslims were more prone to violent crime than other ethnic groups and so needed to be handled differently. A Han thief would have the characters for “thief” tattooed on his face, but a Muslim thief would be tattooed with the specific label “Muslim thief,” which highlighted his Muslimness in a new way [Crossley/Lipman, p. 95]. For imperial powers, law codes were a very important tool for imposing new identities on subject peoples.
Rebellion and collapse of the Qing
There were several anti-Qing uprisings in Xinjiang during the course of the 19th century. Some of these were very large, but none could be characterized as “nationalist” in the modern sense. Rather, the rebels were seeking to restore their former political power or to punish abusive Qing officials. In 1864 Dungan/Hui and Turkic groups together succeeded in expelling the Qing from Xinjiang, although they rebelled because they were angry over corruption and economic exploitation, not because they were trying to found an independent country. While nationalist passions were beginning to destroy the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires in the late 19th century, the idea of “nation” had not yet made much impression on the peoples of Central Asia.
In 1865 a military chief from Kokand, Yaqub Beg, took over most of Xinjiang and strictly enforced Islamic law (sharia), which the Qing governors had never done. Contemporary Uyghur nationalists refer to Yaqub Beg’s campaign as an attempt to create an independent “greater Turkestan,” but that is inaccurate. Yaqub Beg justified his conquest in the name of fighting for oppressed Muslims against Han Chinese infidels. However, the expulsion of Qing armies created a power vacuum in which many local leaders were fighting to assert control. In the chaos, Yaqub Beg sometimes allied with Muslim Hui against rival Turk groups, sometimes fought the Hui, and sometimes even allied with non-Muslim Chinese against Muslims. Once he established his government, he rapidly alienated the population in whose interests he was supposedly fighting. He badly damaged the local economic infrastructure, and angered local residents by sending out religious police gangs to flog anyone not observing Islamic law. The combination of unaccustomed social restrictions with economic degradation caused many inhabitants of Xinjiang to feel that life had been better under the corrupt Qing. The complicated mix of economics, religion, and multiple ethnicities that underlay events from 1864 to the Qing re-conquest of 1878 has led James Millward to caution that the rebellion should not be viewed as an expression of Uyghur nationalism. The general resentment against Yaqub Beg’s imposition of strict Islamic observance also tells us that rebellion was not motivated by militant religion [Millward, 2007, pp. 117–123].
The last decades of Qing rule over China were marked by increasing instability and violence, which culminated in the fall of the dynasty in 1911 and a new period of civil war. As control from Beijing collapsed, the peoples of Xinjiang fell under the rule of local Han Chinese warlords. These upheavals were enormous, but they had little impact on communal identities. A person was from Urumchi or Kashgar, a nomad or an oasis-dweller. Turkic fighters attacked Han settlements, but did not hesitate to join with Chinese fighters who treated them well. However, a small group of Turkic intellectuals and merchants, who maintained regular contact with Turkic-speakers in the Russian Empire, were beginning to discuss the need to modernize Muslims by teaching children to read and write their own vernacular language, rather than to memorize texts in literary Türki or Persian. This was the first step toward developing the Uyghur national identity that we see in Central Asia today. These intellectual reformers were influenced by a group in the Russian Empire known as the Jadids, for the “new method” (usul-i jadid) of teaching that they advocated. The new method focused on phonetic language learning, but Jadid teachers wanted to use Western methods of learning to develop a sense of national pride, so that a new generation could restore political independence to Central Asian Muslims. The handful of Jadid schools in Xinjiang focused on developing a Turkic Muslim identity rather than a specifically Uyghur identity. Nonetheless, these schools did give modern intellectual skills to a small cohort of future Uyghur activists.