At the margins: Uyghur ethnicity and the friend/enemy dialectic in Xinjiang.
Date
2011-06-02
Authors
Evans, Tristan
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Abstract
This thesis builds on Michael Dutton‘s work on the policing of the political in China. It explores the role of the friend/enemy dialectic in Xinjiang. The analysis centers on the Uyghurs and argues that ethnicity has played a central role in shaping the excision of enemy from the category of friend since the construction of the People‘s Republic of China. This identification of enmity is undergirded by the particular ethnic vicissitudes that have produced both a horizontally inclusive and vertically hierarchical Chinese nation. This ethnic component of Chinese nationalism situates the ethnic Han majority as the core of the nation. Beginning with the peaceful liberation of Xinjiang and its incorporation into the PRC and extending to the ―7.5‖ race riots and hypodermic needle attacks in the summer of 2009 the thesis contends that the categories of ethnicity have been at the heart of the elimination of the enemy in China and can be linked directly to many of the Chinese state‘s colonial practices.
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Keywords
Dutton, Michael Robert, China, Interpersonal relations