The Unsettled West

Tyler brings the region's premodern history to life, skillfully employing individual anecdotes to illustrate its wild past, including the introduction of Sufi Islam in the tenth century and the later development of the Silk Road trade route, which passed through Xinjiang. The other two books, which are drier but fact-filled, fill in Tyler's overly broad narrative with rich detail and more nuanced assessment.

Although the reader has to dig through the sprawl of details in these books to find central themes, the implications of history for modern Xinjiang are clear. Tyler has titled his book Wild West China because the Uighurs' relationship with Beijing resembles that of the Native Americans with Washington: as China began to develop into a state with a distinct national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Chinese, with their own version of manifest destiny, began to see Xinjiang as a place inhabited by barbarians ready for civilizing. As a result of what Tyler calls "Chinese orientalism," Beijing even convinced itself that untamed Xinjiang would welcome China's intervention -- conveniently ignoring the region's historical and cultural links to the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Chinese thus underestimated the resistance Xinjiang would mount to Han culture.

By the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, as the Qing dynasty consolidated its power, it began to expand its borders, nearly doubling China's size in an effort to, among other things, protect it from the Great Game machinations of Russia and the United Kingdom. This time, when China conquered Xinjiang it came to stay, securing its annexation of the region with brutal tactics. Tyler describes the slaughter of more than a million people during this period, and James Millward and Peter Perdue, two contributors to the Starr book, detail the Qing dynasty's creation of small, self-sustaining military colonies in Xinjiang -- the precursors of China's massive modern-day military structure there.

Over the next 200 years, interactions between Beijing and the Uighurs set the stage for the worse confrontations to come. Here again, all three books are better at relating details than broader themes, but a few constants still manage to emerge. The Chinese government, unable to see Uighurs as equal to the Han, never offered them autonomy. Instead, Beijing forced the natives to do unpaid labor and barred them from local political positions. Misrule stoked local anger, and a series of uprisings resulted. In one blood-drenched revolt in 1825, tribespeople massacred 8,000 Chinese soldiers, prompting a harsh response from the central government.

As the twentieth century dawned, China's pacification of Xinjiang remained incomplete. With its central government weakened by rebellions, the overthrow of the monarchy, and general chaos, China could not completely consolidate its rule over the west. Wily local warlords took advantage of Beijing's distraction, and three times before 1949, Uighur leaders founded short-lived independent states, which remain important symbols for Uighurs today; as Dillon writes, the bank notes of the last free Xinjiang republic, crushed in 1949, are still revered by many Uighurs as symbols "of a once and future state." The last Xinjiang republic even included a relatively democratic constitution that promised freedom of speech, religion, and assembly.

THE RISE OF THE RADICALS

Although the Qing and Nationalist governments managed to conquer Xinjiang, they never attempted to colonize the vast region. After the communists took over, however, everything changed. Although some scholars see the last few hundred years of Chinese repression in Xinjiang as a continuum, the authors of these books are correct to point out that CCP rule has been drastically different from its predecessors' and has succeeded in radicalizing some Uighurs as never before.

Although it initially promised Xinjiang significant autonomy, once the CCP consolidated its hold over the country in the 1950s, it began to adopt much stricter policies toward the Uighurs. For the first time ever, Beijing had a radical ideology to spread and secure borders within which to spread it. But communist ideology, when combined with the traditional Chinese view of the Uighurs as barbarians (Mao Zedong's wife famously hated ethnic minorities) and a fear of concentrated ethnic groups, wreaked locust-like devastation in Xinjiang. Across China, the CCP targeted the wealthy, the educated, and the devout, but in Xinjiang the terror was worse. As Millward writes in the Starr book, "only in Xinjiang did the party face a majority, non-Chinese-speaking Islamic population with a well-established clerical organization." Thousands of mosques were shuttered, imams were jailed, Uighurs who wore headscarves or other Muslim clothing were arrested, and during the Cultural Revolution, the CCP purposely defiled mosques with pigs. Many Muslim leaders were simply shot. The Uighur language was purged from school curricula, and thousands of Uighur writers were arrested for "advocating separatism" -- which often meant nothing more than writing in Uighur. Meanwhile, Beijing forced Xinjiang's nomadic farmers into collectives, which, thanks to the region's limited arable land, were even less productive than those in other parts of the country. The scars left by such misguided policies remain today, and many of Xinjiang's greener parts are turning into desert.