ABSTRACT
Current scholarship on the Uyghurs eclipses the fact that before the present moment of profound crisis, a robust polite society of the indigenous ethnonational communities existed in Xinjiang in the 1980s. This paper, by uncovering the little-known history of the Urumqi-based Tianshan Film Studio and its cinematic production of the non-Han population as the cultural majority of the region in the 1980s, adds to the academic literature that has firmly pushed against the state tropes of Xinjiang as a restive Muslim backwater with little skill in negotiating modernity. By intersecting institutional history, close reading of concrete filmic texts, and the larger historical context of what I argue as a decade of cultural rule in China’s governance of its ethnic frontiers, this paper presents a fresh look at Uyghurs and their ethnic allies in the polite bargaining with the Chinese state for their cultural majority status in the region.
Introduction
The Uyghurs of Xinjiang are the one “demotic ethnie” (Smith Citation2004, 21) that has been written and read with much distress in recent ethnology literature. Analysis of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ethnic policy documents (Tobin Citation2022), examination of the ongoing operation of the so-called “de-extremification” (qu jiduan hua) programmes (Zenz Citation2019a, Citation2019b), and the recruitment for a permanent police state presence (Zenz and Leibold Citation2020), offer enthralling accounts of what David Tobin (Citation2022, 95) calls the “social death by attrition” of an ethnic collective. Exacerbating anxiety over this bleak picture is the open encouragement of the policy direction the PRC state is taking by eminent Chinese academics (Ma Citation2018, Hu and Hu Citation2012). The current crisis, at least partially engendered by the People’s War on Terror since 2014, shows the Chinese state has placed a premium on creating an authoritarian monochrome in the region at the cost of cultural erasures and violent social deracination (Byler Citation2018; Roberts Citation2020).
When ethnic expression is trampled in this and many other ways, it requires the urgent investigation into the various enabling factors that could engender a relatively untrampled ethnic expression. This paper, using the history of the 1980s, in which a cultural institution in the form of the Urumqi-based Tianshan Film Studio (Tianshan dianying zhipianchang) is embedded, shows that ethnic intellectuals and artists of Xinjiang in an earlier era were able to produce ethnic language cultural texts and political participation that helped to ensure the agentic “collective continuance” of their cultural majority status in the region (Whyte Citation2018, 131; Grose Citation2012). By accounting for the film studio’s personnel politics, production mandates, and the concrete filmic texts it produced during that era, a picture of “managed pluralism” (Balzer Citation2003, 190), as against the current bleak reality of social death by attrition, will emerge.
The paper posits two typological extremes in the PRC state’s ethnopolitical strategy towards the Uyghur polite society – accommodationist cultural rule as exemplified during the 1980s and what I call “biopolitical onboarding” that took place during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and the more recent wave of Uyghur eliticide (Tobin Citation2022, 105).Footnote1 The paper argues that sandwiched by two eras of biopolitical onboarding, the cultural rule of the 1980s represents a policy experiment (even though quickly reversed and denounced by subsequent political leaders) that engendered a moment in history when the Uyghur polite society effectively expressed the constituent value of their ethnopolitical group in Xinjiang.
Biopolitical onboarding denies the constituent value of a minority ethnopolitical group, thus eliminating the role of that group’s polite society as power brokers and cultrual intermediaries. As Bulag (Citation2006, 19) comments on the 1990s Mongol case, such a discursive regime treats the ethnopolitical interest of the ethnic minority as “identical” with the ruling majority group. The superimposed sameness means that if the ethnic polite society were to articulate differences in ethnopolitical interest, which forms the premise and basis for the constituent value of a minority ethnopolitical group, they are set to draw the state’s wrath for their “narrow local ethnic nationalism,” a term often flaunted during the Cultural Revolution, or “separatism” and “splittism,” which are terms invented more recently. Biopolitical onboarding therefore is a negative agency afforded to the ethnic polite society, requiring them to be fully onboard with the state’s assimilationist regime to secure their own biopolitical survival and possibly the inclusion of their ethnic collective in the state’s undifferentiated biopolitical population at large.
By contrast, cultural rule is construed as an era when the Party-state tolerated, to a limit, the vocalization of cultural heterogeneity and differences in historical interpretations by the minority ethnopolitical group. As Timothy Grose (Citation2012) demonstrates in a similar case, Uyghur compilers of 1980s textbooks were able to produce works rich in Uyghur culture and history. Joanne Smith Finley (Citation2013) similarly shows how the Uyghurs over the same period were effective “creative agents” in articulating their cultural autonomies. Tobin (Citation2020) also offers a detailed account of a robust Uyghur ethnic expression in the early 2010s. These studies, to which this paper joins as additional evidence, show that the cultural identity of the Uyghur polite society was formed mainly in the 1980s. Understanding this identity calls for the analysis of both its textualization, in this case cinema, and its political and historical context.
The emergence of cultural rule in the 1980s
The cultural rule era was inaugurated after Deng Xiaoping assumed paramount authority in 1978.Footnote2 Having lost his vice premiership and violently attacked by the party apparatus merely two years prior (People’s Daily, May 23, 1976), the Deng comeback was beset with a Maoist bureaucracy hostile to his reformist agenda. To consolidate his power, Deng turned the entire Maoist bureaucracy upside down by suppressing the ultra-leftists and exonerating those who lost their positions to the Maoists. By 1984, in Xinjiang alone, over 230,000 wrongly accused during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) saw their cases overturned. Over 28,000 former cadres who lost their jobs were reassigned to new positions (“Wang Feng Zhuan” bianxie weiyuanhui Citation2011, 568). To change course on ethnic governance in China’s ethnic regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang, the new policy opened ways for the new leadership to rehabilitate ethnic party cadres, intellectuals, and clergy purged and denounced in the earlier era. Furthermore, the new Dengist regime put them back into positions of power (Ministry of United Front Citation1979, Citation1982).
The new configuration of power allowed the Mongol leader Ulanhu, recently restored as a ranking member of the CCP Politburo, to openly decry the ethnic policies of the Cultural Revolution as “coercive assimilation” in 1979 (Mackerras Citation2003, 25). The redress for the coercive assimilation found expression in the 1984 Law of the People’s Republic of China on Regional Autonomy of Nationalities (zhonghua renmin gongheguo minzu quyu zizhifa), which spells out the political and cultural rights of the titular nationalities in their home regions. Most notable in this law are Article Seventeen and Article Eighteen, the former stipulating that the governors of various levels of autonomous administrative regions must come from the titular nationality of the region and the latter stating that lower-level cadres should “as far as possible” be chosen from the ethnic population in their home regions (Lundberg Citation2009, 399).
These pro-autonomy regulations would not have real impact if it were not accompanied by a concurrent reduction of Han party cadres in the ethnic regions. The trend was epitomized by two landmark events, one symbolic and the other substantive. The symbolic event was an apology. In the summer of 1980, Deng Yingchao, then a ranking member of the CCP politburo, and more famously, Zhou Enlai’s widow, visited Xinjiang and offered an apology on behalf of the Han for the oppression of the non-Han majority in the region (People’s Daily June 25, 1980). The substantive policy was the “let depart” (zou ren) policy. Initiated by Deng’s liberalist lieutenant General Secretary Hu Yaobang, “let depart” referred to the exit of Han personnel (excluding the PLA forces) from Tibet and Xinjiang (Mackerras Citation2003, 28; Wang Citation2014, 30).
In Xinjiang, Hu Yaobang presided over two conferences of the CCP Central Secretariat on the region in July 1980, which pledged to restore autonomy rights and pull Han cadres out of Xinjiang (He Citation2009). In its effect, from 1981 to 1990, over 200,000 Han individuals left the paramilitary colonies of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (hereafter XPCC) and other state organs (Liu Citation2007, 112). Meanwhile, the seventy-one existing work departments of the Xinjiang People’s Government (xinjiang zizhiqu renmin zhengfu) were slated for reduction to about forty (McMillen Citation1984, 588). The regional Party in 1982 also stipulated the precise ratios for ethnic cadres, women, and intellectuals. As a result, the non-Han cadres controlled over half of the positions of the seven-member chairmanship of the Xinjiang People’s Government and the fifty-member Xinjiang People’s Congress Standing Committee (xinjiang zizhiqu renmin daibiao dahui changwu weiyuanhui) (McMillen Citation1984, 588). Control over the People’s Government, however, had limited political significance because it was under the oversight of both the Party Committee and the State Council, the cabinet of the Chinese central government. Moreover, Han dominance remained in the Party Committee, where nine out of the fourteen members were Han, and PLA’s Xinjiang headquarters, where thirteen out of the sixteen members were Han.
Amidst this relative uptick of regional autonomy, changes of cultural policy were one of the most significant parts of the cultural rule. Fitting religion’s dominant role in Xinjiang’s social fabric and cultural expression, the state allowed the restoration of mosques to pre-Cultural Revolution levels (State Council Citation2009). It is also worth mentioning that the Turkophone polite society in Xinjiang quickly decided to switch back to the Perso-Arabic script from the Latinized script official introduced in 1958 (McMillen Citation1984, 577). The authorities also permitted the development of Uyghur-language journals and newspapers so that by 1986 there were twelve published in Urumqi alone (Smith Finley Citation2002, 160). The revival of Tianshan Film Studio was also a crucial part on the front of cultural liberalization. I will now turn to the cultural rule as reflected in the production of three Tianshan-produced films that illustrate the logic of sounding the non-Han majority of the region in that era of cultural rule.
Sounding the non-Han majority at Tianshan
In January 1979, with the general policy shift to restore the former non-Han cultural intermediaries and ethnic expression, the State Council approved to reinstate the Tianshan Film Studio, which was a functional film studio before 1962, in the place of the Tianshan Dubbing Studio (1962–79). Immediately the studio quadrupled in size from sixty-four people on its payroll to 238 in preparation for producing its own fiction films (TFSG, 88). The steady expansion of the studio over the 1980s resulted in a total of thirty-four fiction titles, all but four telling stories of the non-Han, and the majority of the thirty cultural majority films have an exclusive ethnic cast (TFSG, 127–210).
At Tianshan, four personnel changes are particularly notable over this ten-year period (1979–89), offering a glimpse of what transpired as a contestation to affect political decisions on film content. In 1980, the autonomous region government convened its Convention of Writers and Artists (wen dai hui) and elected a new committee in charge of film production and distribution in the region. The chairman was a Uyghur. The five-member vice-chairmanship included three Uyghurs, one Kazakh, and one Han (TFSG 19). A year later in 1981, the Studio exonerated four employees who were wrongfully accused in earlier years and offered them compensation totalling 4,800 yuan (TFSG 20).
In 1985, the Studio saw an injection of twenty-three filmmaking professionals trained by the Beijing Film Academy. Of the twenty-three, fourteen were Uyghur, five Kazakh, two Han, one Tajik, and one Manchu. For the first time in the studio’s history, the total number of Han personnel fell below 60 per cent (52 per cent to be exact), or 185 out of the 355 total at the time (TFSG, 85 & 88). Lastly, in 1987, the studio saw another leadership reshuffle based on an “internal democratic poll (neibu minzhu diaocha).” The position of the party boss switched hands from Zhang Kunshan, a Han, to Yusen Yasin, a Uyghur. The leadership reshuffle was followed a year later by an assessment conducted by the provincial cultural ministry, incorporating opinions from the studio’s own staff. In the report, one major complaint from the staff was that the studio lacked a plan to train and foster its non-Han creative workforce, meaning filmmakers (TFSG, 32 & 35).
This brief account of the personnel changes is important to put into perspective the prominence if not predominance of cultural majority titles produced by Tianshan over this period. Getting close to “the point of decision” (Lampton Citation1992, 52), where policies were deliberated and made at the top of the bureaucratic apparatus, was crucial to ensure that films excluding Han presence or minoritizing it did not become a political liability. The leadership reshuffle in 1987 was culmination of a cultural rule politics that was not merely granted from above but clearly also shows agentic efforts from the non-Han professionals within Tianshan itself. The quest for this cultural autonomy to cinematically produce the non-Han as the cultural majority was also in line with the demographic majority of the Turkic population in Xinjiang.
Not by coincidence, therefore, that Tianshan was quick to tap into history and folk legends in producing the Turkophone peoples in Xinjiang as the agents of history in the region. In 1980, shortly after the provincial Convention of Writers and Artists elected a Turkophone majority committee to take charge of film production in Xinjiang, Tianshan’s two Uyghur script writers produced the story of Herip and Senam (خېرىب – سەنەم) and the studio invited a veteran Han director Fu Jie to turn it into a film (TFSG 135–36). The film, with the same title Herip and Senam (ailifu yu sainaimu), tells the love story between a Uyghur princess named Senam and Herip, son of the king’s prime minister. The two lovers grow up in the palace as schoolmates and after coming of age decide to get married. However, their dream of matrimonial union is dashed after Herip’s father passes away and is replaced by an ambitious new prime minister. The new prime minister convinces the king that his own son, Abdullah, is the most eligible bachelor to marry princess Senam. The new prime minister through a series of intrigues charges Herip with treason and sends his entire family to exile. The exiled Herip then builds alliance with local leaders and before long stages a comeback. The king’s court, upon Herip’s return, rebels against the scheming new prime minister, who meets his downfall on charges of treason. The film ends with a grand palace wedding for the two passionate lovers.
With a straightforward romantic comedy plot, Herip and Senam is notable for its luxurious mise-en-scene of a Turki palace, which generates a cultural imaginary that immediately disassociates it from East Asian civilizations. Islamicate décor, a Persianate garden, big open desert, compounded by a saturation of strong sunlight and irrigated fruit orchards in arid oasis shifts the centre of cultural gravity of Xinjiang from the Party’s ideological apparatuses in Urumqi to the Tarim Basin ( and ). The palace interior and political jostling of the Turki blueblood cannot be a further departure from the more recent cultural suppression of the regional Turki majority by the Maoist regime. This “symbolic construction of community” (Cohen Citation1985) through a cultural-historical imaginary confirms what Anthony D. Smith calls “a template for ethnic elites in search of a ‘golden age’ of unity and strength” (Citation1997, 52). It bears pointing out that a golden age conceived as such could only have been an expression of a conservative ethnic polite society. It certainly did not reflect the sentiments of a Uyghur mass who benefited from the Chinese-led populist social revolutions.
Uyghur participation in the production of their own cultural expression mainly involved script writing and acting. Aside from Herip and Senam, half a dozen Uyghur script writers wrote the screenplays for nine other films made during this period. About twenty films of this period had exclusively Turkic cast. Most notably, three films were directed by Uyghurs independently (TFSG 133–207). There were structural reasons for the relatively few Uyghur directors who made their own films during this period. As mentioned earlier, Tianshan Film Studio’s initial mandate was a dubbing studio, which determined that until after the Cultural Revolution, Uyghurs were mostly trained as language dubbers rather than directors and cinematographers. The 1980s saw the emergence of indigenous filmmaking talent at Tianshan because 34 fiction film productions gave ample opportunities for aspiring young filmmakers to be trained on site. Indeed, nearly a dozen Uyghur and Kazakh would-be cineastes served as deputy directors for nine films over that ten-year period (TFSG 133–207).
The heterogenous creative input at Tianshan over the entire decade of the 1980s, however, defies a simple reading of male, chauvinistic Uyghur nationalism. The ethnically Han director Fu Jie’s contribution to Herip and Senam is more an indication of a tectonic cultural shift to tolerate the sounding of the non-Han nationally and the majoritizing of their cultural presence in their home regions. It bears mentioning that Fu was famously the director who turned Jin Xie’s Maoist classic Red Detachment of Women (Citation1961) into a ballet musical in the style of Madame Mao’s revolutionary model plays in 1972. Furthermore, for the 1980s, Tianshan’s signature directorial talent, Guang Chunlan, is not even Turkic. She hails from the Sibe group in the border town of Qabqal in western Xinjiang.Footnote3 Of the 34 titles produced by Tianshan between 1979 and 1989, nine were made by Guang Chunlan. Against a general trend of cinema losing its audience to TV and performing poorly at the box office, eight of Guang’s nine films of this era were profitable for Tianshan (TFSG, 51, 75–76). Those films enjoyed enormous popularity among the locals. The premiere of The Mysterious Caravan (shenmi de tuodui) caused the audience to jam the streets when Guang was passing through and the film “had been playing for two days and nights until half of a film reel was worn out” (Zhou and Liu Citation2019, 101).
Guang sees her mandate as sounding the non-Han in the way they are happy with: “I have been very careful about representing religious and ethnic relations among ethnic groups, and ethnic sentiments in all my films, and it has paid off with local people’s recognition.” Her oeuvre includes one film about her native Sibe people called A Girl from the Archery Village (jian xiang shaonv 2013), and a few titles about Kazakhs, but the majority of her films foreground the Uyghur people, whom she considers to be the most misrepresented and therefore misunderstood by the contemporary Chinese world,
Sadly, today’s media vulgarly simplifies Xinjiang – they think making Uyghur people wear ethnic clothes does the job of representing Uyghur culture. It’s so shallow. There is a lack of an embodied understanding of the land and the people who are living on it. (Zhou and Liu Citation2019, 102)Footnote4
Guang’s Tianshan debut, A Song of Happiness, is a light comedy about a young Uyghur factory worker’s failed blind date with a girl who dislikes his slacking during work and taking unearned credit for work that is done by others. It offers an urban mise-en-scene in which Uyghur life is embedded and defies metropolitan Chinese’s stereotypical image of Uyghurs as exclusively peasants or smalltime merchandise vendors. Rena’s Wedding criticizes the proliferating mercenary marriage custom that is bankrupting a Uyghur family and making the life of two mutually attracted young successful Uyghur professionals – a nurse, and a teacher – miserable. It is half social critique and half comedy as the idea of the film was suggested to Guang by local Uyghurs in Yili and was partly based on her own observation that weddings in her home region Ili often involved the groom’s family having to give an exorbitant amount of betrothal presents to the bride’s family (Zhou and Liu Citation2019, 97). The Girl Who Doesn’t Want to Be an Actress is the most remarkable among the three, not only because it earned the director success by winning the top award at the Istanbul International Film Festival in 1983 but also for its encapsulating a moment of history that is unique to its time – ethnic cultural reconstruction in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and a catharsis of reconciliation with the atrocious recent past.
Set in its contemporary time, The Girl Who Doesn’t Want to Be an Actress (Guang Citation1983) tells the story of a Uyghur folk terpsichorean, Amina, who goes from town to town across Xinjiang scouting for young Uyghur dancers to revive Uyghur dance culture in the early 1980s. On a scouting trip in a beautiful grassland area, Amina encounters a girl named Maira, who is a natural in Uyghur folk dance. Maira, however, fails to show up at the audition. Amina and her colleague, through much trouble, eventually find Maira but are turned away by the young girl’s father. Amina continues with her trip but leaves her companion behind to persuade Maira’s father.
It turns out that the father figure adopted Maira from the street of Urumqi during the Cultural Revolution. He finds the little girl holding to a pair of her mom’s dance shoes and is left abandoned. He is told that the girl’s mother is a “revisionist black sprout” and is incarcerated. Comparing notes with Amina’s colleague, the contemporary Maira’s adoptive father recognizes that Amina is the biological mother of the girl he took home from the street over a decade ago. The girl is now allowed to rejoin her mother in Urumqi, where she trains under her mother before joining her in a grand Uyghur folk musical performance. In the backstage before the performance, Maira reads her adoptive father’s letter and realizes Amina is none other than her long-missed mother.
For any rehabilitated Turkic intellectual of the time, the film has an uncanny closeness to their own lives and the time when many families are reuniting with their incarcerated members and indigenous culture itself was on track of a gradual but robust reconstruction. The film daringly interrogates the Cultural Revolution for its grim suppression of Turkic cultures. In the meantime, it also offers an upbeat assessment of the trend for revival and reconciliation. Moreover, Mehrigul, the leading actress playing the role of Maira offers a tour de force dance performance, which is itself a spectacular showcase of the confidence and potential of the cultural revival underway concomitantly in the historical world.
It is worth mentioning that the film, on account of its optimism and conciliatory tone, was dubbed into Chinese by the Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio and travelled to Beijing to be featured on events celebrating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the PRC’s founding in 1984 (Zhou and Liu Citation2019, 99). Cinematographically, the film was shot in a road-film style on multiple locations including Urumqi, Turpan, Ili, and by the Sayram Lake (Zhou and Liu Citation2019, 99). It lends the viewer a panoramic view of both urban and rural life in Xinjiang at the time and has a liberating affect as the main characters freely traverse a diverse range of natural terrain as well as social milieux. These natural terrains in turn transpire as what Giuliana Bruno (Citation2007, 6) calls “psychogeographic journeys” in which a voyageuse (rather than a voyeur) “traverses a haptic emotive terrain.” The effect of such psychogeographic journeys is that it offers an imagined Uyghur homeland that is not restricted to a hometown oasis or a city, but a world defined by shared cultural roots as well as commercial and intellectual links. Such a cognitive mapping of the Uyghur homeland corresponds to what June Dreyer (Citation1994) detects as a distinctive political energy for “regionalism” in the 1980s in Xinjiang.
Guang’s personal audacity in taking upon even thornier contemporary issues, however, should not be undervalued. After a brief detour of unsuccessfully trying to launch her private film company around 1986, Guang was quickly drawn into a new project of conscience, which eventually won her wild social acclaim before earning her more official recognition. This time, her challenge was taking on the blatant misrepresentation of Uyghurs by none other than China Central Television (CCTV), the new king of mass media dissemination in the 1980s.
In the 1986 Spring Festival gala show, arguably CCTV’s most popular show of all time, two comedians performed a short sketch called “Shish Kebab” (yangrouchuan) (), which satirizes a cunning street vendor garbed in Uyghur ethnic clothing who cheats customers, sells bad lamb, and dodges food quality inspectors. The fourteen-minute-long performance operates under the cover that the vendor is merely impersonating a Uyghur and therefore could be read as a parody instead of a realist portrayal. But performing a parody is an even worse scheme of stereotyping because it tacitly acknowledges that Uyghur Kebab sellers cheat was a trope already widely appreciated by the audience. The fact that the show was televised with a live audience who were wildly laughing at the parody only confirms how socialized this reductive and disembodied trope was. The insult was further exacerbated by the amplifying of this misrepresentation by CCTV, the face of China’s polite society, on an occasion of national ritual significance.
Guang was personally offended by it. Her Uyghur friends also complained to her that the show defamed their people (Zhou and Liu Citation2019, 104). Guang soon set out making Mehmet’s Anecdotes (مەمەت ھەققىدە پاراڭ mamat hakida parang Citation1987), up to then her most influential and well-received film. Guang recalls that when the film was premiered at Minzu University in Beijing, the audience besieged the auditorium, some of them even clinging to windows. The students even put up a banner at the university writing “Mehmet’s Anecdotes, Xinjiang’s Pride.” After the release, “the kebab restaurants all over Xinjiang changed their names to ‘The Red Rose Kebab,’ taken from the film” (Zhou and Liu Citation2019, 104).
Moreover, the film received two national awards that year, the governmental Best Film Award given by the Ministry of Radio, Film and Television (guangdian zongju) and a Special Film award at the industrial Golden Rooster Awards (jinji jiang). Guang herself also received appreciation from the highest ranked Uyghur politician of the time, Ismail Amat (1935–2018), who was the executive head of the State Nationalities Affairs Commission (zhongyang minwei) in Beijing (Zhou and Liu Citation2019, 105). A few months later, Guang was also promoted to the position of a standing committee member of the provincial People’s Congress. So, what gives Mehmet’s Anecdotes such distinction, and especially recognition by the Uyghur society?
The film is a light-hearted romantic comedy about impersonation and how two passionate young lovers decide to consummate their love despite one finding out the other to be an imposter. It is a Shakespearian Much Ado about Nothing type of comedy, although the nothing here is not fidelity or a vagina, but the status symbol that is one’s occupation. A well-to-do Uyghur couple – a professional singer and a coach driver for a tourism company – are getting married. The singer decides to take her best friend Dilnar, a graduate from a dance academy in Beijing, as her bridesmaid. She entrusts her fiancé to find someone of a matching social status to be his best man. The husband-to-be, however, could only secure Mehmet, a kebab restaurateur, as his best man. The work of setting Mehmet up as an English interpreter for the tourism company is set in motion. In the wedding, restaurateur Mehmet and the college graduate Dilnar are attracted to each other at first sight. They flirt with their dance moves and steal secretive glances at each other. After the wedding, imposter Mehmet goes into hiding and disappears from his crush’s life, until she finds him at his own kebab restaurant. Dilnar now finds herself to have been lied to all the way. But knowing that Mehmet was only playing a role for the vanity of his friend, she forgives him and the two pick up from where they left at the passionate tangoing in their friends’ wedding.
The film offers a rich tour d’horizon view of a vibrant and stratified urban social scene in Urumqi of the mid 1980s. It portrays a Uyghur upper middle class who go on foreign business trips, own private cars and imported electronics, and host foreign guests at their private homes. The décor in the home of this class is remarkably Westernized, with a bust of Beethoven and a copy of Unknown Woman by Ivan Kramskoi (1837–87) occupying the centre of a well-decorated piano room (). Other middle-class consumption that was the fashion of the time – shopping at department stores, seeing a dentist, lavish wedding ceremonies with live band music, women driving motorcycles, and young people sipping carbonated soft drinks – creates, or one may argue, restores Urumqi as a burgeoning metropolis on a par with other centres of urban life in contemporaneous inner China. The film also opens a window to the lower class, where cheap goods are bargained over at bazaars, and the regular folk, both Uyghur and Han, sit on crammed tables savouring a skewer of lamb kebab. All this bustling life frames an unregimented social mobility, which is represented by a kebab restaurateur who has no college degree but is business-smart to self-teach English, operates a restaurant with a waitering staff of both Uyghur and Han, and aspires to marry up through his good sense of humour.
Uyghur cultural literacy or cosmopolitanism is masterfully expressed by the wedding dance party, where the two protagonists flirt and develop mutual affection through a long sequence of three dance pieces. On this lively floor, a first piece of a reinvented Uyghur folk music is adapted to disco beats, allowing the ancient music to come alive with added youthfulness and more expressive moves of the hips. Mehmet then follows up Dilnar’s feat with his imitation of the world’s pop king at the time, Michael Jackson, a statement of a culture in sync with the larger popular culture currents in China and beyond. Then the many spectating young Uyghur couples all join the protagonists in an ensemble waltz, the most occasion-appropriate dance but also the director’s subtle reiteration of a confident culture that is privy to good etiquette, restraint, and the social manners of the well-educated.
The almost exclusive focus on youth is worth dwelling on here. As one guest asks whether it goes against tradition to have the bride and groom join in the dance, his interlocutor replies: “No problem! We are living in the modern time!” It is obvious that Guang Chunlan knows how to present and amplify a new cultural formation without being viewed suspect by the more conservative sectors of her Uyghur audience. This is worth pointing out because Guang is on record as saying she feels her films “were blessed by Allah and therefore were well-liked by my Uyghur compatriots” (Zhou and Liu Citation2019, 102). In other words, she can make her films socially popular among the Uyghurs by appealing to their sense of propriety while gently pushing for a forward-looking outlook.
Guang Chunlan’s self-induced cultural corrective imperative is expressed in unambiguous terms. Mehmet is a smalltime restauranteur, but he is not a peripatetic extortionist of pennies. If anything, he is enterprising and knows honest business is the only route to sustain his enterprise. In the film, when he runs out of lamb on a day, his kitchen staff suggests substituting lamb with beef. Mehmet barks that cheating customers will “smash the name of our business.” If this is only playing the defense to CCTV’s scandalizing Shish Kebab show, a subsequent scene carries a line that is directly flung at the face of CCTV. The snobbish wife of Mehmet’s friend remarks to her husband: “Selling Kebab is a decent business. It’s totally unlike what some TV shows are trying to (mis)represent.” I will end my close reading of the film on this note because unique to the time in question, we see a fissure in the PRC state’s ideological apparatus. Never before, and perhaps also never after in the PRC history, had a subordinate ideological apparatus publicly talked back to the central ideological apparatus. Implicit in that response is a new conception of a distinct cultural self that refuses to be stereotyped, minoritized, and silenced by another nonetheless hegemonic culture.
Remarkably, this is not merely an expression of an individual artist. The production of the cultural majority in the ethnic homeland was supported institutionally and took place in the context of a general cultural rule. As mentioned earlier, the regional government often offered Guang financial support. The state’s official awards frequently recognized her achievements. But this special moment should not be taken as a full retreat of the ethnocratic regime. Over the same period at Tianshan, dubbing of Chinese fiction films and political education films of all sorts were carried out earnestly and in huge volume. In 1980, the studio dubbed 260 reels of the said materials into Turkic languages. That had since been steadily picking up year by year to have reached a record 654 reels for 1989 and cumulatively a total of 4,978 reels over the ten-year period (TFSG, 18–43). If we take four-and-a-half reels as the average length for a fiction film, that’s 1,106 fiction titles worth of Chinese language film being dubbed by the studio, outnumbering, and overwhelming the thirty non-Han-centered titles made by Tianshan itself.
The huge disparity in the volumes of Han and ethnic cultural productions aside, it should be noted that this allowance for cultural self-expression, is after all the modus operandi of a cultural rule. The cultural rule did not go beyond the field of cultural production and the parameters of the ideological state apparatus (Althusser Citation2020, 40). The changes in the operation of the other half of the ethnocratic regime – the repressive state apparatuses – were more cosmetic than substantive. While the cultural sector was gaining a lot of attention at the time, the discredited and sidelined security apparatus was merely standing by. Despite a largescale exodus of PCC personnel from Xinjiang and Tibet, the XPCC maintained their firm control over mining, oil towns, transportation hubs, and the best irrigated state farms in Xinjiang.
The XPCC’s economic functions were in fact expanded so that by 1983 the regional government claimed that the corps had reclaimed 937,500 hectares of land, constructed 691 factories, and managed 170 state farms (McMillen Citation1984, 586). Moreover, a year later the XPCC accounted for a quarter of the region’s total production value (Xinjiang Ribao November 17, 1990). Furthermore, according to the 1990 census figures there were 5,695,626 Han compared to 7,194,675 Uyghur, representing 37.5 and 47 per cent, respectively, of the region’s total population (Xinjiang Ribao November 17, 1990). Once these figures are broken down by prefecture, however, Han dominated the population of key industrial centres such as the regional capital Urumqi, coal city Hami, and the oil towns of Karamay and Shihezi (Xinjiang Ribao November 17, 1990).
Tianshan after 1989
In 1989, the Chinese political centre was shaken by what the state dubbed as the “Tiananmen Incident” (Tiananmen shijian), a student-led movement calling for the Party leadership to relinquish their monopoly on political power. Almost simultaneously in Xinjiang, the largest incident of ethnic minority unrest of the 1980s took place between May and June 1989. The incident began when approximately 3,000 students from Xinjiang University marched to Party headquarters in Urumqi on May seventeenth and May eighteenth to demonstrate their support for the Beijing protestors (Dreyer Citation1994, 50). Ensuing protests of various kinds dogged the region for the remainder of 1989, making it necessary for the Party boss Song Hanliang to demand the Party at all levels to crack down on “illegal organizations” and deal with those “spreading rumors designed to damage nationality solidarity and advocate separatism” (Clarke Citation2007, 75). By December 1990 it was clear that the Party would deal ruthlessly with manifestations of ethnic minority unrest. Song declared that the PLA was a “great wall of steel and iron safeguarding the motherland” (Xinjiang Ribao, November 29, 1990).
On June 26, 1989, Tianshan Film Studio was shaken by an announcement carried by the studio’s Party leadership. Memtimin Hezret (maimaitiming aizilaiti), a promising script writer who wrote the script for Rena’s Wedding (1982) and three other Tianshan films of this period, had deflected to Turkey. The Tianshan Party committee decided to expel him from the party and his job, remove his name from the credit lists of all four films he is involved in, and confiscate the apartment he was allocated by Tianshan’s collective housing (TFSG 304).Footnote5 This scandal involving international press was unprecedented in Tianshan’s history (TFSG 40).
The timing of this disclosure and denouncement is highly significant. It took place on the heels of “meetings of the Party committee and all-member Party congress which had been going on for days in a row at Tianshan ending on June 24th, 1989” (TFSG 40). Those meetings were study sessions of the decrees of the Communist Party Central Commission’s Fourth Plenum of the Thirteenth National Party Congress (shisanjie sizhong quanhui) which “highly commended the crucial roles played by the old revolutionaries including comrade Deng Xiaoping at a time of survive-or-perish crisis for both the Party and the nation.” In accord with the new Party decrees from above, Tianshan decided to “steadfastly follow the Four Fundamental Principles (sixiang jiben yuanze) and oppose bourgeois liberalization (zichan jieji ziyouhua)” (TFSG 40).
The defection of Tianshan’s Memtimin Hezret at this critical juncture and the subsequent Party resolutions it triggered at Tianshan show unmistakably that a sea change was taking place across the Chinese state apparatus. In the few lines quoted above, it is clear that “old revolutionaries” would be lionized while “bourgeois liberalization” would be subject to denunciation in a new regime of power. Hezret’s defection indexes this sea change and could not have been a better token to be used by Tianshan’s Party loyalists to warn of the damages that were brought about by bourgeois liberalization. In other words, the expulsion of Hezret encapsules the beginning of a political shift from cultural rule to biopolitical onboarding in the subsequent decades.
Conclusion
Guang Chunlan’s filmography in the next decade exhibits a dual track. On the one hand, she continued building on the success of ethnic lure, albeit films of this kind increasingly drifted away from the contemporary to de-historicized legends and myths. On the other hand, her most recognized films by the official film awards were all illustrations of the so-called leitmotif cinema (zhuxuanlv dianying) which are propagandist celebrations of national integration instead of cultural plurality. I will leave the discussion of her work in the 1990s for another project. Nevertheless, looking back on the 1980s, Tianshan Film Studio was a lively place. It was an exemplary site of managed pluralism, the state and the regional ethnic polite society collaborated effectively to allow the expression of the different ethnopolitical interests of the region’s non-Han majority.
This paper provides new materials as the current scholarship on the Uyghurs faces a two-pronged battle. One the one hand, it is up against the Chinese state’s People’s War on Terror discourse since 2014. That official narrative justifies its “states of exception” measures (Agamben Citation2005) unleashed on the Uyghurs by conflating separatism, religious extremism, and terrorism in one breath. By also tapping into a global discourse of Islamist radicalism and Islamophobia, the War on Terror mandate presumes the Uyghurs as unable to rally behind the cause of ethnic self-expression in a non-violent way. There should be more scholarship investigating how ethnic self-expression in the more pluralistic moments of history, such as the 1950s and 1980s, which this paper is concerned, were negotiated.
On the other hand, while popular and grassroots expressions of ethnic discontent have been well-studied in the Uyghur case (Millward Citation2004; Waite Citation2006), there is a dearth of scholarship on the ethnic polite society, who often were pragmatically complicit with the Chinese state but explored and expressed different ways by which their ethnic constituents should sustain itself under an ethnocratic regime. Beller-Hann’s and more recently Joshua Freeman’s studies show convincingly that ethnonationalism for the Uyghurs could already rally behind the charisma of nineteenth century secular heroes (Freeman Citation2021, 141; Bellér-Hann Citation2008). Secular intellectuals have also been a forceful presence in several Uyghur autonomist movements in the twentieth century (Rudelson Citation1997; Bovingdon Citation2010). This paper contributes to this emergent scholarship on the ethnic polite society and shows exactly how that section of the Uyghur society and their ethnic allies engaged in polite bargaining with the Chinese state in the 1980s.
The article takes instruction from the twentieth century’s relatively peaceful decolonization projects represented by ethnically autochthonous but transcultural power brokers such as Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) and Nursultan Nazarbayev (1940–) and demonstrates that power operates fundamentally in a processual way (Wolpert Citation1984; Beissinger Citation2002). Whereas the regime of biopolitical onboarding involves a macroscopic cultural construction of “war on terror” to justify its myriad microscopic situations of disempowerment and minoritization, in a regime of cultural rule, there were microscopic situations of empowerment, whose operations both resulted from and benefited a cultural construction of power-sharing and polite negotiations. One qualification that must be offered is that such empowerment almost exclusively favours the ethnic polite society, who are cultural intermediaries that translate and adapt power hierarchies in the local context. But the sudden shift from a cultural rule to a resurgent state-sponsored Han political nationalism, reflected in the restoration and strengthening of the XPCC in Xinjiang, shows that the Party-state found increasingly less use for an empowered Turkic polite society. The exact reason for this confidence and one may argue hubris awaits further research.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Professor Jonathan Lipman, Professor Mark Elliott, Professor Michael Szonyi, Professor David Wang, and Professor Jie Li for commenting on parts of the article in an early stage. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for the journal. Their critical readings and detailed feedback helped improve this manuscript substantially.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 I prefer the term “polite society” over the more established term “elite” mostly because in the 1980s, the Uyghur society that was fresh off the turmoil and destructions of the Cultural Revolution simply did not have a social stratification that divided the society into elite and the downtrodden. In many ways, Mao’s revolutions flattened the social distinction by measure of material wealth. Equally poor and struggling in that decade, the most conspicuous marker of social distinction was along the lines of education attainment and professional skills. The notion of a polite society is to suggest that this segment of society was more willing to negotiate for cultural capital and ethnic pride through non-violent expressions of discontent.
2 I take the inspiration of the phrase “cultural rule” from Christine Gross-Loh’s dissertation “Conflict and Accommodation in Taisho Japan: The Formation of Civil Rule (Bunka Seiji) in Colonial Korea, 1910–1925” [Citation2001]. In her work, Gross-Loh seeks the rationale for the Japanese colonial rulers’ shift from martial rule (Jap: budan seiji Chi: wuduan zhengzhi) to civil rule (Jap: bunka seiji Chi: wenzhi zhengzhi) in the second decade of Japan’s governance of Korea as a formal colony (1910–45). Gross-Loh (Citation2001) argues that the Taisho era, during which both liberalism and imperialism thrive in the Japanese metropole, made it possible for the colonial authorities to switch ways and experiment on a more pro-autonomy rule in Korea. For other scholars using the concepts of budan seiji and bunka seiji, see Brudnoy (Citation1970).
3 Guang was born in Qabqal, Ili Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang in 1940. She studied directing at Beijing Film Academy from 1961 to 1966. During the Cultural Revolution, she was forced to experience labour reform due to her family history. She began her directing career with Nanjing Film Studio in 1976 and moved to Tianshan permanently in 1983.
4 Guang’s views were given in two interviews in 2014, predating the current crisis.
5 Tianshan records Memtimin Hezret as a Uyghur scriptwriter who was born in 1950 and a CCP party member. He left Xinjiang for the Soviet Union in February 1989 to visit his relatives. But on May 4 of that year, he left the Soviet Union for Turkey via Romania.
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