Michael Dillon on Uyghur Nationalism

Your first two books are by the same author: Owen Lattimore. What makes him such an important figure in this field?

He was a writer who was respected in the 1930s and 1940s. He was the editor of the Pacific Affairs, an influential journal, and he was an influential commentator on Asian affairs. What impresses me is the breadth of his knowledge of Asia, his knowledge of Asian languages, his knowledge of Asian culture, and his ability to relate to people living in the region. However during the 1950s he suddenly fell foul of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist House Committee on Un-American Activities, as did a number of American China specialists, although he, like many of McCarthy’s other victims, was not a Communist. Unable to find work in the United States, he came over to the UK where he established a Department of Chinese Studies and a Mongolian Studies Centre in Leeds. He was my first teacher of Chinese history and taught the period of history that he had experienced himself without notes, combining analysis and anecdotes which made the China of the 1930s and 1940s come alive.

Tell me about Inner Asian Frontiers of China. I notice it was first published in 1940. Why is it still relevant today?

Well it hasn’t really been superceded in spite of its age. It was the first serious study in English of the historical relationship between China and Central and Inner Asia, including those parts of Central and Inner Asia which are now considered by the Chinese to be part of China, in other words Tibet, Xinjiang and Mongolia. There had been studies in Russia, but this book really covered the topic from a completely different angle. It was also based both on academic study and Lattimore’s experience in China because he had travelled widely in China, Mongolia and Xinjiang, partly as a result of his job which involved trading between those different parts of China. So it was a combination of academic study and his experience on the ground, a combination that I consider to be extremely important.

What does the book offer people who want to know more about the Uyghurs’ relationship with China?

Well what it really does is to trace the relationship between what can be broadly called the agricultural societies of China proper and the nomadic steppe societies of Inner Asia. The book looks at them as a totality, in a way that hasn’t since been repeated. Lattimore’s most important contribution is that he demonstrates that the conflicts and problems that exist between China and its Inner Asian frontiers today are nothing new and that they go back at least to the 1930s and in fact much further back than that. He divides his study into two. In the first part he looks at the historical background going right through Chinese history from the earliest periods. Some of the details that he presents may be considered irrelevant today, scholars of different periods will wish to query his interpretations and will want to update the account. The second half of the books focuses on the constituent regions of Inner Asia and analyses them in turn but it is the fact that he deals with the whole region as one that is rather unusual.

Your second book is Lattimore’s - Pivot of Asia: Sinkiang and the Inner Asian Frontiers of China and Russia. What does it add to the first?

Well whereas Inner Asian Frontiers examines the whole Inner Asian region from Manchuria right round to Tibet, Pivot of Asia concentrates on the question of Xinjiang which was thought in the 1940s and 1950s to be one of the most significant issues in Asian geopolitics. It’s very interesting that it then lost prominence and people stopped thinking about the region until the 1980s or 1990s. But the question of who really controlled Xinjiang in the 1930s and 1940s occupied the minds of many analysts of Asia. And what Owen Lattimore was able to do then was to assemble a team based in the United States and look at not only the political history of the Xinjiang region, but also its demography, ethnic make-up and the economy. It gives us a clear picture of what Xinjiang was like before the Chinese Communist Party came to take control of it in 1949 and that again reinforces my idea that we shouldn’t look at the current conflict in Xinjiang as a very recent event: it is essential to consider the historical background to begin to understand the reasons behind it.

And what does the book show that the reasons for it are?

Pivot of Asia reveals a complex and divided society in which there were tensions between the different Muslim communities in addition to a distance from, and disdain for, the central government of China by all, including many local Han residents. By 1949 Xinjiang had undergone its own revolutionary changes which included attempts by Uyghurs and Hui Muslims to establish their own administrations. These were only partly successful and this unfinished business was inherited by the CCP in 1949 which attempted to resolve it according to its own principles.

And what was Xinjiang like before 1949?

It was a poor, underdeveloped region, remote from the major centres of power, whether in China or in Central Asia. During the Republican era, which is the period between 1911 and 1949, it was considered to be part of China but as the Republic disintegrated, because of civil war between warlords and the occupation by the Japanese, it gradually became more and more independent, initially under its own warlord governors who were of Han Chinese origin. However, towards the end of the Republican period the Muslim population, both the Uyghurs and the Hui - that is the Chinese speaking Muslims - gradually began to play a greater role in local politics. There were two independent regimes, the first in the southern Xinjiang city of Kashgar in the 1930’s: this was initially an independent Uyghur government, but it was overthrown by the warlord armies of the Chinese speaking Hui.