| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation argues that Xinjiang’s human history cannot be fully understood apart from its non-human history. It explores a ‘problematic of environmental modernity’ in the context of Xinjiang, and, through discourse analysis of Chinese and Uyghur-language state newspapers and other elements of state discourse, argues that Xinjiang’s environments served in the twentieth century as a canvas onto which (and with which) modernizers painted their conception of a new, modern society. Thus, in the case of Xinjiang, discourses on the environment were inextricably intertwined with modern human politics and society.The mid-twentieth-century (1930s-1950s) state newspapers that serve as this dissertation’s foundations—from the Xinjiang Daily (Xinjiang Ribao) and Xinjiang Gazette (Shinjang Géziti), to the Kashgar Gazette (Qeshqer Géziti) and Xinjiang Youth (Shinjang Yashliri)—cover one of Xinjiang (and China’s) most important recent time periods. In Xinjiang the form of the modern that was reflected in these newspapers was often experienced as an abrupt and traumatic crisis of identity and community. Xinjiang’s early and mid-twentieth century also saw a dizzying number of political regimes, for which the above newspapers served as both accounts of record and sympathetic, state-linked ‘actors.’ From at least the mid-1930s, all such regimes and their newspapers were deeply involved in the politics of modernization; indeed, and more than any individual ideology, it was the politics of modernization that undergirded change to state and society in Xinjiang during this period. Far from representing a hindrance to the researcher, the state-influenced discourse present in these newspapers is therefore invaluable for uncovering state and societal attitudes regarding the modern, as well as the political, social, and environmental change that such attitudes justified.The seemingly disparate themes and features of Xinjiang’s ‘natural’ environments examined in the body chapters of the dissertation are thus tied together by the modern state-led discourses in which they were enmeshed. Chapter 1 examines the Chinese-language Xinjiang Daily’s coverage of snow in Ürümchi in the 1930s and 1940s, finding the modern state, citizen, and nation present in articles on snow (and post-snow mud) published in the paper. Chapter 2 picks up the story of non-human environments once more in the early PRC, demonstrating that the portrayal of animal husbandry as a modern form of production allowed newspapers to depict Xinjiang’s ‘remote’ regions, peoples, and environments as modern, integral parts of Xinjiang and the nation through a science and statistics-founded discourse of production increase. Chapter 3 examines discourses in Uyghur-language state newspapers regarding non-humans during the early Great Leap Forward, arguing for the Maoist party-state’s broad, deep-rooted engagement with everything from animals to trees to fertilizer in both discourse and action during this critical period. Chapter 4 examines state media discourse on the Heavenly Mountains and Ürümchi River in the 1930s-40s and post-2000 period, tracing the importance of each of these landscape features to Han Chinese travelers, sojourners, and residents as well as to various governments; the chapter also demonstrates the manner in which the Heavenly Mountains were important, officially sanctioned symbols of Xinjiang in both of these periods, while the Ürümchi River became increasingly neglected in both discourse and reality over the course of this nearly century-long span.Consideration of these non-human environments also points toward a major finding of the dissertation: newspaper discourses of modernity positioned Xinjiang’s natural environments not just in a local context, but also in broader regional, national, and global contexts. So, for example, snow removal in the 1930s and 1940s was tied to conceptions of modern citizen and state formed through influences from China, the Soviet Union, and even more distant locales; the Heavenly Mountains became representative not just of Xinjiang but of the Chinese nation; even early PRC newspaper depictions of Xinjiang’s distant hinterlands and animal husbandry sector were tied to a Maoist discourse of heroic production inseparable from the broader, centuries-long history of global capitalism. In newspaper discourse, Xinjiang’s unique non-human environments thus became situated in a discursive space in which local and broader influences met and overlapped. This dissertation further demonstrates that the influence of the modern contributed significantly to the dramatic increase in the scale, organization, and homogenization of environmental and human transformation in Xinjiang from at least the 1930s on.In accessing the recent history of Xinjiang through non-human environments, this dissertation contributes new, important insights into both the human and non-human history of Xinjiang. It argues that Xinjiang’s last century (including projects of power) cannot be fully understood without reference to its non-human environments. And, the dissertation provides a compelling methodology for historians of the environment to ‘speak to’ historians working in other fields, arguing for increased attention to the discursive techniques whereby local landscapes and non-humans are turned into doppelgangers of global ideologies, as well as to the human and environmental effects of such transformations. In twentieth-century Xinjiang, humans and non-humans could be separated neither from one another nor from the influence of the modern. | en_US |
