As China's mass-internment camps for ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang gain global attention, scholars and journalists are developing an appreciation for the enormous amount of text that authorities in Xinjiang produce for local public consumption. Over the last two years, for example, Adrian Zenz has pioneered the study of public recruitment notices for security personnel and tenders for the construction of internment facilities. Other scholars, journalists, and activists have scoured the Chinese-language Internet for local officials’ own proud announcements about “educational transformation” activities and their associated internment camps, often providing the factual basis for reports on the front pages of the world's most prominent newspapers. As important as these uses of public texts have been, Frederick De Jong's new book Uyghur Texts in Context shows us that they only scratch the surface. De Jong's contribution promises to substantially widen scholars’ understanding of what public texts can tell us about life in Xinjiang (or anywhere in China, for that matter), as well as chronologically deepen our access to the textual public sphere in that region.
De Jong presents, translates, and analyzes a selection of publicly displayed texts that he collected in Xinjiang from 2008 to 2010. These are drawn from his larger corpus of documents from 2008 to 2013, collected variously in physical and photographic form and now housed at Leiden University Library under call number Or.27.171. The bulk of the book comprises 126 selected texts presented in the original Uyghur with facing-page English translations. These are preceded by a substantial (ninety-four-page) introductory section that analyzes the texts and situates them in a broader social, political, and cultural context. Both texts and contextualization are organized into fourteen themed chapters, addressing topics such as family planning, the floating population, law and regulations, healthcare, religious policy, and the aftermath of the July 5, 2009, protests-turned-riots.
The documents that De Jong has chosen offer some surprises even for specialists in the study of Xinjiang. One is that local authorities in Xinjiang seem to have taken official claims about penetration by Hizb ut-Tahrir, a transnational political organization devoted to the establishment of an Islamic caliphate, much more seriously than was previously recognized. Hizb ut-Tahrir has been a target of anti-Islamist policies in former-Soviet Central Asia, and in 2008 Chinese officials asserted that the organization was present in Xinjiang. But it is only through De Jong's sources that we discover that local authorities propagated fears of the organization widely in publicly posted notices and regulations, where “Izbot,” as they called the group in Uyghur, makes remarkably frequent appearances. Another intervention is De Jong's emphasis on the market for audiobooks, which, despite a growing interest in Uyghur literature of the last three decades, has gone largely unremarked in the scholarly literature.
De Jong's contextualization section will be enough for the casual reader to absorb most of these contributions, but the originals are worth close attention. They provide immediate access to a thought-world previously inaccessible to the non-Uyghur speaker, expressing powerfully the state's warped view of Uyghur culture as essentially dangerous, in need of a mature guiding hand. It is a view that Uyghurs must confront daily as they navigate streets cluttered with such official notices.
In effect, the focus on publicly posted texts makes this a study of state-Uyghur relations, leavened occasionally with indirect evidence of consumption habits, in the form of advertisements. De Jong is well aware of the implications of such a distinctive source base, and he provides insightful reflections on the evidentiary value of the collected documents, based in his own ethnographic experience in Xinjiang. He notes, for example, the fact that many government texts are virtually ignored by their intended Uyghur audience, as well as the counter-intuitive educational power of some texts, as in the case of prohibitions on certain kinds of religious practices, prohibitions that actually serve to teach readers about purportedly subversive possibilities they could not have otherwise imagined.
The translations are literal yet readable, conveying accurately the ponderousness of official-ese and the hyperbole of consumer-oriented advertisements. De Jong's frequent citations of foreign political and activist organizations as sources of factual information about Chinese policy, most notably citations of the Falun Gong–associated Epoch Times, add little to the informational breadth of the analytical section while undermining the objectivity and caution that otherwise pervades the book. Ultimately, however, he hews closely to the evidence of the texts he has reproduced and translated, texts that paint a disturbing portrait of the early stage of China's turn to a racially targeted micromanagement of Uyghur thought and action.
The situation in Xinjiang has changed so dramatically in the last few years that De Jong's book is already very much a historical work, though its sources were collected in their own time. At the moment, research that involves personal interaction with Uyghurs inside Xinjiang is all but impossible to carry out ethically, as conversations with foreign scholars and journalists put Uyghurs at risk of arbitrary imprisonment. Uyghur Texts in Context demonstrates the value of an alternative form of on-the-ground field research. The documents De Jong has collected speak to issues that are widely known to Uyghurs but rarely discussed openly—who would dare publicly mention, for example, Hizb ut-Tahrir? And it shows how valuable public texts have been all along, documenting the spiraling expansion of totalitarian policies in Xinjiang. As scholars and journalists grapple with the emergence of open cultural reengineering and mass, extrajudicial interment in Xinjiang, De Jong's crucial insight—that a massive archive of state control of its minority subjects has been hiding in plain sight—will provide indispensable documentation of the policies that led to the tragedies of the present.
