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Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the manner in which the Chinese-language Xinjiang Daily’s (新疆日报) articulation of the experience, utilization, and understanding of snow by Urumchi's government bureaus and Han Chinese community reveals the development of a suite of 'official modernities' in Republican-era Urumchi. The Daily's various snow-related articles during this period include coverage of everything from government snow removal campaigns and student snowball fights to military ski training programs, snow-related literature and poetry, and even a late 1940s "coal through the snow" government-sponsored heating campaign on behalf of the city's poorer residents. These articles form a 'discourse of snow' through which a disparate yet connected tangle of developing modernities can be explored, including those shaped by Soviet influence (including mass society and the 'civic citizen'), 'Inner China' (including patriotism, nationalism, and expanded state powers), and those rooted in Urumchi itself (most notably a claiming of Xinjiang as 'home' by the Urumchi Han Chinese community). Through the thematic categories of 'control,' 'mobilization,' and 'home,' I argue that while the sources of such modernities were thus varied, and while alternative visions of modernity persisted outside the Daily’s official discourse, taken together they demonstrate the ascendancy of a 'Chinese modernity' similar in important ways to both that developing in inner China at the same time and to that which would emerge throughout the PRC after 1949—this was a vision of modernity that placed particular emphasis on expanded state powers, a civically engaged citizenry, and control and utilization of the environment for the achievement of political and ideological goals, even as it also encouraged the growth of local forms of identity and place attachment. This paper thus adds to (and links) the separate but important literatures examining modernity, the relationship between environmental control and the modern Chinese state, and the history of Republican-era Xinjiang.