Paper abstract:

The 1930s and 1940s witnessed a dizzying series of regime changes in Xinjiang, shifts in the region's political winds that were reflected in the likewise frequently changing political orientation of the Ürümchi-edition Xinjiang Daily ( 新疆日报). Nonetheless, the Daily's local coverage of Ürümchi's own urban environment, city sanitation, and resident hygiene, as well as its discursive representation of the benefits to be derived from modernizing reform in these and other areas, exhibited significant continuity across regimes and despite such overarching political change. And, the Daily was not alone among Xinjiang’s newspapers in its modernizing focus. This paper utilizes the remarkable back-page spread of the April 22,1948 Daily as both an exemplar of the Daily’s long-running ‘discourse of the modern’ and as a case study with which to center a broader examination of newspaper discourses of modernity in other Chinese and Uyghur-language publications from the 1930s and 1940s in Xinjiang. Calling for a 'Large-scale Spring Cleaning', the April 22 Daily emphasized the importance of a variety of state-backed sanitation and hygiene-related matters for Urumqi, from snow removal and street cleaning to public restroom use and household waste disposal. Renewed efforts in such areas, the articles indicated, would improve, reform and modernize Ürümchi's citizenry. Comparison of these April 22, 1948 Daily articles, and the long-running discourse of the Daily regarding modernization that they emblemize, with other Xinjiang newspapers and periodicals of the period demonstrates both consistencies between the vision of modernizing reform exhibited by these different publications with that of the Daily as well as differences through which divergent (albeit still modern) futures for Xinjiang can be glimpsed. Taken as a whole, this comparative analysis argues for the importance of newspaper discourses of modernization in understanding society and politics in 1930s and 1940s Xinjiang as well as in laying the ‘discursive roots’ upon which similar future efforts would be founded.