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Paper abstract:

Ushering in repression which notionally terminated the mass organization conflict of 1966-1968, the extension of the Cultural Revolution’s Cleansing of the Class Ranks Campaign to the indigenous Eurasian borderlands of the People’s Republic of China has been under-researched. This paper seeks to address this gap, focussing on the pastoral Altay subprefecture of the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang. In Altay, the “Class Ranks” eventually constituted not one campaign, but three, fusing with the national One Strike, Three Antis of early 1970 and a hitherto-unstudied regional campaign of pastoral classification aiming to fold Xinjiang’s indigenous Kazakh pastoralists into the Maoist organizational system of class labeling for the first time.

This paper makes two core arguments. Firstly, it integrates existing historiography and political science on the grassroots articulation of Chinese mass campaigns to argue that the rollout of these interlocked movements in pastoral Xinjiang was multileveled and contingent. Altay’s historical experience was contoured by processes at the Beijing (central), Ürümchi (regional), prefectural, and county levels, alongside international Sino-Soviet tension, pulling campaign tempo, acceleration, and deceleration in different directions at different times. The stop-start dynamics that these interactions engendered exacerbated political violence in an unstable non-Han region on the frontline of the Sino-Soviet split. Secondly, this paper draws on a critical theoretical reading of the relationship between temporality and ideology from 1966-1976 to introduce the concept of “temporal struggle” in analysis of the Cultural Revolution. Attempting to fully cleave “New China” from the “Old Society”, through severing relationships between the past and the present, temporal struggle in Chinese Central Asia prompted the abandonment of residual conciliatory state policies towards Altay’s indigenous pastoralists, while the once-historicized caricature of the malign Kazakh “herdlord” was revived as a target for comprehensive elimination from New China.

This interdisciplinary paper constructs its narrative by integrating limited extant Cultural Revolution-era press and documents with a series of post-1976 county, prefecture, and regional annals and Communist Party of China official histories. It consequently represents an example of historical research undertaken via critically examining the Chinese party-state’s own official documentary record, and contends that this remains a viable methodology with which to research sensitive events and indigenous territories where direct research access for scholars is otherwise extremely restricted.

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Paper abstract:

In 1935, The Central Asian Soviet Republics for the first time filled their cotton quotas ahead of schedule by delivering 1,500,000 tons. With the onset of World War Two, the need for cotton continued to grow exponentially, along with the need to "educate" and stimulate the masses on producing higher cotton yields. In his 1943 meeting with Uzbek writers, the first Secretary of UzSSR, Usman Yusupov, called for new poems, essays, paintings, and films directed to stimulating cotton production and cotton quota fulfillment. This paper analyzes some of the most ubiquitous postwar cotton propaganda tools in UzSSR, from WWII to the Brezhnev era, by looking at various forms of artistic production, from the film strip titled "Pakhta-oy" (Little Cotton) and Uzbek poems hailing the most prominent cotton pickers, to an annual Pakhta-Bairam cotton harvest festival and popular cotton-themed tableware.

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Paper abstract:

One of the resonant (significant) political events in the USSR in the early 1980s was the so-called "cotton case" in which the majority of the leadership of Uzbekistan was convicted. Along with them, their close relatives were brought to criminal punishment. Collective farm chairmen, foremen, and directors of cotton factories were also subjected to criminal penalties.

1. In the archival funds of Uzbekistan there are facts that prove that false reporting was a characteristic phenomenon of the Soviet planned economy. For example, in Soviet Uzbekistan, even during the period of strict totalitarian rule (in the second half of the 1940s and early 1950s) by Stalin, there was false reporting, although not on such a large scale as it was in the 1970s-1980s.

2. After the fall of the USSR, some former leaders of the republic (Radzhabov, Usmankhodzhaev, A. Odilov, and others) in their memoirs and interviews tried to clear themselves, pointing out that the criminal prosecutions against them were fake and fabricated, and that they were tortured by investigators like Gdlian, Ivanov and their investigation team was forced to recognize themselves as leaders..

There are facts that reveal the participation of the leadership of the republic in the falsification of figures of cotton and corruption. It should be noted that the heads of some ministries of the USSR also participated in the corruption scheme associated with the “cotton case”.

3. In the post-Soviet national historiography, the cotton case is considered a political campaign by Moscow, and it was fabricated by the leadership of the USSR to humiliate the honor and dignity of Uzbekistan and the Uzbek people. However, many Uzbek researchers keep silent about the economic crimes committed by the Uzbek leadership of the highest, middle, and lower levels, and they were convicted according to the Soviet laws in force.

4. In my interviews with numerous people who took various positions and were related to the "cotton case", I found that some of the leaders of Uzbekistan, especially the top and middle managers, deliberately went for false reporting of cotton. At the same time, they pursued their personal interests: for fake implementation of the cotton harvesting plan, these leaders received medals and various government awards, and they also considered false reporting as a way of personal enrichment. .

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Paper abstract:

This paper examines the discursive positioning of animal husbandry (چارۋىچىلىك) as a modern sector of the economy and society by Uyghur-language state newspapers in Xinjiang during the mid-late 1950s. At first glance, the more extensive forms of animal husbandry practiced across much of Xinjiang seem at odds with an early-PRC-era vision of development that is often understood as above all else emphasizing industry and grain-based agriculture. Nonetheless, Uyghur-language state newspapers such as the Xinjiang Géziti and Kashgar Géziti rendered animal husbandry as a not-so-distant third important modern industry through such discursive techniques as interpreting husbandry work as production (ئىشلەپچىقىرىش), the reporting of output (livestock numbers) using the same emphasis on exact statistics and year-on-year growth as industry and agriculture, and detailing the importance of science-based veterinary practices and pedigree improvement for Xinjiang’s livestock herds. The newspapers thus applied a modern vocabulary and interpretive framework to animal husbandry to transform it into a modern industry. In so doing, such newspapers also implicitly imbued the multiple environments in which livestock raising occurred—including mountains and grasslands—with the modern, creating a unique form of modernizing discourse with which the province’s many remote, out-of-the-way locales could be incorporated under the umbrella of the modernity-bestowing PRC state and society. The paper therefore offers evidence for the utility of newspaper coverage of animal husbandry and Xinjiang’s remote spaces for understanding the early PRC project in Xinjiang.