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Abstract

This paper proposes an investigation about the PRC household registration and passport systems as part of a larger toolkit of ethnic control in modern China. I demonstrate that domestic (hukou) and international (passport) migration policies from the late-1950s constituted a form of state control that transformed the cultures, social hierarchies, and economics of borderland ethnic communities. While ample scholarship has broached the topics of Chinese frontier history and ethnic policy, those that mention regulation of migration as an aspect of ethnic control do not consider the tenets of the law and its historic evolution as a tool that coincided with other policies and forms of borderland ethnic control in the PRC’s history. Thus, the central question I pose is: “How has migration policy been deployed as a tool by the PRC state to shape the social, economic and political lives of non-Han ethnic groups, specifically those of Inner Asia’s Turkic Uyghur, Tibetan, and Mongol peoples, and how do they relate to other control mechanisms during Mao Era PRC?”

Utilizing English-, Chinese-, Russian- and Uyghur-language primary and secondary sources, my paper seeks to provide a fresh migratory lens to the overall discussion of borderland ethnic control in the PRC’s modern history. My primary sources include original texts of PRC passport and hukou law, 1950s/1960s missives between Tibetan and Indian government authorities, PRC government white papers and internal memos, Soviet-PRC diplomatic cables in the original Chinese texts, Kazakh SSR presidential archives in the original Russian text, and first-hand accounts from Uyghur, Tibetan, and Mongol individuals from the PRC provided by various ethnographic studies and fieldwork in Central Asia.

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Abstract

More than a hundred years have passed since the tragic events of 1916, known as Urkun. In the summer of 1916, the peoples of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan rebelled against the Russian Empire. But the uprising was quickly suppressed by the authorities. The actions of the military forces of the empire provoked the exodus of the population of then Turkestan to the territory of modern China. It is widely known about three main routes by which people left their lands, pursued by punitive detachments

However, despite a sufficient amount of material, until now there have been no detailed maps that would mark which routes people fled and which settlements on the Chinese side they reached.

This paper is based on the tremendous work done by Gulzada Abdaliyeva in collecting and processing international archival materials and materials collected on ethnographic expeditions to China. On the basis of these materials, using modern geoinformation systems, maps were created that show in maximum detail the path from where the people of Kyrgyzstan fled in those years and where they came.

We hope that the results of this joint work will be of interest to both professional historians and a wide audience

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Abstract

Bazaars and caravanserais of the Turkestan Governorship-General: ethnic composition of merchants and handicraftsmen

The ethnic composition of the traders and handicraftsmen of the bazaars and caravanserais of the Turkestan Governorship-General, represented by local and alien, merchants and traders, as well as a large army of participants in the purchase, sale, exchange, intermediaries and money changers, has not been fully studied. Thus, researchers of the colonial and Soviet periods, as well as Uzbek and foreign historians, limited themselves mainly to covering the trade and economic activities of a particular ethnic group. Interesting facts and information about the trade and economic activities of local Muslim peoples such as Sarts, Kyrgyz (the common name of Kazakhs in the literature of the colonial period - mine) and Tajiks are given in the works by Uzbek and Russian authors. Foreign authors also often mentioned in their works the representatives of local and alien Muslim peoples involved in the trade and economic activities of the traditional trading institutions of the region.

This study examines and summarizes information about the ethnic origin and specificity of occupations of a particular nationality/ethnic group of participants in economic activity in bazaars and caravanserais, as well as the role and degree of influence on society as a whole in the Turkestan Governorship-General in the second half of the 19th - early 20th century. The provisions and conclusions of this article are based on archival materials and works of authors of the period of the Russian Empire, the Soviet period and the period of Independence, as well as studies by foreign, primarily English-speaking authors of the 19th -21st centuries.

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The paper explores one of the darkest pages of the history of the Polish and Korean peoples linked to their deportations from the Far East in 1937, from Ukraine in 1936, and in 1940-1941 to Kazakhstan. We critically analyze and compare the experiences of the uprooted Poles and Koreans in Kazakhstan, their marginalization, dehumanization, and cultural assimilation. The central argument of the study is that the deportation of Poles and Koreans from their historical homeland was carried out based exclusively on their ethnicity. The major goal of the current study is not the thorough historical analysis of the genesis, evolution, main stages, and outcome of the Polish and Korean deportation to Kazakhstan, but rather how those Poles and Koreans who were forcible removed from their homelands were subjected to dehumanization, marginalization, as well as how they experienced collective suffering, national trauma, identity crisis, cultural and linguistic loss, and cultural assimilation. We argue that the real intention of the Soviet regime’s genocidal policy was not confined only to the collective punishment and extermination of Poles and Koreans as a distinct ethnic group, but the regime also sought to subject the deported Poles and Koreans to slave labor exploitation for profit and to forced Russification. The assumption here is that Poles and Koreans were uprooted from their homelands not only for extermination, but also the Soviet regime considered Poles and Koreans to be an important component of its nation building project and their assimilation into Russian-dominated society was on the totalitarian regime’s agenda. We deploy the concepts of ethnicization and racialization as a theoretical underpinning of the study to further deepen our analysis and indicate how ethnic identities of Poles and Koreans were racialized. The study draws upon archival sources and the existing literature on the history of deportation in the Soviet Union, specifically we increasingly focus on Polish and Korean deportees’ collective and individual experiences who went through horrendous dehumanization and brutalization in exile in Kazakhstan.