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.