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Paper short abstract:

My paper examines how the Sino-Soviet cross-border exchange of ideas and personages and political vicissitudes along the Soviet-Xinjiang border from the 1950s till the 1980s shaped the ways Chinese and Soviet Central Asianists researched the two countries’ Central Asian borderlands.

Paper long abstract:

My paper tells a two-sided story of transnational knowledge production revolving around Chinese and Soviet Central Asia. I examine how the Sino-Soviet cross-border exchange of ideas and personages and political vicissitudes along the Soviet-Xinjiang border from the 1950s till the 1980s shaped the ways Chinese and Soviet Central Asianists researched the two countries’ Central Asian borderlands. I also show how scholars and scholarship, in return, took an active part in borderland politics.

When Chinese communists took over Xinjiang in 1949, they had little expertise in the region. In contrast, Soviet scholars, who inherited Russian imperial scholarly legacy, had a more solid knowledge base of Inner Asia, including Xinjiang, which Stalin considered a Soviet sphere of influence in the 1930s and 1940s. During the Sino-Soviet honeymoon of the 1950s, the Soviets assisted the Chinese in the earliest communist academic establishments in Xinjiang. What the Chinese learned from Soviet experts was a nationality-centered approach to studying multiethnic borderlands. However, the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s physically cut off the transnational scholarly contact, resulting in a divergence in borderland studies between the two countries. In the Soviet Union, the legacy of Russian ethnography and Soviet nationalities policy conditioned the institutionalization of Soviet uigurovedenie (Uyghur Studies). Soviet uigurodedy (Uyghur specialists) found in the Uyghurs an exploitable agent in Sino-Soviet ideological battles over Xinjiang. In China, academic de-Sovietization after the Sino-Soviet split, Sino-Soviet territorial disputes, pre-1949 Chinese intellectual traditions, and post-1978 liberalization merged with the lingering influence of Soviet ethnography and nationalities policy, giving birth to Chinese Borderland Studies (Zhongguo bianjiang yanjiu), institutionalized in 1983.

In this way, I hope to reveal the linkages between two academic schools that have been previously examined partially and separately. I demonstrate how domestic politics and foreign policy of the two countries intertwined in a way that affected both countries’ academic establishments. My study provides a new perspective to examine the Sino-Soviet relations other than the “impact-response” paradigm of the 1950s alliance and the political split in the Cold War context. Moreover, the departure of Chinese borderland studies from the Soviet model reflects a substantial discrepancy between Soviet and Chinese understandings of nationalities, territories, and borderlands, which may have contributed to the two countries’ different historical paths: The Soviet Union collapsed along national lines, while China has consolidated its control over its less ethnicized Central Asian borderland.