Making Sense of Uyghur Aspirations: Mobility, Ethnicity, and Everyday Narratives in Shanghai

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of Uyghur migrants in Shanghai. Uyghurs are a Turkic Muslim ethnic minority in China, who live primarily in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region at China’s north-western borderland. In the past decade, public discourse surrounding Uyghurs and Xinjiang has been focused on ethnic nationalism, separatism and terrorism. Under these contexts, my research explores how the deteriorating political situation in Xinjiang and shifting identity politics surrounding Uyghurs are reflected in various aspects of the lives of migrants. The aim of the research is to better understand the tensions Uyghurs encounter in their daily lives in the globally-connected city of Shanghai. The state implementation of the Reform and Opening up Policies (gaige kaifang) in the 1980s ushered in rapid economic development and urbanization in China. Part of these new policies include the relaxation of controls on internal migrations. This has led to increasing numbers of domestic migrants making their way into large cities like Shanghai in pursuit of better education and work opportunities; Uyghurs are part of this trend. My ethnographic research in Shanghai included fifteen months in 2012 to 2013 among Uyghur professionals, business people, university students, workers and street peddlers, as well as local residents and people of other ethnicities. I use depictions of everyday life and narratives of migrants as analytical tools to explore the complexities, ambivalences, and tensions in their lives. By focusing on Uyghurs outside of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, this dissertation provides a unique perspective on encounters between borderland and the inland; the minority and the majority; and on the meeting of cultures, ideas, and lifestyles in China. Perceived images about Uyghurs and majority Han Chinese are reshaped and renegotiated in these encounters; exploring them allows us to reconsider understandings of the relationships among ethnicity, minority, religion, urbanization, globalization and the state in China. I explore Uyghur aspirations in Shanghai as part of a transformative process in which migrants negotiate authoritative state discourse, religious and cultural expectations, and possibilities for socio-economic mobility. The dissertation explores the dynamics of this transformative process through an ethnographic exploration of patterns in new media practice, food consumption and gender perceptions among the migrants. Uyghur are still aspiring to come to inland cities. Uyghur Aspirations toward virtuous, modern and cosmopolitan selves is well captured by the saying: “live like a Uyghur if you are one”. It indicates an idea of Uyghur pride-ghoror (in Uyghur), meaning to be someone who brings honor to the community, by which they also make sense of their often stigmatized minority status, ethnic identities, and continue to aspire to hope for a good life and future. The dissertation argues that virtuousness among Uyghurs is increasingly under pressure due to political changes, migration pressures and an encounter with new cosmopolitan values in the globalizing metropolis of Shanghai. The double political construction of the migrants’ ethnicity, both as Uyghur and xinjiangren (people from Xinjiang), also shapes their experience as migrants in distinctive ways. On the one hand, it signifies their double other status as a “problematic” minority associated by the state and dominant Han Chinese society with terrorism; On the other hand, their ethnicity is viewed positively by the same groups but also commodified through the growing market for Xinjiang/Uyghur food, manifested by increasing number of Xinjiang restaurants in Shanghai and the nearby coastal areas where “exotic” Uyghur dance performance is provided.