Land of Strangers: The Attempt to Turn Muslims into Confucians in Xinjiang

At the end of the nineteenth century, a group of Confucian fundamentalist activists from Hunan province seized control of the government of Xinjiang (East Turkestan), then part of the Qing empire. Those activists engaged in a thirty-year effort to transform the Muslim majority of this region into ideal Confucians, primarily by teaching them Chinese language and intervening in practices of family-making. This talk explores some of the key effects of this project for ordinary people, with an emphasis on its gendered dimensions. The ultimate effect of this Confucian “civilizing project” was not assimilation, of course, but the further solidification of boundaries between communities. This makes the Xinjiang project an interesting example of colonialism in a non-Western imperial context.