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Negotiating Inseparability in China: The Xinjiang Class and the Dynamics of Uyghur Identity. By Timothy Grose. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. 160 pp. ISBN: 9789888528097 (cloth).
Since 1999, the Chinese state has sent thousands of Xinjiang high school students to boarding schools far from their homes in northwest China. Timothy Grose's ethnographic study Negotiating Inseparability in China provides illuminating insight into the goals of this system and how these mostly Uyghur teenagers, the Xinjiang Class, carry its effects through their young adulthood. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over eleven years, Grose shows how the Chinese state has attempted to reshape Uyghur identifications by building a class of model Uyghurs who “love China” and are “dedicated” to the mission of the state (p. 19). He demonstrates how these mostly rural-origin high school students both comply with forms of discipline projected on them by the boarding school system and fashion cosmopolitan subjectivities that are simultaneously Uyghur, Islamic, and Chinese in urban locations in eastern China.
Ultimately, Grose shows how Uyghur students attempt to use the school system to achieve unintended objectives. Many graduates, perhaps the majority, are reluctant to return to Xinjiang and take up roles as police officers, teachers, family planning officials, and other bureaucratic positions in the state project to control Uyghurs. Instead, members of the Xinjiang Class have often leveraged their relatively privileged status as graduates of schools in eastern China to travel abroad and cultivate Islamic identities. As Grose highlights, some...