Re-marking Xinjiang

Abstract This article examines three films made by the Urumqi-based Tianshan Film Studio spanning four decades, from the 1960s to the 1990s. These films encapsulate the discursive shifts surrounding Xinjiang's incorporation into the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. The article demonstrates that while the Maoist paradigm of narrating the PRC as a brand-new socialist state participating in a world revolution engendered a film that shows the Uyghurs as agentic peasants under the revolutionary pedagogy of the Han in bettering their society in the 1960s, the 1980s’ relatively liberal cultural policy produced a film that asserts the heterogenous legitimation of the Xinjiang state as consisting of several constituents, including a modern East Turkestan National Army on the eve of the takeover by the People's Liberation Army in 1949. Moreover, a 1995 biopic eulogizing conquistador Wang Zhen (1908–93) as leading an expeditionary campaign to extend the ethnopolitical interests of the Han nation at the behest of none other than Mao himself ushers in a new era of Chinese ethnopolitics, whereby Xinjiang provides the playing field for a Chinese raison d’état that sees the projection and expansion of a majoritarian Han power into non-Han regions as expressions of China's national interest.