IAAS Lecture by Dr. Joshua Freeman *POSTPONED*

Date: 

Monday, March 23, 2020, 2:00pm to 3:15pm

Location: 

CGIS South Building, Room S153, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge MA 02138

Inner Asian and Altaic Studies Lecture by Joshua Freeman (PhD '19), Lecturer and Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.

This Time It Will Be Different: Chinese State Discourse in Xinjiang, 1936-1957

Abstract: The lecture will focus on parallels in the way successive Chinese-led administrations in Xinjiang—warlord, Guomindang, and Communist—attempted to improve relations with the province's Muslim majority. Specifically, the lecture will demonstrate that these three profoundly different governments ended up using remarkably similar claims and language to insist that preceding Chinese rulers of Xinjiang had been unjust, but that the new administration was enlightened and would prove beneficial to the province's Muslim communities. These parallels, I will argue, show that Chinese governance strategies in mid-century Xinjiang were often determined more by local inter-ethnic relations than by overarching state ideology.