REVIEWS
“With Natural Resources and the New Frontier, Kinzley provides a truly transnational and material approach to the history of Xinjiang. This is an outstanding work that gives us new insights on this important region of China, and its argument connects closely with current concerns about China’s position in Central Eurasia and the world.”
— Peter C. Perdue, Yale University
“Placing the pursuit of natural resources at the center of his narrative, Kinzley effectively reframes the development of state power in Xinjiang during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Making expert use of Chinese and Russian archives, Kinzley constructs a revelatory account of the layered history of state formation in Xinjiang. He details how Chinese planners, provincial officials, and foreign powers collaborated to survey and exploit this Eurasian crossroads, transforming its political and socioeconomic geography in the process. The book offers a novel way of thinking about state building and economic development in China’s other borderlands, while shedding important light on the material roots of inequality and interethnic tension in contemporary Xinjiang.”
— Micah Muscolino, University of Oxford
“Kinzley turns material objects—gold, oil, furs—into subjects around which human actors organized their systems of political economy and infrastructure. What did multiple layers of state and nonstate actors do in Xinjiang over the course of the twentieth century that turned this arid and remote interior of Eurasia into an integrated, productive region in the service of neighboring regimes? And what are the accumulated consequences of these various advanced systems of extraction? This is a groundbreaking work that opens up a new page in the study of China and its frontiers.”
— Wen-hsin Yeh, University of California, Berkeley
"Kinzley’s timely book provides an explanation for how and why the Chinese state arrived at these draconian measures. Using a wide array of archival sources from China, Taiwan, the Russian Federation, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Kinzley argues for a layered model of state formation in China’s border regions, with broad applications to the borderlands of the Global South. By focusing on how the push to exploit natural resources altered the cultural geography of the region, Kinzley makes an innovative intervention in modern Chinese history and the creation of its borderlands."
— Shellen Wu, Technology and Culture
"[An] impressive work...[Natural Resources and the New Frontier] seeks to sort out the role of natural resource extraction in the making of Xinjiang as a Chinese frontier province and its incorporation into the Chinese state."
— NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Resources, Competition, and the Layers of the State
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492322.003.0000
[Xinjiang;Republic of China;Qing Dynasty;People's Republic of China;natural resources;ethnicity;Uyghurs]
This introduction lays out the larger framework for the book. It argues for China's weak border policy in the late 19th and early 20th century and points to how that weakness allowed for various powerful neighbors to play a central role in Xinjiang. These neighbors, eager to stake their own claims to the region's resource wealth played a central in shaping the contours of state power and state investment in Xinjiang in ways that continue to resonate.
Chapter 2: Grain, Agricultural Reclamation, and a New Perspective on Production
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492322.003.0001
[reclamation;agriculture;landscape;resources;statecraft;Zuo Zongtang;natural resources;Qing dynasty]
Shortly after the reconquest of Xinjiang by the Qing dynasty in 1878, Qing officials adopted a sweeping land reclamation policy intended to transform this border region into a component part of the empire. The failure of the reclamation campaign in Xinjiang in the 1880s and 1890s prompted Qing officials to adopt new forms of production. Increasingly, they turned toward away from agriculture and toward new forms of state-sponsored production, including mining, herding, and others that appeared capable of settling contested border regions, raising revenue, and transforming "wasteland" into productive landscapes capable of benefiting the state.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 3: Gold, Oil, and the Allure of Foreign Capital
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492322.003.0002
[mining;gold;oil;petroleum;Russian Empire;Qing Dynasty;imperialism]
The consolidation of Russian control in Central Asia in the second half of the 19th century prompted a growing number of Russian explorers and geologists to enter Xinjiang. The discovery of gold in southern Xinjiang by one such explorer prompted a shift in Qing policy. The confirmation of the region's resource wealth by Russian scientists raised the prospect that gold ore would be capable of raising revenues, drawing in immigrant settlers, and transforming "wasteland." The desire to profit off of ores led officials to undertake new state-sponsored mining enterprises. Growing financial shortfalls in the province led to a new effort by Qing officials to reach out to the Russian empire for capital and support for the production of gold, and in the early 1900s, petroleum. Continuing into the years following the 1911 revolution and the founding of the Republic of China, the effort to uncover and exploit various resources serve as the earliest layers of state interest and investment at a handful of sites in northern Xinjiang.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 4: Furs, Pelts, Wool, and the Power of Global Markets
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492322.003.0003
[furs;pelts;infrastructure;Soviet Union;railroads;China;informal empire;roads;highways;nomads]
The emergence of new global markets for furs, pelts, and other products produced by nomadic pastoralists in northern Xinjiang in the early 20th century led to efforts by various actors to assert control over these lucrative goods. Aided by railroad infrastructure constructed in Central Asia in the late 19th century and extended in the 1920s, agents of the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union, became increasingly aggressive in their efforts to control markets for various pastoral products. The lack of effective infrastructural ties connecting Xinjiang to markets in China-proper meant that when a financial crisis wracked the province in the early 1930s, officials reached out to the Soviet Union for material aid. To pay for it, officials in Xinjiang delivered vast quantities of furs, pelts, and other goods. The growing ties between the Soviet Union and provincial leadership in Xinjiang prompted the development of new infrastructural and institutional ties that were built atop the earlier layers lain in the late Qing period. These layers served to connect this erstwhile province more clearly to their neighbors to the west.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 5: Industrial Raw Materials and the Construction of Informal Empire
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492322.003.0004
[Soviet Union;petroleum;oil;tungsten;beryllium;Dushanzi;informal empire;geologists;World War II]
The emergence of a new "closeness with the Soviet Union" policy in the early 1930s helped ensure that Soviet agents had priority access to Xinjiang's resource wealth. Increasingly, as war appeared to loom low on the horizon by the mid-1930s, Soviet economic officials came to be interested less in commodity goods and more in industrial minerals essential for the production of armaments. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Soviet agents aggressively surveyed Xinjiang's deposits of resources like petroleum, tungsten, and beryllium. Building upon earlier surveys and infrastructures, they concentrated their efforts at a small handful of petroleum, tungsten, and rare non-ferrous production sites in northern Xinjiang that were located close to the Soviet border.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 6: Oil, Tungsten, Beryllium, and the Resonances of Soviet Planning
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492322.003.0005
[Soviet Union;People's Republic of China;oil;geology;tungsten;beryllium;World War II;Chinese Civil War;East Turkestan Republic;Three Districts]
The German threat to the Soviet Union in 1942 prompted the provincial governor of Xinjiang to turn away from his Soviet patrons and embrace the Chinese Republic. Chinese officials quickly realized, however, that due to the heavy Soviet investment in Xinjiang in the late 1930s and early 1940s, if they wanted to quickly and inexpensively exploit the region's resource wealth they needed Soviet assistance. As a result, throughout the early 1940s, Chinese leaders were split between a schizophrenic policy of driving out Soviet influence in the province, and reaching out for Soviet help in exploiting Xinjiang's oil and tungsten ore. While Soviets rejected the Chinese requests, they quickly regrouped and helped spearhead a large uprising in the region that established a new regime more amenable to the Soviet Union. Chinese efforts to reach out to the Soviet Union largely failed until the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, when new joint operations were established and lasted into the mid-1950s.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 7: Petroleum, Lithium, and the Foundations of Chinese State Power
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492322.003.0006
[First Five Year Plan;oil;beryllium;lithium;Great Leap Forward;Bingtuan;Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps;Sino-Soviet split;Karamay]
The lofty production targets of the People's Republic of China's First Five Year Plan (1953-1957) created a desperate need for raw materials like petroleum, and various minerals like beryllium, lithium, and tantalum niobium, among others. Increasingly in the 1950s, this demand pushed exploratory efforts in Xinjiang. These efforts, driven by the earlier layers lain around Dushanzi and in the Altay Mountains, led to the discovery of oil at Karamay and new efforts to exploit the high value nonferrous metal ores in northern Xinjiang in particular. The state investments into resource-sites in this region helped transform it into a hub of state power and authority. While the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) led to the aggressive surveying and exploitation of the region, the larger priorities of the state stayed tied to those regions prioritized for production by Soviet state planners and their provincial counterparts in the 1930s.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 8: The Enduring Power of Layers
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492322.003.0007
[Deng Xiaoping;reform and opening;Open the West;One Belt One Road;layered model;oil;inequality;unrest]
The layers lain in northern Xinjiang continued to direct state institutions and investment toward a small handful of sites in the northern half of the province into the 1990s. Chinese Communist Party planners in recent years have undertaken various efforts to redirect funds toward the south and other areas that had long been left off of investment priority lists. These efforts have taken on a greater urgency as ethno-cultural tensions in Xinjiang have bubbled over into a series of violent incidents. Yet. the long-held patterns of directing investment toward the north at the expense of the south has helped create socio-economic inequalities in the province that have proven hard to combat. The chapter ends by extrapolating beyond the case of Xinjiang, revealing how long-term patterns of state investment by multiple actors have helped shape other border regions in China and throughout the global south.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
