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From domestic to international: the politics of ethnic identity in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Enze Han
Enze Han*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Dominican University, River Forest, Illinois, USA
*
*Email: ehan@dom.edu
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Abstract

This paper examines two contrasting cases of ethnic-group political activism in China – the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the Mongols in Inner Mongolia – to explain the former's political activism and the latter's lack thereof. Given similar challenges and pressures, how can we explain the divergent patterns in these two groups’ political behavior? This paper forwards the argument that domestic factors alone are not sufficient to account for differences in the groups’ political behavior. Instead, international factors have to be included to offer a fuller and satisfactory explanation. The paper illustrates how three types of international factors – big power support, external cultural ties, and Uighur diaspora community activism – have provided opportunities and resources to make the Uighur political activism sustainable. In Inner Mongolia, its quest for self-determination reached the highest fervor in the early half of the twentieth century, particularly with the support of imperial Japan. However, since the end of WWII, Inner Mongolia has not received any consistent international support and, as a result, has been more substantially incorporated into China's geopolitical body.

Keywords

UighursMongolsXinjiangInner MongoliaChinaethnic politics in Chinainternational dimension of ethnic politics
Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 39 , Issue 6 , November 2011 , pp. 941 - 962
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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