Year of Award

2009

Document Type

Thesis - Campus Access Only

Degree Type

Master of Arts (MA)

Degree Name

Geography

Department or School/College

Department of Geography

Committee Chair

Jeffrey Gritzner

Commitee Members

Ulrich Kamp, Terry Weidner

Abstract

China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is a province of challenging topography, extreme aridity, and limited water sources. The central problem that this study examines lies in the impact of modern industrial development upon centuries-old farming and grazing traditions practiced by Xinjiang’s indigenous people. Through an interdisciplinary methodology including historical, ethnographic, quantitative, and qualitative accounts, this study’s corpus of data includes pre-industrial observations from fifteen Western and Chinese researchers along with historical research, contemporary news reports, and peer-reviewed journals. This study’s results show that Turkic-speaking tribes now known as the Uyghurs, as well as other Central Asian and non-Chinese populations, maintained an indigenous presence in the region as early as the first-century B.C. and absorbed numerous external religious, cultural, and political influences since then. These groups maintained a pre-industrial economy based upon indigenous practices of farming, grazing, and regional trade, and adapted to environmental challenges through agricultural techniques including: the construction and maintenance of underground aqueduct systems, seasonal crop rotation, diversified farming, and commerce with other Central Asian regions to the west though centuries-old trade routes now known as the silk road. However, aridity, shrinking pasturelands, and tribal conflict constrained these efforts. China’s progressive industrialization in the twentieth century led to a rapidly- increased commercial development campaign by the year 2000, called the Go West campaign. The Go West campaign transformed Xinjiang through the rapid in-migration of non-indigenous Han-Chinese and expansion of industrial infrastructure and production. As this study concludes, the campaign worsened both the ecological and social constraints that challenged farming, agriculture, and trade in the pre-industrial era. Industrialization displaced the existing economy and exacerbated these constraints through rapid Han-immigration, imbalanced growth and development, water depletion, administrative dysfunction, and by creating social unrest and domestic instability.

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© Copyright 2009 James Robert Harper