Horowitz, Richard S.

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

526 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXVIII, no 76 (novembre-November 2005)KIM, Hodong — Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in ChineseCentral Asia, 1864–1877. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.Pp. xviii, 295.On June 4, 1864, Chinese-speaking Muslims in the old Silk Road city of Kucha roseup and attacked the garrison troops of the Qing Dynasty. Turkic Muslims (todayknown as Uyghurs or Uighurs, a term that did not exist at the time) quickly joinedthe uprising. Within months rebellion had spread across Eastern Turkestan andZungharia. The Qing Empire had lost control of what they called Xinjiang, the NewDominion, which the Qianlong emperor had subdued in the 1750s. In the ensuingyears, a Khotenese official named Ya’qufb Beg united those territories south of theTianshan range and created a Muslim state centered on Kashgar. Ya’qufb Beg’s statelasted for over a decade and signed agreements with Britain, Russia, and the Otto-man empire, until subdued by Qing armies under the command of the prominentChinese official Zuo Zongtang in 1877.Hodong Kim notes that Holy War in China is the first English-language bookfocused on this uprising published since Victorian journalist Demitrius Boulger pub-lished his Life of Yakoob Beg in 1878. This is slightly misleading: in the 1960s and1970s Wen-djang Chu, Lanny Fields, and Immanuel Hsu published studies of theQing suppression of the rebellion. Unlike those earlier works, however, Kim’s bookfocuses primarily on the Muslim protagonists and the state they created. Kim, aKorean scholar trained at Harvard (this is a revision of his 1986 dissertation), hasconsulted materials in an extraordinary range of languages. By using several CentralAsian accounts written in the decades after the collapse of Ya’qufb Beg’s state, aswell as Chinese, Russian, British, and Ottoman records, he has avoided the sinocen-tric bias of previous scholarship, and his work throws an altogether new perspectiveon an important event in nineteenth century Eurasian history.Holy War in China is a political history of the Muslim uprising. Kim begins witha survey of the background of the (often brutal) Qing conquest and of Qing methodsof indirect rule, in which local notables, known as begs, were appointed to officialpositions. He points to the growing problems Qing administrators had with charis-matic Sufi leaders, khwajas, who, free from association with the Qing overlords,formed the centre of Muslim dissent. Kim carefully examines the beginning of therebellion in 1864, apparently a response to rumours that the Qing authorities wereplanning a massacre of the Muslim population and, Kim claims, to excessive taxa-tion. In succeeding chapters the author traces Ya’qufb Beg’s arrival in Kashgar in1865 and swift rise to predominance, examines the organization of the Muslim state,its diplomatic relations with Russia, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire, and finallydescribes the swift collapse of the Muslim state in 1876–1877.For historians of China and Central Asia, Kim offers numerous insights. First, heclearly distinguishes the developments in Qing Central Asia from the earlier upris-ing by Muslims in the Chinese provinces of Shaanxi and Gansu. While the rumoursthat spurred the 1864 Kucha uprising may have been related to the massacres report-edly undertaken by ethnic Chinese militia against Muslims in Shaanxi and Gansu,Histoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXVIII, no 76 (novembre-November 2005)Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 527the new rebellion quickly took on a central Asian character, with Turkic Muslimsjoining their Chinese-speaking coreligionists. The following year Khotenese outsid-ers led by Ya’qufb Beg moved in, seized control from locals, and unified the local-ized rebellions under a single government in Kashgar. Kim’s Ya’qufb Beg is not thecentral Asian adventurer and former dancer of earlier European accounts, but alongtime official in the Khoten khanate, who was sent to try to influence events inKashgar. Only when the Khotenese polity disintegrated did he become an indepen-dent player.According to Kim, the state that Ya’qufb Beg created was organized to maximizethe power of the leader. It used secretaries of low status rather than scions of promi-nent lineages to aid the leader in civil affairs. The rebellion was dominated by new-comers from Khoten rather than locals, and the state was a standing army of 40,000to avoid dependence on tribal forces. Ya’qufb Beg promoted more restrictive policieson social behaviour associated with the enforcement of Islamic law, such as the veil-ing of women and the banning of alcohol, but he also suppressed Sufi leaders whohe evidently believed were a threat to his power.Kim makes a convincing case that the Ya’qufb Beg and his chief diplomatic emis-sary, his nephew Sayyid Ya’qufb Khan, skilfully managed diplomatic affairs, playingoff different powers against each other to maintain autonomy. British officials wereinitially enthusiastic about supporting Kashgar as a buffer against Russian advance,and only slowly realized that it was peripheral to the defence of India and its com-mercial potential was limited. After initially cutting off trade with Russia, Ya’qufbBeg subsequently signed commercial treaties. Thereafter, the Russians, while notenthusiastic, tolerated the Kashgar regime. Kim argues that it is misleading to viewthese events in the framework of the rivalry between Britain and Russia called theGreat Game: “The term easily conjures up the image of Central Asia as a chessboardand the separate political entities as pawns that were manipulated ... the fact is thatKashgaria was not a pawn” (p. 157). Particularly interesting is Kim’s account ofKashgar’s diplomacy with the Ottomans, who were increasingly concerned withtheir role as leaders of the Islamic world. It was the Sublime Porte that offered themost substantial support to Ya’qufb Beg, in return for his acknowledgement of suzer-ainty to the Sultan.Kim’s work has limitations. The complex political and military narrative in sev-eral chapters is sometimes hard to follow, and Kim assumes his readers have someknowledge of Chinese and Central Asian history. The emphasis on politics gives thebook an admirable focus, but it leaves one asking a few questions. For a book thatincludes “holy war” in its title (the title is borrowed from one of the Central Asiansources), Kim gives little attention to the religious aspects of the rebellion. Like-wise, the charismatic nature of Sufi traditions in Central Asian political culturedeserves more discussion. In a different vein, Kim suggests that high taxes were animportant cause of both the initial rebellion and the 1864 uprising and the collapseof the Muslim state a dozen years later, but he offers few specifics. Finally, somereaders will be disappointed that Kim does not use his Muslim sources to explorequestions about Qing massacres of local residents in Xinjiang during the Qing528 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXVIII, no 76 (novembre-November 2005)reconquest, which have been raised in works by Lanny Fields and Owen Lattimore.Nevertheless, Holy War in China is a major contribution, and it will be of interest toscholars of China, central Asia, and nineteenth-century world history.Richard S. HorowitzCalifornia State University, NorthridgeKIRBY, William C. (ed.) — Realms of Freedom in Modern China. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 396.Edited by Harvard University historian William Kirby, Realms of Freedom in Mod-ern China offers 11 closely argued essays on the very general theme of freedom —or its absence — in the modern Chinese experience. This volume is the last of 15produced in the series entitled “The Making of Modern Freedom” (general editor: R.W. Davis), which has traced the emergence of the idea and experience of freedombeginning in early Stuart England, and is the only volume of the series dedicated toa single Asian example (although a previous volume in the series covers both Africaand Asia). China merits inclusion because of its historical and contemporary impor-tance and because of its protracted struggle to achieve political modernity, which,according to China’s detractors, has largely denied the legitimate rights of the Chi-nese people to the same freedoms we enjoy in the West.Indeed, without joining the ranks of “China-bashers”, the contributors to this vol-ume have a hard time locating and clearly describing significant “realms of free-dom”. Some authors (such as Irene Bloom) identify alternative currents of politicalthought that might be rehabilitated (“Confucius himself was not nearly as hostile tothe individual as the Confucianism of the imperial state turned out to be”); others(Madeleine Zelin, Robert P. Weller) discuss realms of relative autonomy that existbeyond the state’s ability to exercise effective control (the late imperial commercialeconomy, local religion past and present). But the theme that dominates this volumeis that of growth of the Party-State over the course of the twentieth century, a Party-State that both carried forward certain imperial prerogatives and added many others,thanks to ideology and technology, in the process severely limiting the expression ofany other sort of freedom. Taiwan’s recent achievement of democracy is one of thevery few success stories recounted here; otherwise, even if groups or individualsmanage to carve out tentative realms of relative autonomy, the Chinese state seemsconsistently to deny any formal claim to an enforceable right to freedom.I do not mean by this that the volume should not be read — quite the contrary.Realms of Freedom in Modern China is a valuable corrective to the work of those(now relatively few) who continue to see China as a totalitarian society, and it is avaluable supplement to scholarship that focuses on Westernized Chinese intellectu-als, their dissenting opinions, and their fate under the Chinese regime (indeed, intel-lectuals, authors, and artists hardly make an appearance in Kirby’s volume). Thequality of the essays is uniformly high, much of the scholarship is new, and the vol-ume deserves to be widely read — even if its title might be somewhat misleading.

Kim, Hodong — Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877

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Kim, Hodong — Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)