ABSTRACT
In the wake of China’s market reforms introduced in the early 1980s, Uyghurs enjoyed unprecedented freedom for cultural expression. They engaged in the building and restoring of mosques and saintly shrines, revived religious and life-cycle rituals, as well as ethnic crafts and the arts in general. Intellectuals started to produce narratives ranging from fiction and poetry to linguistic and ethnographic celebrations of Uyghur communal identity. State recognition of Uyghur minority status was a prerequisite for these cultural activities. Censorship remained in place, but, at least in the early phase of the reform era, its boundaries were broad and porous enough to allow counter-hegemonic narratives to find their way into print. Challenges to the state’s master narrative were silenced more completely in the early 1990s, notably in historiography (Bovingdon & Tursun 2004: 363–8; Bovingdon 2010: 99–101). However, Uyghur cultural production continued, facilitated in the first years of the new century by a surge in private publishing, in the spirit of the market economy.
