ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how national communities are produced and negotiated in multi-ethnic regions where conflicts over community boundaries are present. It analyses how communities are symbolically constructed in overlapping, conflicting ways by both states and individuals. The chapter shows how official Chinese party-state discourses on modernisation and bilingual education in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region seek to produce the boundaries of and order the meanings attributed to the national and the ethnic. Bilingual education has largely replaced the parallel system of minkaohan and minkaomin schooling. Minkaohan and minkaomin refer to examination in Mandarin Chinese and examination in a minority language respectively but are also popularly used as categories to denote individuals who have undergone these forms of schooling. The chapter presents a discourse analysis of how the literature of the party-state imagines Xinjiang's position within China as a national community. It also explores the officially articulated relationship between ethnic identity and national community in Xinjiang.
