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Neo Oasis: The Xinjiang Bingtuan in the Twenty-first Century

Military-agricultural colonies have long been a feature of Chinese frontier policy, but in the late twentieth century the bingtuan underwent an unprecedented transformation of form, function and rhetorical justification that raises questions regarding the contemporary bingtuan’s motives, mechanisms and role models. By examining these questions, this article sets out to determine the role that is being played by the twenty-first century bingtuan, and how it diverges from the militaryagricultural colonies of the past. In 1982 Deng Xiaoping declared that the bingtuan ‘‘should be different from military farms’’ (Seymour, 2000, p. 182), and in 1998 the bingtuan (which translates as Corps) officially became a corporation (a move that I shall term Incorporation). These changes were not simply rhetorical. The bingtuan had by 1999 undergone a series of major structural changes. Whereas in 1954 the organisation was subject to the authority of the XUAR government, by 1999 it had been gradually promoted to the same bureaucratic status as the XUAR government. The bingtuan has occupied expanding areas of Xinjiang since 1954, and the bureaucratic promotion of 1998 effectively made it a ‘‘state within a state’’. Despite these changes, Chinese and Western authors continue to refer to the twenty-first century bingtuan as little removed from Dynastic era forms of militaryagricultural colony. Within this discourse, there is an assumption that the bingtuan of 1954 is the same organisation as the bingtuan of 2005. James Seymour says that the bingtuan ‘‘should be thought of as an institution designed to carry on a twothousand year-old policy in central Asia’’ (2000, p. 188). The State Council issued a White Paper on Xinjiang in 2003, stating that the bingtuan’s historical origins are Han dynasty policies of stationing troops to reclaim wasteland and defend the