Uyghur educational elites in China: mobility and subjectivity uncertainty on a life-transforming journey

Abstract

The Xinjiang Interior Class is one of the most influential but controversial ethnic minority-focused educational policies in contemporary China. The policy recruits ethnic minority youth from their northwest homeland and offers them senior secondary education in eastern and central parts of the country. The literature on the policy is flourishing, yet little attention has been paid to spatial contexts outside of school that also significantly contribute to the interethnic politics of the policy. Drawing on interviews (N=16), participant observations, and questionnaire surveys (N=97) with Uyghur students on a train which took them to their new educational world, this article examines what the students felt, thought, perceived and did during the trip, and analyses how these subjective experiences are related to the process of being mobile. This article finds that the train space is a physical space of mobility, but also an affective space, entailing students’ intensive subjectivity experiences: a conflicting sense of eliteness, reinforced sense of self-discipline, and increased place identity to Xinjiang. The article supplements the current literature by presenting the poetics and politics of subjectivity among Uyghur students in a mobile space, further reinforcing the significance of mobility theories in understanding ethnic migration and its politics in China.