Since 1999, the Chinese state has sent thousands of Xinjiang high school students to boarding schools far from their homes in northwest China. Timothy Grose's ethnographic study Negotiating Inseparability in China provides illuminating insight into the goals of this system and how these mostly Uyghur teenagers, the Xinjiang Class, carry its effects through their young adulthood. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over eleven years, Grose shows how the Chinese state has attempted to reshape Uyghur identifications by building a class of model Uyghurs who “love China” and are “dedicated” to the mission of the state (p. 19). He demonstrates how these mostly rural-origin high school students both comply with forms of discipline projected on them by the boarding school system and fashion cosmopolitan subjectivities that are simultaneously Uyghur, Islamic, and Chinese in urban locations in eastern China.
Ultimately, Grose shows how Uyghur students attempt to use the school system to...
