Negotiating Inseparability in China: The Xinjiang Class and the Dynamics of Uyghur Identity. By Timothy Grose. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. 160 pp. ISBN: 9789888528097 (cloth)

ISBN: 9789888528097 (cloth). Since 1999, the Chinese state has sent thousands of Xinjiang high school students to boarding schools far from their homes in northwest China. While the Xinjiang Class system is less overtly coercive, Grose shows that Chinese state authorities apply both financial incentives and, at the local level, social pressure to induce Uyghur parents to agree to, and at times pursue, forms of family separation that radically change the lives of young teenagers. Since only around 7 percent of Uyghurs graduated from senior high school in Xinjiang in 2010, some parents see the system as a primary means of escaping poverty and oppression that is pervasive in the region. Toddlers are being sent to stay-away “kindness centers,” and elementary school children are being held in dormitories separated from their parents for weeks at a time.4 Although the Xinjiang Class system was framed as a benefit for Uyghurs, and Uyghur students did at times use it as a way of learning to speak Chinese and perform for a Han gaze, its stated goal is to replace the traditional knowledge that Uyghurs carry with them.