This chapter argues that the institutional dynamics of the autonomous system – centralization and ethnicization – have intensified in the reform era, fueling key sources of ethnic tensions in contemporary China. The driving force has been the decline of class universalism and the rise of identity politics. The chapter shows how these two developments were spurred by early post-Mao policies to redress the leftist excesses of the Mao era, including the “declassing” of minority policy, rehabilitation of former ethnic elites, exit of Han personnel, revival of religion, and accommodation of ethnic customs in law enforcement. These policies have affected the TAR and Xinjiang in particular because of the central government’s greater urgency and efforts to implement them in the two politically sensitive and centrifugal regions. Yet the very end of class universalism and the advent of identity politics have also made it harder for the central state to achieve its goal of better integration. Whereas class universalism was divisive intraethnically, pitting ethnic masses against small groups of ethnic aristocrats, identity politics is divisive interethnically, creating cleavages along ethnic lines.

This chapter continues with the argument that the built-in tensions of the autonomous system, namely centralization and ethnicization, have intensified in the reform era. The focus of this chapter is religious revival in Tibet and Xinjiang. Religion has been a volatile problem in the state’s relationship with the two outer peripheral regions, thanks to its crucial linkage to ethnic and cultural identity. This identity, in turn, can be linked to ethno-nationalism and even separatism. Heightened institutional tensions for ethnic strife have stemmed, on the one hand, from state sponsorship of religious revival, and on the other hand, from state curtailment of its unsanctioned growth. The alternatively facilitating and constraining roles of the state have intensified centralization as well as ethnicization in the religious development of Tibet and Xinjiang, or cycles of state facilitation/control of religion and ethnic backlash. Foremost among this backlash has been increased radicalization, from private madrassas, Wahhabism, “Arabianization,” and “terrorism” in the Uighur case, to self-immolation in the Tibetan case. These have in turn induced state crackdowns, including deradicalization camps.

This chapter explores biographies of Borobudur and other Hindu–Buddhist material remains of the past in Java in the context of widening knowledge networks, religious revivalism, and tourism from within and outside Java, which also stimulated the colonial state to institutionalise archaeological care and protection. Via the visit of King Chulalongkorn of Siam to Borobudur in 1896, and via the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900, it analyses the exchanges of knowledge and objects taking place there. It follows Borobudur’s Buddha statues and other Javanese Hindu–Buddhist objects travelling as gifts along with the king to Siam, where they transformed into objects of popular Buddhism and legitimation of Siam’s Buddhist dynasty. And it follows plaster casts of Borobudur reliefs to France and Britain, exploring parallel heritage dynamics, in Greater Dutch and Greater British Indian geographies. Thanks to the uncovered treasure of a guestbook of Borobudur (1888–1898), and the diary of a Javanese nobleman, they, moreover, broaden the social scope of Borobudur with site impressions of a growing number of visitors to Borobudur, from as far away as the United States and Australia, but also – and mostly – from Java.