Xinjiang: China's Muslim Far Northwest (Durham East Asia Series)

Xinjiang – China’s Muslim Far Northwest Xinjiang, the nominally autonomous region in China’s far northwest, is of incr...

Author: Michael Dillon

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Xinjiang – China’s Muslim Far Northwest

Xinjiang, the nominally autonomous region in China’s far northwest, is of increasing international strategic and economic importance. With a population which is mainly non-Chinese and Muslim, there are powerful forces for autonomy, and independence, in Xinjiang. This book provides a comprehensive overview of Xinjiang. It introduces Xinjiang’s history, economy and society, and above all outlines the political and religious opposition by the Uyghur and other Turkic peoples of Xinjiang to Chinese Communist rule. Michael Dillon is Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese History and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Durham. His books include China’s Muslims and China’s Muslim Hui Community: Migrations, Settlements and Sects. He is a frequent commentator on Chinese and Asian affairs for the BBC and other international broadcasters.

Durham East Asia Series Edited from the Department of East Asian Studies University of Durham

The Book of Changes (Zhouyi) Bronze Age document translated with introduction and notes Richard Rutt (1996) Strengthen the Country and Enrich the People The reform writings of Ma Jianzhong (1845–1900) Paul Bailey (1998) China: a Historical and Cultural Dictionary Michael Dillon (1998) Korea: a Historical and Cultural Dictionary Keith Pratt and Richard Rutt (1999) State Formation in Korea Historical and archaeological perspectives Gina L. Barnes (2001) China’s Tibet Policy Dawa Norbu (2001) Xinjiang – China’s Muslim Far Northwest Michael Dillon (2004)

Xinjiang – China’s Muslim Far Northwest

Michael Dillon

First published 2004 By RoutledgeCurzon 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group # 2004 Michael Dillon All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-16664-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-40875-6 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–32051–8 (Print Edition)

Contents

List of plates Preface Acknowledgements Map: Northwest China

vii ix xiii xv

PART I

Introduction to Xinjiang

1

1 Xinjiang’s geographical position

3

2 Xinjiang before 1949: a historical outline

8

3 Ethnic groups in northwest China on the eve of CCP control and Uyghur language and culture in twentiethcentury Xinjiang

23

4 The Three Districts Revolution and ‘peaceful liberation’: the CCP takes political and military control

32

5 The economy of Xinjiang in the reform and opening era

37

PART II

Turkic opposition and CCP response

49

6 Political and religious opposition to Han Chinese control (1949–1996): cultural, nationalist and Islamist

51

7 Beijing’s response to opposition in Xinjiang (1980–1996)

72

8 Political leadership in Xinjiang during the People’s Republic

77

vi

Contents

9 ‘Strike Hard’: the long hot summers of 1996 and 1997 10 Underground ﬁres: the conﬂict continues

84 110

PART III

The changing international context

131

11 New great games in Central Asia: Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan

133

12 China and the newly independent Central Asian republics

142

13 Xinjiang and the ‘war against terror’

156

PART IV

Conclusion

163

14 Xinjiang in the twenty-ﬁrst century

165

Notes Bibliography Index

170 189 196

Plates

The following plates appear between pages 48 and 49 1 2 3 4(a)(b) 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14(a)(b) 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Department store in Urumqi Outside the main mosque in Urumqi Religious book stall at the Urumqi mosque Modern cityscapes, Urumqi Pharmacy in Urumqi with sign in Uyghur and Chinese Traditional Uyghur herbalist Uyghur craftsman working at home in Kashghar Uyghur woman fully veiled in Kashghar Traditionally veiled women in Kashghar Police and local people resting outside the Id Gah mosque in Kashghar Wood turners in Kashghar Police and sheep dealer in Kashghar Mosque in the centre of old Kashghar Id Gah mosque in Kashghar Great Western Bridge mosque in Kashghar Military and civilian clothing shop in Yining/Ghulja Military and civilian suppliers in Yining/Ghulja Deng Xiaoping promoting the development of Xinjiang Mule carts are still the most common form of transport in Yining/ Ghulja Mosque in Yining/Ghulja Poster in Yining/Ghulja: ‘Let the world know Xinjiang – Let Xinjiang move towards the world’ Modern mosque in Turfan

Preface

There has been no comprehensive study of Xinjiang in English since 1950 when Pivot of Asia: Sinkiang and the Inner Asian Frontiers of China and Russia was published. The main author of Pivot of Asia was Owen Lattimore but the book was based on a major research programme carried out at the Page School of International Affairs, Johns Hopkins University by a distinguished team of scholars, which included specialists on the languages, history and cultures of China, Russia and the Turkic societies of Central Asia. An up-to-date survey of the same breadth and depth is long overdue but a number of factors have convinced me that there is an urgent need to make background information and analysis on the conﬂict in the region more widely available. These factors are the escalation of ethnic tension and armed resistance to Chinese rule in the 1990s; the deterioration of the situation in what is now commonly referred to as China’s most turbulent or restive region since the onset of the ‘Strike Hard’ campaign of the summer of 1996; and ﬁnally the potential instability in Central and Inner Asia as a result of the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001 and the changing balance of power in the region. It is essential that there is better understanding of both the plight of the Uyghurs and other non-Han Chinese residents of Xinjiang, and the choices that the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang and Beijing are compelled to make in order to deal with what they consider to be their national interests. My approach to the Xinjiang question is intended to be as balanced and as objective as possible but this is not an easy task, even for a disinterested outsider, given the extreme partisanship of the protagonists and the depth of disagreement about the issues. Documentary sources from both the ofﬁcial Chinese press and opponents of Chinese control have been used in this study, but both sides have clearly deﬁned and opposing political agendas and it is often extremely difﬁcult to evaluate the evidence that is available. To some of those most deeply involved in the politics of the region, the choices for the future are stark: Xinjiang must either remain a fully integrated region of China, albeit with token autonomy, or it must become a completely independent non-Chinese state. However other approaches such as genuine autonomy within a federal and decentralised China have been suggested and it may be that a solution along these lines could be part of the answer to the conﬂict. I am aware that those who support the policies of

x

Preface

the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) towards Xinjiang will consider that I am far too sympathetic to separatism. Conversely, supporters of an independent Xinjiang may well be disappointed that I have often bent over backwards to explain Beijing’s point of view fairly. The Xinjiang issue is a complex one, partly because of the geographical position of the region, poised as it is between the Chinese, Turkic and Russian worlds, and partly because of the tortuous history from which present day Xinjiang has emerged. In an attempt to do justice to this complexity, I have tried to cover a considerable range of topics, straying, I am sure, beyond whatever professional competence I may have. I have tried to set the most recent developments in their historical and geographical contexts, but have then ranged over matters relating to language, culture, religion, economics, politics and international relations. Specialists in any of these ﬁelds will almost certainly ﬁnd shortcomings but I ﬁrmly believe that a work of synthesis, which is the aim of this book, is of value in itself. When the question of separatism and cultural and political nationalism within the boundaries of the People’s Republic of China is raised, it is usually Tibet that comes to mind. The precarious state of Tibetan culture, religion and society and the concerns about its survival have rightly attracted world-wide attention, and this makes it all the more surprising that the predicament of the Tibetans’ near neighbours to the north, the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs of Xinjiang, has not merited the same sympathy. Mongol culture and national aspirations in Inner Mongolia (or Southern Mongolia as some Mongolian nationalists call it) have also been underestimated in the West, but there must inevitably be some suspicion that, because the Uyghurs are Muslims, with varying degrees of piety it is true, there is far less sympathy for them in the West than for other minorities in China at a time when some analysts assume that irreconcilable differences between Western and Islamic civilisations are likely to lead to serious global conﬂict. The amount of published information on the politics and society of Xinjiang is still very small and what is available often does not contain the kind of information that a serious student of the issue requires. For example the twovolume work, Xinjiang’s 50 Glorious Years (Xinjiang huihuang 50 nian), published under the auspices of the local CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and government in 1999, runs to over 1,000 pages of text and tables but gives virtually no details of the struggle against separatism that the Chinese government itself had identiﬁed three years earlier as the main political problem for the region. The new generation of local gazetteers or histories of individual counties is beginning to redress the balance but the amount of detail on anything remotely controversial remains frustratingly inadequate. In addition to drawing on the published sources cited in the footnotes, I have carried out research and ﬁeldwork in Xinjiang and its neighbours on a number of occasions. The initial research for this book was carried out during a ﬁeld trip to Xinjiang and other parts of the Islamic north-west of China in 1991, a visit which included seminar discussions with members of the Xinjiang Regional

Preface xi Academy of Social Sciences in Urumqi, and some time spent in the Changji Hui Autonomous zhou (prefecture) to the north of the Xinjiang administrative centre of Urumqi, where I met local government ofﬁcials of Han, Hui, Uyghur and Kazakh nationality. I was also able to visit Turpan, one of the most important centres of Uyghur culture in eastern Xinjiang. In September 1992, I made a further visit to Ningxia, Gansu and Xinjiang to follow up contacts made in 1991 and to collect more up-to-date information. In Xinjiang, I travelled ﬁrst to Urumqi where I attended the major international Trade Fair, which was targeted at the new Central Asian states that were just emerging from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then on to Kashghar, where I was fortunate to be present during the ﬁrst visit of Hojjatoleslam Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to that city where he led the Friday prayers at the important Id Gah mosque. I have travelled in Xinjiang both with the help of the local Academy of Social Sciences and as a private individual in an attempt to see as much of the region and meet as many different kinds of people as possible. As so much information on Xinjiang in the 1990s has reached the West by way of Kazakhstan, I visited its then capital Almaty (formerly Alma Ata) in September 1994 to collect data on China–Kazakhstan relations, cross-border trade and the Uyghur and Hui (Dungan) communities that live in Kazakhstan.1 Discussions with members of the Institute of Oriental Studies and Institute of Uyghur Studies of the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences were extremely useful in helping me to form a view of the likely future of the separatist movement in Xinjiang. An earlier visit to Mongolia in 1990 helped me to make useful comparisons with the relationship that the different regions of Inner Asia have with China. Finally, in order to bring myself up-to-date with economic developments in the region and with the social and political changes wrought by the increased contacts with the outside world, I travelled again to Almaty in September 1998 and crossed over to the troubled city of Yining/Ghulja and the regional capital Urumqi. These visits and my ﬁeld research in Xinjiang have been supplemented by the regular monitoring of reports from Xinjiang, both from the ofﬁcial Chinese media (in the original Chinese and in translation) and from e´migre´ Uyghur sources in Europe and Kazakhstan many of which have been published only in short runs. A further planned visit to Xinjiang in the autumn of 2001 was cancelled at the last minute by the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences in the wake of the September 11th attacks in the USA, an indication of the sensitivity of this issue. Michael Dillon January 2003

Acknowledgements

This book began life as a brieﬁng paper commissioned in January 1993 by the Research and Analysis Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Ofﬁce (FCO) in London. That paper was updated and published with their permission, for which I am most grateful, as Xinjiang: Ethnicity, Separatism and Control in Chinese Central Asia, Durham East Asian Papers No. 1 in 1995. The ethnic and political conﬂict which has since escalated throughout Xinjiang, or Eastern Turkestan as it is known to many non-Chinese in the region and overseas, is justiﬁcation, if any were necessary, for the commissioning of the original paper and its expansion into the present book which provides the opportunity for a more detailed examination of the region and its problems. Members of the staff of the FCO are, of course, not responsible for either the opinions or any factual statements in this or any of my publications. I am, however, grateful for the stimulus that the original commission provided. Funding for the visits to Xinjiang, without which my ﬁeldwork would have been impossible, was made available by the British Academy, the Universities’ China Committee in London, and the University of Durham Staff Travel Fund. I am also grateful to the many individuals who have helped in my research on Xinjiang. Many Uyghurs, both in and outside of the region have helped me to understand their society and its problems, but for obvious reasons, most of them must remain anonymous. In Urumqi, Liu Jianyi and his wife, a Han couple who are both scholars of the Uyghur language, showed me that Great Han chauvinism is not universal. Liu accompanied me to both Turpan and the Changji Hui Autonomous zhou and his facility with the colloquial Uyghur language smoothed the way for many encounters with Uyghur villagers who were initially suspicious of the arrival of a group of Han Chinese and a foreigner. I am also grateful for the assistance of Yang Chen of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who travelled with me to northwest China in 1991 and learned much about this remote area of his country for the ﬁrst time. In Almaty, I am grateful to Svetlana Shorokhova for help with discussions in Russian and for cooking blinis, and to other staff of the Institute of Oriental Studies and Institute of Uyghur Studies of the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences. Ildiko Beller-Hann of the University of Kent was kind enough to supply information about her ﬁeldwork in Kuqa in the difﬁcult summer of 1996 and to encourage me in my

xiv

Acknowledgements

own research. Peter Sinnott and Huji Tuerdi have supplied me with key documents. Durham University East Asian Studies graduates Victoria Metcalfe, Stephen Pickup and Hector Snuggs have helped to keep me up-to-date on the situation in the region after their own travels there and have supplied valuable information and documentation. In Durham, I am fortunate in having been able to call on the cultural and linguistic expertise and local knowledge of a colleague originally from Kashghar. Wang Jianping of Lund University, Sweden and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing kindly made available to me his unpublished paper ‘Islam in Kashghar’ and discussed many aspects of Islam within the borders of China during a period he spent working in Durham and again in Beijing in October 2001. An anonymous reader for RoutledgeCurzon provided many useful comments and criticisms. The reports from Chinese central and local newspapers and the broadcast media in Xinjiang published by the BBC Monitoring service at Caversham in Summary of World Broadcasts have made it possible for me to continue to follow the conﬂict in the region even from a great distance. In particular, the reports of broadcasts from Xinjiang Television and the Xinjiang Peoples’ Broadcasting Station in Urumqi are invaluable and these are otherwise unobtainable outside Xinjiang. I would also like to mention the conference panels on Xinjiang at the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting in Boston, Massachusetts in March 1999 and later at Coolidge Hall, Harvard University. These panels brought together what was almost certainly the largest group of specialists on Xinjiang that has ever met in the West and I would like to record my appreciation to Gardner Bovingdon of Cornell University and Barry Sautmann of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for having made these sessions possible and to my fellow panelists for many insights into various aspects of Xinjiang studies. Comments on papers that I have given to seminars at the Universities of Oxford (Institute of Islamic Studies), Leeds, Leiden, London (School of Oriental and African Studies) have all been helpful in putting together this book. Versions of Chapter 12 were also given as papers at the conference on Central Asia organised by the Department of International Politics of the People’s University of China in Beijing in April 2002 and the conference on East Asian Security at the University of Lancaster in the UK on June 6th 2002. My interest in China’s northwest frontier was aroused by my ﬁrst teacher of Chinese history, Owen Lattimore (1900–1989), Professor of Chinese in the University of Leeds from 1963–1969, formerly of Johns Hopkins University, and author of the seminal Inner Asian Frontiers of China among many other works. His modern history lectures to undergraduates in Leeds incorporated his reminiscences of China in the ﬁrst half of the present century and I count myself privileged to have been taught by him and to have an opportunity here to acknowledge the continuing inﬂuence of his work.

N

Ust'-Kamenogorsk Land above 2000 metres

Al

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i

M

o un

K A Z A K H S T A N

M O N G O L I A

t

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Shihezi Yining / Ghulja

Ürümqi

Almaty BISHKEK

Turpan

K Y R G Y Z S TA N KYRGYZSTAN

S h a n

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Korla

X i n j i a n g Yumen

Ta r i m B a s i n

Kashi / Kashgar

Ta k l a m a k a n D e s e r t

C

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u

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Aksai Chin

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T i b e t I N D I A 0

kilometres

Northwest China

500

N

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Part I

Introduction to Xinjiang

1

Xinjiang’s geographical position

Xinjiang, or the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Xinjiang weiwu’er zizhiqu, to give it its full Chinese ofﬁcial name, lies on the northwestern frontier of China on its border with the former Soviet Union. It stretches some 3,220 miles (2,000 kilometres) from east to west and 2,660 miles (1,650 kilometres) from north to south, has an area of over 1,600,000 square kilometres (almost three times the size of France) and is by far the largest administrative unit within the People’s Republic of China. It lies so far west of, Beijing that it is effectively two hours behind the Chinese capital: Xinjiang operates on Beijing time, in particular for long distance air and rail transport and communications with Beijing and government ofﬁces, and also on local time for informal use. Local people almost always indicate which time they are using when making business and personal arrangements and Uyghurs use local time whenever possible as part of an assertion of the physical and cultural distance between Xinjiang and the rest of China. Xinjiang has common borders with Mongolia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India and with three of the Central Asian states that were part of the USSR, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. It is close to two other new Central Asian nations, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Its nearest neighbours within China are Gansu province and the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, both of which have large and inﬂuential Hui Muslim communities, Tibet, which is usually considered to have been Beijing’s main separatist problem since 1949, and Qinghai, which is part of historic Greater Tibet, and is home to both Tibetan Buddhist and Hui Muslim communities.1 An explanation for the spelling of ‘Uyghur’, which is used here for both the name of the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang and the autonomous region that is named after it, seems appropriate. The more familiar spelling in recent Western writing on the region is Uighur.2 ‘Uighur’ has generally been replaced in English-language publications in China with ‘Uygur’ as this is closer to the spelling of the name in the Uyghur language, when written in the modiﬁed Latin script that was developed for it by Chinese-language reformers during the 1960s and 1970s. It is also the spelling used in the standard Turkish language of Turkey to refer to the language and people of Xinjiang. However, Reinhard Hahn in Spoken Uyghur, Seattle, 1991, suggests the spelling ‘Uyghur’ as being the

4

Introduction to Xinjiang

closest to the local pronunciation. It is also the version used in Henry G. Schwarz’s monumental An Uyghur–English Dictionary (Western Washington 1992) and that form has therefore been used in this book. The Uyghur language and the people who speak it were also referred to in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writings as Turki or Eastern Turki and Taranchi (meaning ‘cultivator’ and used especially of those who migrated to and lived in the northwest of the region around Yining/Ghulja close to the border with Kazakhstan). Xinjiang, although a provincial-level administrative division of China, is deemed by the Chinese government to be not a province but, since October 1st 1955, an Autonomous Region (zizhiqu) in deference to the non-Han, that is nonChinese, majority of the population.3 Non-Han people in the region and e´migre´ communities in Kazakhstan, Turkey and Germany often prefer not to use the name Xinjiang, which means literally ‘new frontier’, because of its connotations of imperial Chinese colonisation, and many of them refer to the region instead as Eastern Turkestan, or, in the Uyghur language Sharqi Turkistan. The name Uyghuristan has also been used by some supporters of independence, but it is not favoured by the Kazakh and other non-Uyghur people of the region. Earlier studies of the region have often used the spelling ‘Sinkiang’, notably Owen Lattimore’s Pivot of Asia and Sinkiang Pawn or Pivot by Allen Whiting and Sheng Shih-ts’ai and it has also been called Chinese Turkestan to distinguish it from the rest of Turkestan which is the name given to the Muslim Turkic speaking areas of the Russian empire. In this book, the name Xinjiang has been used throughout for consistency and simplicity, even when it is anachronistic, and this is not intended to imply support or otherwise for China’s control over the region. Xinjiang is divided by the great range of mountains, the Tianshan. The Zhungar Basin lies to the north and the Taklamakan Desert and the settled Altishahr (Six Cities) region are in the Tarim Basin to the south and the two regions have signiﬁcantly different histories and cultural identities.4 The southern part of Xinjiang is the Uyghur heartland, a mainly rural society which still lives by traditional oasis agriculture with the minimum of outside inﬂuence. In the north, with its mountains and grasslands, where Uyghurs have lived alongside Kazakhs and Mongols for centuries, pastoral nomadism is an important part of the way of life and the inﬂuence of the Russian empire has been signiﬁcant. The north of Xinjiang is also the most industrialised with many large cities devoted to such modern industries as oil reﬁning. Although Xinjiang has often been depicted by Chinese ofﬁcials and writers who were posted or exiled there throughout the centuries as a desolate and isolated wilderness, it is in fact a region of stunningly beautiful landscapes and the attachment that the Uyghur and other native peoples feel for it is understandable. While foreign visitors in the past have rarely failed to criticise the grey Soviet-style architecture of the regional capital, Urumqi, and the other main industrial centres, travellers who venture off the beaten track are invariably captivated by the rural landscape – the desert, the mountains, the steppes and the

Geographical position

5

lakes. The vast Taklamakan Desert dominates the geography of Xinjiang and makes so much of it inaccessible. In the north the snow-capped mountain range known to the Chinese as the Tianshan (Mountains of Heaven) and to the Uyghurs as Tengritagh (Mountains of God or Heaven) towers over the plains and oases below and, with its northern extension the Alatau, forms a formidable natural barrier between the eastern part of the Turkic world which ﬁnds itself within the borders of the People’s Republic of China and the much larger western part in what was once the Soviet Union and before that the Russian empire. Travelling the northern route across Xinjiang between Urumqi and the grape-growing oasis of Turpan it is difﬁcult not to be impressed by the majesty of the mountains, the colours of the rocks and sands which change dramatically as the sun rises and sets and the sheer barrenness of most of the landscape. Xinjiang has been classiﬁed by geographers as part of the dry ‘dead heart of Asia’, which also includes Tibet and the Pamirs and Mongolia. This area is marked by a series of high inland-drainage basins to the south of the Tianshan range, running from the enormous Tarim and Zhungharian basins in the west to the smaller basins of Turpan and Ili in the east and west respectively. The Taklamakan desert occupies most of the Tarim basin and rather than being a sandy desert in the familiar sense, ‘consists really of ﬁne, disintegrated particles of rock and is of the character of allluvial loess’. For a desert, it is in fact potentially extremely fertile and it is only the absence of irrigation that makes it barren. The Tarim basin, named after the most important river in Xinjiang and the others are surrounded by narrow belts of sparse vegetation and it is in these areas that the important oasis settlements have developed, some of them watered by small streams which ﬂow from the Tarim river and its tributaries.5 It is in these dry and dusty oasis towns that most of the settled population lives. Many, if not all, of these settlements owe their development to an ancient system of subterranean aqueducts, the kariz, which supplement any existing irrigation from streams and rivers. The kariz, which may have originated in Persia, where they are called qanat, draw the melting snows from the mountains and carry them in underground channels to preserve them from evaporation while they ﬂow to the oases. The kariz irrigation system, of which local people are so proud, is nowadays considered to be backward and inefﬁcient and is being replaced by electrically powered pumps in parts of Turpan Prefecture. It is estimated that Xinjiang had over 1,500 kariz in the 1950s, of which over 1,100 were in Turpan but that by the late 1990s there were fewer than 600 and very few craftsmen capable of building them. The remaining kariz are being preserved, but only as museum pieces and local farmers are not permitted to dig any new wells near them.6 Many of these oasis towns such as Kashghar, Kargalik and Yarkant lie on the southern fringes of the Taklamakan, as far away from Chinese cultural inﬂuence as it is possible to be within the borders of the present day People’s Republic. They are the home of the most traditional Uyghur culture that remains in the twenty-ﬁrst century and, as they also suffer from poverty and underdevelopment, they are the fertile ground in which militant separatist and, more recently,

6

Introduction to Xinjiang

Islamist movements have ﬂourished. In the north, the towns and villages in the foothills of the Tianshan mountains in the Yining/Ghulja and neighbouring regions also have their own traditional cultures although these are often Kazak, Kyrgyz or Mongolian as well as Uyghur. Not only is Xinjiang unstable politically, it also suffers from chronic instability in its climate and geology. Dramatic and dangerous weather conditions are common and the more remote communities in the mountains are often cut off by heavy falls of snow in the harsh winters. Earthquakes are frequent, especially in the mountainous border areas, as they are also in neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan. Most quakes are mild, but they are occasionally severe enough to threaten lives and the livelihood of whole communities. On November 2nd 1995, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale struck Zhaosu county in the northwest of Xinjiang and also affected Baicheng, Yining/Ghulja and Aksu.7 A quake of 7.1 occurred in the Karakorum on November 19th 1996 was followed by aftershocks and the Zepu region was hit by an earthquake of 5.0 on November 23rd 1996 but no casualties were reported in this sparsely populated area.8 On January 21st 1997, a quake of 6.4 on the Richter scale badly affected Jiashi county near Kashghar, killing twelve people and leaving over thirty injured.9 A further quake registering 6 on the scale destroyed thousands of buildings in Jiashi in March of the same year.10 The region was again affected by an earthquake of a similar magnitude on April 6th, with no deaths but injuries to twelve people the loss of livestock and damage to 3,000 buildings.11 A further quake struck on April 11th12 and on May 17th a quake of 5.4 on the Richter scale caused some damage and serious injury to one person.13 On March 19th 1998, a quake measuring 6.0 on the Richter scale struck Artux in the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture, as had been predicted by a national congress of seismologists earlier in the year.14 A quake of magnitude 5.2 was recorded in Aksu and neighbouring areas on June 25th 1998 and one of 5.5 on July 28th in Baicheng county.15 August 4th saw a magnitude 6.0 quake in Jiashi county with some damage to property and livestock but no human casualities and on August 27th a quake of 6.6 on the Richter scale struck on the borders of Jiashi and Bachu counties in the west of Xinjiang.16 Another earthquake measuring 5.7 on the Richter scale was recorded on Wednesday December 25th 2002. Its epicentre was 20 kilometres southeast of Ulugqat, some 50 kilometres away from the city of Kashghar.17 This is far from being a complete list of all the earthquakes that Xinjiang has suffered in recent years, but it is sufﬁcient to indicate the frequency with which Xinjiang is affected, the seriousness of the problem and the need for measures to ameliorate the effect of earthquakes. The need to take a long-term view of how the people and government of Xinjiang should come to terms with seismic activity of varying degrees of intensity was acknowledged in August 1997 when new building codes were issued by the local authorities with the intention of ensuring that all new buildings were earthquake resistant.18 Between January and March 1998, heavy snow in the Bayanbulak District of Hejing county high in the Tianshan mountain range caused three deaths and the

Geographical position

7

loss of over 8,000 head of cattle.19 High winds and a sandstorm that struck many parts of Xinjiang in April 1998 caused at least six deaths and many injuries and caused severe damage to houses, the tents of nomads and communications, telecommunications and electricity generating equipment. As many as 100,000 head of livestock may also have been killed.20 Not all of Xinjiang is subject to such extremes of weather and they do not occur all the time but they are important aspects of the character of the region. All of these geographical features, in particular Xinjiang’s isolation, the chronic shortage of water (a problem which it shares with both its Central Asian neighbours and inland regions of China such as Gansu and Ningxia) and the problems that local communities have encountered in making a living from difﬁcult land have all had, and continue to have, a profound inﬂuence on the region’s history and its economic and social development today.

2

Xinjiang before 1949 A historical outline

Although this study is primarily concerned with contemporary developments in Xinjiang, it is essential that some consideration be given to the history of the region from the earliest times. This history has been used by Uyghur and Chinese historians and writers to argue their very different cases for either the legitimacy of the independence of Eastern Turkestan or its incorporation into China. What follows is necessarily an incomplete outline of that history and does not claim to consist of original research, especially for the earliest periods, but it does indicate the major issues in the early history of the region as they affect perceptions of Xinjiang today. Mummiﬁed bodies found in the dry earth of the Tarim Basin caught the attention of the Western public in the late 1990s when it was suggested that their features and clothing indicated that they had migrated into Xinjiang from much further west and that they may have been of Caucasian (in the tradtional anthropological sense of indigenous European) origin rather than Asiatic. The possibility that they may have been speakers of the Tocharian branch of the IndoEuropean family also excited scholars as the academic world has been trying to identify Tocharian speakers for decades. Tocharian was an independent member of the group of languages that includes modern European languages such as German and French, modern Asian languages including Persian and the Hindi and Urdu branches of the northern Indian language once known as Hindustani, and the classical Indian Sanskrit language in which many of the sacred texts of Hinduism and the great epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana were written. Tocharian was probably spoken in the Tarim Basin in the second half of the ﬁrst millennium AD, and German and French explorers who travelled through the lands around the towns of Turfan and Kucha in the nineteenth century took back with them to Europe Buddhist documents written in a script related to Sanskrit which were identiﬁed as Tocharian.1 The empire of the Yuezhi (Yue-chih in the older Wade-Giles spelling), which was known to the Chinese during the Han dynasty (206 BC –AD 221), has been identiﬁed as the group known to the ancient Greeks as the Tokharoi, who are presumed to be speakers of Tocharian or a related language. The Yuezhi were recorded by the chroniclers of the Han dynasty as allies of the Han against the Xiongnu, who, after their defeat by the Xiongnu, were forced to migrate to northwestern India where they established

Historical outline

9

the Kushan kingdom. The Han was the ﬁrst Chinese dynasty to establish a degree of inﬂuence or control over the Western Regions, Xiyu as this area of Central Asia became known and much of the Chinese case for Xinjiang being a part of historical China is derived from Han imperial expansion. Within historical time, however, the earliest traceable indigenous inhabitants of the region known today as Xinjiang were probably Turkic-speaking migrants from Mongolia from whom the present-day Uyghurs claim descent and who may well have intermarried with the descendants of the people represented by the mummies whom they encountered when they arrrived in Xinjiang. The history of the Turkic peoples, designated according to the group of languages that they speak, is complex and difﬁcult to pin down precisely, but since the Uyghurs of Xinjiang (and indeed their neighbours the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks) consider themselves to be the descendants of the early Turkic tribes, a brief account of the origin and migrations of these ancestral groups is necessary to set the context. It is generally accepted that the ﬁrst peoples in history who can be referred to as Turkic lived originally in the steppes of what is today the northern part of Mongolia. It is probable that other Altaic peoples whose languages are more distantly related to the Turkic tongues – principally the Manchus and Mongols – also originated in the same area as did the Xiongnu or Huns.2 These tribes of the steppe came into contact with the Chinese as their empire expanded and contracted from dynasty to dynasty. During the Han dynasty (206 BC –AD 221), military campaigns under Ban Chao brought the Tarim basin, in what is now the southern part of Xinjiang, under Chinese control while Turkic tribes migrating westwards from their Mongolian homeland took the route to the north of the Tianshan mountains to avoid the Chinese armies. This westward migration of the Turks continued as far as Europe where the Huns were one of the major adversaries of the Roman empire in the fourth and ﬁfth centuries. By the eighth century when the ﬁrst people known as Uighurs (and this spelling is retained here deliberately as there is no clear and direct link with the contemporary Uyghurs of Xinjiang) were recorded in the standard ofﬁcial histories of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–906), there was not only the great Uighur kingdom to the north of the Gobi desert but also a number of different Turkic tribes spread westwards as far as the Tarim basin.3 The earliest written evidence of any of the languages of the Turkic family is preserved in the eighth-century inscriptions found in the basin of the Orkhon river in what is now Mongolia.4 These Orkhon inscriptions are carved into monoliths which are described as being made of either low-grade marble or limestone alongside Chinese inscriptions and include accounts of the military history of the Turkic empire in northeast Asia in the seventh and eighth centuries and memorials to statesmen and military commanders.5 The empire of the Uighurs was, like much of Central Asia, subdued by Tibetan invaders in the eighth century and then by the expansion of waves of nomadic peoples from northern China and Mongolia, culminating in the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century.

10

Introduction to Xinjiang

Islam in Central Asia Islam originated in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century AD when, according to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muhammad received the revelation of the Qur’an from Allah with the angel Jibril (Gabriel in the Christian tradition) as intermediary. It rapidly became the most powerful religion in the Arab lands and spread throughout western and Central Asia, initially in the wake of the conquering Arab armies, as they marched east into Persia, Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Indian sub-continent. Arab armies marching eastwards overland had crossed the river Oxus in 654 for the ﬁrst time, but resistance from the local Iranian population and their princely rulers was ﬁerce and determined and it was not until the middle of the eighth century that Transoxania (the region of Bukhara and Samarkand) could be regarded as completely under Arab control. The armies of the Tang dynasty China, which were led by a Korean general known in Chinese as Gao Xianzhi, were defeated by the Arab forces at the battle of the Talas river in the Ferghana valley in 751. This battle ‘settled the question as to which of the two cultures . . . would prevail in Turkestan. The Arabs themselves looked on Turkestan as a province wrested from the Chinese emperors’6 The Tang dynasty never recovered from this defeat and from the An Lushan rebellion which followed it. They abandoned their garrisions from Central Asia, withdrawing troops to try to consolidate their position at home and from that time onwards ceased to be a power in the western regions. The Arab armies were only prevented from pushing further eastwards into China by the formidable physical barrier of the Tianshan and Pamir mountain ranges which today mark the border between China and the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union.7 The foremost Soviet scholar of Central Asian History, V.V. Barthold has suggested that Arab forces may have reached Kashghar, but this remains to be proved. Central Asia was ruled by the Caliphs of the Omayyad dynasty and subsequently by the Abbasids after the fall of the Omayyads in the middle of the eighth century. In the tenth century, the Samanids succeeded and Bukhara, rather than Samarkand, became the leading city of the region.8 The decline of Tang dynasty power in central Asia on the Chinese side of the Tianshan enabled the establishment of independent kingdoms by groups of Turks who had migrated from present-day Mongolia. Only a few years after the Uighurs were forced to leave their homeland on and near the Orxon, they were able to establish two realms in their new land, both in the year 847: one in Gansu, which in 1037 came under Tangut rule – from these Uighurs are descended the Sari-Uygur [Yellow Uyghur] of our day – the other in Eastern Turkistan, with Qoco (from Chinese Gaochang) in the Turfan oasis, as its capital. While in both of these realms, the Uighurs ﬁnally adopted a sedentary and even urban way of life, it was in the western realm, that of Gaochang in Eastern Turkistan, on that ideal crossroads of culture, peoples and languages that the Uighurs became the ﬁrst Turkic people to develop a considerable literature, albeit of translations. This

Historical outline

11

literature was almost exclusively religious and pertained to the three great faiths of pre-Islamic Central Asia – Christianity in its Nestorian creed, Manichaeism and Buddhism.9 These communities of mixed faith gradually adopted Islam following the conversion of the ruler of the Karakhanids (also written Qarakhanids), the legendary Satuq Boghra Khan, in 960. The Karakhanids were a confederation of Turkic tribes, the aristocracy of which ruled parts of Central Asia and later Transoxania after ousting the Samanids in a war of conquest. In Central Asia, Kashghar was one of their main administrative and cultural centres; the precise site of the other centre, Balasaghun, is not known for certain but it is presumed to be somewhere in present-day Kyrgyzstan.10 Coins of the Karakhanid period were inscribed with both the Uyghur script in use at the time (the forerunner of the Mongol script) and Arabic.11 It is difﬁcult to say precisely when these Central Asian communities could be described with any accuracy as Muslim societies, but Islam was probably more inﬂuential than either Buddhism or the earlier animistic religions by the beginning of the twelfth century throughout most of Central Asia, although it was probably as late as the ﬁfteenth century before it had reached as far as Hami or Turpan.12 Evidence for the spread of Islam in this period can be adduced from the existence of translations of and commentaries on the Qur’an which were available in Central Asia at the time. It is known that a Persian translation of the major commentary on the Qur’an, containing the complete text of the Qur’an itself, by al-Tabari (and Persian was the lingua franca of the region) was produced in Bukhara under the Samanids (875–999). Some scholars are of the opinion that a translation into the Eastern Turkic language was produced at the same time, others date it to the beginning of the eleventh century. Whichever is the case, this was the ﬁrst of a series of translations of the Qur’an into eastern Turkic which appeared from then until the sixteenth century, indicating that Islam had established a ﬁrm foothold in the region.13 There is further evidence for the early inﬂuence of Islam in what is now Xinjiang in the pages of one of the classic works of Uyghur or, more accurately, Eastern Turkic literature, the Kutadgu Bilig or Wisdom of Royal Glory by Yusuf Khass Hajib, written in Kashghar in 1069 and placed by its translator Robert Dankoff in the category of ‘mirrors for princes’, that is a guide to rulers on administration, justice, manners and much more besides. One of the central characters in the series of dialogues that make up the book has become a Muslim, and Islamic ideas and indirect references to the Qur’an and the hadiths (records of the pronouncements and activities of the Prophet Muhammad which have an inﬂuence in Islam second only to that of the Qur’an) recur throughout. There are also many references to ideas drawn from Suﬁ literature, which had clearly impressed the educated aristocracy in Kashghar by this period.14 It is more difﬁcult to establish whether Islam had been accepted by the less educated strata of society. However, Eastern Turkestan as a whole can reasonably be considered to have been Islamic from about the middle of the fourteenth century

12

Introduction to Xinjiang

and by this time, Kashghar had become the centre of Islamic religious and literary activity in the region, a role in which it was to continue until the twentieth century.15 The Mongol conquest of eastern and central Asia between 1215 and 1276 by Chinggis Khan and Khubilai Khan brought the whole of this vast region under the control of one powerful and ruthless empire. China was ruled by the Mongols as the Yuan dynasty, and what is now Xinjiang was in the eastern part of the Chaghatai Khanate, the lands governed by Chaghatai, the second son of Chinggis Khan, and his descendants.16 When the Mongol empire in China collapsed in the middle of the fourteenth century, a rebel band led by Zhu Yuanzhang was in control of the key areas of the country and Zhu proclaimed himelf the ﬁrst emperor of the Ming dynasty (Ming Taizu as he became known after his death). The Ming is always considered to be a Chinese dynasty, in contrast to its Mongol predecessor and Manchu successor, but it was in fact an ethnically mixed administration with many Central Asians playing a prominent role. The priorities of the Ming were the consolidation of their rule and defence against the ever-present danger of a resurgence of Mongol power in the steppes. As a result the oasis societies of Central Asia were left very much to their own devices, although they were nominally incorporated into the Chinese world by way of the tribute system in which the rulers of China’s less powerful neighbours sent regular ‘tribute’ missions bearing gifts to the Chinese capital, missions which the Chinese emperors chose to regard as symbols of a subject-ruler relationship.17

Origins of Central Asian Suﬁsm In Central Asia, in the areas that came under both Russian or Chinese control, unorthodox movements, particularly Suﬁsm were to play a major role in the preservation of Islam in the region. C.E. Bosworth has suggested some reasons for the particular nature of Islam in Central Asia and why it was fertile ground for later developments in which the Suﬁ orders were to play an important role. ‘Because the conversion of the steppes was undertaken mainly by Suﬁ mystics and holy men, and not by the rigorists of the ulema, Islam there has always shown a considerable elasticity in both belief and practice.’18 Reformist and other theological movements that have spread throughout Islam have also had an impact in Xinjiang, usually by way of Western Turkestan (or former Soviet Central Asia). Among these movements, the most commonly mentioned is the revivalist movement loosely referred to as Wahhabi, but it is Suﬁsm, and especially its Naqshbandi branch, which has established deeper roots in the region and which plays a signiﬁcant but almost unspoken role right up to the present day. The divisions between Islamic groups are not always clear cut and certainly not always explicit. It should be remembered that membership of the Suﬁ orders is not exclusive and that followers of a Suﬁ shaykh would also probably attend their local mosque and might appear, to all intents and purposes, as orthodox Sunni Muslims. The name Wahhabism has been used as a very

Historical outline

13

imprecise catch-all term for radical or ‘extremist’ Islamists in the former USSR, whatever sect they follow. It should properly be reserved for the movement launched in what later became Saudi Arabia by the Islamic lawyer and scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the political leader Muhammad ibn Saud in the eighteenth century. This was largely a movement to return to the ‘straight path’ of the scriptures and in opposition to popular religious practices such as the veneration of saints and their tombs.19 This clearly brings them into conﬂict with the Suﬁ orders for whom the tombs of their founding shaykhs are central to their religious lives. The relationship between Suﬁ orders in Xinjiang is often unclear and their relationship with established Suﬁ orders outside of Xinjiang is even less well understood. Statements about Suﬁs, in particular followers of the Naqshbandi silsila (path) within Xinjiang should not be taken to imply that this is true about the Naqshbandi path in general. In the Islamic world, Suﬁsm, the mystical arm of Islam and the religous expression of the dervishes, is an unspoken power, a secret authority, a hidden connection. It often provides an explanation for why people do things that reason might otherwise prevent them from doing. It connects people who may have no other obvious connection and it imposes or provides a structure of authority and obedience that can have religious, political and social signiﬁcance of the highest order. Because it is such a secretive movement and its leadership is maintained within families for generations, it is difﬁcult to trace its inﬂuence over a period of time with any certainty. However, it is this very secrecy that has enabled it to survive repression by the empires of Russia and China and then the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.

Naqshbandiyya and its origins in Central Asia The Naqshbandi orders of Suﬁsm are named after Baha’ad-din an-Naqshbandi (1318–1389/90) although the Naqshbandiyya list ﬁve previous shaykhs as belonging to their tariqa and traces its lineage to the middle of the thirteenth century, creatively inventing their tradition to so that it goes back as close to the Prophet Muhammed as possible. Baha’ad-din may have been a Tajik (the name used for non-Arab Muslims of Central Asia who were mostly Persian speakers), but in the multi-ethnic and multilingual society of Central Asia also had connections with Turkic-speaking communities. The centre of his activities was the city of Bukhara and the order was inﬂuential among traders and members of craft guilds. It became increasingly political, intervening in the factional politics of the Timurid court on behalf of its followers. Bukhara and its environs was one of the areas from which the ancestors of China’s Muslim Hui community were forced to migrate eastwards by the Mongol conquerors in the thirteenth century.20 The Naqshbandi order was already known in Kashghar as early as the twelfth century. By the time that Khwaja Ahrar (1404–1490) became head of the order, Central Asia was effectively controlled by the Naqshbandiyya. The order also became inﬂuental in South Asia but never acquired the same prestige and power in the Arabian heartland of Islam.

14

Introduction to Xinjiang

Followers of the Naqshbandi path are distinguished from members of other Suﬁ orders by their adherance to the silent dhikr, ‘recollection’ or ‘remembrance’. The dhikr is the constant repetition of the name of Allah or Allahu akbar ‘God is greatest’ and is derived from instructions on the constant recollection of God given in two Sura (verses) of the Qur’an.21 It became the most important devotional activity for Suﬁs and the different forms of the dhikr and the vocal, musical or physical activity which accompanied it were often the crucial factors in distinguishing one Suﬁ order from another. In Suﬁ orders other than the Naqshbandiyya, the dhikr was vocal and often accompanied by music. The silent dhikr of the Naqshbandiyya and their emphasis on the one-to-one spiritual relationship between the master and disciple ﬁtted it ideally for survivial underground in times of religious repression.22

Naqshbandiyya in Russian and Soviet Central Asia The religious authority of the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand at the time of the Russian conquest in the 1860s appeared to be vested primarily in the orthodox Sunni imams but the Suﬁ orders which had developed over the centuries also wielded a great deal of unseen power. The clandestine nature of the orders makes it impossible to assess the degree of support with any accuracy but it seems clear that the Naqshbandiyya had by far the largest following of any of the Suﬁ orders.23 The funeral of a highly esteemed Naqshbandi Ishan (the Persian word used in Central Asia for Suﬁ shaykhs) at the end of the nineteenth century is said to have been attended by at least 15,000 murids or followers of the order.24 Bennigsen and Wimbush have demonstrated convincingly how Islam was kept alive by Suﬁs under Soviet rule and how all signiﬁcant Muslim resistance to both the Russian and the Soviet state from the eighteenth century onwards was dominated by the Suﬁ orders.25 The most important revolt against Tsarist Russia’s control over Muslim Central Asia began in 1895 when ‘disturbing reports foreshadowed a mass movement considerably more important than the unorganised and anarchic explosions that were occurring elsewhere’. In that year, an Ishan of the Naqshbandi order, Ismail Khan Tore from Andijan in the Ferghana valley, the centre of the Khokand Khanate (Andijan is in present-day Uzbekistan near to its borders with Kyrgyzstan and remains noted for its Islamic fervour) was arrested in Aulie Ata while collecting funds to ﬁnance a holy war. He was apparently released because of the lack of evidence against him and he went into hiding. When a revolt broke out in Andijan in May 1898 and spread to the neighbouring districts of Osh, Namangan and Margilan, another Ishan of the Ferghana Naqshbandi movement Muhammad Ali Madali, who had attracted sufﬁcient support to build a madrasa, two mosques and a religious library, was at the helm. The inﬂuence of the Naqshbandiyya made it a very different movement from previous uprisings. It was ‘a prepared holy war, beginning according to a plan and not haphazardly on some pretext’. The rebels under Madali attacked Andijan and groups of his supporters marched on Osh and Marghilan at the same time

Historical outline

15

but Russian forces crushed the rising. Mardali and ﬁve of his leading followers were hanged and severe repression followed. ‘This was a religious revolt in which not only the elite of the former khanate, but also the poor people, exasperated by the Russian presence, had gathered round a Naqshabandi ishan’.26

China and the Naqshbandiyya For centuries there had been close connections between the regions of Ferghana and the Altishahr (southern Xinjiang). Trade between Andijan and Kashghar ﬂourished in spite of the physical difﬁculties of travel across the mountains and there were resident communities of Andijanese in Kashghar and vice versa, so it is not surprising that religious ideas and movements migrated between the two centres. Gunnar Jarring has demonstrated the similarity of the Turkic dialects of the two regions, reinforcing the evidence of close contact between them.27 The starting point for any serious investigation of the penetration of Suﬁsm across the Central Asian borders into China has to be the last essay written by Joseph Fletcher, ‘The Naqshbandiyya in Northwest China’. Fletcher dates the earliest appearance of the Naqshbandi in what is now Chinese territory to the late fourteenth or early ﬁfteenth centuries when traders from west of the Pamirs, Mawarannahr (Transoxania), brought the order into the Altishahr region, today also known as southern Xinjiang where Suﬁsm of the Yasawiyya school had already become popular. Naqshbandi Suﬁs built on the Yasawi tradition28 and during the ﬁfteenth century the Naqshbandiyya gradually replaced the Yasawiyya in the cities of the Tarim basin and also among the nomads. Suﬁ adepts from the Altishahr maintained their links with the Naqshbandi population of Mawarannahr and regularly studied in Bukhara and other religious centres.29 The Suﬁ orders, including the Naqshbandiyya, although not directly under that name, spread further east into the Hui communities of what are now Ningxia and Gansu in northwestern China, extending the reach of transnational Islam in its Suﬁ form.30 In this part of China, the central organisation of the Suﬁ pathway (Arabic tariqa) evolved into the daotang ‘hall of the path or doctrine’ or jiaotang ‘hall of teaching’ often based on the tomb gongbei of the founder, paralleling the mazars of Xinjiang. The equivalent of the Arabic silsila (the inherited chain of succession) is possibly the menhuan, a term for which it is difﬁcult to ﬁnd a precise Chinese etymology, but which appears to be connected with Confucian concepts of ofﬁcialdom huan (literally a govenment servant or ofﬁcial) and gateway or pathway, reﬂecting the inﬂuence of Confucian thinking on Chinese Islam that can probably be traced back to the Ming Muslim thinker Wang Daiyu. Ma Tong, one of the leading contemporary Chinese specialists on the development of menhuan considers the organisation to be a speciﬁcally Chinese innovation, a Chinese contribution to Islam, because neither the term nor the menhuan system exist in the Arab world or Persia. However the system seems to be a continuation of the silsila rather than a completely new form of religious organisation. Ma Tong suggests that the term menhuan ﬁrst appeared in the twenty-third year of the Guangxu reign of the Qing dynasty (1897) in an

16

Introduction to Xinjiang

essay on Muslim denominations by the Hezhou (Linxia) Prefectural Magistrate Yang Zengxin, who later became Governor of Xinjiang, in A Brief History of Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai.31 However, Mian Weilin suggests that the term menhuan might be related to an older form, menfa, which means powerful and inﬂuential families, or the phrase menhu used by many people in northwest China to mean ‘gateway’, or ‘faction’ and argues that there may have been some confusion between the terms with both indicating the power or inﬂuence of a clan or group.32 The distinctive pronunciation of the dialects of northwestern Mandarin spoken in the Gansu and Ningxia areas makes this kind of confusion perfectly possible. The most inﬂuential of all the Suﬁ orders in Central and East Asia, the Naqshbandiyya, is hardly mentioned in either the Chinese or Western literature on Chinese Suﬁsm. Perhaps this is entirely appropriate given the covert and underground nature of the order. The posthumous publication of Joseph Fletcher’s ‘The Naqshbandiyya in Northwest China’ ﬁlled this gap in Western scholarship on Chinese Islam and made the link between Suﬁ orders in China and in Central Asia and the Yemen explicit and irrefutable, although he relied heavily on an article by Joseph Trippner for details of the formation of Naqshbandi menhuan among Chinese-speaking Muslims and biographical details of their leaders.33 In fact the Naqshbandiyya did spread into China proper, via Xinjiang. Joseph Fletcher gives a detailed account of how the order spread from west of the Pamirs to the Tarim Basin in what is now southern Xinjiang in the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries. It travelled eastwards into Gansu and became the most powerful of all Suﬁ movements in China, ﬁrst under the name of the Khuﬁyya (Chinese Hufuye) and its branches and the Multicoloured mosque menhuan of Ma Laichi was probably the earliest Naqshbandiyya order in China. The Jahriyya (Zheherenye) order of Ma Mingxin was a rival branch of the Naqshbandiyya order and can be traced back to a spiritual master in the Yemen. This is important because it conﬁrms that the Suﬁ organisations that evolved within China were not idiosyncratic, isolated phenomena peculiar to China but an integral part of developments that were affecting the whole Muslim world including Xinjiang.34

Xinjiang Suﬁsm Suﬁ orders and their leaders are known in Xinjiang, as in most of Central Asia, as Ishan, (Yishan in Chinese). This name began as a highly respectful form of address for individual Suﬁ shaykhs which was then extended to the organisations whose loyalty they commanded. This term is derived from the Persian third person plural pronoun meaning ‘they’ or ‘them’. When Central Asian Suﬁsm underwent its greatest developments in the fourteenth century, the leaders of the orders, living and dead, were treated almost as saints, and their disciples, whether out of respect or fear, did not address them directly by their personal names. In conversations with other devotees, they replaced the taboo personal name with Ishan and this gradually evolved into the name used for the leaders of the orders, appearing ﬁrst amongst

Historical outline

17

the Naqshbandiyya order and adopted later by other Suﬁ orders. In books and articles on Islam written in Chinese, all Suﬁ groups in Xinjiang are known as yishanpai and their leaders as yishan.35 The Arabic equivalent is shaykh. The Ishan were treated as contemporary living saints by their followers and were believed to be the living human beings closest to Allah. They were the protectors of the happiness and well-being of their disciples both in this life and the next. Some of their followers believed that they could perform miracles and return to life after death and in many orders they were the objects of the fanatical devotion of their followers who pledged their unconditional obedience.36 The hereditary and hierarchical nature of the Suﬁ orders is important as an explanation of their persistence and the ﬁrmness with which they were able to exert control over their members. Succession to the post of Ishan normally passed from father to son, but in the absence of suitable offspring, the Ishan could choose a favoured disciple. The orders imposed tight communal discipline on their members through education, ritual and worship at the tombs (mazars) of the shaykhs or founding fathers of their order. The Andijani connection, to which attention has already been drawn, was crucial in the establishment of Naqshbandi Suﬁsm in Xinjiang and in particular in the Altishahr region of the southwest. It is likely that a large number of the merchants originally from Andijan who traded with and settled in the Altishahr were followers of the Naqshbandiyya, and the Makhdumzada khojas who had been the dominant spiritual leaders of the Altishahr before the Qing conquest retained a considerable degree of inﬂuence although some were exiled back to Kokand after disturbances in the late eighteenth century. Links between Naqshbandi khojas and their followers in Kokand and the Altishahr were maintained.37

The creation of Xinjiang by the Manchu Qing state Genuine Chinese control over its northwestern frontiers, rather than political inﬂuence or a tributary relationship, dates from the eighteenth century and the name Xinjiang (New Frontier) was probably used for the ﬁrst time in 1768. The ruling house of China at that time, the Qing, was not Han Chinese in origin, but of foreign extraction. The Chinese dynastic name of Qing had been adopted by the sinicised Manchus of Manchuria, now the northeastern region of China, in 1636. When the Manchus invaded China from their homeland in 1644 and gradually took control over the area that had been under the control of the Ming dynasty, the name Qing was used for their rule of the whole of China, an empire that was to last until 1911. The Qing dynasty was expansionist and its armies conquered vast tracts of land on its inner Asian borders, almost doubling the amount of territory under the control of the emperor in Beijing. The Manchu homeland, Mongolia, Eastern Turkistan and Tibet were gradually incorporated into the vast empire of the Qing. As the armies moved westwards so did the inﬂuence of the Han Chinese,

18

Introduction to Xinjiang

their language and their culture, although this was never the intention of the Qing administration and there were strenuous attempts to restrict the migration of Chinese to the newly acquired frontier territories, particularly during the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, Han Chinese immigration into these regions was substantial.38 This was largely due to the problems faced by the Qing government in ﬁnancing its garrisons in these distant outposts. The court became heavily dependent on merchants from China to help supply these garrisons, and a complex relationship grew up between the Han Chinese, Hui Muslim (then more usually known as Dong’an or Tungan) and local Uyghur traders, although the traders from China seem to have become the most prosperous.39 The administrative centre of the Qing conquerors was the city in north-western Xinjiang, variously known as Ili in Russian, Yining in Chinese and Ghulja to the Kazakhs and Uyghurs: Ili had also been the capital of the Zhungar steppe empire. The Qing built a new centre to the west of the old city of Ghulja and named this Huiyuan, a practice followed in the conquest of many of the cities of northwestern China: the old city was renamed Ningyuan. Although the region was heavily garrisoned, as far as possible the Qing ruled through existing political and religious structures and had as little contact as possible with the indigenous population. There was little interference in the religious beliefs and practices of the region, and the Islamic calendar and traditional forms of dress were tolerated by the Qing authorities. In southern Xinjiang, in particular, a complex and hierarchical native civil and religious bureaucracy evolved, the begs and akhunds, who controlled their villages or towns formally in the name of the Qing emperor but by means of Islamic law. The city of Dihua, (also found as Ti-hua or Tihwa, but better known by its modern name of Urumqi) developed as the military and administrative centre of northeastern Xinjiang, controlling communications to the north of the Tianshan mountains and the settlements of Hami and Turpan. Manchu or Mongol bannermen controlled the southwest of Xinjiang, the Altishahr, from their base at Kashghar. The rank and ﬁle of the garrison troops were drawn from a motley collection of people from northern and eastern China, perhaps some 20,000 in all, including bannermen from the area around Beijing, Mongolian nomads from the northern steppes, minority tribes from Manchuria including Xibo, Solon and Daghur Mongols and Chinese members of the Army of the Green Standard who were moved from their bases in Shaanxi and Gansu. These occupation forces were the basis for the non-Uyghur, non-indigenous layer of Xinjiang’s social structure in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.40 The Qing dynasty’s military administration encountered constant political and religious resistance to its control of Xinjiang, often allied to Islamic forces in the neighbouring khanate of Khokand.41 Jahangir and Baha’ad-Din, sons of Samsuq, one of the Makhdumzada khojas, declared a jihad in 1820 and invaded the Altishahr after the khan’s demands for commercial privileges in Kashghar were refused by the Qing authorities. This invasion was defeated but the massacre of his local supporters by the Qing army prompted a further incursion in 1826 and an attack on the Qing garrison of Kashghar, which they held under siege for ten

Historical outline

19

weeks. When food and water ran out, the Qing ofﬁcers committed suicide and their troops tried to escape but were massacred by the Kokandis. Jahangir’s army took the fort of Kashghar and burned down the Manchu settlements. They held the town until a Qing army was sent to retake it in 1827 and Jahangir and his followers ﬂed into the mountains. Jahangir was betrayed by fellow Muslims and was captured and executed by the Qing government. All trade and communication across the mountains to Kokand was banned and newly arrived residents were sent back in an attempt to isolate the citizens of Altishahr from their co-religionists outside the frontiers of China. There was a further attempt at an invasion of Altishahr in 1830, this time under the orders of the khan of Kokand, but the attack was beaten off by Qing forces as Kokandi troops withdrew to deal with an escalating conﬂict between Kokand and Bukhara. The Qing authorities increased the number of troops stationed in the Altishahr and fortiﬁed the city of Yarkant to act as their administrative centre. In 1831, in a complete break with Qing policy in Inner Asia, the ﬁrst Han immigrants from China were allowed to move into southern Xinjiang to cultivate reclaimable land or to take over land abandoned during the conﬂict. A treaty with the Khanate of Khokand was signed in 1835 and Kokand was given permission to station commercial agents in the Altishahr and an ambassador in Kashghar.42 However the conﬂict between the Muslims of Kokand, their supporters in Kashghar was to continue for decades, culminating in a Muslim incursion into Kashghar in 1865 by Buzurg Khan who was eventually replaced by his deputy, Yakub Beg, who is far better known. Yakub Beg declared himself the ruler of an independent khanate based on Kashghar and expanded his inﬂuence into northern Xinjiang, prompting the invasion and occupation of Ili by Russian forces. Within the Qing court there was a prolonged debate on whether Xinjiang was worth recovering from the ‘rebels’ led by Yakub Beg. Of those who favoured allowing the territory to remain in the hands of the khojas and their supporters, Li Hongzhang, one of the greatest statesmen of the Qing and a proponent of modernisation of defence and the economy, is the best known. Zuo Zongtang, another major statesman of the Qing, on the other hand argued persuasively that Xinjiang should be kept as Chinese territory. After the suppression of the Hui Muslims in Gansu in 1873, the government ﬁnally approved the reconquest of Xinjiang. Yakub Beg’s forces were ﬁnally defeated by the armies of the Qing in 1878, and Xinjiang was formally incorporated into the Chinese empire as a province in 1884 during the period of the intense British and Russian imperial rivalry in Central Asia known as the Great Game.43

Xinjiang in the early years of the Chinese Republic The Revolution of 1911 began in the central Chinese city of Wuchang (now part of the great conurbation of Wuhan) and brought down the Chinese empire, which had been in decline for decades after over half a century of Western invasion and domestic rebellion. Under the Republic of China, which was formally inaugurated on January 1st 1912, the semi-autonomous provinces

20

Introduction to Xinjiang

which had seceded one by one from the empire during the revolution were taken over by administrations that were dominated by military men: these men would later be categorised as warlords. Yang Zengxin became governor of Xinjiang in 1911 and ruled until his assassination in 1928. In many ways he maintained the status quo in the region, retaining for all practical purposes the framework of civil administration used by the Qing Imperial court to govern its most distant subjects. He kept the region tightly under control, partly by isolating it from the political factionalism of the Republican politicians in China proper but also kept open a weather eye for Russian and later Soviet interference and inﬂuence. In Owen Lattimore’s words, he was ‘an experienced ofﬁcial of the civil service, who ﬂew the ﬂag of the Republic but ruled the province for himself until his assassination in 1928’.44 It is both signiﬁcant and ironic that even a Chinese-run administration sought to segregate Xinjiang from the rest of China in order to keep it under control. Yang was murdered, by political rivals desperate to end his autocratic rule, at a banquet to celebrate the graduation of the class of 1928 of the Urumqi School of Law, this being a fair representation of the table manners of the rulers of Xinjiang at the time. His successor Jin Shuren had none of the power or authority that Yang had wielded and under his administration there was a marked increase in tensions between the Chinese administration and the native Uyghur leaders with whom Chinese ofﬁcials had to negotiate. In 1930, Shah Makhsud the native leader of the Uyghurs of Hami/Qumul (and known in Chinese as Wang or prince and in Uyghur as Khan) died of natural causes at the age of sixty-six, having been khan since the death of his father in 1908. Although his son Nasir succeeded him, Jin Shuren used the old khan’s death to assert his authority over the Hami region and the resentment that this provoked was the immediate cause of the insurrection of the Uyghurs of Hami against the Chinese authorities in 1931, a rising that was supported by the warlord Ma Zhongying, an ethnic Hui (Chinese-speaking Muslims who are also known as Dungans in Xinjiang). Ma brought his Gansu Hui armies into Xinjiang, ostensibly to support the local Muslims.

The Turkic-Islamic Republic of Eastern Turkestan Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples throughout Xinjiang, inﬂuenced to some degree by pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic sentiments, rose against Chinese control but were divided among themselves into family, religious and regional factions so that no single group or individual emerged to lead a uniﬁed government. However, by the autumn of 1933, the Amirs of Khotan had emerged as the single most important politico-religious group in the south of Xinjiang. The most senior of the Amirs was Muhammad Amin Bughra and his role in the independence movement in the 1930s remained a symbol long after the failure of the movement itself. The Turkic-Islamic Republic of Eastern Turkestan was proclaimed in Khotan on November 12th 1933. Its policies were ‘directed towards the establishment of a radical Islamic system, based on the Shari’a but encompassing certain educational, economic and social reforms.’45 It also strove

Historical outline

21

to remain outside the control of the Soviet Union. The Republic lasted only until February 6th 1934 when Kashghar was taken by the forces of Ma Zhongying as part of his strategic campaigns against Sheng Shicai. On February 14th after the Khotan forces had attempted to retake the city, ‘for two days the [Dungans] systematically looted Kashghar Old City, whilst between 1,700 and 2,000 citizens were massacred’.46 It is ironic that the Turkic-Islamic Republic was defeated, not by the secular nationalist forces allied to the Guomindang, but by Chinese Muslim armies. The new republic was in many ways the direct descendant of the regime of Yakub Beg that had controlled the Kashghar region from 1867 to 1877 and this continuity is important to Uyghur nationalists today. In its short life, it had created the framework of an independent state with a cabinet, a national assembly and a constitution. It issued its own currency and had its own ﬂag of a white star and crescent on a light blue background. The ﬂag and banknotes together with those of the East Turkestan Republic of 1944–1949 are revered by contemporary supporters of Xinjiang independence as symbols of a once and future state.

Sheng Shicai’s Governorship Jin Shuren was ousted in a coup d’e´tat and replaced as Govenor by Sheng Shicai, a native of northeastern China who had fought alongside Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) during the Northern Expedition which had been mounted to create a uniﬁed Republican government in the 1920s. Sheng arrived at an accommodation with the Soviet authorities with whom he was to cooperate until 1942, and they decided to intervene on his side against the Hui forces of Ma Zhongying. Ma was forced to retreat to southern Xinjiang, which was also in turmoil after uprisings by Uyghur, Kyrgyz and Hui groups against the Chinese administration based in Kashghar. Divisions between Turkic and Hui Muslims led to a vicious local civil war in which Ma Zhongying once again intervened on the side of the Hui troops and brieﬂy took control of Kashghar early in 1934. Sheng Shicai launched an attack on Kashghar in July 1934 with an army that included the Manchurian veterans and Turkic troops. Ma Zhongying withdrew, and probably ﬂed into Russian Central Asia although his ultimate fate is unknown. Sheng then had effective control over the whole of Xinjiang apart from the Yarkand and Khotan area which was still held by Hui forces loyal to Ma Zhongying. Although Sheng Shicai’s administration in Urumqi was nominally subordinate to the National Government in Nanjing, it was effectively autonomous and in this it followed the pattern established by Yang Zengxin, forbidding secessionist movements by the Uyghurs but to all intents and purposes seceding as a Chinese-controlled province. To achieve this, Sheng built a closer relationship with the Soviet Union. Russian inﬂuence in Xinjiang had been strong for decades and to this day there is a resident ethnic Russian population in Xinjiang, particulary in the Ili region next to the old Sino–Soviet border, but also evident in Urumqi. Since the Turkic and Tajik populations of Xinjiang are closely related

22

Introduction to Xinjiang

to their counterparts in Soviet Central Asia there was a natural tendency for this relationship to develop. Opposition to Chinese control continued. Turkic Muslims rose against Sheng in southern Xinjiang in 1937, and an independent Kazakh and Uyghur East Turkestan Republic controlled the northwestern Ili or Ghulja region from 1944 to 1949.47 This seminal experiment in independence, known to the Chinese as the Three Districts Revolution will be examined more closely in Chapter 4.

3

Ethnic groups in northwest China on the eve of CCP control and Uyghur language and culture in twentieth-century Xinjiang

The ethnic composition of Xinjiang The ethnic composition of the northwestern part of the People’s Republic of China, which stretches westwards from Xi’an, the old imperial capital and home of the Terracotta Army, to the western marches of Xinjiang is extraordinarily complex. It is the area where Chinese dynasties, expanding and contracting over many centuries, encountered peoples speaking Tibetan, Mongolian and Turkic languages and where the Chinese beliefs of Confucianism and Daoism came into contact, and often conﬂict, with Buddhism in its Tibetan and Mongolian lamaist forms and with Islam. In the provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu and Qinghai and the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region there is a mixture of Han Chinese and Muslim Hui communities, together with some Tibetan communities, especially in Qinghai. Further west, the inﬂuence of Chinese culture grows less and less. Although it has been under nominal Chinese control for centuries, Xinjiang, particularly in the south and west below the Taklamakan desert, is almost entirely Turkic in its language and culture and Muslim in religion. In very broad terms, Xinjiang is divided between Muslims, most of whom speak Turkic languages, and non-Muslim Han Chinese immigrants. The Muslims are in the majority, but they do not constitute a single solid bloc against the Chinese because they are also divided linguistically and culturally. The ethnic composition of Xinjiang has been oversimpliﬁed by modern Chinese ethnographers working within the guidelines set by the Chinese Communist Party and based on the concept of ‘nationalities’ created in the Soviet Union under Stalin. The real complexity of this ethnic mix is revealed in the most comprehensive and up-to-date study of ethnic groups in Xinjiang, by Thomas Hoppe and based on his ﬁeldwork in the region. Although the ethnic categories that are used in this chapter follow Hoppe in broad terms his work indicates clearly the complexity of the ethnic situation in the region.1 The single most important ethnic group are the Uyghurs, the people after whom the autonomous region is named. They are traditionally agriculturalists living in the oases, craftsmen and traders, who are united as a group by language and culture, but they are also closely related to other Turkic peoples in Xinjiang and the rest of Central Asia. The great majority of Uyghurs live in Xinjiang,

24

Introduction to Xinjiang

which they consider to be their homeland, although there are substantial and inﬂuential e´migre´ communities in Kazakhstan, Turkey and in Western Europe, notably Germany. Uyghur nationalism is usually considered to be a recent phenomenon as in the past Uyghurs have tended to identify with the particular oasis town from which their family traces its origins rather than with an abstract Uyghur nation, but after centuries of Chinese rule, and inspired by Muslims in Central Asia, there is a growing consciousness of an Uyghur identity, especially in the Altishahr region, which borders on Pakistan and Afghanistan and is where eighty per cent of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs live. Other major non-Han ethnic groups in Xinjiang include the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks and Tajiks, all with relatives in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and the Muslim Hui (known as Dungans in the former Soviet Union and to the non-Chinese people of Xinjiang), whose language and culture is closer to that of the Han Chinese.2 The assignment of these ethnic terms clearly has to be treated with a great deal of caution as they are based on the policies of ascribing ‘nationalities’ to all the ethnic groups of the USSR under Stalin which were later copied by the leadership of the CCP. Anyone familiar with Xinjiang will be aware that the ethnic divisions are far from clear-cut and there are, as might be expected, marriages that cut across ethnic lines, particularly among the educated urban classes. However, individuals and communities continue to identify themselves as Uyghur or Kazak and often wear clothing, headgear and, for men, beards in a fashion that marks them out as members of one group or another.

Population and population change Xinjiang is a frontier region lying on the crossroads between the Chinese, Turkic and Russian worlds and the composition of its population is a reﬂection of this geographical location. Estimates of the population before 1949 suggest that it was predominantly non-Chinese (the ethnic groups classiﬁed today as Uyghur, Kyrgyz and Kazakh). Although it is generally accepted that no census taken anywhere within the boundaries of the present People’s Republic of China before the national census of 1953 is at all reliable, there was a survey carried out by the Xinjiang provincial police in 1940–1941, which estimated the total population at 3,730,000. Figures from the same period suggest that 3,439,000 of these were Muslim and that 3,338,000 spoke either Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek or Tatar. These ﬁgures do not stand up independently to scrutiny in terms of modern surveys and statistical techniques but taken together, they indicate clearly that this was a region with only a minority Han Chinese community in the early 1940s.3 Migration from China to Xinjiang had been restricted during the eighteenth century but the border region did prove attractive to traders although they did not generally become permanent residents. The immigrant non-Muslim community remained a relatively small minority and was dominated by imperial ofﬁcials and merchants. The position changed completely after the CCP took control of China after the end of the civil war in 1949. PLA (People’s Liberation Army) forces moving

Ethnic groups, language and culture

25

westwards to take control of Xinjiang were demobilised there and many Han former soldiers settled into the region as cadres, or farmers in the quasi-military Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps which was to play such an important role in the stabilisation and economic development of Xinjiang. Migration to develop this frontier region was encouraged as a patriotic duty on the model of the opening of virgin lands in Siberia during the Stalin period in the USSR. Non-Han people in Xinjiang viewed this migration as a conscious attempt to undermine their traditional religious and cultural life and, at worst, as a form of culture genocide. This migration since the 1960s has played a major role in inter-ethnic conﬂict in Xinjiang. This migration from eastern China has changed the population proﬁle of Xinjiang dramatically and by the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century, the nonHan population are in a majority in the region but not in the overwhelming numbers that they were in the 1940s. The latest population statistics give the total population for the whole region as 17,915,459. Of these, 8,256,661 are Uyghurs making them 46 per cent of the total, 7,023,910 Han (39 per cent). There are 1,277,474 Kazakhs (7 per cent) and 159,584 Kyrgyz (0.9 per cent) and 813,023 Hui (4.5 per cent). Thus 54 per cent of the total population are Turkic speakers and possibly nearly 60 per cent Muslims in total when the Uzbeks and Tajiks are included in the total.4 These overall statistics, however, conceal a more complex picture. Newer Han migrants do not necessarily settle permanently in Xinjiang and they tend to live in the cities rather than the rural areas and in the north rather than the south of the region. Consequently there are still large areas of Xinjiang, typically the poorer areas of the west and southwest that are predominantly Muslim and non-Han. For example, the ﬁgures for the regional capital, Urumqi, are 1,643,760 total, Han 1,199,783 (73 per cent) and Uyghur (12.8 per cent), whereas for the Kashghar district as a whole, the corresponding ﬁgures are 3,365,560 total, Han 294,503 (8.75 per cent) and Uyghur 3,019,187 (89.7 per cent).5

Uyghur language and culture in twentieth-century Xinjiang The Uyghur language6 belongs to the eastern or Altay branch of the Turkic family and is therefore related to Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Turkmen, distantly to the Turkish of Turkey and, most closely, to Uzbek. It is in fact so close to Uzbek that many native Uyghur speakers take the view that the two languages are virtually identical, if allowance is made for the variation between dialects of the two languages. In October 1935, the distinguished Swedish scholar and diplomat, Gunnar Jarring, studied the speech of an informant from Qilich, a village 40 kilometres to the north of Namangan in what was then Russian Turkestan but is now on the borders of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. He identiﬁed the man’s dialect as one of the intermediate, Iranised dialects of Andijan-Kokand in the Fergana group and therefore related to Eastern Turki (Uyghur).7 These linguistic relationships give Uyghurs a ready means of communication with their counterparts in Central Asia, but not with the Han Chinese population

26

Introduction to Xinjiang

of Xinjiang, unless they learn the Chinese language formally. Uyghur staff in hotels in Kashghar speak the Chinese they have learned at school and refer to it in Chinese as Hanzu hua, the language of the Han people, with the implication that this is a minority language.8 Fluency in Standard Chinese (Mandarin, putonghua) is essential for ofﬁcials or teachers, but the standard of spoken Chinese in Xinjiang, even among Uyghur and Kazakh academics can be surprisingly poor.9 Traders and small shopkeepers in the bazaars do not always speak Chinese well, even in the regional capital Urumqi where the dominant population is ethnic Han Chinese, and few Han Chinese can communicate effectively in Uyghur. There is a serious language barrier between the two communities. Visiting Turpan with a Han colleague who spoke ﬂuent Uyghur, I was struck by the negative reaction produced by the appearance of a group of Hans and the transformation when at least part of the conversation could be carried out in Uyghur.10This is in spite of the fact that the Uyghur language is taught in schools and at Xinjiang University and despite the existence of many textbooks and phrasebooks designed for Chinese speakers who might wish to learn Uyghur. In the early 1990s, there were a number of textbooks available in Xinjiang for Han Chinese who wanted to learn Uyghur. By 1998, there were fewer of these in the bookshops but more were available for Uyghur speakers wishing to learn Chinese.11 There are marked age and gender differences in the use of Chinese in Xinjiang. Younger Uyghurs are more likely to be able to speak Chinese than older people and women possibly more so than men. Older Uyghurs often have to call on younger ones, especially young women, to interpret.12 The regional CCP secretary, Wang Lequan, interviewed in 1998, considered this language barrier, particularly in the rural areas, to be one of the most serious impediments in maintaining security or Chinese control over Xinjiang ‘Today there are still very few village cadres who can speak Chinese. . . . The minority nationalities do not understand Chinese, and we can only use their languages for publicity, which is very difﬁcult, especially in remote areas . . .13 Raising the level of Chinese among non-Han people in Xinjiang so that they can be integrated into Chinese society is a major priority for the government, and students whose ﬁrst language is not Chinese have been encouraged to take the National Chinese Language Standard Test. In spring 1997, 2,100 sat the examination in Urumqi and Kashghar, an increase on the 1,600 who took it in 1996.14 Joanne Smith and Nicolas Bequelin have drawn attention to the growing social divisions in Xinjiang between ethnic minority students whose education has been in Chinese (minkao han) and those who have been educated in their own language (minkao min) and the widely differing career prospects that the two groups have. Uyghurs educated in Chinese have a far greater chance of avoiding the discrimination that Uyghurs generally face in employment and they are often the children of government ofﬁcials.15 The Uyghur language was ﬁrst written using a script based on the writing system used for the Middle Eastern language Syriac, a script which was itself derived from the Aramaic alphabet of Biblical times. This Uyghur script was

Ethnic groups, language and culture

27

eventually used as the basis for the Mongolian written language in the days of the Mongol empire, but it fell into decline among the Uyghurs themselves and their language came to be written in a version of the Arabic script heavily inﬂuenced by Persian written forms after the adoption of Islam in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries. Uyghur in China did not convert to the Latin script, as had the Turkish of Turkey in 1928 under Kemal Ataturk, or to modiﬁed versions of the Cyrillic script which were imposed on the non-Russian languages of the Soviet Union, including Uyghur which is used by a small but signiﬁcant population who live there.16 The government led by the Chinese Communist Party launched a language reform programme throughout the whole of the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. This was designed primarily to make the notoriously difﬁcult Chinese script accessible to the mass of the population and to improve literacy, but the authorities in Beijing also adopted new and energetic policies on what they saw as reforming the languages of ethnic minorities. A ‘new script’ for Uyghur, based on a modiﬁed Latin alphabet was created in June 1958, replacing an experimental Cyrillic script, which reﬂected the inﬂuence that the Russian language had exerted in Xinjang in the 1930s and 1940s. However this ‘new script’ was seen as a Han Chinese imposition, and the ‘old script’ reappeared publicly but unofﬁcially in 1978 and was formally authorised in 1980 for the printing of books and periodicals in both the Uyghur and Kazakh languages. It had of course been in constant use privately in handwritten communications between individuals and in the mosques and other religious centres. The current version of written Uyghur is this ‘old script’, essentially a modiﬁed PersianArabic script (the form of written Arabic that is also used for Pashto and Dari in Afghanistan and Urdu in Pakistan) with additional diacritical marks for the complex vowel system. All Uyghur language books and newspapers now appear in the ‘old script’ as do street and shop names. In practice, much of urban Xinjiang is a bilingual environment with street names, many shop signs and ofﬁcial leaﬂets and posters printed in both Uyghur and Chinese.17 However, in the rural areas there are many monolingual Uyghur speakers. The re-emergence of the ‘old script’ has helped Uyghurs to identify with the rest of the Muslim world.18 Religious observance and cultural features associated with Islam including distinctive coloured hats for men, and for women, veils (in Kashghar and the Altishahr) or headscarves (in Urumqi and Turpan) reinforce this identity. Uyghur folk and popular music with a driving rhythm that distinguishes it immediately from Chinese music and lyrics that often refer to Uyghur heroes and legends is constantly played in bazaars, restaurants and at wedding parties as a statement of cultural assertion.19 The broadcast media in Xinjiang are also multilingual: television and radio stations broadcast programmes in both Standard Chinese and Uyghur and there are also Kazakhlanguage transmissions, particularly in the northwest of the region.20 Some Uyghurs, particularly e´migre´s, have expressed concern at the Sinicization of the Uyghur language, in particular the systematic changes to place names with a Chinese version preferred by the authorities to an indigenous

28

Introduction to Xinjiang

original. For example Qumul appears to have been replaced by Hami, Ghulja by Yining and Kashghar by Kashi. In fact both names are used in Xinjiang. It is a fact that other Turkic words, including internationally recognised words such as telephone and museum have been replaced by Chinese loan words, but there is some evidence that these might be fashionable with young Uyghurs.21 In 1993, Uzbekistan, a near neighbour of Xinjiang decided to use the Latin alphabet for written Uzbek, and this is signiﬁcant as Uzbek is the closest of the Turkic languages to Uyghur. The decision to abandon the Cyrillic script, which had been imposed on all the republics of the Soviet Union by the Russiandominated government in the 1930s after a brief initial period when the Latin script replaced the Arabic, is seen as a clear break with Uzbekistan’s Soviet past.22 Some scholars and religious leaders had argued for the return to the Arabic script, but the decision to opt for the Latin script was viewed as a signal of the Uzbek leadership’s intention of allying itself with secular and modernising nations such as Turkey rather than with Islamist states and movements.23 Given the close relationship between Uzbek and Uyghur, it will be interesting to see to what extent Uyghurs respond to the pressure to revert to a Latin script.

Muslim society and culture in 1950s Kashghar Xinjiang is a vast region, three times the area of France, and its major centres of population are separated by hundreds of miles of desert and mountain ranges so it is not surprising to ﬁnd great social and cultural differences between the oasis towns. The most signiﬁcant differences are those between the north and south of the Taklamakan Desert. Although Xinjiang is such an ethnic patchwork that it is diffcult to generalise, Mongol, Kazakh and Russian inﬂuences tend to be greater in the north, including the town of Yining/Ghulja and its surrounding towns and villages, and traditional Uyghur culture has to a large extent been retained in the south. In general, the towns and villages of the far south and southwest, the Altishahr, being the furthest from Chinese inﬂuence, have preserved the most distinctively different Uyghur culture. Of these, the best documented and one of the most westerly in China is the great religious, intellectual and commercial centre of Kashghar (Kashi in its Chinese form) and the rural areas that surround it. It is difﬁcult to overestimate the importance of Islam in Kashghari society up to the point at which it came under the control of the CCP after 1949. Islam was society and society was Islam. In the early 1950s, there were more than 12,000 mosques of different size and status in the prefecture in which Kashghar is situated, while in the Muslim sector of Kashghar city itself (known in Chinese as Shufu), there were no less than 126. The most important and best known of all is the imposing ’Id Gah mosque which stands in the centre of the city. The name ’Id Gah, which is used for the main mosque in most towns, is a combination of the Arabic word id for ‘religious festival’ or ‘feast’ and the Persian word gah for ‘square’ or ‘public place’ and it was traditionally the mosque in which major festivals such as ’Id al Fitr, the feast of breaking the fast of Ramadan, and ’Id al Adha, the feast of sacriﬁce which takes place during the month of the hajj

Ethnic groups, language and culture

29

pilgrimage, were celebrated. The Kashghar ’Id Gah Mosque is one of the largest mosques in China and has a prayer hall that can accommodate 5,000 worshippers. Local mosques known as jami’ were found in central locations in towns and villages of the prefecture and in the suburbs of Kashghar itself. Smaller mosques or masjid were established everywhere in residential areas to enable the faithful to fulﬁl their obligations of ﬁve daily prayers and there were also mosques attached to the mazars or tombs of shaykhs or other holy ﬁgures. Finally there were the yetim or ‘orphan’ mosques built by the roadside or in the desert to provide for the needs of pious travellers.24 The sheer number of mosques is a clear indication of the powerful position that the Muslim religious hierarchy had achieved in Kashghari society. The Association for the Promotion of Uyghur Culture, founded in the 1930s provided thousands of poorer religious leaders with food and money. Mosques levied the ’ushr or tithe tax on the community and this provided a steady income for the clergy until it was stopped by the new government in 1951. The traditional waqf endowments of land to mosques or other religious foundations had also been a valuable source of income, but during the land reform and collectivisation campaigns that affected all the rural areas in the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s, many waqf lands and properties were conﬁscated and divided up among landless peasants. This should not be interpreted speciﬁcally as an anti-Islamic policy as it was directed against all owners of large tracts of land, whether they were individuals or social groups, throughout the whole of the territory under CCP control. The Land Reform Law of June 1950 made speciﬁc provision for the conﬁscation of land belonging to landlords, but property and land that was owned by lineage organisations (including ancestral halls), Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist temples and monasteries, churches and schools was to be left intact but would be taxed on the income it yielded. Clause 3 of the Land Reform Law made it clear that, ‘Mosques should be allowed to retain their land, with the approval of the local Muslim population’. However this changed during collectivisation and particularly during the Great Leap Forward and the establishment of communes throughout China after 1958.25 Religious courts played a key role in Kashghar’s pre-1949 Muslim society. The Islamic court and qadi (judge) system was complex and hierarchical with the highest court responsible for the overall administration of Shari’a law and subordinate courts which adjudicated on matters such as debts, pledges, divorce and the criminal law and disputes between members of craft guilds or traders in the bazaar. After the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, major criminal cases were handed over to the ofﬁcial Chinese courts, but the qadi system continued to run in parallel with the Chinese system, concentrating on civil and religious case. When the CCP took control of Kashgharia in 1949 and 1950, all of the functions of the religious courts were abolished, with the exception of the court that regulated trade and craft guilds, and all legal powers were ofﬁcially transferred to the courts of the PRC. However, the tradition and inﬂuence of the qadi courts persisted unofﬁcially.26 It was not until the religious

30

Introduction to Xinjiang

reform campaign that accompanied Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward in Xinjiang that the CCP made a real effort to dismantle the religious structures of the region. The waqﬁyya system of land owned by mosques and other Islamic bodies and the Islamic courts were also central to the power of Islam, but Suﬁsm also played an important role. Some waqﬁyya land, for example, was attached to the mazars or tombs of the Suﬁ orders. Wu Dongyao, in a list of prominent Muslim clerics in Kashghar, mentions one Khoja Sopi, an Ishan leader who was prominent not only in Kashghar but throughout southern Xinjiang. He had completed the normal madrasa education up to the age of ﬁfteen and had then studied Suﬁsm under his father, a local shaykh before travelling to a Suﬁ lodge in Pakistan for further study and then making the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca when he was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He later succeeded his father as Ishan of his Suﬁ order.27 This is merely one example among many possible of the inﬂuence of Suﬁ masters in the region.

The Kazaks of Xinjiang Kazakhstani (and that neologism is employed deliberately as not all of the population of Kazakhstan, and especially the capital Almaty, are Kazakh and even the Kazakhs have lost their own language) scholars and politicians attach considerable importance to the Kazakhs of China. Only a few years after the collapse of the USSR, and still feeling their way towards an independent cultural and political identity, the Russiﬁed Kazakhs of Kazakhstan had two major sources from which they could draw. The ﬁrst was the Kazakh aul: the dictionary translation of this is merely ‘village’ or ‘countryside’, but it has assumed almost a mystical signiﬁcance as the repository of traditional Kazakh values and culture, and the place where Kazakhs who have lost their language might visit to recover it (for readers in the British Isles, a parallel with the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht in the western coastal areas of Ireland comes to mind). The second source was the Kazakhs of China, ‘the only real Kazakhs left’ as one Russian-speaking ethnic Kazak in the Academy of Sciences in Almaty explained. Although there were strong cultural, economic and family ties between Kazakhs in the former Soviet Union and the Kazakh areas of China, primarily the northwestern part of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, those ties had been all but completely severed since the outbreak of serious unrest in the area around Yining/Ghulja in 1962 and the sudden and dramatic migration of thousands of Kazakhs and others to what they regarded as the more tolerable political climate of the Soviet Union.28 By 1962, the Sino–Soviet dispute was already causing serious problems for relations between the two Communist giants, although it did not come to the notice of the wider world until the newspaper polemics of 1963 and the demonstrations against the ‘new Tsars’ in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. With the cross-border ﬁghting of 1969 between Soviet and Chinese forces which cost lives on both sides, the separation between those Kazakhs inside China and

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31

those outside seemed permanent. All this changed with the collapse of Soviet power and the new government of Nursultan Nazarbayev that emerged in December 1991 and Kazakhstani scholars were encouraged to carry out research on the traditional society and culture of the Kazakhs on both sides of the border as interethnic relations became important policy issues in the construction of the new Kakzakhstani state.29

4

The Three Districts Revolution and ‘peacful liberation’ The CCP takes political and military control

Three Districts Revolution or Islamic Republic? In the 1940s, the northwestern part of Xinjiang experienced a brief period of independence and this has had a profound impact on the culture and psyche of the Uyghurs and the other non-Han Chinese people of the region. This independent government, the Eastern Turkestan Republic (ETR), which lasted from 1944 to 1949 is known in the ofﬁcial Chinese histories as the ‘Three Districts Revolution’ sanqu geming and is regarded by the Chinese Communist Party and by historians sympathetic to the party as having been a necessary precursor of the ‘peaceful liberation of Xinjiang’ during which the CCP took control of the region. A simpliﬁed deﬁnition of the rising is given in a historical dictionary of Xinjiang published: ‘The Three Districts Revolution was an armed uprising against the reactionary rule of the Nationalist Guomindang by mainly Uyghurs and Kazakhs in the districts of Yili, Tacheng and Ashan (now known as Altai) in northwestern Xinjiang and was a constituent part of the Chinese People’s democratic revolution’.1 However, it is the independent, non-Chinese, and indeed anti-Chinese, nature of the East Turkestan Republic of this period that is remembered by many Uyghurs and others in Xinjiang today and the ﬂag of the ETR, a star and crescent on a turquoise background remains a symbol of Turkic and Muslim nationalism and is anathema to the Chinese authorities as a symbol of separatism. Tensions between the Soviet-backed administration of Sheng Shicai and the local population had been high for years, but the insurrection was triggered by the decision in March 1943 of the government in Xinjiang to requisition 10,000 horses for military use. Horse requisition committees were formed and those who could not supply horses were obliged to pay an amount greater than half the market price of a horse. This was a serious ﬁnancial burden for the poor herdsmen in the mountain pastures of northern Xinjiang, in particular the herding families of Yili, Tacheng and Altai, and it was the catalyst that converted resentment into armed rebellion. Underground rebel organisations, some inﬂuenced by Chinese or Russian Communists, began to appear throughout Xinjiang. A liberation organisation led by Ishaq Beg and others formed a guerrilla organisation in Puli in June 1944 and attacked Guomindang military

Three Districts Revolution

33

units. Similar groups emerged in Yili, Tacheng and other areas, even in the Chinese controlled administrative headquarters of Xinjiang, Dihua (later known as Urumqi), among ethnic minority members of Guomindang government organisations.2 Discontent and guerrilla activity spread until in the autumn of 1944 a group of Uyghur and Kazakh farmers and herdsmen in the small town of Nilka (Gongliu in Chinese) some 100 kilometres to the east of Yining/Ghulja rose against the authorities on the instigation of the underground guerrilla units and attacked the county town. Nilka, sheltered in the mountains and with a river running through it was an ideal location for the hit and run tactics of guerrilla warfare and the Guomindang garrison there was defeated early in October 1944. From Nilka, the rebels set out for the main regional centre of Ghulja, arriving in the town in the ﬁrst week of November. The Guomindang authorities were in a state of panic, declared martial law and shot hundreds of local people in a reign of terror. The insurgents attacked key installations in the city, including GMD government buildings, a power station and the police headquarters and after a week of ﬁerce ﬁghting the city of Ghulja was ﬁrmly in the hands of Muslim rebels who proclaimed on November 15th 1944 that they had established an East Turkestan Republic with Ghulja as its capital.3 Guerrilla warfare against retreating GMD units continued and the rebels consolidated their hold over the region. The GMD moved their forces further east to ensure that they remained in control of Dihua (Urumqi). In August 1945, as the Second World War came to an end, Ahmedjan and other leaders of the East Turkestan Republic began negotiations with GMD representatives in Dihua. Jiang Jieshi sent the head of the political department of the GMD Military Committee, Zhang Zhizhong, to negotiate with the rebels in September 1945. Zhang became Chairman of the Xinjiang Provisional Government Council and thus effectively Governor of Xinjiang, but his control did not extend to the Three Districts. A new provisional government was formed in October 1945, but the negotiations with the GMD were superseded by the outbreak of the civil war between the GMD and CCP.4 Today, in the western part of Yining/Ghulja, inside People’s Park which is just off Ahemaitijiang Street, (named after Ahmetjan one of the most signiﬁcant leaders of the ETR government who was killed in the infamous aircraft crash of August 1949), there is a museum dedicated to the Three Districts Revolution. In September 1998 it was closed and empty apart from a sleeping caretaker, and some of the windows had been partially bricked up. It is possible that it had become the focus of attention during the disturbances that shook the Yining area during 1995 and 1997 (see Chapters 7 and 12). By 2002, the museum had reopened. The actual seat of the government of the ETR is on Jiefang beilu (Liberation Street north) within the Military Administration Zone of Yining, which is heavily guarded and not accessible to foreigners. The four buildings that are still in existence run east to west in a straight line. The most easterly was the ofﬁce of the chairman of the Three Districts revolutionary government; the next was the military headquarters; the third was the Supervisory Council; and ﬁnally

34

Introduction to Xinjiang

on the west side was the court. These buildings all date back to the Qing period and after 1937 had become the ofﬁces of the Yili land reclamation commissioner. Their original appearance has been preserved to this day.5 The Second World War in China and the occupation by Japanese troops of most of the major cities of China proper came to an end with the unconditional surrender of Japan on August 15th 1945, announced in a broadcast by the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, after the Allies had dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Nationalist Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party had been nominal allies during the occupation in what was ofﬁcially styled the Second United Front, but bitter ideological differences meant that there was very little real cooperation in resisting the Japanese. At the end of the war, the international community, mainly the United States, attempted to broker an agreement between the two parties for the formation of a coalition government, but negotiations broke down and China was plunged into a devastating civil war which lasted from 1946 to 1949. Most of the ﬁghting took place in northern and central China, far away from Xinjiang which was almost entirely unaffected by the conﬂict. The civil war ended in 1949 with the defeat of the Nationalists and the capture by the CCP of the former Nationalist capital city, Nanjing, on April 23rd. Beijing, the old imperial capital had already fallen to the CCP and it was proclaimed the capital of the People’s Republic of China on October 1st 1949. Party and government ofﬁcials of the Guomindang and their military forces retreated to Taiwan. As the CCP consolidated its position in eastern China, units of the People’s Liberation Army (as their troops were renamed on May 1st 1946) that had been ﬁghting there were released and ordered westwards to take control of the outlying provinces. Lanzhou, the administrative capital of Gansu province and a strategic crossing point on the Yellow River was captured on August 26th 19496 and Xining, the main city of neighbouring Qinghai province, which is just 200 kilomeres away from Lanzhou, was taken on September 5th.7 Xinjiang came under the control of the CCP in what the ofﬁcial accounts refer to as the ‘peaceful liberation’ heping jiefang of the region and which Burhan Shahidi, one of the most signiﬁcant political leaders of early twentieth century Xinjiang calls, in an outbreak of humour rare in the history of Xinjiang, the ‘telegram uprising’ tongdian qiyi, referring to the exchange of telegrams between himself, Zhang Zhizhong, Tao Zhiyue and CCP Chairman Mao Zedong in September 1949 in which Xinjiang was surrendered to the PLA and during which Burhan pledged his allegiance to the CCP.8 In this way, the Eastern Turkestan government was absorbed into the revolutionary administration of the CCP. Eight of the leaders of the East Turkestan Republic were invited to Beijing to negotiate the precise details of the relationship between Xinjiang and the PRC with the Communist Party leadership early in 1950. They were killed when the aircraft they were travelling in crashed and their deaths are still seen by many Uyghurs as the deliberate elimination by the Chinese authorities of that section of the ETR leadership who were in favour of genuine autonomy or independence.

Three Districts Revolution

35

Indeed some of those closely connected with the East Turkestan Republic maintain to this day that the leaders never made it to the aircraft but were killed in the Kazakhstan town of Panﬁlov on the orders of Stalin.9 The ofﬁcial Chinese account is simply that it was an accident. A programme to encourage the immigration of Han Chinese from the east was announced in 1950. Two major political campaigns which were launched by the CCP in the early years of its rule, the movement against counter-revolutionaries and the Land Reform programme, which included the conﬁscation and redistribution of mosque-owned waqf land (land owned by mosques or other religious and charitable foundations), were used to break down the traditional social structure and political and religious authority.10 These campaigns took place throughout the whole of China but were modiﬁed in Xinjiang to take account of the special social and religious conditions of the region. Campaigns against Pan-Islam and Pan-Turkism were added to campaigns against landowners and in a retrospective article written in 1994, Urumqi Evening News estimated that millions of yuan were conﬁscated and over half a million people killed or sent to labour camps as part of the campaign.11 On October 1st 1955 the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was created, with a number of autonomous Mongol, Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Hui counties. Burhan Shahidi, an ethnic Tatar born in the village of Aksu in Tetesh county in the Kazan region which was the centre of the Tatar community of Russia,12 and Seypidin Aziz (Saifudin), an Uyghur, headed the regional government, although real power rested with Wang Zhen, commander of the PLA units which took control in 1949, and the regional Communist Party Secretary, Wang Enmao, both ethnic Hans.13 The quasi-military Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (Xinjiang shengchan jianshe bingtuan, probably the single most important institution in contemporary Xinjiang, and generally referred to in the region as the bingtuan ‘the Corps’ in the region, was established on October 7th 1954 although it had been planned some years earlier. It has been described as ‘a predominantly Han organisation of demobilised PLA men, former Guomindang soldiers and resettled Han people’ and has played a key role in establishing and maintaining CCP control over the region.14 It continues to play a crucial role in the government and defence of Xinjiang and the importance of this role is constantly referred to by the Chinese leadership. It operates almost as a state within a state as it has its own militia (including the elite Emergency Militia Units), armed police, court system and prisons. It also administers its own schools and hospitals and has an independent budget. By the early 1990s there were perhaps 2 million people working for the bingtuan, which had several hundred farms dotted throughout Xinjiang and especially in the border areas. In 1997 the number of members had risen to 2.4 million according to the statistical yearbook that was published by the corps in the more open period when it was attempting to transform itself into a public corporation.15 After the 1958 Great Leap Forward, radical policies, even less sensitive to local feelings replaced what in comparison appears as the relatively cautious

36

Introduction to Xinjiang

approach to inter-ethnic relations in the early 1950s. ‘Local nationalism’ and Han and Muslim leaders sympathetic to the USSR were systematically criticised and bazaars and Islamic organisations were closed down. Wang Enmao introduced more moderate policies in 1962 after the exodus of many Kazakhs and Uyghurs to Kazakhstan,16 but the 1966 Cultural Revolution, during which he was dismissed, caused chaos until the imposition of direct military control in 1971. The CCP leadership was divided on policy towards Xinjiang in the early 1980s. After a visit to Tibet in May 1980, Hu Yaobang, shortly to become CCP Secretary General, proposed a reform programme which recommended genuine rather than token autonomy, economic policies suited to local needs, investment in agriculture and animal husbandry, the revival of cultural, educational and scientiﬁc projects and the phased transfer to the interior of Han ofﬁcials. In a modiﬁed form these proposals were adopted for use in Xinjiang by the Secretariat of the CCP Central Committee in July. At that time, Hu considered that Xinjiang was less of a problem than Tibet as there were no religious leaders or governments in exile comparable to the Dalai Lama with his base in Dharamsala and there was no independence movement with overseas support. These reformist policies were abandoned after conﬂict in the central leadership between Wang Zhen, the former Xinjiang military commander and Hu Yaobang, who was purged in 1987, although this was more to do with what was described as his ‘pro-Japanese’ position in foreign policy than his views on Xinjiang or Tibet. According to a Han ofﬁcial in Xinjiang sympathetic to Wang Zhen, You give them autonomy and they will only turn round and create an East Turkestan. Hu Yaobang also wants to withdraw Han cadres to the interior. That would be surrendering Xinjiang to the Soviet Union and Turkey. Only a traitor would do such a thing. To stabilize Xinjiang we must send hard-liners like Wang Zhen . . . here.17

5

The economy of Xinjiang in the reform and opening era

Introduction The development of the regional economy is central to the strategy of the Chinese government in maintaining its control over Xinjiang in the era of ‘reform and opening’ the post-Mao period of economic growth and modernisation which is associated with Deng Xiaoping’s period as General Secretary of the CCP. To put it at its simplest and crudest, Beijing is banking on prosperity buying off the population and reducing the support for independence, separatist and politicised Islamic movements such as Wahabbism, Naqshbandi Sufsim and Uyghur nationalism, which is strongest in the rural and marginal areas where poverty is greatest. It is not at all certain whether this strategy is likely to succeed or whether or not the population might actually prefer a lower level of economic development in a society without control from Beijing. It is, however, the best card that the authorities in Beijing can play, possibly their only card. Consequently, massive investment in the infrastructure of the region took place in the 1990s, and this, combined with the beneﬁts of trade with the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, has produced a highly visible and startling transformation in parts of the region. The greatest transformation has been in the administrative capital of the autonomous region, Urumqi, which is being modernised in a way that is very reminiscent of the changes that Beijing started to go through in the 1980s. A new expressway links the airport to the centre of the city, ultra-modern hotels and towering ofﬁce blocks have sprung up and older buildings have been given a face-lift. Trafﬁc in the city has increased dramatically and cars, lorries and mini-buses are driven with the noise, lack of sophistication and judgement also reminiscent of late 1980s Beijing before it gradually came to terms with its problem of trafﬁc congestion with the completion of its system of ring roads and ﬁrmer policing of trafﬁc. Seemingly thousands of little red taxis now stream through the streets of Urumqi and Yining/ Ghulja like demented ladybirds, hooting and touting for custom. Although the regional government and its press and publicity organs emphasise development and modernisation, processes which are only too apparent in Urumqi and other major cities, it is important to bear in mind that much of Xinjiang, in common with similar areas throughout the whole of

38

Introduction to Xinjiang

western China remains underdeveloped and that poverty is still a reality for a large section of the population. The China News Agency Zhongguo Xinwenshe reported in 1996 that out of the total population of Xinjiang, approximately 14 million at that time, 1.43 million were living below the ofﬁcially determined poverty line of RMB 350 per person per annum. Although poverty relief programmes had been a feature of government policy in Xinjiang since 1986, ten years later, thirty of Xinjiang’s seventy counties were judged to be below the poverty line and as many as 1 in 6 of the population in rural areas were unable to afford adequate food or clothing. Government plans in 1996 included the provision of more safe drinking water, the installation of telephone and electricity supplies and the construction of more tarmac roads with the intention of transferring the poor to oilﬁelds and mining and industrial areas where they might ﬁnd work.1

Agriculture Stockbreeding and nomadic pastoralism dominated the traditional economy and there are still about 35 million livestock, primarily sheep in the region. Lamb is the principal ingredient of Uyghur cuisine with the familiar kewap (kebab) being the most obvious form. As in neighbouring Gansu and Ningxia, the trading of sheep and sheepskins is an important source of income for the poorer farmers as could be seen on the streets of Kashghar in 1992 and Yining in 1998. The number of families leading the nomadic lifestyle which was typical of the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz of the region has declined dramatically since 1949 as many have moved or been moved to permanent settlements constructed by the local government. The ofﬁcial view is that this has drastically reduced the death toll among the livestock of these stockbreeders and has increased their income and improved their quality of life.2 Oasis agriculture also remains important and a sophisticated centuries-old system of kariz wells and canals that was constructed to tap melting snow from the Tianshan mountains remains in place today although there are moves to modernise this and replace the wells with electrical pumps. Grain and cotton are grown and cotton factories include one run by a Chinese–Japanese joint-venture company in the nominally Hui Muslim township of Changji to the north of Urumqi, which uses the most up-to-date technology.3 Xinjiang is China’s largest producer of cotton and the 1996 harvest produced a total of 900,000 tonnes. The yield per hectare of 11,760 kilos is also the highest in China. Developing cotton production is regarded by the Xinjiang government as second only to oil in promoting the wealth of the region and between 1990 and 1997, the acreage given over to cotton doubled with the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps contributing as much as 40 per cent of the region’s cotton crop and bringing in Han workers to farm it. There is considerable doubt as to the value of a monoculture approach such as this and the problems experienced in Uzbekistan both before and since the collapse of the Soviet Union suggest that these doubts may well be justiﬁed.4 Agriculture remains underdeveloped with irrigation

The economy in the reform and opening era

39

problems in the grasslands and deserts, and serious drought in the late 1980s and again in 1997.5 The problems of irrigation and of husbanding and sharing the scarce supplies of water is likely to be a major challenge for Xinjiang as it will be for the rest of Central Asia in the twenty-ﬁrst century. Land reclamation and resistance to desertiﬁcation are seen as vital components of the development of the region and these can only take place in parts of Xinjiang where water is available.6 The discovery of substantial natural underground fresh-water reservoirs early in 1999 gave rise to some optimism that these problems could be alleviated to a large extent. The largest reservoir is 120 metres below ground level near an oasis on the Weigan river which is a tributary of the Tarim, China’s longest inland river, in Aksu prefecture and the water is deemed to be of sufﬁciently high quality to be used for drinking as well as for the irrigation of agricultural land.7 There are reported to be others in the Zhungar and Tarim basins and below the Taklamakan Desert.8 Fruit is very important in both the diet and the economy of the region, especially Hami melons and Turpan grapes. This is in contrast to the rest of China where, although it is on sale everywhere, fruit does not play such a central part in the daily diet. Markets in Xinjiang have an abundance of fresh produce on display, both in the areas open to tourists and the more remote parts of the region. For example, in September 1998, market stalls near the Shaanxi mosque on Shengli Road in Yining had high quality grapes and peaches for sale and just to the south a dozen mule carts laden with water melons had drawn up with their wares. Melons and grapes produced in the Yining/Ghulja region are particularly full-ﬂavoured. Tinned and dried fruit are exported, and a Sino–Japanese joint venture raisin processing plant opened in Turpan in March 1992.9 Locally produced wine made from the abundant grape harvest is generally too syrupy for most Western tastes, but is potentially of high quality. Various enterprises have been attempting to produce wines of export quality and Loulan Red, produced to the east of Turfan is much drier, although rather thin, and is closer to European wines and consequently much more expensive.10

Oil, gas and other mineral resources The Chinese government’s development strategies for Xinjiang have their main emphasis on the exploitation of mineral and other natural resources and also border trade.11 Petroleum oil, coal, minerals and non-ferrous metals are abundant, although Chinese estimates often tend to be considerably higher than those of Western analysts, and there are oil drilling operations the length of the railway line from Hami to Urumqi.12 Oil exploration began in 1951;13 the ﬁrst well was drilled in 1955 and the output of the Zhungaria, Turpan-Hami and Tarim basins was planned to reach 18 million tonnes by 1995 and 30 million tonnes by 2000. State plans also envisaged 2.3 billion cubic metres of natural gas by 1995, rising to 5 billion cubic metres by the year 2000. Oil and gas are processed locally with oil reﬁneries at Dushanzi, Karamay (the headquarters of the Xinjiang Petroleum Administration) and Zepu, supported by British and

40

Introduction to Xinjiang

Italian ﬁnance and French, Japanese and British commercial cooperation.14 Brieﬁngs given to Prime Minister Li Peng by oil industry ofﬁcials in November 1989 suggested that ‘the Tarim basin has the largest oil storage structure so far discovered in the world today,’15 and Japanese cooperation in the Tarim Basin was discussed in September 1992.16 Central government plans to use the oil, gas, coal and other mineral resources to turn Xinjiang into a major chemical industry base.17 A group of Russian specialists was briefed by Chinese geologists on the possibilities of prospecting for gas in Tarim Basin February 1993. The four-man delegation led by Vladimir Vasileyev, Deputy Director of the Russian Federal Nuclear Industrial Centre’s Research Institute visited the Northwest Geological Bureau of the Ministry of Geology and Mineral Resources for a brieﬁng on petroleum gas prospecting activity in the Tarim Basin in recent years. Local ofﬁcials expressed hope for cooperation with their foreign counterparts on prospecting equipment, petroleum prospecting and research. ‘The Russian guests expressed their admiration for China’s successes in petroleum gas prospecting in the Tarim Basin’.18 In 1993, China decided to open up twelve new oil exploitation ﬁelds. Prime Minister Li Peng speaking in Beijing on February 17th announced that ‘In the old oilﬁelds, cooperation will aim to raise oil recovery ratio, while in new oilﬁelds including the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang . . . risk prospecting will be conducted and cooperation in oil development will begin after oil reserves are veriﬁed’. Wang Tao, President of the China National Petroleum Corporation said at a press conference on the expansion of international cooperation for onshore oil development that two rounds of bidding were available for foreign cooperative partners. The ﬁrst round was to be conducted in March 1993 for the southeastern part of the Tarim basin. Five bidding sectors were identiﬁed with a total area of 72,730 square kilometres. The second round was scheduled for late 1993 or early 1994.19 Although oil industry professionals are more conﬁdent of the possibility of exploiting the oil resources of Xinjiang than of neighbouring Mongolia, there has not been much enthusiasm by Western oil companies to take advantage of the new ﬁelds.20 The Xinjiang Petroleum Administrative Bureau, the state body responsible for prospecting for oil and managing the oil industry, has shifted its exploration activities from ﬁeld to ﬁeld in search of commercially exploitable sources. By late 1998, the focus had moved to the Karamay ﬁeld in the northern part of Xinjiang, part of the Junggar basin and close to the border with Kazakhstan. Karamay is not a new ﬁeld as it was opened in 1955, but new discoveries of oil and gas and an ambitious investment programme have led the local government to claim that it will be in the forefront of development in the industry in the early years of the twenty-ﬁrst century.21 On December 22nd 2002 it was reported that the Karamay ﬁeld had realised its annual target of 10,000,000 tons and had become the ﬁrst major oilﬁeld in the northwest of China to do so.22 In June 1997, the China National Petroleum Corporation was the successful bidder in a competition for the purchase of Aktyubinkskneft the main oil

The economy in the reform and opening era

41

company in Kazakhstan. It brought 60 per cent of the shares of the company for US$4 billion and planned to double existing production of 50,000 barrels a day within three years and construct a 3,000-kilometre pipeline into Xinjiang to assure its long-term oil surplus.23 In August 1996, the Institute of Remote Sensing Applications, a specialist organ of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reported that the analysis of satellite and other remote-sensing data suggested the possibiliy that there may be largescale gold deposits in the west of the Tianshan mountains.24 Gold prospecting began in the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture in 1998 after agreements on cooperation had been signed by the local mining department and the Australian mining company Broken Hill Proprietary and Barrick Resources from Canada. The prefecture, located at the point where the Tianshan and Kunlun mountain ranges meet is on the Pamir River and is thought to be the most likely site for gold. Kizilsu is in an area of particularly harsh climate that has made it extremely difﬁcult for prospecting.25

Communications Because so much of Xinjiang consists of either mountain or desert, communications problems have been a major hindrance to economic development. Domestic air travel within Xinjiang itself has become essential, both for local ofﬁcials and for traders because of the size of the region, and in 1992 China Xinjiang Airlines, operated ten local routes out of Urumqi, ﬁfteen to other parts of China and a twice-weekly ﬂight to Almaty in Kazakhstan. One Air China ﬂight from Beijing to Istanbul operates via Urumqi. Xinjiang is less isolated internationally than previously, but communication by air is still inadequate. The ﬁrst direct Almaty to Beijing ﬂight was apparently turned back after having reached the Chinese border as it failed to get the necessary clearance to proceed and returned to Almaty during a ‘heightened alert on the Kazakhstan border’ in November 1992.26 There were plans to increase internal and external services, including ﬂights to Shenzhen, Shenyang and Xi’an, and local airports are being developed.27 The renovation of Urumqi airport was included in plans drawn up by the State Planning Commission for the development of the western region of China in August 1996.28 By September 1998, there were still ten local routes but there were now twenty-four destinations in other parts of China and ﬂights to Novosibirsk as well as Almaty.29 The departure computer terminal at Urumqi airport also showed a direct ﬂight to Sharjah in the Arabian Gulf.30 The international aviation weekly, Flight International, in its 1996 World Aviation Directory, listed fortythree scheduled destinations from Urumqi including Tashkent, Islamabad and Moscow and many others within Xinjiang and China proper, but it is not clear how many of these were actually operating as direct links.31 Air travel across the border between Kazakhstan and Xinjiang was still not easy in 1998. Government restrictions forced both international ﬂights and internal ﬂights in the border area to take place at night for security reasons. It was not clear whether this was to

42

Introduction to Xinjiang

avoid military installations in restricted areas being visible or because of concern about separatist activity in the mountains. The main rail link from Urumqi to inland China is no worse than railways throughout the rest of China. In other words it is slow and crowded but vital for trade. There are regular trains from Beijing and Shanghai via Lanzhou and construction of a multi-track line on the Urumqi–Lanzhou section of the route was due to begin in September 1992.32 It ﬁnally became operational in July 1995, increasing the freight capacity of the line by up to three times.33 A line from Urumqi to the Kazakhstan border at the Alatau Pass was opened on September 12th, 1990,34 initially freight only, but the ﬁrst passenger trains ran between Almaty and Urumqi on June 22nd 1992 with the Prime Ministers of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan on board.35 This route connects with the Turkistan–Siberia railway, linking the Chinese and former Soviet rail networks, and is seen as a key section of a new ‘Europe–Asia land bridge’. Xinjiang still has only a rudimentary internal rail network but an extension into southern Xinjiang was due to begin during 1995.36 By the beginning of 1999, the Uzbek– Chinese intergovernmental commission was able to announce that a section of the southern Xinjiang line had been completed and would be linked to Kashghar and would form part of what was by then being referred to as the Shanghai–Paris transcontinental railway.37 Because of this, most local transport is on poorly developed and maintained roads. Nicolas Becquelin has pointed out that until the mid-1990s, there was essentially only one usable road into the south of Xinjiang, ‘linking Urumqi to Kashghar and then extending toward Khotan and the easternmost oases in a horseshoe pattern.’38 Since the break-up of the USSR, Xinjiang’s transport links with its neighbours have been improved. There are roads to Pakistan (via the Karakorum highway), Kyrghyzstan and Kazakhstan, and a bus service from Qinghe county to Bulgan in Mongolia began in July 1992.39 Temporary roads have been opened through the passes to allow extra passenger trafﬁc through.40 Early in 1992, China and Kazakhstan agreed to reopen for navigation the Ili River, once a major freight transport route linking Ili in Xinjiang with Kapchagay in Kazakhstan, but closed for over thirty years.41 The World Bank agreed to ﬁnance a high-speed road to link Urumqi with six other cities in northern Xinjiang. The road will help the development of the most developed part of Xinjang to the north of the Tianshan mountains and will link the region of Kazakhstan, the rest of Central Asia and eventually Europe. Construction was due to begin on April 1st 1997 and had reached Kuytun by spring 2002.42 The difﬁculties that extreme climatic conditions can cause for transport were illustrated in July 1996 when the railway line that serves the oilﬁelds of the Tarim basin was cut by severe ﬂooding that was a result of unusually heavy rains in the Tianshan Mountains. The line was only reopened after three weeks of concentrated emergency repair work.43 Flooding was again blamed for the closure of a section of the northern Xinjiang stretch of the Lanzhou–Urumqi line in July 1999. There have been suggestions that from time to time, ﬂooding or landslides have been given as reasons for disruption when the real cause is

The economy in the reform and opening era

43

sabotage, but the weather in summer 1999 was unusual with heavy rains, river levels unusually high and a series of ﬂash ﬂoods.44 Satellite communications are used extensively and dishes are in evidence at railway stations. There are links between Xinjiang and Beijing, Chengdu and Guangzhou. There are plans to improve the telephone system with links to Central Asia’s mobile telephone networks,45 a Xi’an–Lanzhou–Urumqi optical ﬁbre network and a 2,000 kilometre digital microwave trunk line linking north and south Xinjiang.46 By late 1995 the optical ﬁbre network was operational and extended further to Yining/Ghulja.47 Direct telephone links between Xinjiang and Kazakhstan were reported in 1991.48 Mobile telephones were already in use in Lanzhou in neighbouring Gansu province in the early 1990s. By 1998, they had spread to Xinjiang, even as far west as Yining/Ghulja.49 Xinjiang Ribao (Xinjiang Daily) satellite ground stations, which were constructed jointly by People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency and Xinjiang Daily, have become operational. Newspapers including People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao), Daily Dispatches (Meiri Dianxun), Cankao Xiaoxi, Fazhi Ribao and Zhongguo Qingnianbao have already used it to send facsimile versions of their papers. A four page newspaper can now be faxed from Beijing to Urumqi in just over ten minutes, with great improvements in the quality and efﬁciency of transmission.50 A very practical effort to ensure that the word of the party reached even the remotest outposts of Xinjiang was the despatch from Urumqi on June 2nd 1999 of twenty truckloads of television and radio equipment, including satellite dishes, television transmitters, ﬁbre optic cables and tuners, destined for towns and villages throughout the region.51 The geographical problems of communication in Xinjiang were illustrated graphically by the events of Sunday May 9th 1993, when a hurricane carried large quantities of sand to Xinjiang, burying sections of the Lanzhou to Urumqi railway. On the 100-kilometre stretch from Liaodun to Shanshan, seven sections were buried, stranding fourteen passenger trains and thirty-four freight trains and over 10,000 passengers. Seven locomotives were damaged. The railway authorities took emergency measures including the supply of food and water but a continuing Force 12 wind hampered rescue work. Telecommunications facilities were also damaged.52

Trade Foreign trade, almost non-existent before the 1980s is a vital ingredient in all plans for Xinjiang’s economic development, in particular cross-border trade with Pakistan, Central Asia and Mongolia. Trade agreements with Kazakhstan led to the opening of an Urumqi trade centre in Almaty on March 20th 1992. Cooperative projects run by enterprises in Xinjiang, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan include the Xinjiang Thermos Company, already exporting to Poland and Afghanistan.53 On the ﬁrst day of the 1992 Urumqi Trade Fair, Xinjiang ﬁrms signed a contract to build a three-star hotel in Almaty, the region’s largest ever overseas investment project.54 Domestic trade was underdeveloped throughout

44

Introduction to Xinjiang

China until the introduction of free markets after 1979, and the expansion of rural markets is seen as a high priority if Xinjiang is to take advantage of the expansion of border trade.55 Sino–Mongolian trade negotiations in the wake of the collapse of Soviet power in 1991, notably the emphasis on barter trade, provided an early model.56 Cross-border trade between Xinjiang and Mongolia developed, with four trading posts open, and Hovd Aymag in Mongolia has signed barter agreements with Urumqi for the supply of tea, ﬂour, petrol and diesel oil.57

Islamic countries and trade and investment During the 1980s, Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia and Shaanxi began to approach their western Islamic neighbours for trade and investment as prospects for cooperation with the Middle East seemed more promising than with Europe or Japan, given geographical proximity and shared religious and cultural values. Xinjiang’s ‘friendship delegation’ to Turkey and Saudi Arabia, including Mecca, in July 1985 and the Overseas Economic and Trade Fair in August of the same year were early examples of this approach. The northwest secured funding from the Middle East for religious and cultural development programmes. Through its exchange of personnel scheme, the Islamic Development Bank gave US$4,060,000 for four projects, the Ningxia Islamic Academy in Yinchuan, the Ningxia Tongxin Arabic Language School and enhancement of the Xinjiang and Beijing Islamic Academies. Other plans include labour export to the Middle East and exchange schemes to encourage the mutual understanding of economic and political conditions. Northwestern China received regular visits throughout the 1980s from delegations of Islamic and Middle Eastern organisations such as the Islamic League and the Kuwait Religious Foundation.58 Ningxia clearly hoped to play a leading role in relations with the Muslim world with its new Islamic Academy and secular Arabic Language School, but may have been upstaged by Xinjiang once cross-border trade became a reality.

Tourism Tourism is expected to play an important role in Xinjiang’s development. A new Holiday Inn in Urumqi and the Oasis Hotel in Turpan have been built to cater for package tours, and hotels in Kashghar, including the former British and Russian consulates during the nineteenth century ‘Great Game’ have been refurbished. Xinjiang, like Gansu, is capitalising on the Silk Road image as an exotic and romantic tourist destination. 230,000 business people and tourists are estimated to have visited Xinjiang in 1992, an increase of 100,000 on the 1991 ﬁgure, and 90 per cent coming from the former Soviet Union. Income from tourism in 1992 was US$35 million, an increase of 60 per cent on the previous year.59

The economy in the reform and opening era

45

Urumqi trade fair and border trading posts Deng Xiaoping’s highly publicised tour of southern China in January and February 1992 and his call for accelerated reform had profound consequences in Xinjiang. In June 1992 reports of a conﬁdential ‘Central Document Number 4’ mentioned plans for the opening of cities in the northwest and southwest border regions (Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Guangxi and Yunnan) for cross-border trade.60 In September 1992, Prime Minister Li Peng timed an inspection tour of Xinjiang to coincide with the Urumqi Border and Local Trade Fair, demonstrating high level support for cross-border trade and economic and technical cooperation with the CIS by visiting the Korgas trading post on the border between Xinjiang’s Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture and Kazakhstan with local political leaders.61 Li explicitly linked his visit with Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour, which he described as a ‘spring breeze blowing through China, deepening and advancing reform’.62 During 1992, a number of border towns were designated as trading posts. Korgas was ofﬁcially opened on August 18th with 500 stalls and trade estimated at over RMB 300,000 daily. Border trade has stimulated business throughout Xinjiang, including Kashghar already an important centre for trade with Pakistan. Pakistani merchants are regular visitors to Kashghar, in trade delegations and individually, operating out of shops deep in the bazaar quarter.63 The total value of border trade in the period from January to November 1992 was in the region of US$220 million, an increase of 359 per cent on the 1991 ﬁgure.64 More border trade centres were planned in Qapqal, Korgas and Monggolkure counties to cater for traders crossing over from Almaty and other parts of Kazakhstan.65 People’s Daily, reporting from Urumqi in February 1997, summarised the situation to date. ‘Xinjiang has lost no time in implementing the strategy of “opening up on two lines, with priority given to areas along the border”, by utilising ﬁfteen border posts and the Eurasian continental bridge, attracting a tremendous [amount] of funds from the state and various provinces’.66 The Urumqi Trade Fair was considered to have been a great success, and in the nine days from September 2nd to 11th, business worth over US$1,790,000,000 was transacted, made up of US$655 million export contracts for sugar, cereals, edibile oils, clothing and household goods and $644 million import contracts for iron and steel, chemical fertiliser, motor vehicles, farm machinery and aluminium.67 Of over 5,000 registered delegates to the fair, 1,683 were from thirty-eight foreign countries, including the CIS, Pakistan, India, Iran, Afghanistan, Hong Kong and Macao, Mongolia and Poland. Twenty-seven Chinese provincial level administrations and twenty-nine Chinese overseas trading companies were represented.68 The atmosphere of the trade fair was interesting. Commercial and government buildings were decorated with bunting, and banners in Chinese, Russian and occasionally English called for ‘the world to get to know Xinjiang and Xinjiang to get to know the world’. Foreigners in Urumqi were approached and addressed in Russian as it was assumed that they were all from over the former Soviet border.

46

Introduction to Xinjiang

The local Chinese-language press emphasised the part played in the trade fair by the military Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which had signed twenty-six contracts worth 130 million Swiss francs by noon on the second day,69 but this was not mentioned in the English-language media. Military units based in Xinjiang have been assigned a key role in ‘acting as a bridge for border trade’. Troops from the Baktu base were involved in the export of livestock, corn and other commodities to Kazakhstan and have been supervising construction sites and link roads, including those at the Alataw pass.70 Two new organisations were created in January 1992, the Chinese Minority Nationalities’ International Trust and Investment Corporation and the Chinese Minority Nationalities’ Association for Exchanges with Foreign Countries to promote development in northwestern China but also to strengthen central government control over an increasingly independent region.71 Assessing Xinjiang’s economic prospects, local CCP Secretary Song Hanliang agreed that it had ‘suddenly become an attractive place for enterprises in the hinterlands and coastal provinces’, but that he was still ‘worried to death’ by the widening gap between the economies of Xinjiang and the coastal regions.72 Four years later, the Chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region government, Abdulahat Abdurixit, summarised the economic situation in Xinjiang in a speech he made at the meeting of the regional CCP committee on August 13th 1996 and which was printed in Xinjiang Ribao on August 18th 1996. He pointed out the positive aspects such as ﬁnancial stability, the rise in the region’s income and a slowing down of inﬂation in commodity prices. The grain harvest was a bumper one, cotton production was on the increase, the number of domesticated livestock was at an all time high and industrial output had increased by over 9 per cent compared with the previous year. On the negative side, he reported losses in nearly 60 per cent of state-owned industrial concerns and ‘a remarkable drop in output’ in the cotton textile, sugar and light industrial production. Flooding, which had hindered water conservancy and other infrastructure projects such as transport, telecommunications and power generation was cited as the major cause. Overall, Chairman Abdulahat said that the ﬁnancial prospects for Xinjiang were very grim and that debts and commodity prices were likely to rise.73 In sharp contrast, the Xinhua News agency reporting from Urumqi in December 1998 was far more upbeat and spoke of steady growth, the successful implementation of a strategy to make Xinjiang a major agricultural region, reform of state enterprises and a steady growth in foreign trade.74 Similarly a Xinhua report in February 1997 claimed that Xinjiang was well on its way to achieving its aim of bringing people from below the poverty line.75

Western development Beijing’s strategy in dealing with the problem of ethnic separation in Xinjiang since the early 1990s has been twofold. On the one hand there has been the severest repression of any unofﬁcial religious activity and any political activity

The economy in the reform and opening era

47

that could be classiﬁed as separatist. On the other, there has been a recognition that poverty and underdevelopment lie at the root of the region’s social problems and programmes to alleviate poverty have been initiated from time to time. The decision to tackle the problem of the relative underdevelopment in the whole of China’s western provinces led to the policy of the Great Development of the Western Regions (Xibu da kaifa) which was launched in 2000 in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. Ever since Deng Xiaoping announced the policy of ‘reform and opening’ in 1978 and encouraged foreign investment to assist in the modernisation of China’s economy, development has been uneven. The Special Economic Zones in which foreign investment was ﬁrst permitted, beginning with Shenzhen, were in the south and south east of China, coastal areas that had already beneﬁted from earlier development during the Treaty Port era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the economic development of these areas in the provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang and the city of Shanghai became the phenomena of the 1980s and 1990s. As capital moved to these areas, so did labour and China experienced a migration of population unlike any it had seen for over a century. Poor and underdeveloped areas in the west suffered even more from lack of investment. The Western Development policy was targeted at the whole of the west, not just Xinjiang and this includes Ningxia, Gansu, and Qinghai as well as Sichuan. The choice of provinces and regions to be included is somewhat controversial as it includes relatively prosperous areas such as Sichuan in addition to the genuinely impoverished parts of the west and the strategy requires considerable investment from abroad if it is to succeed. The economy of the West of China is clearly in desperate need of development, although improvements in the infrastructure, primarily road and rail links and urban construction have taken place over the last ten years. However the newest development plan treats the west as one homogeneous region and does not take into account the ethnic and religious diversity: this is likely to lead to conﬂict if it appears that economic development will beneﬁt one ethnic group, the Han, above others.

Plate 1 Department store in Urumqi

Plate 2 Outside the main mosque in Urumqi

Plate 3 Religious book stall at the Urumqi mosque

Plate 4(a)

Plate 4(b) Modern cityscapes, Urumqi

Plate 5 Pharmacy in Urumqi with sign in Uyghur and Chinese

Plate 6 Traditional Uyghur herbalist

Plate 7 Uyghur craftsman working at home in Kashghar

Plate 8 Uyghur woman fully veiled in Kashghar

Plate 9 Traditionally veiled women in Kashghar

Plate 10 Police and local people resting outside the Id Gah mosque in Kashghar

Plate 11 Wood turners in Kashghar

Plate 12 Police and sheep dealer in Kashghar

Plate 13 Mosque in the centre of old Kashghar

Plate 14(a)

Plate 14(b) Id Gah mosque in Kashghar

Plate 15 Great Western Bridge mosque in Kashghar

Plate 16 Military and civilian clothing shop in Yining/Ghulja

Plate 17 Military and civilian suppliers in Yining/Ghulja

Plate 18 Deng Xiaoping promoting the development of Xinjiang

Plate 19 Mule carts are still the most common form of transport in Yining/Ghulja

Plate 20 Mosque in Yining/Ghulja

Plate 21 Poster in Yining/Ghulja: ‘Let the world know Xinjiang – Let Xinjiang move towards the world’

Plate 22 Modern mosque in Turfan

Part II

Turkic opposition and CCP response

6

Political and religious opposition to Han Chinese control (1949–1996) Cultural, nationalist and Islamist

Because of the intransigence of Beijing’s opposition to anything that appears to support separatism and the scale of the Chinese military presence in Xinjiang, organised political dissent within the region has always of necessity been clandestine,1 but the Turkic-speaking and other non-Han Chinese peoples have maintained and asserted their separate ethnic identities through the open expression of their cultural distinctiveness. The Chinese authorities have frequently mounted public demonstrations of their support for ethnic minority cultures, and for Islam, both to placate members of the minority communities whom they wish to keep loyal to the PRC state and, in the case of Islam, to show foreign Muslims that their Chinese co-religionists can take part freely in religious observances. At the same time the authorities have made clear their opposition to individuals and groups whose cultural or religious activities could be construed as support for separatist activities. Chinese ofﬁcials regularly take part in Muslim festivals, describing them as ‘festivals of unity’, while warning against separatist activities, ‘carried out under the pretext of religion’.2 When intellectual or cultural expression has appeared to the authorities to threaten the unity of China, condemnation and suppression has been swift. A book by the celebrated Uyghur writer Turghun Almas, The Uyghurs, which was poublished in February 1990 was attacked in the summer of 1991, because it portrayed the Uyghurs as a separate nation, distinct from the Han Chinese, and sought to demonstrate that Xinjiang has not, as ofﬁcial Chinese historiography maintains, been an integral part of China since the Han dynasty, and that the Uyghurs are culturally and ethnically related to other Turkic peoples outside China. Two other books by the same author, A Brief History of the Xiongnu and Ancient Uyghur Literature were also attacked3 because of similar pan-Turkic sentiments. A vehemently anti-separatist book, Xu Yuqi’s Xinjiang fandui minzu fenliezhuyi douzheng shihua (History of the Struggle against Ethnic Separatism in Xinjiang) which was published by Xinjiang People’s Press in Urumqi in 1999, conceded that the works of Turghun Almas were widely circulated in Xinjiang and that people seized on them ‘as if they had discovered a treasure. Young students in particular ‘were desperate to pass them around’. Because of the popularity of the books, the CCP mounted a devastating and concerted campaign against the author.

52

Turkic opposition and CCP response

In February 1991, the Xinjiang CCP’s Propaganda Department, the local Academy of Social Sciences and the News Publication ofﬁce organised a joint symposium on the ‘Three Books’ as they became known. More than 140 people attended, including historians, ethnographers, archaeologists and literature specialists of different ethnic groups from Xinjiang and beyond, as well as senior staff from educational, cultural, publishing and ethnic and religious affairs departments. The texts of Turghun Almas’s books were examined in minute detail, the historical and political background was discussed and, not surprisingly, the symposium arrived at the conclusion that the ‘Three Books’ were a pernicious inﬂuence, which distorted and falsiﬁed history.4 Turghun Almas’s work was clearly in the tradition of books such as the History of Eastern Turkestan by Muhammad Amin Bughra which was ﬁrst published in 1940 and is still ‘secretly printed and distributed’ in Xinjiang where it has become the ‘operational guide book for present-day separatism and illegal religious forces’.5Turghun Almas was reported to have been placed under house arrest in Urumqi and remained under this restriction until he died in 2001.6 Uyghurs living outside China maintain that Turkic scholars and writers in Xinjiang are constrained from writing about their own history and culture for fear of persecution.7 An Uyghur scholar who left Xinjiang for Turkey has claimed that ﬁfteen well-known Uyghur scholars, intellectuals and religious ﬁgures were arrested early in 1992 for ‘counter-revolutionary activities’.8 Opposition has not by any means been conﬁned to intellectuals. Ethnic or nationalist disturbances, whether motivated by political or religious issues are usually depicted by the Chinese authorities as riots, hooliganism or sabotage. However, it is clear that there have been, political, religious or ethnic dimensions to all of the major instances of conﬂict that have occurred in Xinjiang since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949.

Khotan 1954 The ﬁrst major incident of resistance to CCP control over Xinjiang is generally acknowledged to have been the Khotan rising of December 1954 in southern Xinjiang by a Pan-Turkic organisation, known to the Chinese authorities as the Amin group, which was led by Abdimit. Muhammad Amin Bughra (1901–1965), after whom the group was unofﬁcially named, was a literary scholar and journal editor who had been one of the leaders of the independent Turkestan government which followed the uprising of 1932–1934 in Khotan and when it failed he ﬂed to Afghanistan. He was part of the coalition government in Xinjiang in 1946 and was a close colleague of Isa Yusuf Alptekin but left when the CCP took control in 1949 and settled in Turkey.9 He sent his wife, Amina, to Khotan on the eve of liberation and then went there himself to organise pro-independence demonstrations. When the PLA moved into Xinjiang, an army of his followers blocked its path into Khotan. Amin’s supporters inside Xinjiang included Suﬁ shaykhs and other religious

Opposition to Han Chinese control

53

leaders and they met regularly to devise strategies for opposing the advance of the PLA. The inspiration for these meetings was Ayup Kari of Yarkant who called a meeting in 1949 outside his hometown and when he died he was succeeded by Musa Khalipa. Musha convened a meeting of pro-independence activists in September 1950 at which the leaders of the independence movements in the various towns of southern Xinjiang were appointed and Khotan was identiﬁed as the ﬁrst town which would rise up against the Chinese occupation. This was a tense period for Xinjiang as the CCP was carrying out its policies of suppressing counter-revolutionaries, rent reduction, opposition to local tyrants and land reform there as well as in the rest of China and religious leaders in Xinjiang, some of whom had effective control over large waqf landholdings were natural targets for these campaigns.10 The Khotan rising itself took place after these campaigns had been successfully completed and during the agricultural cooperation movement which swept across China in the mid-1950s and which was a precursor to the creation of People’s Communes in the Great Leap Forward of 1958. There was considerable opposition to the creation of cooperatives in the Khotan region, some of which may have been exacerbated by lower level cadres who implemented the policies in an oppressive and heavy-handed manner. This discontent was fertile ground for an anti-Chinese rebellion and Abdimit, a Suﬁ shaykh from Khotan became its leader. In February 1954, Abdimit met Badirdin Makhsum an active supporter of Amin who had been imprisoned just after liberation during the campaign for the Suppression of Counter-Revolutionaries and had only recently been released. In May after a series of meetings they set up the Committee for the Salam Government Alliance with Abdimit as Chairman. Salam is the Arabic for ‘peace’. In June, Abdimit travelled to Karakash where he secreted himself in the desert and deputed his younger brother Abdusamat, Badirdin and others to continue the plannning of the rebellion. They visited mosques and other religious foundations and met in the houses of believers in Khotan, Karakash, Luopu (Lop) and elsewhere, holding religious ceremonies at which supporters took an oath on the Qur’an, pledging their loyalty to Abdimit and the Great Mullah and their support for a jihad to establish the Salam Government.11 Declaring its intention of establishing a Muslim state, the Amin group published a document entitled Guidelines for an Islamic Republic, issued many posters and pamphlets and elected a government in which Abdimit was to be President. On December 31st, Abdimit led more than 300 supporters from the Karakash, Hotan and Lop areas, all of them followers of one of the Suﬁ orders collectively known in Xinjiang as Ishan, in an attack on a prison camp (the Chinese term for this is laogai nongchang labour reform farm) in Karakash during which an ofﬁcer, an NCO and seven soldiers were killed. The Personalities: Martyrs section of the Xinjiang nianjian (Xinjiang Almanac) for 1990 which I was able to consult in Almaty, Kazakhstan, lists the names of eight people, seven Han Chinese and one Uyghur who lost their lives in a disturbance at the Aqu company of the Khotan Laogai (Labour Reform) Brigade on December 31st 1954. They were formally consecrated as revolutionary heroes on August 14th 1989.12

54

Turkic opposition and CCP response

They seized weapons and a vehicle, launched an attack on the county town of Khotan, and sent disciples to nearby towns and cities including Kashghar where anti-Chinese disturbances took place. The main activists of the Emin group escaped and ﬂed abroad, but between December 1954 and the Lop riots of May 1956 in which supporters of Abdimit seem to have played a part, there were eight major disturbances in the Khotan area under the slogans ‘Allah commands us to ﬁght for religion’ and ‘The Communists have stolen the land, food, minerals and property of the Muslims’, the latter clearly referring to the conﬁscation of land during the implementation of Land Reform. It is quite clear that Abdimit used his position and inﬂuence as a Suﬁ shaykh to motivate his supporters to rise up against the Chinese, gathering them together in a large group in Karakash county and persuading them to take an oath of loyalty to him while holding the Qur’an. In this way he developed a considerable following in the rural areas which seems to have persisted even after he left Xinjiang.13 A detailed account of the Khotan rising appeared in History of the Struggle against Ethnic Separatism in Xinjiang, the unashamedly partisan account produced in 1999 to give the ofﬁcial history of the suppression of ethnic separatism in the region. Key personnel of the Salam organisation met in the house of Mamat three times in December 1954. Abdimit was elected Chairman and Minister of Military Affairs and Badirdin became Secretary General and Deputy Minister of Military Affairs. Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Finance, Civil Administration, Education and Health were also appointed in what was clearly intended as a shadow government. January 1st 1955 was set as the date for the rising. On the night of December 27/28th, over 200 Suﬁ adherents gathered at a house near one of the forced labour camps for a dua (prayer) and were issued with weapons. The Khotan CCP committee heard of this gathering from an imam who was a member of the CPPCC and called a meeting of all religious personnel to ‘explain Party policy’. On December 29th a group of Uyghurs led by Ahmat set off to attack the No. 3 Farm run by the Production and Construction Corps but ﬁnding the guards there were already on the alert, they decided to postpone the attack until the next day in the hope that the crowds attending the bazaar would afford them more cover. When Ahmat’s group arrived in Moyu county on the 30th they found that the district CCP committee had already sent an armed propaganda team which was convening a meeting and the rebels dispersed. The following day they attacked and robbed the District 5 Supply and Marketing Cooperative but Aihemaiti was arrested by staff of the No. 3 Farm. Two other groups of rebels remained at large. Abdimit and Badirdin personally led over 100 men into the brickyard of the labour camp at Buzha, killed a political instructor as he was getting our of bed, a squad commander who rushed out to confront them, and the quartermaster who was working on the accounts with the commander of the camp, Wang Zhenhai. Wang managed to escape and reported the attack to his headquarters. The rebels took control of the labour camp, distributed weapons to their supporters and opened the gates of

Opposition to Han Chinese control

55

the prison, encouraging the inmates to join the rebellion and attack Khotan with them, although few seem to have done so. The rebel leaders forced a former GMD colonel and a driver to take them into Khotan. The Khotan Party committee sent police units to the scene and they managed to arrest over thirty of the rebels and seized documents belonging to the Salam organisation including its political programme, membership lists, minutes of meetings, proclamations and plans of future activities. They also seized seals, mimeograph machines, banners, cudgels, knives and hatchets. On January 1st 1955 the police arrested another dozen or so people on the streets of Khotan. They were carrying cudgels or knives and some were bloodstained, which led the police to believe that they were rebels who had been involved in the ﬁghting at the labour camp. They apparently thought that Khotan has already been taken by the rebels. According to police sources, the rebels had issued the following proclamation: The enemy of religion the CCP has occupied the Muslim homeland, has plundered Muslim land, minerals and other property and has imposed its laws on the laws of Islam . . . It allows our people to labour but does not allow us to be the masters of the fruits of our labour. According to Islamic law, if the inﬁdel invades Muslim lands, resisting the inﬁdel is the duty of all Muslims. The time for rebellion is here. The Khotan Party Committee called a mass meeting on January 1st 1955 in the town’s main square to ‘expose to the masses of all ethnic groups the crimes of the separatist criminals, to appeal to them to remove the scales from their eyes and see the true face of the rebels so that they would never again be deceived’. Over 140 rebels were arrested, often with the help of local informants and a further seventy surrendered of their own volition. Most were released after a period of re-education but twenty-seven people regarded as core rebels remained in custody. The authorities were clear about the connection between the rebellion of Abdimit and the Amin group outside China and claim that Muhammad Amin Bughra had told Abdimit to stay in Khotan in 1949 as he was an Imam and could not be harmed by the CCP. He ordered him to develop the Suﬁ order and wait for his return when together they would defeat the CCP and establish an Islamic government. Imit had built up the order in Khotan to over 15,000 with twentyeight Suﬁ leaders. After the failure of the 1954 rising, Abdimit ﬂed and continued his separatist activities. On March 9th 1956 at dead of night they again raided the No. 3 Farm, seized weapons and killed a guard but were repulsed by armed bingtuan personnel and twenty-nine rebels were arrested. The ringleaders disappeared into local mosques and villages and this second rebellion ﬁzzled out with Abudu Imit ‘like a treacherous ghost fanning the ﬂames from behind the scenes’ and planning further uprisings including an insurrection in Luopu (Lop) in May 1956 and at the 6th District tomb in Khotan in April 1957, both of which were put down by armed troops and police.14

56

Turkic opposition and CCP response

Ili disturbances and the Kazakh exodus The 1962 Ili disturbances, including the insurrection of May 29th and the mass exodus westwards from Xinjiang of Kazakhs and others, arose out of protests at the grain rationing system, Han Chinese immigration and competition between the military land reclamation units of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and local residents for scarce agricultural land, water and pastures. Among those who ﬂed to the USSR were senior political and military ofﬁcials appointed by the CCP, almost all Kazakhs or Uyghurs. Many of these became involved in the establishment of a Turkestan People’s Liberation Committee, which acted as a focus for e´migre´ political activity and became the basis for a number of organisations run by political exiles. Some Chinese sources quite simply blame Soviet agents for the exodus and accuse them of having a long-term plan to subvert the region, using ethnic and social ties with Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Uyghur people inside the USSR. Russian and Soviet inﬂuence in Xinjiang had been strong for many years. Xinjiang in the 1940s under Sheng Shicai had been very close to Moscow and there is a signiﬁcant ethnic Russian population resident in Xinjiang. A propaganda campaign to persuade the population of northwestern Xinjiang that life was much better in the Soviet Union had been under way for some years, with printed pamphlets, radio broadcasts, letters and parcels of food and clothing sent across the border.15 During the 1950s, China and the USSR were ofﬁcially fraternal socialist states but relations had already come under serious strain after Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 in which he denounced the excesses of Stalin, which Mao took as a threat to his own position. Soviet scepticism at Mao’s policies, in particular the Great Leap Forward and mass collectivisation became clear at the Moscow Conference of Communist Parties from around the world in 1960 and Soviet and allied technicians were withdrawn from China in 1960, the beginning of what was to become known as the Sino–Soviet split which was never resolved before the collapse of Soviet power in 1991. On and around April 10th, small groups of people from Tacheng (Qoqek) county crossed the border into the Soviet Union. The numbers grew, people from other counties became involved and the exodus reached its peak at the end of May. On May 29th there was a major disturbance at the bus station in Ghulja where people were waiting to take the bus to Korgas, close to the border with what was then the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic of the USSR. The ofﬁce of the bus station was damaged and the crowd broke into the ofﬁces of the local government and party organisations, damaged equipment and removed documents from the Foreign Affairs Ofﬁce. Weapons belonging to the armed forces were looted and and a number of armed personnel and party ofﬁcials were injured. Among the slogans shouted during the riot were: ‘Xinjiang is ours, the Han Chinese have occupied our land’, ‘Down with the Communist Party’ and ‘Exterminate the Dark Lords (heidaye)’.16 From that time onwards, posters and leaﬂets calling for the establishment of Uyghurstan were circulated constantly throughout Xinjiang.

Opposition to Han Chinese control

57

According to some Chinese sources, the Soviet deputy consul in Yining/ Ghulja visited Tacheng/Qoqak many times between January and April 1962 and met at least 6,000 people, offering invitations, residence permits and other documents to assist their migration to the Soviet Union and protected protesters inside the consulate. The Soviet authorities opened their borders in the counties of Chochek/Qoqek, Korghas, Chagantokhay and Do¨rbiljin to let in the refugees, who numbered something like 56,000 in total. Most of those who left were local farmers, workers and herdsmen and they took with them property including over 30,000 head of livestock, but there were also government ofﬁcials and party cadres and from this group emerged the anti-Chinese resistance that grew outside the borders of the PRC.17

East Turkestan Peoples Revolutionary Party The East Turkestan People’s Revolutionary Party (ETPRP), considered by Chinese researchers to have been the single largest resistance organisation in Xinjiang since 1949, was founded in 1967 or 1968 and was naturally a clandestine group. This was during the most chaotic phase of China’s contemporary history, the Cultural Revolution which had started in the summer of 1966 and paralysed, at least temporarily, most of China’s major cities as rival Red Guard factions fought to demonstrate their loyalty to Mao Zedong. The party was originally called the Uyghurstan Peoples’ Party but changed its name to echo that of the Eastern Turkestan Republic which ruled parts of Xinjiang between 1944 and 1949. In addition, the name Uyghurstan was, not surprisingly, less attractive to the Kazakh and Kyrgyz population of the region. Chinese writers have alleged that the ETPRP was formed by Soviet spies. This may simply mean that it was formed by individuals on both sides of the Sino–Soviet border or by Uyghurs who had were based in the Soviet Union, but it is perfectly possible that Soviet intelligence was involved given the difﬁcult relations between China and the USSR at the time. The party was established in both Urumqi and Kashghar between April and October 1967, although some Chinese sources claim that the date of its foundation was falsely backdated to November 12th 1960, the sixteenth anniversary of the independent East Turkestan government in Yining/Ghulja. The party’s Central Committee or Praesidium (zhongyang zhuxituan) was set up in February 1968 and taking advantage of the factional strife of the Cultural Revolution period was able to organise rapidly. The ETPRP had its own committee structure modelled on the organisations of both the CCP and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It had a Central Committee and a Praesidium or Political Bureau which had direct control over three activist organisations, the Youth Organisation, the Avengers of the Tengritagh (Tianshan) and the Avengers of the Urals (Wulaer fuchouzhe), and between January and April 1969 it set up branch organisations in Ghulja, Aksu, Chochek/Tacheng, Bortula/Bole and Urumqi and smaller cells throughout the whole of Xinjiang. There were seventy-eight grass-roots level groups distributed throughout twelve

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counties of the region and twenty-two regional level units. Chinese researchers estimate that there were over 300 party members. In Urumqi and Kashghar there were also groups such as the League for the Struggle for East Turkestan Independence, the East Turkestan Youth National Salvation Army and the Avengers Society. Although Chinese sources refer to one single organisation, it is fairly clear that there were a number of different groups operating in various parts of Xinjiang and this was the pattern of resistance groups throughout the twentieth century. This was possible because the chaos of the Cultural Revolution had undermined many of the structures of authority that the CCP had built up in its twenty years in power. The ETPRP targeted different sections of the Xinjiang community with considerable success and even had members who worked in departments of the Autonomous Region government. Students were a particular target and the Avengers of the Tengritagh recruited mainly among secondary school pupils. Documents published by the ETPRP outlining its aims and principles included ‘The Destiny of Uyghuria’, ‘The ETPRP Constitution’ and the ‘General Progamme of the ETPRP’ and their general thrust was quite clear. They presented the ETPRP as the only party for an independent Xinjiang, asserted that it would require the assistance of the Soviet Union to gain independence and wrote accounts of the history of the region to contradict the Chinese argument that Xinjiang had always been part of China, claiming that it was a recent colony. Pamphlets were produced and a number of newspapers published including Torch (huojubao), Awakening (juexingbao) and Independent (dulibao). Members of the party were also encouraged to listen to radio broadcasts from the Soviet Union. The noted writer Turghun Almas, who was a member of the ETPP wrote articles advocating independence and criticising the policies of the CCP in Xinjiang. Plans were also made to rob banks, shops, grain stores and warehouses to raise funds for the activities of the ETPRP and some groups planned to seize weapons from local military and mass organisations. In the Urumqi, Yining/ Ghulja and Karamay areas they were estimated to have amassed over RMB 100,000 as a result of robberies in addition to donations which Chinese sources allege were imposed rather than voluntary. ETPRP branches in Ghulja, Urumqi and Altai sent a total of twelve delegations to the USSR and the Mongolian People’s Republic to request arms, radio stations and even military advisers. Chinese sources claim that Soviet intelligence sent nine groups of fourteen people into Xinjiang with transmitters, weapons and funds and that these made contact with local ETPRP members. On August 20th 1969, a group of ETPRP members led by one Ahunov was ordered by the Southern Xinjiang branch of the party and its Central Committee to take two vehicles and a large number of weapons and set out from Kashghar and Mekit for the Soviet border to solicit support for their cause and establish a base for their pro-independence activities. News of this expedition leaked out to the authorities and the group were surrounded by Chinese troops near Suhkaz in the Atush region the following day. This rising was effectively crushed before it

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even began and the Chinese authorities claimed that they had destroyed the ETPRP as the Cultural Revolution came to an end, but subsequent events were to demonstrate that this was not the case and it persisted underground.18

Aksu, Kashghar and the 1980s In April 1980 there were disturbances in Aksu, a town half way between Urumqi and Kashghar. These involved the mainly Han military and state farm personnel of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, discontented xiafang youths19 and local non-Han people and many lives were lost when the rioting was put down by PLA troops. As a conciliatory response to these disturbances and the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in Xinjiang, mosques which had been closed were permitted to reopen and Islamic literature was allowed to circulate. In June 1980, the Xinjiang Islamic Association which had been suspended during the Cultural Revolution was re-established, ostensibly to promote, but also to control, Islam in the region. When the police were called in to deal with a disturbance among Uyghurs celebrating the 1980 lunar New Year in Kashghar a major riot followed and as many as 1,000 people were injured. Local people called for improved employment prospects and greater autonomy. Some Han Chinese police in the area, fearful for their businesses and lives, were reported to have attempted to return to China proper, but were prevented by troops.20 Uyghur opposition to Chinese rule gradually became more overtly nationalist during the 1980s as the repressive atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution began to fade. In January 1981, a small group in Jiashi (Payzawat) county to the east of Kashghar planned to establish a pro-independence organisation and it took shape towards the end of March in the same year as the Eastern Turkestan Prairie Fire Party Dong Tujuesitan liaoyuan dang with its own National People’s Liberation Front, economic affairs committee, organisational committee and discipline and inspection committee. Various members were designated as chairman, secretary and other titles were conferred. Its aims were clear to establish an independent Eastern Turkestan Islamic Republic by means of armed force and to drive out the imperialist unbelievers, in other words the Han Chinese. On May 24th a meeting was called to plan an armed insurrection and an attack on the county town and on the evening of the 26th several hundred members of the Prairie Fire Party forced the guards of the military weapons store in Jiashi to hand over the keys and seized 152 riﬂes of various types, eighty hand grenades and more than 28,000 rounds of ammunition. Before they could attack the town they discovered that the authorities knew about their plans and retreated to woods 3 kilometres outside Jiashi, declaring themselves to be ‘ﬁghters for the Jihad who were going to drive the Chinese out of Eastern Turkestan’. The authorities adopted a two-pronged response to the rebels. The army, People’s Militia and ofﬁcers and men of the Public Security Bureau (the police) were deployed to attack and arrest the armed insurgents who were dealt with severely, but those who were regarded as dupes and less signiﬁcant participants

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were visited by the police, senior religious ﬁgures and relatives brought in by the authorities and shown the error of their ways. The mopping up operation took some time and the police claimed that they were helped by ‘fathers informing on sons and elder brothers informing on younger brothers’ as some Uyghurs sought to distance themselves from the riots.21 There were disturbances in Kashghar on October 30th 1981 as a result of a criminal trial in which a young Han man was accused of killing a Uyghur youth during a ﬁght. Serious riots spread throughout the whole of Kashghar city and local Han people feared for their lives as rioters armed with knives, cudgels and whips rampaged through the streets wreaking havoc and shouting ‘Down with the Han’, Down with the Heidaye (Chinese) government’ and ‘Long Live the Republic of Uyghuristan’. Over 600 people were attacked during this outbreak of violence, over 200 were injured and two people died. Trafﬁc was intercepted, public buildings were attacked and shops were looted and damaged in what was then considered to have been the most serious outbreak of ethnic unrest in Xinjiang since 1949. Some of the violence reached the Kashghar Teachers’ College where students and staff of all ethnic groups were said to have resisted the call to take part in the rioting.22 In Urumqi, over 2,000 students from seven universities and higher education colleges demonstrated illegally on December 12th 1985 during local elections when the regional governor was replaced by Tomur Dawamat, an Uyghur but a prote´ge´ of the Han CCP Secretary Wang Enmao. They chanted slogans such as ‘Han out of Xinjiang,’ ‘Independence, Freedom and Sovereignty for Xinjiang and ‘Long Live Xinjiang’s Independence’. The university authorities together with the local military college mounted a propaganda campaign to counter their separatist ideas.23 Uyghur students at the Central Nationalities Institute in Beijing, the main educational and training establishment for young high-ﬂying members of minority ethnic groups (and since renamed the Central Nationalities University), protested against the use of Xinjiang as a base for nuclear testing on November 12th 1985 and there were also demonstrations in June 1988 against the publication of a book, The White House in the Distance, which allegedly contained racial slurs against Kazakhs and Uyghurs, and in Urumqi after racialist slogans had allegedly been found on a toilet door at Xinjiang University.24 Over 300 Uyghur students at the Nationalities Institute demonstrated in Beijing on December 28th 1988 against racialist slurs in ﬁlms and called for genuine human rights for ethnic minorities and ‘nationality solidarity on the basis of equality between nationalities’.25 A demonstration in Urumqi in 1989, which followed protests in Qinghai, Gansu and Shaanxi against the alleged blasphemy of a book entitled Sexual Customs was originally described in local radio broadcasts as an orderly march in support of the Beijing democracy movement.26 However, on June 15th, eleven days after military supression of the Tian’anmen Square protests, the Public Security authorities in Xinjiang issued a circular announcing measures against the ‘fabricating and spreading of reactionary political rumours and distributing

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reactionary slogans, leaﬂets and big- and small-character posters’, and a wanted list of seven people, alleged to have been involved in a May 19th riot was issued.27 After their arrest, Xinhua news agency described the May 19th incident as an organised and premeditated incident devised by a handful of people who adopt a hostile attitude to the CCP and the socialist motherland and oppose the reuniﬁcation of the motherland and unity among all nationalities. Under the pretext of the issue caused by the book, Sexual Customs, they carried out beating, smashing and looting activities on a large scale against the Autonomous Region Party Committee and the Regional People’s Congress, Advisory Commission and Discipline Inspection Commission. During this turmoil, more than 40 saloon cars were destroyed and over 150 members of the armed police forces, public security policemen and government functionaries were injured. The defendants were accused of planning demonstrations on May 16th and 18th and also the demonstrations on May 19th which developed into a riot. Three were singled out as ringleaders, Ma Youtu and Ma Yiliang (probably of Hui ethnic origin) and Abbas Tursun (probably Uyghur) and they were sentenced to life imprisonment, of eight and ﬁfteen years respectively. The other defendants were sentenced to between one and eight years for defacing public and personal property, sabotaging telecommunications equipment and ‘interfering with the exercise of public functions’.28 The charge of sabotage is signiﬁcant as there have been many reports of sabotage of key installations, including damage to electric power and telecommunications facilities. Between July 1987 and May 1988 there were ﬁfty-eight cases of electricity and telecommunications being interfered with, with 56,000 metres of transmission lines stolen including 30 kilometres of 35,000-volt high tension aluminium wires from one plant, causing total losses of RMB 645,000. Electric power lines for agricultural use in Ili, Aksu and Changji had also been cut or stolen, seriously affecting irrigation and other farming activities. It is not clear whether these cases were theft or deliberate attempts to sabotage the local economy based on a political or ethnic agenda.29 Damage to similar property is not unknown in the rest of China. The reappearance of nationalism in Xinjiang led to growing concern in Beijing about the problem of separatism fenliezhuyi, or ‘splittism’ as it is often inelegantly translated in ofﬁcial Chinese documents, terms that are also applied to demands for Tibetan independence. Wang Fang, Minister of Public Security, inspected Xinjiang from August 8–21 1989 and met Wang Enmao, by then ofﬁcially retired as Xinjiang’s political leader, and his successors. Wang Fang was predictably positive about political stability, economic development, price equilibrium, increased incomes and living standards and drew attention to the ‘rich underground resources’ of the region. He noted that the May and June 1989 democracy movement had had very little impact in Xinjiang, but that “separatist

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forces have been the main factor for instability in the region, and the root cause of instability lies in the attempt by the USA and other countries to split and subvert our country. Meanwhile, some people at home are also engaged in conspiratorial separatist activities”.30 Tomur Dawamat, Chairman of the Autonomous Regional Government identiﬁed separatism as the ‘main threat to the stability of Xinjiang’ in his 1990 annual report,31 and when interviewed by journalists in Beijing was clearly concerned by the implications of independence movements in the USSR.32 His concern was well founded. Throughout the 1990s, political violence gradually spread throughout the region, partly evolving out of the internal dynamics of Xinjiang’s political, social and ethnic structure and partly in response to the cataclysmic break up of the Soviet Union and the formation of new states by the predominantly Turkic peoples across the border from Xinjiang. As the decade progressed, the conﬂict became more severe and more organised.

Baren 1990: the turning point The crucial events which determined the region’s slide into conﬂict and violence, were the riots of April 1990 at the height of the spring ploughing season at Baren in Akto county which is in the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture in southern Xinjiang. Baren is some 50 kilometres to the southwest of the great trading centre of Kashghar, has common borders with the Kashghar counties of Shufu, Shule and Yengihisar, and is close to the Pamir mountain range which forms China’s border with Afghanistan. A group of mainly Uyghur men attending prayers at a mosque on April 5th began criticising CCP policies towards ethnic minorities including birth control, nuclear weapons testing and the export of Xinjiang’s resources to ‘inland China’. This developed into a mass protest with some activists calling for a jihad33 to drive the Han unbelievers out of Xinjiang and to establish an East Turkestan state. One hundred police ofﬁcers sent to quell the riot were overpowered and their weapons and ammunition stolen. Disturbances continued on April 6th with rioters ﬁring small arms and throwing bombs at police and ofﬁcials who were surrounding them, and blowing up part of the local government building. According to the ofﬁcial account of the events, the rising was ﬁnally suppressed by the Public Security Bureau, People’s Armed Police from the Kashghar garrison and militia units, but there were also reports that 1,000 regular PLA troops were brought in, and local politicians later visited injured soldiers in hospital to thank them for their part in suppressing the rising. There were conﬂicting reports of the number of casualties in the insurrection, with the foreign press claiming over sixty dead and Tomur Dawamat admitting that six People’s Armed Police ofﬁcers and one Uyghur cadre had been killed, and that ﬁfteen demonstrators had also been killed and over 100 arrested. The Chinese-language channel of Xinjiang Television on April 22nd showed ﬁlm of Uyghur language documents which it claimed gave instructions for a jihad combined with an armed Turkic nationalist uprising for an East Turkestan

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Republic. The Chinese media reported that young Uyghur militants had been receiving weapons and unarmed combat training, in an Islamic Holy War Force ﬁnanced by contributions (extorted, according to the Chinese authorities) from the local Muslim population. Some reports suggested that the rebels were supplied with arms by mujaheddin34 units in Afghanistan and named the leader as Abulkasim from Karghalik, a town south of Yarkant in the Altishahr and, like Akto, close to the border with Afghanistan. Chinese ofﬁcials blamed foreign interference, in particular the long-established group of Uyghur exiles in Turkey associated with Isa Yusuf Alptekin.35 In September 1990 there were also similar disturbances, but on a smaller scale, in northern Xinjiang near the border with the USSR.36 What appeared at the time to have been a spontaneous act of deﬁance against Chinese rule in Baren was in fact, according to Chinese scholars, a well-planned and highly organised operation, conﬁrming the Xinjiang television reports. This is in keeping with the history of Uyghur opposition to Chinese rule since the nineteenth century. The rising had been prepared in great secret the previous year by a group led by Zeydin Yusuf who recruited members to his Eastern Turkestan Islamic Party at prayer meetings in the mosques. They were making plans for an armed uprising to create an East Turkestan Republic based on Baren and had collected money totalling RMB 13,000, supplies, horses, motorcycles, explosives and weapons and had given military training to their followers, but were forced to act prematurely when the authorities learned about their activities in the middle of March 1990. According to Chinese sources the party was composed of all kinds of anti-social elements including murders on the run, people released from labour camps and other hardened criminals. Their youth wing was formed into an ‘Islamic Dare to Die Corps’ (Yisilan gansidui). Party members set up loudspeakers in the courtyards of mosques in the villages of Baren and Tur and played cassette tapes praising the virtues of the jihad. They held ceremonies in which they placed knives on the ground and got people to swear their support for the jihad on the Qur’an, threatening to kill those who betrayed Islam, which included local cadres and Muslim religious professionals who had cooperated with the CCP and its government. Among their slogans were ‘We do not believe in socialism’, ‘We are opposed to socialism’ and ‘In the past Marxism-Leninism suppressed religion, now religion will suppress Marxism-Leninism’ and they made clear their intention of driving the Han Chinese out of Xinjiang. From the CCP’s point of view they were simply using religion to hoodwink Muslims and stir up ethnic hatred by persuading the imams to instruct members of their congregations to join the jihad against the unbelievers, in other words the Han. The activities of the separatists escalated in mid-March 1990 and became more overt, calling for jihad and demanding that Muslims ﬁght to promote Islam in Baren; dozens of young people were trained in hand-to-hand ﬁghting and throwing hand grenades.37 On March 27th, after the beginning of Ramadan, the separatist attacks and intimidation were stepped up. Han youngsters selling yoghurt on the street had their earthenware yoghurt jars smashed and sellers of roll up cigarettes found

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their tobacco strewn all over the ﬂoor: there were threats that girls who went out to the shops would have their hair cut off and that restaurants that opened would be wrecked. The separatists boasted ‘on Thursday (April 4th) we will ﬂy the ﬂag of Islam on the town hall’.38 Before dawn on the morning of April 4th, over 200 people came out on the streets to demonstrate, carrying torches and reading from the Qur’an as they walked and gathered for prayers. They surrounded the Baren town hall with the intention of occupying it and using it as their base. The authorities responded by sending senior ofﬁcials from the Kizilsu Kyrgyz prefectural government and the Akto county government to ‘persuade and educate and control the situation’. At 6.30 in the evening they ordered sixty People’s Armed Police ofﬁcers from the prefecture to Baren where they found ofﬁcials and police ofﬁcers and men trapped in the town hall compound and surrounded by two to three hundred people. At 8.40 the demonstrators began to throw stones at the ofﬁcials and police injuring two of them and also attacking two drivers outside the town hall. At about 9.00, Armed Police reinforcements from Kashghar reached Baren. They were attacked by the demonstrators at the crossroads outside the town hall, the windows of two of their vehicles were smashed and fourteen Armed Police, one police ofﬁcer and a driver were injured. The PAP got out of their vehicles to disperse the crowds and the vehicles were driven into the town hall compound with a number of demonstrators that they had arrested. The crowds outside the town hall were growing and were throwing stones at the ofﬁcials. Five police ofﬁcers sent to arrest Zeydin Yusuf were taken hostage and their weapons, two-way radios and electric truncheons were seized and they were forced to hand over their police uniforms.39 At about 11.00 that evening, the Deputy Political Instructor of the Akto county Border Defence Regiment, Xu Xinjian went to Baren in a military vehicle with three of his troops to liaise with local ofﬁcials. They were intercepted by rebels at the main bridge, just 1 kilometre away from the Baren town hall, and all four were killed. Shortly afterwards a Toyota Landcruiser carrying People’s Armed Police from the 6th Company based in Kashghar was held up at the same bridge and the three police ofﬁcers and their driver were dragged from the car and beaten up. The leader of the patrol, Deputy Company Commander Eli Yasin was kidnapped and his Han team were murdered. The Landcruiser was blown up and pushed over the bridge. At about midnight, separatists armed with riﬂes took ﬁve police ofﬁcers hostage and, using the two-way radios that they had taken from the hostages, demanded the release of rebels who had been arrested in exchange for their captives: they threatened to kill the hostages if the authorities did not comply. At four in the morning on April 6th, the rebels attacked the town hall with hand grenades and other explosives, injuring three members of the PAP. The PAP claim that they ﬁred warning shots but were ﬁnally obliged to ﬁre back to defend themselves. The leader of the rebels, Zeydin Yusuf, was shot dead together with another separatist who had climbed a tree to ﬁre at the police. The ofﬁcial account says that the PAP used the minimum force possible as they were conscious that hardline rebels and ‘ordinary people who did not understand the

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real situation’ were all mixed up together in the demonstration. After 8.00 a.m., two columns of reinforcements consisting of troops, militia from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and the local militia arrived in Baren. Faced with such overwhelming odds, the rebels dispersed and attempted to ﬂee. Most were captured but a dozen or so escaped. By 9.50 on the morning of April 6th the ‘counter-revolutionary armed rebellion’ had been crushed.40 When the rebellion broke out, the Xinjiang Communist Party and the Regional Government jointly established a Headquarters for Suppression of Counter-revolutionary Armed Rebellion in Baren County (Pingxi Baren xiang fangeming wuzhuang baoluan zhihuibu) in Kashghar and the subsidiary prefectural and county governments set up Insurrection Defence Commands (fangbao zhihuibu )in their own areas. On April 6th at 4.44 a.m., a counter attack was launched and ‘the bullets of revenge began to be ﬁred at the enemy’. The police and the military faced serious problems as the rebels were occupying higher ground and pinning them down with crossﬁre. The Kashghar regional police sent in a technical team equipped with cameras and a video camera to collect evidence and the HQ organised pursuit teams to capture ﬂeeing rebels. Several separatists were captured at Shaman where they had been demanding food from local peasants. They were attempting to ﬂee to Korgan and some were still dressed in the police uniforms that they had stolen. The pursuit teams formed a twenty-three-man mounted unit, which climbed the snow-covered plateau to nearly 4,000 metres to a small Kyrgyz village and captured more ﬂeeing rebels after a wild-west style chase.41 It is difﬁcult to assess the scale of popular support for the Baren rising or the extent to which there was genuine support for an independent East Turkestan at the time, although subsequent disturbances in Akto, the Kizilsu Kyrgyz region, Kashghar and Khotan in the Altishahr and on the northwestern border since then suggest that it was signiﬁcant then and has grown substantially since. After the Baren rising the Chinese authorities produced many local Uyghur, Kazakh and Hui Muslims who condemned the rioting, but the issue of an independent East Turkestan Republic had been brought into the open for the ﬁrst time since 1949. The authorities perceived a continuing threat to troops in the region and in July 1990 enacted a Military Installations Protection Law under which all prefectural, city and county administrations were obliged to establish organisations to protect military establishments in their areas.42 Xinjiang television reported, also in July 1990, that ‘in the ﬁrst half of this year, courts at all levels in Xinjiang gave top priority to cracking down on criminal activities of ethnic splittists inside and outside the border and on other serious criminal offenders’ and recorded 5,000 criminal cases involving 7,900 defendants, although it is not clear how many of these were involved in separatist activities.43 Xinjiang television in August 1990 reports assessed the public order situation as ‘very grave’,44 and sources in Hong Kong spoke of the arrest of thousands of people including members of ﬁve hundred ‘bandit gangs’ in June and July. The high-ranking Politburo member and security specialist Qiao Shi visited the region at the height of the crackdown.45

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The Hong Kong journal Zhengming which had the reputation for having good contacts with high-level CCP sources in Beijing reported that armed insurrections had broken out in northwestern Xinjiang in 1991 in the cities of Tacheng in May and Bole in June, with demands that included free political parties, independence and the right of local residents to become citizens of the Soviet Union. There were many deaths and injuries as well as damage to shops and government ofﬁces and martial law was imposed.46 Accurate information on clandestine organisations operating inside Xinjiang is obviously difﬁcult to obtain, but in 1993, the then Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee in Xinjiang, Ba Dai, identiﬁed a number of what he described as foreign organisations involved in separatist activities in the region: the Eastern Turkish National Salvation Committee; Eastern Turkish National Revolutionary Front; Eastern Turkestan Charity Funds; Kazakh Turk People’s Charity Funds; New Eastern Turkish Residents Association; World Islamic Federation and Eastern Turkestan Mongolian, Manchurian and Tibetan Peoples’s Federation Committee. The group associated with Isa Yusuf Alptekin, the Eastern Turkestan Foundation, was seen as the most active, having forged links with Xinjiang people who go abroad on the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca or to visit relatives.47 Alptekin, who was General Secretary of the Xinjiang Provincial Government from 1947–1949 lived in exile in Istanbul, blind and over ninety years old, but still remained a focus of Uyghur national aspirations whose name is known to many young Uyghurs in Xinjiang.48 He died on December 17th 1995. A Xinjiang Justice Party was included in a classiﬁed list of sixty-two underground organisations prepared by the Ministry of Public Security and circulated in October 1992.49 The authorities accept that the activities of such groups are an inevitable consequence of China’s open policies. If in 1986, Hu Yaobang assessed the threat from outside groups as insigniﬁcant, that was clearly not the case by 1991 and in particular after the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 26th of that year. Since the Baren rising the authorities in Xinjiang issued statements accusing separatists of publicising the history of East Turkestan, running Quranic schools, training ‘East Turkestan backbone elements’, developing an East Turkestan Islamic Party, sending agents into Xinjiang and subverting pilgrims on the hajj.50 In April 1991, the Uyghur Liberation Organisation was formally registered as a legal political party with the Ministry of Justice in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and support for it is expected to come from the 300,000 Uyghurs living in the CIS, half of whom are resident in Kazakhstan, although it is not clear what forces the aging leadership, mainly veterans of the short-lived independent East Turkestan Republic of the 1940s might have at their disposal.51 The organisation appealed to the United Nations in November 1991 for immediate action on human rights in Xinjiang.52 In June 1992, the creation of a new political party, For a Free Uyghuristan, was announced by Uyghurs living in Kyrgyzstan and an International Uyghur Union was formed on January 16th in Almaty at a meeting reportedly attended by 350 Uyghur delegates from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. It claims to represent the interests of Uyghurs living in the CIS

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and to be working for democracy, human rights and self-determination for Uyghurs living in Xinjiang. Uyghurs in the CIS have also called for radio broadcasts to China in Uyghur, as the last were discontinued in 1979.53 Although Uyghur organisations in Kazakhstan are active and legal, they are clearly an embarrassment to the post-Soviet Kazakhstan government which is attempting to maintain stable diplomatic relations with China while at least paying lip-service to pan-Turkic sentiments in its own population. In practical terms, the Urumqi perspective of a Han-dominated, stable and economically successful Xinjiang coincides more closely with the interests of the Kazakhstan government than the separatist Kashghar perspective. Scholars in Kazakhstan who are in contact with e´migre´ Uyghur groups there do not have a very high opinion of their potential for achieving major political changes within Xinjiang.54 However this may change rapidly. In March 1992, Tomur Dawamat, the Uyghur Chairman of the Xinjiang Regional Government accused Muslim separatists of sabotage and subversion. He said that ‘hostile forces, both at home and abroad have stepped up their inﬁltration, subversion and sabotage’, inspired by the break-up of the USSR and the newly found independence of the Muslim republics of Central Asia. A bomb attack on a bus in Urumqi in February 1992 was reported to have injured at least twenty-six people and there were also reports of two other bombs planted the same day, in a cinema and on a second bus although these caused no injuries. Emigre´ Uyghur sources, quoting classiﬁed Chinese CCP documents, also reported bomb attacks in Ghulja (Yining) in February and in Khotan, Kashghar, Kucha, Korla, Chochek and Bortala between March 5th and 8th. The same sources claimed that these incidents resulted in at least eighty casualties and caused damage estimated at millions of RMB, and were followed by street demonstrations, attacks on party, government and military installations and violent confrontations with the police.55 The Front for the Liberation of Uyghurstan issued a threat from its base in Kazakhstan that it was prepared to carry out guerrilla warfare in Xinjiang.56 A bomb exploded in Kashghar in June 1993. Government buildings were damaged and as many as ten people killed or injured in what was seen as a calculated attack on the representatives of the provincial government in the city.57 Emigre´ sources reported that there were several bomb attacks in the Altishahr region of southern Xinjiang during 1993 and that martial law had been declared in Kashghar city. Song Hanliang, CCP Secretary for Xinjiang is reported to have visited Kashghar and is quoted as telling a multi-ethnic meeting of cadres that, ‘Nationalist separatists form the main danger to the stability of our region, Xinjiang is a land with rich underground resources, our main task in Xinjiang is to keep the stability so the other parts of China could develop smoothly’.58 More detailed reports appeared in the German press. The explosion was apparently caused by ‘a well-trained commando’ which used a large quantity of explosives that tore a hole 7 metres long in the facade of the government’s agricultural building in Kashghar. The report included a photograph of the damage. A second explosion occurred on August 4th and further bombs were planted in ﬁve

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different cities. Leaﬂets calling for independence and the cessation of Chinese migration into Xinjiang were distributed. Kazakhs in the Ili region clashed with Chinese security forces during the summer of 1993 with some demonstrators demanding that they be allowed to become a republic in the CIS. There were also reports of an attack by Uyghur farmers on Han Chinese labourers who had been brought in to work in an oilﬁeld in Karghalik in the Altishahr. An assassination attempt on the chairman of the Xinjiang Regional People’s Congress, Hamudin Niyaz, was reported in July.59 The trial of eight men accused of carrying out the Urumqi bombing of February 5th 1992 was made public on May 30th 1995. Ablimit Talip and Idrishan Omar were sentenced to death after having been found guilty for organising and leading a counter-revolutionary group and engaging in counterrevolutionary sabotage. Mamat Imin Seyit, Helil Altun and Abudulla Mamat were sentenced to death for causing explosions, robbery and possession of explosives. The ﬁve were taken to the execution ground and executed immediately. It was alleged that Ablimit Talip and Idrishan Omar were among the leaders of the Islamic Reformers Party, founded in October 1990. They ﬁnanced their operations by robbing a bank in Xayar county on the northern fringes of the Taklamakan Desert and bought guns and ammunition with the proceeds. Urumqi buses 01-16715, running on route 52 and 01-16786 on route 30 were bombed on the evening of February 5th 1992. Three people were killed, four seriously injured and eleven others suffered minor injuries. Bombs planted at the same time in the Qunzhong Cinema and the balcony of a block of ﬂats on Wenhua road failed to detonate. The trial took place in July 1993, but all eight appealed against their sentences. It was not until the appeals had been turned down in May 1995 that the details were made public.60

Yining/Ghulja disturbances, April 1995 There was serious unrest in six towns in the Ili61 region of northwestern Xinjiang between April 22nd and April 24th 1995. On April 22nd, as many as 50,000 people were reported to have taken part in rallies and demonstrations against Chinese rule in the towns of Monggolku¨re (Zhaosu), Tekes, Ku¨nes (Xinyuan), Qapqal and Nilka which surround Yining/Ghulja, the administrative capital, and are close to the border with Kazakhstan. The climax of the agitation came on April 24th with strikes by as many as 100,000 workers, teachers and shopkeepers. Demonstrators handed in petitions to local authorities and called for the end of Chinese rule in the Ghulja region and its incorporation into Kazakhstan. They carried banners with slogans including ‘Establish a Kazakh state’, ‘End Communist rule in Xinjiang’ and ‘Long live Uyghur Xinjiang’. More than 3,000 residents of Zhaosu and Gongliu are said to have surrounded local government ofﬁces, driven lorries at police stations and stolen guns and police vehicles. The local government ofﬁces in Zhaosu are reported to have been completely ransacked. Public Security Bureau police and People’s Armed Police Units dispersed the crowd with armoured vehicles but were faced with

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return ﬁre from light machine guns manufactured in the former Soviet Union. Military units from Ghulja and Bole were sent to the two towns to restore order. Zhaosu was placed under curfew on April 25th and over eighty people suspected of involvement in the disorder were arrested. As many as 220 people may have been killed or injured and over 8,500 rounds of ammunition were ﬁred. In the town of Tekes on April 25th, more than 500 people, many of them armed, descended on the local government store in as many as forty vehicles and ransacked it. Supplies of grain, cooking oil and petrol laid aside for use in emergencies were looted. On their way back to town they encountered an army patrol and in a battle that lasted half an hour, 160 people, thirty-two of them troops, were killed or injured. Nilka and Qapqal experienced equally serious disturbances. Demonstrations on April 22nd were followed by a sit-in at the ofﬁces of the municipal govenment on the 23rd and strikes on the 24th, during which water, electricity and gas supplies were cut off. Crowds surrounded the government ofﬁces on April 25th, breaking into them in the afternoon and into the Public Security base and People’s Armed Police barracks in the evening. As many as 3,000 demonstrators surrounded the local military base, demanding Chinese withdrawal from Xinjiang and the establishment of an independent state of Uyghuristan. Troops ﬁred back and issued an ultimatum that the demonstrators depart by nine o’clock in the evening or they would take further action, and the demonstrators demanded that police who had opened ﬁre be prosecuted. On April 25th, the CCP State Council and Central Military Commission ordered the Xinjiang CCP and Government and the Lanzhou and Xinjiang Military Regions to ‘resolutely, thoroughly and rapidly put down armed rebellion organised by splittists and to resolutely crack down upon those organisations attempting dismemberment and those organisations masterminded and supported by foreign forces’. Twenty thousand troops of the 33rd and 41st divisions were dispatched by air and rail to the Ghulja region and put on a war footing. They imposed a curfew in Nilka, Qapqal, Xinyuan and Zhaosu and used armoured cars and cars with loudspeakers to demand the surrender of the insurgents. As many as eighty-eight people may have been killed and 200 injured in ﬁghting between local residents and Public Security police and People’s Armed Police units. The insurgents ﬁred riﬂe grenades stolen from military barracks against the police. During the insurrection, two senior political ﬁgures from Beijing were sent to oversee operations, Luo Gan, Secretary General of the State Council and Li Jing, Deputy Chief of the General Staff. Liu Jingsong, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region CCP Secretary and commander of the Lanzhou Military Region took command. Clearly the disturbances were being treated as more than mere riots. A Chinese ofﬁcial at the Xinjiang Foreign Affairs Bureau in Urumqi, Liu Yusheng, is reported to have denied that any of these events occurred.62

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Khotan July 1995 A demonstration began in Khotan on July 7th 1995 after reports that an Imam at the Baytulla mosque had been arrested. Some hundreds of his congregation went to the local police and government ofﬁces to demand his release and a disturbance broke out when this was refused. The ﬁfty or so ofﬁcers and men of the People’s Armed Police who were stationed there were reinforced by large numbers of armed troops and police and there were many injuries to protesters, police and government ofﬁcials. There were arrests on the day and in the weeks that followed and over twenty people were imprisoned after trials that took place in September of the same year.63

Aksu 1996 Between February and April 1996 there were a number of serious incidents in four counties of the Aksu region, which is approximately half way between Kashghar and Urumqi. They all had links with the separatist struggle and were almost certainly connected. On February 10th four men dressed in old-style police uniforms, carrying pistols and hoping to be taken for police ofﬁcers drove a Beijing 2020 jeep to Bozidun farm in Wensu county where they robbed six herding families. They stole riﬂes including hunting riﬂes, ammunition, gunpowder, telescopes and over RMB 4,000 in cash. The local border police were called and two police ofﬁcers and one of the robbers died in the subsequent gun battle. On March 22nd, two masked men armed with daggers and guns attacked and killed the Imam of the Tokusu county mosque, a ‘patriotic religious ﬁgure’ in the eyes of the Chinese authorities. Hekim Sidik Karihaji was eighty-ﬁve years old and was a member of the standing committee of the local Islamic Association, which is recognised by the Chinese government. Separatists are said to have regarded this as justiﬁed punishment of ethnic traitors. There were a number of armed robberies by masked men between March 24th and April 2nd in Shaya county which appear to have been politically motivated. The deputy chairman of the county’s Chinese People’s Consultative Committee (the non-CCP united front body) was robbed of RMB 15,000 on March 24th and the imam of the Shaya mosque was robbed of more than RMB 6,900 on March 27th. On April 2nd a village headman was injured when he was attacked by masked robbers. Police sources claim that the robbers shouted that the money was not for them personally but for the organisation, for the jihad. Early in the morning of April 2nd in Alahase township some 30 kilometres from the county town of Kuche, eleven men armed with daggers, guns and explosives attacked villagers including the village head and his wife and the party secretary. Four people were killed and a number of others severely injured.64 Opponents of Beijing’s control have also criticised the Chinese for exploiting Xinjiang and moving its valuable resources, including oil, uranium and cotton to China Proper. High quality wool has also been exported, with a consequent

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decline in the quality of Xinjiang’s once-famous carpet industry. Critics have argued that in spite of Xinjiang’s vast natural resources, the Turkic population live at a level scarcely above subsistence. Even the post-1979 economic reforms, it is suggested, have not beneﬁted the Turkic peoples because permits for most private businesses have been given to Han Chinese. Han Chinese are also said to monopolise the more highly paid jobs in such industrial enterprises as exist in Xinjiang.65 Xinjiang Daily carried an article in September 1988 which criticised the ‘very small number of people who make a great fuss about the exploitation of Xinjiang’s resources’, according to Urumqi Radio which felt it necessary to point out that although Xinjiang had been exporting mineral resources to the rest of China, the region had also beneﬁted from state aid.66 A complicating factor in assessing ethnic unrest is the relationship between the different non-Han groups. The majority non-Han group are the Uyghurs, but many people charged with rioting have names which suggest that they belong to the Hui Muslim community, and it has been suggested that Hui people, whose ethnic origins are mixed Central Asian and Chinese have led anti-government disturbances in the cities as they can pass more easily as Hans than other Muslims, and merge into the background.67

7

Beijing’s response to opposition in Xinjiang (1980–1996)

After the 1980 unrest, factional conﬂict erupted within the Urumqi Military Region, and there were Uyghur calls for ‘self-rule’ during a 1981 visit by Deng Xiaoping to Xinjiang. Wang Enmao, who had a reputation as a moderate and was seen as sympathetic to local sensibilities but not to separatism, was returned to Urumqi as Party Committee First Secretary and First Political Commissar of the Urumqi Military Region. In 1982 under his aegis, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps was strengthened to enforce CCP nationality policies, run ‘socialist economic enterprises’, defend the border and extend the militia. By mid-1982, it claimed to have opened up 937,500 hectares of previously uncultivable land, established over 170 state farms and built 691 factories. It had a ready supply of labour from the xiafang youth, demobilised PLA troops and Han settlers.1 The continuing importance of the Corps was underlined by Prime Minister Li Peng, who met key cadres in the organisation during a visit to Xinjiang in November 1989. He ‘fully afﬁrmed the Corps’ tremendous contributions in stationing troops in the border region to open up wasteland, defend the border regions of the motherland, and develop Xinjiang’s economic construction during the past four decades’2 By the late 1990s, the secretive and often considered to be downright sinister bingtuan was beginning to be referred to more openly. A branch of the Agricultural Bank of China in northwestern Urumqi bears a plate identifying it as the Urumqi Corps Branch Wulumuqi bingtuan fenzhi and is located on the ground ﬂoor of the Corps Agricultural Investment Corporation, Bingtuan nongzi gongsi building. The latest commercially available map of Urumqi and its region includes a route map with roads to the various farms run by the Corps marked.3 The corps also publishes its own newspaper, the Corps Daily (Bingtuan Ribao) and the Xinjiang Reclamation News (Xinjiang junken bao) is also closely associated with it. The precise nature and character of the corps became a major international issue in 1995. World Bank loans were being used to ﬁnance construction and production projects in Xinjiang, and some of these projects were run by the corps. Harry Hongda Wu, a former inmate of the laogai prison camps and a campaigner against the whole Chinese prison camp system made representations to the World Bank that its funding was being used for military purposes, but

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these claims were rejected by the Chinese authorities.4 In October 1995, Jiang Chunyun, Vice-Premier and member of the Politburo, visited Xinjiang and met members of the PLA, the People’s Armed Police and the corps and praised the contribution they had made to stability and development in Xinjiang.5 Song Hanliang, at a forum organised by the Southern Xinjiang Military Region, emphasised the importance of food production for troops in the area for achieving stability and forging closer ties with the masses, raising the possibility that there had been difﬁculties in supplying military units.6 The Baren rising of April 1990 called into question the security of the whole southern Xinjiang region, the Altishahr, where separatist feelings are strongest. This concern had been raised during Li Peng’s meeting with ofﬁcials of the southern Xinjiang Military Region in November 19897 and again by the Deputy Secretary of the Xinjiang CCP, Li Shoushan visiting the area in March 1990 just before the insurrection.8 Strengthening control over the rural areas of southern Xinjiang was identiﬁed as a priority in May 1990, because political Islamic movements were increasing their support in those areas.9 Grassroots CCP organisations were blamed for allowing the separatists the opportunity to organise,10 and 8,000 ofﬁcials in rural work teams were despatched during 1990 to stabilise the border regions and strengthen political organisations.11 In May 1990, Tomur Dawamat, after ritual pronouncements about the excellent political and economic situation, continued ‘we should see clearly that we are still facing a grim and complicated situation . . . [and] be soberly aware that the main danger to Xinjiang’s stability is the domestic and overseas national separatists waving a banner of an independent East Turkestan.’12 This pessimistic view of Xinjiang was endorsed by a meeting of the Xinjiang regional standing committee of the united front body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) attended by Wang Enmao, the veteran Xinjiang leader who is also Vice-Chairman of the national committee of the CPPCC.13 After the 1989 demonstrations, a campaign had been launched to bring unofﬁcial religious schools under central control, and in southern Xinjiang two were closed and imams whose qualiﬁcations were not recognised ofﬁcially were stripped of ofﬁce. Following the 1990 Baren insurrection this clampdown was intensiﬁed, to include a ban on foreign preachers and a move to close down ‘illegal Islamic schools, forced donations for mosque building and anti-Han activities’.14 This was formalised in two sets of regulations enacted by the Xinjiang Region government in September 1990, the Regulations for Religious Personnel and Regulations on Religious Activities, which are designed to restrict religious activities to those which do not threaten the status quo in Xinjiang, and to prohibit religious leaders other than those approved of and licensed by the authorities from practising.15 Many mosques and Quranic schools were closed down, particularly in the areas where there had been disturbances. In Akto county, site of the Baren rising, ﬁfty mosques, described as ‘superﬂuous’ were closed and the construction or planning of a hundred projected new mosques was halted.16 All imams were required to write a letter to the government pledging their loyalty.17

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Nationally, the CCP imposed tighter controls over the reporting of unrest and after a meeting of editors from all the autonomous regions in August 1990 in Lhasa, factual reporting, often sympathetic to ethnic minorities was replaced by articles and editorials attacking separatism.18 In Xinjiang, new press cards were issued on November 15th and the use of old ones declared illegal to ensure that only approved journalists were published.19 New identity cards for Xinjiang residents were announced for May 1st 1991.20 A ceremony in Kashghar on October 1989 named the city a ‘model in the progress of ethnic solidarity and army-people unity’. Tomur Dawamat said, ‘When turmoil occurred in Beijing and the political disturbance of beating, smashing and looting occurred in Urumqi on May 19th, the political situation in Kashghar stayed consistently stable.’21 On October 24th, military personnel of the South Xinjiang Military District met, also in Kashghar, to discuss ethnic unity with a speech by Wang Enmao which emphasised the role of the military in the economy and culture of the region as well as their security responsibilities.22 The population of Kashghar prefecture is overwhelmingly Uyghur with a long tradition of anti-Han nationalism and the ceremony was a clear warning that unrest would be ruthlessly suppressed. In June 1990, specialised riot control training for the People’s Armed Police was extended and there was an attempt to increase the number of ethnic minority members,23 and militia units were strengthened.24 Regional government leaders in January 1992 reafﬁrmed their ‘double support’ policy, for the army their dependants.25 A major increase in military and police suppression of separatist activities is clearly expected by the authorities. A meeting of senior ofﬁcials of the Communist Party, the government, the army and security and intelligence services is reported as having taken place in Urumqi on August 14th 1993. The conference agreed to increase the number of Peoples Armed Police (PAP) in Xinjiang by 28,000. The PAP are frequently used for riot and crowd control. Armoured riot units of a 100 troops were to be established in Urumqi and Kashghar. Police salaries were to be raised and their equipment improved. Han Chinese police were to replace the ethnic minority police in Kashghar and the latter were to be transferred to Urumqi.26 In a delicate balancing act to avoid alienating the international Muslim community, support for Islamic activities and organisations acceptable to the state was maintained. Nine hundred and sixty Xinjiang Muslims took part in the hajj in 1989, a total of 8,278 Muslims from China had been allowed to go to Mecca since 1984 and plans were being made to open a new air route from Urumqi to Jeddah.27 On June 7th 1990, the ﬁrst group of Xinjiang Muslims to travel to Mecca by charter ﬂight left Urumqi. Since previous travel was by bus to Pakistan before ﬂying to Mecca, this was a considerable improvement.28 A documentary ﬁlm on Muslims in China, shot in Ningxia, Xinjiang and southern China was announced in 1990, with plans for overseas distribution in versions dubbed into English and Arabic.29 Educational provision for non-Han students was also a major issue. In 1989, to counter claims of discrimination, the Xinjiang government proposed an

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increase in the proportion of ethnic minority students in Xinjiang University and technical institutions.30 In 1993, ofﬁcial agencies reported on improved education for ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. The number of minority students was said to be 1.5 million and the enrolment rate of ‘school-aged ethnic children’ had reached 91.5 per cent in rural areas and 96.9 per cent in the cities. Xinjiang’s twenty-one universities and colleges had a total of 17,500 minority students, and since 1989 forty-six universities and colleges in other areas had opened 110 special classes for minority students from Xinjiang.31 There was some recognition that political and ethnic unrest in Xinjiang had economic roots. In 1994, the poverty relief fund for Xinjiang administered by the government was increased from RMB 61 million to RMB 165 million. A poverty reduction programme started in 1986 had identifed lack of drinking water and poor transport facilities as the fundamental causes of privation in the region and a three-year plan for 1995–1998 was announced in which RMB 300 million were to be allocated to alleviating the shortage of drinking water in the rural areas.32

Han Chinese migration to Xinjiang The issue that has provoked the most intense hostility among the Uyghurs and other non-Chinese of Xinjiang is the encouragement of Han Chinese immigration, which is seen as a way of diluting local culture and ensuring Beijing’s control.33 Large scale migration began after the suppression of the Yakub Beg regime in 1878, but the government of the PRC has consciously and effectively used it to control Xinjiang. The proportion of Hans in Xinjiang rose from 5.5 per cent in 1949 to about 40 per cent in 1970. Five groups make up the Han population: a small group of the descendants of early settlers; troops of the Guomindang garrison who defected to the Communist General Wang Zhen in 1949, and their descendants, many of whom serve in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps; administrative, professional and technical personnel assigned to key government jobs; young people transferred to Xinjiang in the 1960s and 1970s during the Cultural Revolution; and prisoners from the Labour Reform and Labour Education camps that are spread throughout Xinjiang and released prisoners who have been found work placements in the region.34 Local non-Han people ﬁnd the policy of turning Xinjiang into a vast prison camp particularly offensive. Beijing has been peculiarly insensitive to the feelings of the non-Han people on immigration. It is ofﬁcial policy to attract from other parts of China qualiﬁed professional and technical staff, most of whom would be Han.35 Kashghar announced in December 1992 that it would be prepared to resettle up to 100,000 people, all Han, who will be displaced by the Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangzi River.36 A national and international outcry over these proposals which came at the same time as the visit of a delegation from the Muslim CIS states, the signing of an agreement of troop reduction on the border and President Yeltsin’s December visit to China, forced the Beijing authorities to back down.37

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It is debatable whether Hans would settle in Xinjiang in those numbers apart from people assigned to jobs there. There is a feeling that Xinjiang is still a place of exile for Hans. Migration from the poorer rural areas to the rapidly developing areas became a feature of Chinese society in the 1980s and 1990s. Most migration was to major cities such as Beijing or Shanghai or to the booming coastal region of the south east, but Xinjiang also attracted migrants looking for jobs on either a temporary or permanent basis. Migrant farm workers are attracted by the opportunities for cotton picking during the harvest and travel to Xinjiang during the autumn returning home in early spring, although some have stayed on to ﬁnd permanent jobs as managers of cotton plantations. Some have even accumulated enough capital to be able to set up their own businesses as the money earned in a few months’ picking cotton can be the equivalent of several years’ income in their home villages.38 The opening of the borders with former Soviet Central Asia and the increase in cross border trade in the early 1990s created an ironic echo of this outcry when Kazakh newspapers began to report fears in Kazakhstan and in Almaty (Alma Ata) in particular of a massive inﬂux of Chinese, many of whom had come to trade but had settled.

8

Political leadership in Xinjiang during the People’s Republic

Although the central government in Beijing has endeavoured to integrate its farthest ﬂung region fully into the political system of the Chinese People’s Republic, local leadership and local politics have necessarily been important in shaping the development of the autonomous region. The two most powerful political ﬁgures in Xinjiang during the early years of control by the CCP were the two Wangs, Wang Zhen and Wang Enmao, both military men and both Han Chinese, whose careers overlapped closely.

Wang Zhen Wang Zhen had joined the Red Army in 1927 and was a guerrilla leader in the 1930s. By the time of the civil war between the CCP and the Guomindang from 1945 to 1949, Wang was effectively in command of the main CCP military headquarters in northwest China and then commander of the Second Column of the Northwest People’s Liberation Army under the overall command of Peng Dehuai, one of the PLA’s most senior commanders. The Second Column later became better known as the First Field Army. By 1949 as the civil war was coming to an end, Wang Zhen was leading the First Army Group westwards to secure Xinjiang for the CCP. The Guomindang garrison commander in Xinjiang, Tao Zhiyue, defected to the CCP in September 1949 and Wang Zhen’s forces were able to take control of Urumqi (known then as Dihua) on October 20th with virtually no resistance. Although Peng Dehuai was nominally both commander and political commissar of the Xinjiang Military District that was established by the CCP in December 1949, he operated mainly from Xi’an and it was Wang Zhen who was in effective command and he formally replaced Peng in these posts in 1951. In addition to the military positions that were his powerbase, Wang established himself as the dominant political ﬁgure in the region and one of his early policies was the direction of communist military units into economic work, the basis for the development of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. Wang Zhen was also involved in the early stages of the discussions that led to the designation of Xinjiang as an autonomous region, but in 1952, before this was created, he was transferred to Beijing where he was appointed to more senior posts. He was replaced in Xinjiang by his long-time associate, Wang Enmao.1

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Wang Enmao Wang Enmao had been active in CCP guerrilla units since the 1920s and, in the 1940s, had worked closely with Wang Zhen in the 359th Brigade which was part of the Eighth Route Army, the main army unit of the CCP. In addition to its military role, the 359th Brigade was involved in a celebrated land reclamation project at Nanniwan near the CCP base of Yan’an in 1942 and that experience proved useful when Wang Enmao subsequently moved to Xinjiang. Between 1946 and 1949, Wang Enmao was Wang Zhen’s political commissar in units of the Northwest People’s Liberation Army which became the First Field Army in 1949 when it was deployed westwards to Xinjiang. While Wang Zhen’s forces took Urumqi without encountering any resistance, Wang Enmao took the units under his command further to the southwest, into the Uyghur heartland to the city of Kashghar.2 In 1950, he was named chairman of the Kashghar Military Commission and he remained in the city until 1952 when he replaced the recently promoted Wang Zhen as the most senior leader of the CCP in Urumqi. Wang Enmao became Xinjiang CCP Secretary and took part in the process by means of which the Xinjiang became an Autonomous Region in 1955. He also acted as political commissar to the Xinjiang Military District. Although the Uyghur Saifuddin was designated as Chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 1955, it was Wang Enmao with his dual military and party roles who actually controlled the region until he was forced out in 1968 during the Cultural Revolution. He spearheaded the campaigns against ‘rightists’ and ‘local nationalists’ in 1956 and 1957, campaigns that were directed against those who wished to see more genuine autonomy given to ethnic and religious minorities.3 After the death of Mao and the collapse of the Cultural Revolution, Wang Enmao returned to power in Xinjiang, making his comeback in 1981 shortly after a visit to the region by Deng Xiaoping who had become the effective leader of the CCP in 1978. The two non-Han political ﬁgures who played the most signiﬁcant but ultimately subordinate roles in the early administration of Xinjiang were Burhan and Saifuddin.

Burhan Shahidi Burham Shahidi was one of the people responsible for surrendering Xinjiang to the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 and he became one of the best known non-Han ﬁgures in Xinjiang and indeed in China until his death in 1989. Burhan, as he was universally known, was not a native of Xinjiang but was born in the town of Aqsu in the Kazan region of Russia where the Turkic Tatar language, a distant relative of Uyghur, is spoken. This Aqsu is often confused with the town of the same name in southern Xinjiang and this confusion, which may have been deliberate, added to Burhan’s credibility among the Uyghurs of the region.4 He served in the broadly nationalist Xinjiang Provincial Government in the 1940s,

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beginning his career as a clerk and rising rapidly through the administration, and was regarded as fairly left-wing. In 1949, he was one of the signatories to the telegram that conceded the CCP’s authority over Xinjiang and he defected to Beijing, taking with him General Tao Zhiyue and some 60,000 troops and was rewarded for this with the governorship of Xinjiang. His role in Xinjiang diminished and he was replaced by Saifuddin, but he became Beijing’s ofﬁcial voice of Xinjiang, representing the PRC in many international bodies and was praised as a great Chinese patriot and an enemy of separatism.5

Saifuddin Seypidin Aze (Azizi), more commonly known by a version of the Chinese transliteration of his name, Saifuddin, was born into a family of traders in Artush county which lies some 15 miles to the northwest of Kashghar. After attending a school in Xinjiang, he enrolled in the Central Asia Political Institute in Tashkent where he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, retaining his membership until 1950 when he transferred to the CCP. He was part of the movement for an Eastern Turkestan Republic that took control of the Kashghar region in 1933 and returned to the USSR in 1934 when that movement collapsed. He moved back to Xinjiang in 1943 and joined the administration of the second Eastern Turkestan Republic that was established in Yining/Ghulja in 1944. When the CCP took control of Xinjiang in September 1949, Saifuddin attended the inaugural conference of the united front body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in Beijing and took part in the formation of the new CCP central government. During the winter of 1949, he returned to Xinjiang and became deputy governor to Burhan. After the inauguration of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on October 1st 1955, Saifudin became Chairman of the Regional Government, a post that he held until 1968 when it was converted into the Chairmanship of the Revolutionary Committee.6 He was removed from that position in 1978 but retained his place in national politics with a seat in the Politburo in Beijing. Saifuddin was succeeded by Ismail Amat from 1979 until he was in turn ousted by his long-term rival Tomur Dawamat in 1985.

Tomur Dawamat Tomur Dawamat, an ethnic Uyghur, was headman of his village of Toksun in central Xinjiang by the time he was twenty-two years old in 1950 and he joined the Chinese Communist Party two years later. He studied at the Central Nationalities Institute in Beijing in 1955–1956, returned to Toksun and was CCP Secretary there until 1964, the ﬁrst non-Han county party secretary in Xinjiang. In 1964 he was elected Vice-Chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Regional Peoples Congress under Xinjiang’s best-known leader Seypidin Aziz (Saifuddin). He was a prote´ge´ of the Chinese military commander of the Xinjiang region, Wang Enmao and supported him against Seypidin during the

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Cultural Revolution. When Wang was ousted during 1968, Tomur lost his patron and his political positions. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he worked in an agricultural ofﬁce in central Xinjiang. Wang Enmao returned to power in Xinjiang shortly after a visit by Deng Xiaoping in 1981 and under his mentor Tomur regained his former inﬂuence. He became Chairman of the Xinjiang Autonomous Regional People’s Congress in 1979, held national party and army posts and the post of Vice-Minister of the State Nationalities Affairs Commission. In December 1985, Tomur was appointed Chair of the XUAR Government, replacing Ismail Amat who was transferred and later emerged as Minister of the State Nationalities Affairs Commission in Beijing. The change of leadership upset students at Xinjiang University, especially those from the south of the region who may have felt that Ismail Amat from Khotan was more likely to represent their interests and there were major demonstrations and boycotts of classes in protest.7

The leadership changes of 1993 Signiﬁcant changes in the leadership of the Xinjiang regional government and other bodies were announced during 1993. The most important of these was the removal in December of Tomur Dawamat, chairman of the regional government since 1985. The other political moves in the CPPCC, People’s Congress and People’s Government appear to be connected with his political demise. At the time of the leadership changes, the reasons for his removal were not entirely clear, although his pronouncements on the future of Xinjiang were becoming increasingly gloomy. It transpired that he was not completely out of favour and he re-emerged in a senior national role as the Vice-Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, visiting Xinjiang in that capacity in spring 1998.8 The Xinjiang CPPCC committee elected a new leadership at the end of the seventh regional CPPCC committee meeting in the People’s Hall in Urumqi on January 16th 1993. The list of members was given as: Chairman Janabil; ViceChairmen Feng Dazhen, Yibulayin Rouzi, Mao Dehua, Deyal Khulmash, Wen Kexiao, Wang Shizhen, Han Youwen, Wu Jiahe, Yasheng Nashir, Sulayi Mai, Aronghanaji and Pasha Yisha; General Secretary Hasmu Yimiti.9 Further personnel changes were announced at the eighth Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Regional People’s Congress on January 18th 1993. The list of members of the standing committee of the elected Regional People’s Congress was headed by Amudun Niyaz, Chairman of the Regional People’s Congress. The Vice-Chairmen elected were Xie Fuping, Hederbai, Yusufu Muhanmode, Turbayim, Xu Peng, Ma Cunliang, Xie Hong, Hujihan Hakemofu, Amina Apaer and Yang Maoquan, and Maimaiti Simayi was elected General Secretary. The list of ofﬁcials of the People’s Government elected on January 18th 1993 included Tomur Dawamat as Chairman, and Wang Lequan, Abdulahat Abdurixit, Wang Yousan, Wufuer Abudula, Li Donghui, Aisihaiti Kelimubai, Zhang Heng and Mijiti Nasier as Vice Chairmen. Kurban Rozi was elected

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President of the regional higher people’s court and Mijiti Kurban the Chief Procurator.10 However, a report from Xinjiang television in Urumqi on December 7th 1993 announced the resignation of Tomur Dawamat as Chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region People’s Government. The resignation was announced, almost as an afterthought, at the end of a list of agenda items from the ﬁfth session of the Eighth Standing Committee, which opened in Urumqi on December 7th. Earlier items in the list included the adoption of a socialist market economic structure, markets in technology, protection for the handicapped, blood donation, corruption and economic crimes. Tomur Dawamat is said to have requested that his resignation be accepted because of ‘changes in his work’ and his request was introduced by Amudun Niyaz, chairman of the regional People’s Congress. He is to be replaced by Abulahat Abdurixit, one of his vice-chairmen since August 1991. The ﬁlm of the meeting apparently showed Abdulahat smiling and Tomur Dawamat unsmiling.11 Tomur Dawamat then made a statement to a plenary session of the Xinjiang Regional Government on December 9th. He said that ‘in accordance with the constitution and local organic law which states [that] NPC standing committee members may not assume executive ofﬁces, the regional peoples government had accepted my resignation as regional government chairman’. He went on to say that he would ‘continue to work in Xinjiang on behalf of the party Central Committee and the NPC standing committee and that he would spend most of his time as a member of the Xinjiang Regional Party Committee’s leadership core’. Abulahat Abdurixit was also elected a member of the Standing Committee and Deputy Secretary of the Xinjiang CCP Committee.12 The two key political leaders of Xinjiang throughout most of the 1990s were an ethnic double act, Wang Lequan, a Han who was Secretary of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Communist Party and Abdulahat Abdurixit, the Chairman of the Autonomous Region Government, who was an Uyghur. Wang Lequan as a Han and the regional party leader was the senior of the two, but in general tended to be far more pessimistic in his estimation of the security situation than his Uyghur colleague. This came over clearly in the large number of joint press conferences and meetings that the pair held and which were reported fully in the regional and occasionally the national press. Details of Abdulahat’s career emerge from his own speeches, including one to the Ninth Autonomous Region People’s Congress, reported in Xinjiang Daily on January 19th 1998. He thanked the delegates for electing him Chairman of the Autonomous Region again and reﬂected on his ascent to power. ‘In 1991, I began to assume [a] leading position in the autonomous region government. In March 1994 I was elected chairman of the autonomous region . . . . I am a minority cadre raised by the party’.13 Interviewed by the New China Xinhua News Agency the following March during the National People’s Congress, Abdulahat, who was born into the family of a shoemaker, endorsed the party’s policies of ethnic unity and equality from which he clearly felt he had beneﬁted: ‘I never dreamed that I could attend college, become an engineer, serve as chairman of

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the Xinjiang regional people’s government and act as NPC chairman’.14 Hong Kong journalists, reporting on remarks by Abdulahat at a press conference during the NPC commented on the Regional Governor’s ‘substandard putonghua’.15

Rabiya Qadir One unusual and inﬂuential individual who emerged during the 1990s, although someone who could only tangentially be described as a political leader, was Rebiya Qadir, usually described as the millionaire businesswoman of Xinjiang and known as is the Uyghur convention by her main given name Rebiya. She had established herself as a major economic force in Urumqi with wide-ranging commercial interests that included department stores and hotels and had contacts with businesses across the border in Kazakhstan. She became a member of the national committee of the Chinese Peoples’ Political Consultative Committee, the united front body set up originally by the CCP in the 1950s to allow non-party ﬁgures a degree of participation in affairs of the state. However, she was not re-elected to the committee in 1998. Wang Lequan explained this by saying that her commercial activities were in decline and that she owed state banks large amounts of money, up to RMB 7 million, but also said that it was because her exiled husband, Sidiq Rouzi, was involved in anti-China activities. Because she had not been prepared to oppose this activity publicly, she was not considered ﬁt to serve on the CPPCC.16 Rebiya Qadir was arrested by the Chinese authorities in August 1999 when she was travelling to meet visiting research staff of the United States Congress in Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang. At a trial held on March 9th 2000 in Urumqi’s Intermediate People’s Court, she was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for passing on classiﬁed information to foreigners, an offence under Article 111 of China’s criminal law code, and committed to Liudaowan prison in Urumqi. The reason for her arrest appears to be connected directly with the activities of her husband. In 1996, Sidiq Rouzi, an academic who had already come into conﬂict with the authorities because of his sympathies for Uyghur independence, left Xinjiang for the United States and began a career as a journalist, broadcasting to China and Central Asia for Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. According to the Urumqi Evening News of March 12th 2000, Rebiya Qadir had posted batches of newspapers containing articles and speeches on the activities of separatists to her husband, and some of these were intercepted by the authorities in June 1999. The newspapers concerned were all local editions and included a two-year run of Kashghar Daily from 1995–1998, and issues of Xinjiang Legal News, Yining Daily and Yining Evening News. Although local newspapers in the People’s Republic of China are freely available at kiosks and stalls on the streets, in the past they were treated as neibu or ‘internal’ publications and it has only recently been possible for foreigners to subscribe to them. They have given far more detailed information on local problems than the

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more tighly censored nationals such as People’s Daily or even the regional Xinjiang Daily. Kashghar and Yining, in respectively the southwest and northwest of Xinjiang, are the two main foci of separatist activity and their local papers carry details of the government repression. Xinjiang Legal News is the organ of the public security authorities in Xinjiang and carries reports on the successes of the police and military against separatist forces. The Chinese authorities do not wish this kind of information to be made available to foreigners, and certainly not to citizens of China working for the USA and this explains their draconian actions. Although restrictions on neibu publications have been relaxed or are ignored in other parts of China, they are still enforced strictly in Xinjiang. The imprisonment of Rebiya Qadir focused world opinion on Xinjiang for the ﬁrst time in decades and, since the trial, questions have been asked about the Uyghurs in the United States Congress and in the Houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom. On November 4th 1999 dozens of ethnic Uyghurs living in Kazakhstan staged a demonstration in front of the Uzbek Embassy in Kazakhstan demanding that Islam Karimov – the Uzbek President – pay attention to the plight of the Uyghurs, particularly on the destiny of Rabia Qadir, during the summit meeting due between Uzbek President Karimov and his Chinese counterpart Jiang Zemin. This is a measure of the signiﬁcance attached to Rabiya Qadir by Uyghurs.

9

‘Strike Hard’ The long hot summers of 1996 and 1997

A systematic crackdown on crime throughout the whole of China was launched at the end of April 1996. It was known as the ‘Strike Hard’ campaign yanda, an abbreviation of yanli daji yanzhong xingshi fanzui huodong ‘Campaign to strike severely at serious criminal offences’ and was initiated after a working conference of the Bureau of Public Security, the date of which has not been made public. The Bureau of Public Security requires, through this “Strike Hard” struggle, the investigation and uncovering of a large quantity of major cases, and the pursuit, capture and bringing to justice of a large number of escaped criminals; a resolute attack on criminal and underworld gangs and the evil inﬂuence of hoodlums; a severe strike at those who secretly keep a look out in ﬁnancial units and residential areas with the object of committing crimes of robbery; a focus on consolidating a number of areas, positions and sections of road or railway where there is public order chaos; the prohibitition of the manufacture of, trafﬁcking in and taking of drugs, prostitution, manufacture and trade in pornography, gambling and other illegal and socially repulsive activities; the vigorous seizure of illegal ﬁrearms, ammunition and explosives and control of knives and similar weapons, a severe attack on the illegal manufacture of and trade in ﬁrearms and a resolute bringing down of the rampant arrogance of the criminal elements to resolve the outstanding public order issues.’1 However, in addition to this crackdown on crime in general, the campaign was also quite clearly directed against unofﬁcial political organisations and in particular separatist activists in Tibet, Inner Mongolia and, of course, in Xinjiang. A meeting of senior government and party ofﬁcials held in Urumqi on April 30th called for the campaign to be deepened and a statement issued demanded that the crackdown ‘should mainly focus on the violent and terrorist cases organised and manipulated by national separatist forces’. The statement continued There is every indication that national separatists are working in collusion with all kinds of criminal and violent elements. Their reactionary and

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sabotage activities are increasingly rampant and have seriously threatened the safety of people’s lives and property, as well as social stability and the smooth progress of the modernisation drive in Xinjiang.2 The following week, the Xinjiang Party Committee explicitly linked separatism with what it termed ‘unlawful religious activities’ and launched a campaign to reduce their effect in schools in publishing and throughout the region. The party pointed to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps as ‘a major reliable force with the assignment of maintaining Xinjiang’s stability and building and defending the country’s frontiers’, indicating the important role that it continues to have in policing and controlling the region.3 The growing importance of the religious element in the separatist movement was becoming clear to the Chinese authorities and in April 1996, a thirteenarticle document outlining regulations for controlling Islamic books, periodicals and audio-visual products was drawn up by the Party’s Propaganda Department, United Front Work department, Press and Publications Bureau, Culture Department, Public Security Department and Nationalities Affairs Commission, the range of bodies involved giving a good idea of the importance attached to the issue by the government of the Autonomous Region. The regulations stipulated that all publications connected with Islam, whether for internal consumption or wider publication had to be vetted and approved before they appeared.4 Party ofﬁcials openly admitted that they had lost control of many of the grassroots organisations in rural Xinjiang to separatist and Islamist groups. ‘Some village-level organisations are but empty shells and are dominated and controlled by illegal religious forces. These localities have often become fortiﬁed villages of national splittist and illegal religious activities’.5 Reports of the effects on the ground of the clampdown were patchy at ﬁrst and it was extremely difﬁcult to assess the degree of repression that it created in Xinjiang. Uyghur nationalist sources clearly had reason to emphasise the size and strength of the opposition to Chinese rule, while, conversely, the ofﬁcial Chinese media has tried to demonstrate the success of its rule in Xinjiang and the weakness and criminality of the independence movement. The authorities in Xinjiang were acutely aware of the parallels with the Chechen struggle for independence against Russia and gave the war in Chechnya as one of their reasons for clamping down so hard. On April 29th, Xinjiang Ribao reported on the success of the crackdown, claiming that over 1,300 arrests had been made, seventy criminal organisations had been destroyed and large quantities of weapons, ammunition and money acquired during robberies had been seized.6 Two days earlier, the same newspaper had reported on the celebration of the Muslim festival of Korban (’Id ’al-Adha, the Feast of Sacriﬁce) by the political leadership of Xinjiang in a show of ethnic unity, solidarity and stability.7 The Chinese authorities consistently presented the activities of separatists as just another manifestation of crime or hooliganism and Uyghurs charged with political offences were frequently tried at the same time as criminals accused of serious non-political crimes such as murder, rape or armed robbery. For

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example, on May 14th 1996, Abduwayat Ahmat was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and two years’ deprivation of political rights for ‘writing reactionary manuscripts’ and other acts of reactionary propaganda. His sentence was announced at a rally held by the Urumqi Intermediate Court, at which another ten defendants were sentenced to death for horriﬁc crimes of violence.8 The CCP in Xinjiang was also becoming increasingly concerned about the inﬂuence of separatist and Islamic ideas within its own ranks. Its Discipline and Inspection Commission issued a statement threatening that party cadres who persisted in taking part in religious activities, or produced books and other materials that promoted the idea of national separatism and religious education, would be punished as would any who were found to have been associating with criminals or terrorists.9 Xinjiang Daily on May 10th 1996 pointed out that many grassroots organisations in the region, including CCP branches were weak and disorganised and even went so far as to claim that ‘some village organisations are but empty shells and are dominated and controlled by illegal religious forces. These localities have often become fortiﬁed villages of national splittist and illegal religious activities’. The newspaper’s commentator advocated the strengthening of these organisations and the training of a large body of Han cadres to work alongside those from the ethnic minorities.10 Essentially, what was happening was that the chickens of the United Front policies were coming home to roost. In order to integrate ethnic minority and religious leaders into the wider community, they had been given posts within the party and other organisations such as the local branches of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. When relative stability gave way to serious ethnic tension, these leaders were in a position to exploit the positions they had been given to exercise leadership over anti-CCP organisations. Xinjiang Daily on May 22nd 1996 carried a more detailed analysis from the regional discipline inspection commission, dealing with CCP members who failed to clamp down on separatist activities and to sternly deal with party members and cadres, especially leading cadres, who continue to be devout religious believers despite repeated education, instil separatist ideas and religious doctrines into young people’s minds, publish distorted history, books or magazines encouraging separatism and illegal religious ideas or make audio or video products propagating such ideas.11 It is quite clear that CCP attempts to recruit ethnic minority members in Xinjiang had created a separatist and Islamist ﬁfth column within the party. There were a number of attacks on police and other symbols of Chinese authority in Urumqi. On April 24th, two young Uyghur men opened ﬁre on four police ofﬁcers, two of whom were killed instantly. One of the Uyghurs was killed in a battle that lasted over two hours and the other escaped. On June 3rd, three Uyghurs shot at a group of police in the Erdaoqiao and Sanshihangza quarters of the city, injuring three of them. The Uyghurs were arrested, one badly injured

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with bullet wounds to the stomach. On June 6th, a bomb exploded in the Ergong railway administrative ofﬁces at a club where Chinese employees were watching videos. Eighteen Chinese were killed and thirty-two injured. Police arrested all traders from the south of Xinjiang who were in the area and some were imprisoned on suspicion of being separatists.12 One of the most serious and signiﬁcant incidents was an attack in Kashghar on May 12th on a senior imam of the Id Gah Mosque in the city who was also the Vice-Chairman of the Xinjiang Chinese People’s Consultative Committee and a member of the Standing Committee of the state-sponsored China Islamic Association. The attack on seventy-ﬁve-year-old Mullah Aronghan Haji, left him injured and hospitalised and was one of a series of assassination attempts that targeted ethnic Uyghurs who were seen to be collaborating with the Chinese authorities.13 Later reports from the news agency Zhongguo Xinwenshe gave further details of the attack and the fate of the men who carried it out. The imam was on his way to the mosque early in the morning to pray, being pushed by his son on a bicycle as was their usual practice, when they were attacked by men wielding cleavers, and sustained serious injuries. On May 27th, acting on a tip-off, local police attempted to arrest two men but withdrew after the men shot and killed a police ofﬁcer. The suspects were cornered in an area of marshland and in another gun battle one was killed and the other wounded.14 Aronghan Haji recovered from his injuries and was able to attend the meeting of the Xinjiang People’s Political Consultative Conference when it met in Urumqi in January 1997.15 His assailant Nurmamat who had been killed by the police was an Uyghur from Awat in Maralbashi county which is between Aksu and Kashghar. Nuermaiti had been sent by his parents to an underground madrasa from the age of ﬁve where he had apparently absorbed pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic sentiments before leading a life of petty crime and involvement with another illegal madrassa in his teens.16 Pro-independence organisations in Xinjiang claimed that between April and June 1996, some 4,000 talibs, students of Islam, were arrested and sent out of the region to prison camps in Qinghai. Camps in Xinjiang received Han Chinese prisoners from Qinghai in exchange. On June 18th in Urumqi, 10,000 troops and police searched the homes of families suspected of separatist sympathisers and 300 people were arrested. At a celebratory meeting afterwards, paid for with money collected from Uyghur families in the city, the local government congratulated the ofﬁcers involved. Between June 9th and June 20th, communications within Xinjiang and with the rest of China were disrupted because of sabotage, and special guard units drawn from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps had to be formed to supplement police guarding the roads and railway lines.17 Ofﬁcial Chinese sources spoke of building a ‘steel wall’ to protect the stability of Xinjiang.18 Yusupbek Mukhlissi, head of the United National Revolutionary Front is reported to have claimed on July 12th that the number of arrests was unprecedented. He said that 10,000 people had been arrested in Aksu and a further 8,000 in Urumqi, although in other reports the ﬁgure of 8,000 appears to

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refer to Urumqi, Turpan, Ghulja and Karamay. The Chinese authorities denied that arrests on this scale had taken place. Nevertheless, according to a report on Urumqi radio on July 8th, 400 criminals had been arrested and sentenced in Ghulja and the heads of 3,700 families had been obliged to sign statements that no member of their family would carry out any further activities against the Communist Party. Emigre´ Uyghur sources collecting information on the arrests produced a detailed list of the numbers arrested in Khotan prefecture from April to July. A total of 2,220 were taken in by police with 580 of them coming from Karakash, 450 from Khotan city, Khotan county 370, Kerye county 250, Lop county 200, Guma county 180, Chira county 120, Niya county 70. There were 420 arrests from Kargilik county in Kashghar prefecture in the same period.19 A Chinese border guard ofﬁcer and twenty of his men were killed on June (some sources give July) 4 in ﬁghting on the Khunjerab Pass on the border with Pakistan.20 A statement by the United National Revolutionary Front on July 15th claimed that 450 Chinese troops and militiamen had been killed in Xinjiang since April.21 Schools and colleges were identiﬁed as potential hotbeds of separatist and illegal religious activities and became the main target of the Chinese authorities in June 1996. Xinjiang Television, broadcasting from Urumqi, reported that the focus of the campaign would be ‘stopping the inﬁltration of national separatism and illegal religious authorities’ and preventing their inﬂuence on students. Marxist teaching on patriotism and ethnic relations was to be stepped up to counter these inﬂuences.22 A lengthy commentary in Xinjiang Daily on May 18th 1996 attacked the growth of unlawful religious activities while pointing out that Muslims had freedom of worship under the constitution of the People’s Republic of China providing that they did so through legal patriotic religious activities and organisations, in other words those registered with the state. The article called for a ban on underground scripture and martial arts classes and underground talibs (religious students) preaching in places other than those authorised and the enforced collection of taxes for religious purposes.23 What were described as illegal mosques and religious schools were closed down in Luntai county in central Xinjiang in June 1996 and police ‘conﬁscated a quantity of reactionary books and publications promoting national separation, as well as some illegal religious publicity materials’.24 Xinjiang Daily on July 17th 1996 carried a lengthy article on controlling the ‘cultural market’. It touched on the issues of pornography, gambling and prostitution but also made the point that, ‘Greater importance should be attached to cracking down on illegal publications and audio and video products that promote religious fanaticism and instigate national separatism.25 On July 4th, Xinjiang television reported that police had seized weapons, including three guns made in Pakistan, a riﬂe manufactured in China and 260 rounds of ammunition.26 It was once again acknowledged that the Public Security Departments of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps had played a key role in the Strike Hard campaign.27 Xinjiang Daily ran an article on May 30th describing the ‘steel wall’ being constructed by the military to safeguard stability in the region

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and in addition to praising the regular troops of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and the paramilitary People’s Armed Police, highlighted the role of the Corps. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps is a reliable and important force in safeguarding Xinjiang’s social stability and in building and protecting the border. The existence and development of the Corps constitute an unsurmountable obstacle to international hostile forces and national splittist forces in and outside the country in their attempt to ‘split’ Xinjiang. Over the last 40 years, the one million cadres, workers, and staff members of the Corps have made indelible contributions to reclaiming lands, to building Xinjiang, to safeguarding the border, and to bringing about Xinjiang’s economic development and social progress.28 The role of the paramilitary People’s Armed Police (PAP) was also drawn to the attention of the public in Xinjiang by the local television station on June 11th 1996 when it reported on a period of intensive training undergone by the 2nd Detachment of the Xinjiang Regional PAP.29 The Chief of the Chinese General Staff, General Fu Quanyou made a special journey to Urumqi where he inspected troops together with Wen Zongren, the Political Commissar of the Lanzhou Military Region which commands troops deployed in Xinjiang. He was briefed by local political leaders and issued a statement on the position of troops under the command of the Xinjiang Military District in which he underlined their key role in combating separatism.30 Senior military and police ofﬁcers met from July 8th to 12th in Urumqi to review the ‘Strike Hard’ campaign, according to a report on Urumqi Radio on July 14th. It was decided to extend the period and scope of the campaign and use it as a method of clearing up separatist elements in Xinjiang. Pro-independence sources say that information was given to the meeting that 450 members of the military and public security had been killed during the campaign and 1,000 had been injured. The meeting observed three minutes’ silence to commemorate the dead and agreed that ﬁnancial assistance be provided for their families and that it must be decided within ten days which of those arrested were to be given death sentences. The areas where the campaign was to be carried out next were identiﬁed as Karashahar, Lopnor and Korla counties in Korla prefecture and all the counties of Kashghar and Khotan prefectures.31 Wang Lequan, CCP Secretary of Xinjiang speaking on June 28th claimed that separatist activities were being supported by Western forces. ‘Unwilling to see China become uniﬁed and strong, international hostile forces have persisted in pursuing a policy of “westernisation” and “disintegration” towards China’. He went on to make it clear that the CCP’s struggle against national splittist and illegal religious activities is ‘irreconcilable’ as they were the ‘main danger to Xinjiang’s stability’. In August 1996, it was reported that twenty people suspected of having been involved in bomb attacks on military vehicles in Urumqi had been arrested. The exiled separatist leader Yussupbek Mukhlisi,

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speaking from his base in Kazakhstan, claimed that there had been at least ﬁfty bombings in Xinjiang since the end of July.32 In the latter half of 1996, the CCP, both in Xinjiang and nationally had decided to focus more directly on the role of religion in ethnic and social conﬂict than at any period since 1949. In Urumqi, Abdulahat Abdurixit, Chairman of the Xinjiang Autonomous Regional Government addressed the regional CCP committee on August 13th on the struggle against separatism: [W]e sternly cracked down on violent terrorist acts and separatist and sabotaging activities carried out by an extremely small number of ethnic separatists. In light of actual conditions, localities and department formulated speciﬁc implementation measures and plans; provided speciﬁc regulations on managing religious venues, clergy personnel, the content of scriptural teaching, and the talifu (students). They put forward regulatory requirements and improvement suggestions on ethnic customs and habits and religious ceremonies and activities. They investigated illegal religious activities, cleaned up and outlawed underground scriptures schools, scripture-teaching venues and martial arts halls and carried out supervision, monitoring and education of ideologically reactionary talifu. This has dealt a ﬁrm blow to illegal religious activiities . . .’33 Wang Lequan, the CCP secretary echoed these points in his own speech34 and the United Front Work Department of the Party Committee held a three-week course in September to provide training on China’s legal system for local religious leaders. Among those attending the course were imams of all ages, and delegates to the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Consultative Conference and the stated aim of the course was to clarify the CCP’s policy on religious belief and the distinction between legal and illegal religious activities.35 The Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao reported that the government appeared to be taking a harder line on religion in general with the new emphasis being on controlling religion within the law rather than preserving the freedom of religious expression. The authorities announced a limit to the number of pilgrims allowed on the hajj pilgrimage and ofﬁcials were said to have complained about imams returning to China dressed like Arabs.36 Islam was singled out as the greatest religious threat to national stability compared with Christianity, Buddhism and Daoism. The issue of the religious afﬁliation of CCP members was raised in an article published in the name of the CCP committee of Turpan in Xinjiang Daily on September 27th 1996. It was estimated in 1990 that 25 per cent of party members were practising Muslims and that this ﬁgure might be as high as 40 per cent in rural areas. Educational materials and lectures on atheism had been used to in an attempt to counter this trend.37 Turpan (or Turfan) is in the east of Xinjiang and, although very much an Uyghur area, it is not normally associated with the strength of adherence to Islam found in the southern regions of Altishahr. The insight this report offers into the pervasiveness of Islam including members of the CCP is interesting.

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The focus of the Islamic revival in Turpan is the Aisawulikaibu cemetery, visited by about 10–20,000 Muslims every year. Aisawulikaibu is one of a large number of tomb sites, mazars, where the remains of the founders of Suﬁ orders are revered by their adherents. Strenuous efforts were made by the local CCP to counter the inﬂuence of Islam and they claim to have reduced the number of party members actively participating in religious activities to 7 per cent by 1996. This was done by a concerted educational programme and the purchase or reprinting of large amounts of teaching materials including Deng Xiaoping’s Selected Works, readings on the party constitution and popular material on atheism. CCP committee members from Turpan went on lecture tours into the grasslands and, as an alternative to the hajj, elderly CCP members from the rural areas were taken on a ‘study and sightseeing trip’ to Beijing in 1995 to coincide with celebrations of National Day (October 1st). Books and television programmes promoted heroic ﬁgures including a CCP Youth League Secretary who prevented a Qur’anic scholar from preaching illegally. Party members also successfully opposed the construction of new mosques.38 An article published in Xinjiang Ribao on October 7th 1996 summed up the effects of the ‘Strike Hard’ campaign in Xinjiang throughout that year. It was written by He Shihong and Li Shusen and its title, ‘The end is nowhere in sight – Xinjiang’s Strike Hard campaign summarised’, gives a clear indication of the assessment journalists had of the situation in the region at that time. ‘Since this spring, the hurricane of a harsh crackdown on criminal elements committing serious crimes has swept across the divine land.39 This “strike hard” campaign to demonstrate the authoritativeness [sic] of the law was also launched in Xinjiang on a grand scale.’ The focus of the campaign was said to be on ‘solving major crimes, capturing fugitives and crushing gangs’ and the targets were terrorism, robbery, murder, organised crime and the manufacture of and trafﬁcking in drugs. Police in Aksu, Kashghar and Urumqi were reported to have solved ﬁfteen violent crimes in May and between June and August enjoyed more successes. They also claimed to have eliminated ‘some criminal gangs that endangered society’, including groups involved in bombing, murder and robbery and to have recaptured 902 fugitives from the law. Although the report does not explicitly refer to separatist groups it is almost certain that this is what they were. Credit for the success of the campaign is given to Wang Lequan the Secretary of the Xinjiang CCP committee and Li Fengqi, Secretary of the region’s Political and Legal Committee who are said to have rescheduled all of their other business, cancelled journeys outside Xinjiang and concentrated on the crackdown, commencing with a telephone conference that took place on April 19th after which all government and military units were mobilised to back up the campaign. The writers concluded that ‘after the crackdown, the growing trend of serious crimes seems to have slowed; public order has been restored in most regions; the people now feel more secure’. However, they warned against complacency. ‘Progress of the “strike hard” campaign has been uneven across the region. Some

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localities and units have fallen short in action; sometimes they strike hard, but other times they are too lenient. There are still many weak links . . . A handful of areas are still marked by public disorder’.40 In spite of all the difﬁculties that must have been obvious to all the inhabitants of Xinjiang, Xinjiang Daily continued to insist that the unity of nationalities and socialist relations among ethnic groups were the order of the day.41 Xinjiang Television on June 12th warned against those who doubted that separatism could be defeated and declared that the struggle would succeed because it had the support of the masses, a strong party leadership in Xinjiang, strong armed forces and because agreements signed by Jiang Zemin and the presidents of neighbouring Central Asian states were creating a more stable international environment.42 Activities against the separatists continued. Police in Urumqi were involved in a major campaign to seize illegally held ﬁrearms and by September 1996 had netted over 300 weapons and 1,000 rounds of ammunition.43 Units of the People’s Armed police carried out an exercise on the border with Kazakhstan in December 1996 to test their effectiveness in conditions of exteme cold in a mountainous area in which separatist guerilla groups were reported to be hiding.44 Xinjiang Daily reported on October 7th 1996 that the ‘Strike Hard’ campaign had broken up many criminal gangs and that many of their members had been arrested, had given themselves up or had been handed over to the authorities by local people.45

The Yining/Ghulja rising of February 1997 1997 began with the heaviest snowfall that Xinjiang had seen in thirty years. Conditions were worst in the Altay, Ili and Bayingolin prefectures in the north of the region and the military were kept busy ﬂying in relief supplies and rescuing herdsmen and miners trapped in the snow. Food, medicines, a radio and generators were dropped to aid a group of geologists trapped in Altay. Gold miners in Fuyun received drops of rice ﬂour and medicines. Tens of thousands of people in remote mountain areas were without food and the Altay prefectoral government organised relief supplies of food for the people and fodder for their livestock. More than thirty people died and hundreds were trapped in the mountains. Transport and communications were severely disrupted and thousands of head of livestock were lost.46 Xinjiang Daily summed up the effects of the snows in a front-page article on January 19th 1997. Altogether, twenty-seven counties throughout northern Xinjiang were hit by what were thought to have been the worst snowstorms for three decades, and according to the ﬁnal casualty ﬁgures, thirty-six people were killed, eighteen were seriously injured and the dwellings over 183,000 of local herdsmen were destroyed.47 Severe earthquakes struck Jiashi (Payzawat) county near Kashghar on January 21st, leaving ﬁfty people dead with severe damage to property and the loss of thousands of head of livestock. Civilian and military teams were rushed in to carry out rescue and relief operations.48

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Abdulahat Abdurixit, ﬁlmed during discussions with members of the CPPCC on January 19th made it clear that he was now deeply concerned about the threat to the stability of Xinjiang posed by ethnic separatist and what the government referred to as illegal religious activities. Highlighting the authorities’ growing awareness of the inﬂuence of militant Islam in the region, he stressed the CCP’s commitment to religious freedom within the law but called on the people of Xinjiang to ‘resolutely unmask and crack down on those individuals who engage on ethnic separatist activities and undermine the motherland’s unity in the name of religion’.49 As 1997 wore on, his worst fears were to be more than justiﬁed. Unusually in 1997 the traditional Chinese Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) and the Muslim festival of ’Id al Fitr, which ends the fasting month of Ramadan, almost coincided. According to an ofﬁcial account, the atmosphere in Yining was happy and relaxed and people of all ethnic backgrounds were busying themselves with their Spring Festival shopping, sweeping their yards, sprinkling water on them and looking forward to a pleasant holiday.50 Xinjiang Television, broadcasting from Urumqi early in January, had reported on a meeting of the Communist Party Committee of the Xinjiang Military District. Zhou Yongshun Political Commissar of the Military District had stressed the importance of CCP control of its army and of the need to follow instructions from the centre, both of which it might have been assumed were taken for granted in Xinjiang after nearly ﬁfty years under the Communist Party. War preparations, border defence and support for local government and civilian communities were singled out as the key tasks facing the Military District at that time.51 Xinjiang’s public security bodies held a high level conference from January 20–22nd 1997. Wang Lequan, the CCP regional secretary spoke about the ‘grass roots construction’ of public security organisations and pledged to reorganise the entire police system of Xinjiang in the villages and small towns. He undertook to establish new police stations, send experienced police ofﬁcers to the rural areas and revive militia organisations. He drew attention to the particular language problems faced by police in Xinjiang and promised to extend bilingual (Chinese and Uyghur) training and to deploy more bilingual ofﬁcers to try to reduce the difﬁculties caused by language barriers.52 In early 1997, reports, not initially conﬁrmed by the Chinese authorities, began to emerge from Xinjiang that ten or twenty separatists had been secretly executed, that these executions had fuelled serious outbreaks of violence in Yining, Urumqi and Beijing. On January 31st 1997, Xinjiang Daily carried a report of the trial of sixteen people found guilty the previous day of a range of crimes including murder, rape, robbery and drug trafﬁcking. All were sentenced to death and executed on the same day. The two members of the group indicted for the bombings that took place in Urumqi on February 13th 1996 when a vehicle parked outside the Xinjiang Military District Teachers Training Centre on Donghuan Road was blown up were also tried at the same time. One was executed and the other sentenced to life imprisonment.53 The Hong Kong newspaper Mingbao carried an interview with a resident of Yining on February 10th 1997. The informant claimed that the most serious

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disturbances in the city since 1949 had taken place on Wednesday 5th and Thursday 6th of that month. Over 1,000 young Uyghurs were said to have taken to the streets, attacking Han residents. At least ten Hans were killed and some of their bodies were set on ﬁre by the rioters. Over 100 people, including police ofﬁcers, were injured. The regular civilian police and units of the paramilitary People’s Armed Police suppressed the rioting but Han residents of Yining were too frightened to leave their homes for the next week which was the week of the Spring Festival holiday. According to the informant, the disturbances were reported on the local television station but the local police would not conﬁrm that there had been any trouble.54 Mingbao continued to pursue the matter and obtained conﬁrmation from the Yining television station that there had been unrest but the authorities there denied that the rioting had separatist overtones and blamed it on hooligans and drug addicts. Xinjiang Ribao also conﬁrmed the disorder but played it down and ofﬁcial sources claimed that only four or ﬁve people had been killed but that up to 500 had been arrested by the local police although some were later released. The authorities imposed a curfew. In contrast, Uyghur exiles gave ﬁgures of up to 300 dead, illustrating the difﬁculty of assessing the scale and nature of such disturbances.55 An eyewitness record of the disturbances in Yining was provided by Parhat Niyaz who was said to have escaped from Yining during the violence, and subsequently sought political asylum in the United States.56 According to this testimony, the demonstration on February 5th and 6th was to demand the release of large numbers of Uyghurs who had been taken prisoner in a police swoop between February 1st and 4th. ‘At ﬁrst, the police and the army used highpressure hoses, and tear gas to try to disperse the demonstrators, but after some hours, they began to ﬁre on the crowds. The weather was freezing and Niyaz claimed that almost 150 people froze to death because their clothes were soaked and another ninety were beaten to death on February 5th in the city and that hundreds more were injured and approximately 500 people were arrested. The following day, troops used machine guns on the crowd, both from the air and on the ground and 160 demonstrators were killed. The ﬁnal death toll was 400; hundreds were wounded and as many as a thousand were arrested. All of those killed, injured and arrested were from the Uyghur community. The ﬁrst victim of a Chinese bullet was an 8-year-old Uyghur girl named Fatima who came to demand the release of her father, and a pregnant woman, Gulzira, who came to try to secure the release of her husband was also shot and killed. Six members of the family of Yakup-Haji from Juliza (an area 15 miles from Yining) were all killed on the same day. The whole of the city of Yining was surrounded by the army, and an entire army combat corps of 30,000 troops was moved to the city from Gansu. The ratio of armed troops to Uyghur civilians is 4:1 when the garrison of the regional military-district, the police, and People’s Armed Police are included. China informed the President of Kazakstan, Nursultan

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Nazarbayev, about the large-scale military movement in the border city as Yining is only 70 kilometres from Kazakstan. All members of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps were issued with weapons in case of more serious disorder. It is estimated that 90 per cent of families in the Yining had 1–3 family members held in jail. Prisoners have only one manta (steamed dumpling) a day and were beaten every day. Every day after 4 p.m., the whole of Yining city is in a high state of alert. Soldiers were ordered to kill anyone who disobeyed orders to stop. There are about 80 armoured vehicles patrolling in the Yining city 24 hours a day with loud sirens. Classiﬁed document Number 175 from the central government referred to a ‘Three-No’ policy: ‘no questioning, no telling, no visiting’. No-one is allowed to question what had happened in Yining, nor are they allowed to tell outsiders the true story, and they are not allowed to visit relatives who had been imprisoned in the Yining massacre. People arrested, some of them injured people, are still held in prison camp, and waiting for further instruction from Beijing. Parhat Niyaz went on to say that, Beijing is worried about further unrest and hatred that could be caused by hundreds of funerals following the Yining massacre. In Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang, after the bus bombing, there were 5–10 soldiers in every bus station to observe, and arrest any suspicious individuals who have no residential permit (these have to be bought in one’s own district for 50 yuan, which most Uyghurs can not afford) or have a mustache as growing a mustache is now a symbol of separatism. People are preparing food and medicine for a possible war in Urumqi and other cities in East Turkistan.57 Press reports spoke of instant trials of those accused of taking part in the rioting and immediate, and in some cases public executions, the numbers given for those executed varying from six to over 100. Executions are not normally carried out in public in China in spite of the popular misconception in the West that they are: they take place in specially designated execution grounds after a public trial. Xinjiang citizens who ﬂed to Kazakhstan after the riots claimed that there had also been serious disturbances in other cities.58 An unidentiﬁed Uyghur woman who was an eyewitness to the violence in Yining and then ﬂed to the United States gave an interview to the Japanese news agency Kyodo on April 29th. She told Kyodo that she had taken part in a demonstration to protest against the arrest of 100 Muslim students and heard later that thirty-one people had been killed when police and troops opened ﬁre. Chinese sources admitted that ten people had died and 140 others were injured when the demonstrations were dispersed by force.59 A spokesman for the Uyghur separatist organisation, the United Revolutionary National Front in Almaty claimed that three further separatists had been

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executed for the part they had played in the February riots. Seventeen others were sentenced to long prison terms. The same source claimed that since 1996 when the separatist uprising had started, 183 Uyghurs had been executed or shot dead while escaping from prison, and as many as 62,000 had been arrested by the Chinese authorities.60 Reports from Moscow claimed that six of the people executed were members of the Party of Allah, Zhenzhudang, the literal Chinese translation of Hizb’allah, a new grouping only referred to since the 1996 ‘Strike Hard’ campaign. According to the Hong Kong newspaper, Pingguo Daily, a train on the Lanchou–Urumchi railway line was derailed by a bomb planted by separatists on February 12th. The line is the main gateway into Xinjiang for most visitors from China proper.61 A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry of China, Tang Guoqiang, speaking in Beijing on February 18th conceded that there had been unrest in Yining ‘incited by a small number of rufﬁans’ but that situation had been brought under control and the city was now calm.62 A more complete account of the events from the point of view of the police and the Xinjiang authorities was presented in Xinjiang fandui minzu fenliezhuyi douzheng shihua (History of the Struggle against Ethnic Separatism in Xinjiang) edited by Xu Yuqi and published in Urumqi by the Xinjiang Peoples’s Press in 1999. The February 5th ‘beating, smashing and looting’ (da-za-qiang) incident as the authorities referred to it was no accident, rather it had been planned for many years with the object of splitting the motherland. Since 1995, ethnic separatists across the region had been operating as the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Party of Allah (Dong Tujuesitan Yisilan Zhenzhudang) and its leader, Payzulla, and a number of other key ﬁgures had frequently been to the Yili region. They had also sent more than twenty members from southern Xinjiang to Yili to preach jihad and develop their organisation there. In January 1996, Payzulla had sent people into the villages of Yining and the rural counties attached to it to establish a training point. In January and February, supporters were sent in to establish secret contacts and it was decided that there would be street demonstrations on the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan (February 5th). Abduhelil, Abdumijit and other key members claimed, We are going on to the streets to carry out religious propaganda openly. Whether we succeed or fail it will still be a success. Everyone can enter paradise. If we go to prison we will still have Allah’s blessing and protection and those left outside will carry on the work. On February 4th, Abdumijit passed on to his supporters by word of mouth the slogans for banners to be carried during the demonstrations and the time and the place where the demonstrators were to meet and the route were ﬁnalised.63 On February 5th at 10.30 a.m. Beijing time, hundreds of young Uyghurs came out holding banners in Arabic script with two slogans. One read, ‘It has begun’, the other, ‘Fight the unbelievers with all our might using the Qur’an as a weapon’. They gathered at the Tashilaipukai market on Victory Road and made

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their way along Red Flag road, Stalin Street and Liberation Road ‘in an illegal demonstration’. By the time they reached the Great Western Bridge (Xidaqiao) their numbers had risen to over 300 and as they walked they chanted, ‘Don’t pay taxes’ and ‘We want nothing from the government’.64 This is a fair reﬂection of the attitude of many Uyghurs who prefer to run their own businesses, avoid working for the state, and have as little as possible to do with what they regard as an alien and oppressive government. At about 12 noon, over 1,000 people congregated outside the entrance to Yining’s People’s Hospital and raised another banner with the text, ‘There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet’ [the Chinese text uses the word ‘angel’, tianshi, which is presumably a mistranslation from the Uyghur or Arabic of the banner]. The demonstrators continued through the town centre and shouted more slogans including, ‘Establish an Islamic caliphate’ and ‘Drive out the Hans’. At 1 p.m. a crowd of several hundred gathered in front of the buildings of the Yili District Communist Party Committee, the Municipal Police Headquarters, the Masses Cinema and the Red Flag shopping complex. The ofﬁcial sources pointed out that the number of people participating in the demonstrations varied considerably with some leaving and others joining as it made its way around Yining. The police claim that the demonstrators were armed with cudgels, knives, bricks and stones and attacked ofﬁcers and men, injuring twelve of them and damaging and setting ﬁre to vehicles belonging to the police and passers by. A Volkswagen Santana driven by a Han was overturned and badly damaged and a stall near the Red Flag shopping complex that was selling ﬁreworks for the Spring Festival was burned to the ground. A minibus was smashed up near the Baidula mosque and its Han driver badly injured and government, commercial and residential properties were attacked and many windows were broken. It was not until ten in the evening, Beijing time, that police tactics of dividing the demonstrators and arresting the ringleaders brought the protests to an end.65 On February 6th there was still a small group demonstrating and throwing stones in the streets. Passing Hans were attacked and their cars destroyed. A Han man in his ﬁfties was killed with clubs and stones outside the bedding factory on Victory Road and two others were badly beaten at the People’s Hospital crossroads and one died on the spot. Other Hans were apparently killed and in some cases their bodies were burned. Some of the rioters continued their activities day and night until February 9th but police tactics had forced them to divide up into small groups and disperse into the back alleys and the villages around the town. On February 7th, an ordinary Han worker suffered eight stab wounds at the brick and tile factory run by the 4th Company of the quasi military Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and another group attacked the homes of two Han families in Tashikuleke county, severely injuring six people. Ofﬁcial police and government ﬁgures put the civilian casualties of the two days of rioting at 198 injured of whom ﬁfty were seriously hurt, seven ordinary Han people has been killed. Thirty police and armed police were injured,

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fourteen of them seriously. Twenty-four passing cars had been destroyed and six cars, nine police vehicles and two houses had been set on ﬁre. No information is given on casualties among the demonstrators by this source.66 The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Regional Communist Party Committee and the Regional Government convened an emergency meeting in the face of rioting on this unprecedented scale. They sent work teams to Yining and the prefectural, regional and municipal administrations of Ili established joint commands to deal with the situation. On February 5th and 6th the mayor of Yining, Polat Omar and the deputy director of the Ili region Kurbanjan issued televised speeches condemning the unrest. Proclamations calling for an end to the violence were issued over the radio and in the press and pasted on walls throughout the town and the Ili region despatched 450 cadres onto the streets of Yining to reinforce the government’s message. The authorities stressed that they were intent on capturing the ringleaders and dealing leniently with ordinary citizens who had been led astray and they managed to arrest two of the main instigators of the insurrection, Abduhelil and Abdumijit. A group of the demonstrators then attacked the main police station, presumably to try to free their comrades. Police, armed police and troops set up roadblocks on the main thoroughfares of Yining and in the shopping area and stopped every person and vehicle that was entering or leaving the town. They mounted day and night-time patrols on the streets and placed guards on the electricity generating station, waterworks, airport, post and telecommunications ofﬁce, the main bridge over the Yili river, the television and radio stations and government and party ofﬁces, all of these being classic targets in a coup d’e´tat. Small groups of armed roops were sent around Yining to tackle trouble wherever it arose. It was not until 10 p.m. Beijing time that they were satisﬁed that the situation was under control.67 On the morning of February 8th the combined forces of police, armed police, military and Production and Construction Corps militia staged a show of strength in the town: trucks packed with troops and police drove round and round the streets while helicopter gunships circled overhead. That evening the authorities discovered that a group of separatists led by Abdurazak Momin were hiding in Yuqiweng county and sent a unit of police in a blizzard to arrest them. They were heavily armed and opened ﬁre on the police, then broke in to the house of Han villagers, killing three of them and seriously wounding two others. When warning shots proved ineffective the police ‘resolutely suppressed them’. The following day, February 9th was the third day of the Chinese New Year festivities and the ﬁrst day of ’Id and ‘tens of thousands of Muslims of all ethnic groups left their homes in great delight and went to their mosques in the city and the surrounding towns and villages for the ’Id prayers’.68

After the Yining insurrection The Hong Kong daily newspaper, Ming Bao, quoting sources in the state and public security ministries in Beijing reported in August that the Chinese authorities were beginning to suspect increased CIA involvement in the

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separatist movement, both in Xinjiang and in neighbouring Central Asian states, although public statements have so far been restricted to formulae such as ‘foreign forces hostile to China’.69 The separatist campaign of terror continued with the bombing of buses in Urumqi on February 25th 1997. These were the ﬁrst bomb attacks reported since 1992, the sixth and last day of ofﬁcial mourning for Deng Xiaoping who died on February 19th. The bombs exploded on bus routes 2, 10 and 44 in the city and initial reports suggested that four people had been killed and dozens more injured. Representatives of Uyghur nationalist and Islamist groups at a press conference in Moscow the previous day had conﬁrmed that some separatist groups had decided that a terror campaign was the only way they would be able to create an Islamic state in the region. Some of the natives of Yining who had taken part in the insurrection were reported to have taken to the mountains where they had formed themselves into guerrilla bands. There was also a report that a prison in the Tarim basin had been captured by Uyghur guerrillas and that the prisoners had been released and 168 Chinese troops killed.70 Ming Pao on February 27th was reporting that the death toll from the bombs has reached seven with over seventy injured, most of the casualties having been taken to Xinjiang Military District General Hospital in the northwest of the city. The United Revolutionary National Front was claiming responsibility for the bombings. Large areas of Urumqi were sealed off, police, armed police and troops were patrolling throughout the city and police guarded every bus stop.71 An Uyghur eyewitness claimed that the trolley bus explosion caused the death of over twenty Han Chinese passengers.72 Because of the security situation in Xinjiang the Central Military Commission in Beijing ordered all police and troops and especially the PAP to maintain a state of combat readiness beyond the period of mourning for Deng Xiaoping.73 Concern was being expressed in Beijing that separatists might launch bomb attacks in the capital itself.74 In Urumqi itself, according to Uyghur exiles, a fourth bomb exploded on March 1st in a building in which a meeting of police ofﬁcers was taking place. There were no reports of casualties and ofﬁcials refused to conﬁrm that there had been another explosion but agreed that security in the city had been tightened even further.75 E´migre´ sources in Moscow claimed that this was a similar bombing and that the meeting was of high-ranking public security ofﬁcers coordinationg operations against terrorists.76 Russian Public TV in Moscow on March 3rd repeated the reports of a kamikaze bomb and reported e´migre´ separatists as claiming that it was in retaliation for the deaths caused when the Yining riots were quelled by police and troops. The authorities in Xinjiang responded to the disturbances in Yining and the bombs in Urumqi by strengthening their control over the region. On February 17th the 10th Xinjiang Provisional Work Conference opened and afﬁrmed the role of the courts, using legal means to deal ‘severe blows to national secessionists and criminal activities of illegal religions’. As always this clamp

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down on political and religious activities was linked with an ongoing campaign against crime and corruption.77 At the same time, the Discipline Inspection Commission and Supervisory Committee of the powerful Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps launched a campaign to turn the population into informants, promising to respond to reports received, to protect the identity of informants to give feedback to informants and to reward those who informed. The corps claimed that it received over 8,000 reports from informants each year and that the numbers were constantly increasing.78 A high level meeting of Xinjiang’s party, government and military and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (bingtuan) which took place in the Kunlun Guesthouse in Urumqi heard reports from government ofﬁcials that disturbances in Xinjiang were caused by hostile forces from outside the region.79 Although plans for the political order after the death of Deng Xiaoping had been in place for some time, the possibility of further terrorist attacks clearly unnerved the authorities in Beijing as well as in Xinjiang. According to the Hong Kong newspaper Sing Tao Daily, the Central Military Commission, the political organisation ultimately in control of China’s armed forces, issued a document ordering all troops to heighten their state of alert. The Beijing Military Region was placed on number two alert. Xinjiang itself and Tibet were placed on number one alert, the highest level. The CMC warned the armed forces to be on their guard against foreign hostile elements, which were creating conﬂict in Xinjiang.80 In Beijing, the whole of the public transport system was on the alert for any evidence of the spread of bomb attacks from Xinjiang. In particular, bus and taxi drivers were ordered to report suspicious objects and people (especially if they appeared to come from Xinjiang) to the police. The drivers were also ordered not to drive any suspicious looking characters to central Beijing in view of the impending meeting of the National Peoples Congress and CPPCC.81 The Minister of Public Security Tao Siju interviewed by journalists of the Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po on his way to attend a meeting of the NPC on March 7th said that social order in Xinjiang was ﬁne and that it was impossible for separatist activities to spread to Beijing. He blamed problems in Xinjiang on a few excitable young people who had all been arrested.82 That evening there was a bomb attack on a bus as it passed through the Xidan area of Beijing. Initial reports suggested that six people had been killed in the blast that Beijing Ribao later said that ten had been injured some seriously but that no-one had been killed. E´migre´ Uyghur sources in Turkey immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.83 The mayor of Beijing, Jia Qinglin, was clearly at a loss as to how he should respond and could only describe the explosion as a ‘political incident of retaliation against society’. Police in Beijing had been mobilised to ensure that similar incidents would not recur. As details gradually emerged it became clear that the bomb had exploded on a crowded number 22 bus at 7.00 p.m. as it drew in to a bus stop on Xidan Road.

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A dozen or so people were injured and eleven kept in hospital. It was also revealed that there had been an earlier explosion in a vehicle near a department store in the Chaoyang District but that no-one had been injured.84 Central and local government ofﬁcials convened an emergency meeting in Zhongnanhai on the morning of March 8th and Xinjiang separatists were regarded as the main suspects. Police reported that they had received a telephone warning about an explosion at the Longfu building in Doncheng District on the day of the bomb and had evacuated people but the explosion happened in Xidan road at that time.85 On March 14th police in the Haidian area of northwestern Beijing arrested a man, described as a washing-machine repair man, in connection with the Beijing bus bombing. Police sources claimed that his ﬂat contained a quantity of ﬁreworks and ﬁrework gunpowder. However the picture was clouded when the police received telephone calls from a man claiming to represent the Beijing Federation of Unemployed Workers. He was also thought to have telephoned the police on the day of the bombing and to have been responsible for the evacuation of the Longti Shopping Centre in Dong cheng. Further calls were received, warning of bombs in the city centre, the railway station, the airport and other buses but in spite of police searches nothing was found. Rumours that police had issued a wanted poster, and were looking for two Han men and a Uyghur woman and that there had been a serious bomb threat to the Beijing underground, were dismissed by Minister of Public Security Tao Siju.86 Meanwhile, back in Xinjiang, the political leadership was strenuously denying reports that the disturbances in Yining were more serious than had previously been admitted. In particular Wang Lequan, CCP Secretary in Xinjiang denied, furious and agitated according to Sing Tao Daily that 400 people including as many as 300 Uyghurs had died in the riots. Xinjiang Daily on March 11th called for continuing class struggle against the separatists and once again blamed ‘hostile foreign forces’ for taking advantage of the changes that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and trying to ‘split’ China.87 These concerns were echoed by Tomur Dawamat, former Xinjiang regional chairman, now Vice-chairman of the central organisation the NPC Standing Committee. The main concern of the authorities was to stress that Xinjiang was not out of control and was secure enough for the continuation of cross-border trade and economic development. Abdulahat Abdurixit, Xinjiang UAR government chairman announced on March 14th in Beijing that the 1997 Urumqi Trade Fair would go ahead from September 1–8 in spite of the disturbances. Wang Lequan, in support of this maintained that the ﬁfteen border trade posts linking Xinjiang with Central Asia and the Indian sub-continent continued to operate normally and that the value of trade had risen by 50 per cent compared with the same period in the previous year.88 Beijing assigned a group of over 200 cadres, mainly from eastern China, to work in Xinjiang to support the region’s drive for economic development. These

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were the ﬁrst of a total of over 2,000 senior technical and professional ofﬁcials, many of them CCP or government cadres destined for service in Xinjiang.89 Xinjiang Daily reported the concern felt about the quality of leadership in CCP branches in the rural areas of Xinjiang as this was thought to be one of the reasons why discontent had spilled over into riots and demonstrations. An article published on December 25th 1996 reported on a survey carried out throughout the region to try to ascertain the state of relations between the populace, the CCP and its ofﬁcials. The survey pointed to serious conﬂicts between the party and the people and highlighted the backwardness of the regional economy, bureaucracy and cadres feathering their own nests, corruption, authoritarian styles of management and the ﬁnancial plight of farmers.90 An article in the January 2nd issue looked in more detail at the village of Laoshawan in Shawan county. The local CCP committee had found it difﬁcult to recruit new members to replace those retiring and those on the party committee had very poor education. The committeee had virtually no standing with the local community.91 In the aftermath of the bombings in Urumqi and Beijing, public security organisations in Xinjiang launched a renewed crackdown throughout the region, a ‘spring strike-hard campaign to improve order’. The targets as before were criminal gangs and terrorist groups and the main emphasis of the new push was said to be on ‘solving major cases, cracking down on criminal groups, [and] arresting escaped criminals’ and the police promised action against drug dealers, ﬁnding and seizing illegally held guns and ammunition and securing lines of communication in the region.92 The presentation of the campaign was clearly intended to blur the distinction between criminal and politically motivated offences, and the emphasis on escaped criminals, guns and ammunition and the security of communications reﬂects the concerns of the authorities that roaming separatist groups were carrying out wide-ranging sabotage. Even when separatist suspects were caught and imprisoned, the authorities remained concerned about their continuing inﬂuence. A Regional Prison Affairs Conference held in early April 1997 raised the issue of ethnic separatist and unlawful religious activities inﬁltrating the prisons and undermining the administration.93 The Xinjiang Regional Government gave a press conference in Hong Kong in April 1997 on foreign trade and economic investment. The spokesman was Li Donghui, vice-chairman of the regional government. He sought to reassure journalists that growth and investment would not be compromised by security considerations. Questioned about the reported detention of Rabiya Qadir, the prominent and wealthy Uyghur businesswoman, he denied that she had been detained or that she was suspected of having sympathised with separatist elements or given them ﬁnancial support. Although there were no authorised accounts of operations by the Chinese security forces against Uyghur separatists, informal reports indicated that these operations, as might have been expected, were intensiﬁed after the bombings in

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Urumqi and Beijing. Qiao Shi, chairman of the Standing Committee of China’s quasi-parliamentary assembly the National People’s Congress, made a detour to Urumqi while on his way to Mongolia following a trip to Europe. Qiao who is also a senior member of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee is widely believed to be the most senior party member in charge of security matters. He gave a tough speech to local political leaders, insisting that the security problems in Xinjiang should be resolved swiftly and ﬁrmly.94 At the same time Tao Siju, Minister of Public Security, was sent to Xinjiang to take personal charge of security operations and it was reported that ﬁve divisions (50–60,000 men) of PLA troops and members of the People’s Armed Police were sent to the region. Rapid response units of the PLA based in Lanzhou, Beijing and elsewhere were placed on standby to support the local military in Xinjiang. Unconﬁrmed reports spoke of the murders of a number of Han Chinese in Xinjiang and the move of separatist groups from the cities to the rural areas. The authorities were reportedly becoming increasingly concerned about growing links between separatist groups in Xinjiang and Islamic organisations outside China, particularly in Kazakhstan, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.95 An ofﬁcial statement by a Taliban spokesman in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan denied that there were any political links between the Taliban and Islamic groups in China and pointed to the immense difﬁculty of communications across the Wakhan, the virtually impassable thin strip of land between the Pamirs and the Karakorum where Afghanistan and China have a common border.96 As part of its long-term propaganda exercise against separatism and for the unity of nationalities in Xinjiang, the Xinjiang UAR CCP Propaganda Department compiled and published in April 1997 a Reader on Nationality Unity Education in the Uyghur, Kazakh and Han Chinese languages. This was to be distributed to all party and governmment ofﬁcials and used as a key text during Nationality Unity Education Month, which was to be observed in Xinjiang throughout May 1997.97 On a practical level, the local authorities placed renewed emphasis on the militia army reserve units as a force for preserving order at local level.98 At the end of April, what were described as the ‘ﬁrst group’ arrested in connection with the February rioting in Yining were brought to the prefectural [illegible] in the city by the courts to receive their sentences in public. Thirty people appeared before the rally, three were sentenced to death and the remainder to prison for terms of between seven and eighteen years.99 Within days of the trial, Xinjiang Television was reporting on a renewed ‘intensive special campaign’ targeted at ‘national separatists and religious extremists’ combining a crackdown on criminal activities with the strengthening of management of legal religious practices.100 This was essentially a reafﬁrmation of the principles of the original ‘Strike Hard’ campaign. In the run up to an educational programme on national unity (a feature of late spring in Xinjiang since 1983) the regional leadership held a telephone conference to discuss the main thrust of their educational work. Abdulahat

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Abdurixit, Regional Government Chairman, presided, but as usual it was Wang Lequan, CCP Regional Secretary who set the tone. He argued that economic development and social progress were only possible with the unity of nationalities and social stability. Xinjiang, like the rest of China, would have to adhere to the four key principles – leadership by the CCP, the socialist road, Marxism Leninism-Mao Zedong thought and the People’s Democratic Dictatorship. Maintenance of public order and ‘striking hard’ at violence and terrorism were essential conditions for assuring stability. The educational programme outlined by Wang had six main aims: 1 publicising positive achievements by the CCP and its government in Xinjiang to eliminate the inﬂuence of separatist propaganda; 2 promoting ‘advanced’ units and individuals and their unsung contributions to the development of Xinjiang and the welfare of its people; 3 strengthening grassroots education of ordinary people and local ofﬁcials – a rectiﬁcation campaign directed at separatist and extremist religious propaganda; 4 ﬁnding practical solutions to real problems for whichever ethnic groups are in the minority in any given area; 5 emphasise educating the people at the lowest level; 6 strengthening party and government leadership over local bodies.101 A commentary broadcast in Chinese by Xinjiang TV the following day used far more robust language, pointing out that ethnic conﬂicts in other countries have led ‘to divisions and incessant wars, turning people into refugees and plunging them into the abyss of misery and death’. To avoid this happening in ‘a vast complicated and unevenly developed country like China’ required a resolute struggle against separatism and illegal religious activities. Before and since the founding of New China, separatist forces at home and abroad have never stopped for a minute their separatist activities in Xinjiang. The struggle between separatism and anti-separatism has always been a concentrated expression of class struggle in Xinjiang . . . Cadres and people of all nationalities must have a sober understanding of this, be on the alert and prepare to ﬁght a protracted war.102 According to Xinjiang Daily, police in Urumqi were able to report a high degree of success in the spring ‘Strike Hard’ campaign. Among the major cases they claim to have solved were dozens of gangs involved in robbery and drug trafﬁcking, which was gradually becoming identiﬁed as a major social problem.103 The problem of poorly-educated cadres was highlighted by Wang Lequan at the CCP regional conference on discipline and the duties of cadres. Cadres did not read books or newspapers and ‘have paid no attention to ideological

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transformation, thus becoming illiterates in laws and discipline’. Wang claimed that bribery was a serious problem among cadres.104 The ﬁrst ever conference of the CCP representatives from the armed police units under the jurisdiction of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, the bingtuan, was held in Urumqi on May 13th, shedding light on the increased importance of the security role of the corps. According to Wang Lequan, units of the corps police have have played an important part in ﬁghting crime and rescue and relief operations.105 As part of the May campaign to promote inter-ethnic harmony, the Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee of the United Front Affairs Department of the Chinese Communist Party in Xinjiang convened a high proﬁle forum. The United Front Affairs departments of the CCP throughout China are the bodies charged with integrating non-party members, in particular senior ethnic and religious leaders into the political structure, both nationally and locally. Senior Islamic leaders who were invited to this forum included Abdulla Damolla Haji, Vice-President of the ofﬁcially sponsored Chinese Islamic Association and Imam Ma Antai, a member of the Standing Committee of the Association. Other religious leaders including Buddhists were also present. All praised the policies of the CCP on ethnic and religious affairs and denounced separatism and unlawful religious activities.106 Concurrently with this propaganda and education work with religious leaders, the CCP ran an atheist education campaign, targeted at members of the party who were also believers and focused on the region around Turpan where religious belief was said to be particularly persisitent.107 In the southwest corner of Xinjiang, Chairman Abdulahat toured the prefecture of Kashi in early May 1997 and held public meetings with senior local religious leaders who were regarded by the CCP as the most cooperative and were consequently distrusted and hated by Uyghur separatists. Among those that Abdulahat met was Aronghan Haji, Vice-Chairman of the Xinjiang People’s Consultative Committee who had been the object of an assassination attempt the previous year. He also visited Mamat Sadik Kasim of the Id Gah mosque in Kashghar and Abdukadir from Ailixibu town in Yarkant as a public indication of support for ofﬁcially sponsored religious organisations and the opposition of the Chinese state to religious activities outside the legal framework prescibed by the government.108 Although most of the publicity about the anti-separatist campaign was couched in very general terms, detailed information gradually emerged about the effects of the campaign on the everyday lives of the population and speciﬁc local targets. In Yining/Ghulja itself, the centre of the February 1997 disturbances, many tapes and video-tape recordings on ofﬁcial policy were distributed to counter underground Islamist tapes, and literary and art teams were despatchd to the surrounding towns and villages in the time-honoured manner to stage agitprop performances. Illegal religious activities and underground madrasas and 105 of the madrasas were closed down. One hundred and thirty-three mosques judged to have been constructed without ofﬁcial approval were closed down or

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conﬁscated to be used for other purposes and qualiﬁed teachers were deemed to have had their qualiﬁcations revoked if they were judged to have taught material sympathetic to the nationalist and separatist cause. A complete reorganisation of grassroots party and govenment organisations was also carried out to root out separatist sympathisers and new police and military posts were established.109 The execution of eight people described as terrorists was announced by the Xinjiang Higher People’s court on May 29th 1997. Mahmut Abdurahman, Jilil Bilal and six others were accused (along with four others given lesser sentences) of having set off bombs on buses numbers 2, 3, 10, 44 and 58 in Urumqi on February 28th, killing nine passengers and injuring ﬁfty-eight others, some of them from the Muslim Uyghur, Hui and Kyrgyz ethnic groups. The accused were also charged with a series of robberies of shopkeepers, taxi-drivers and others and of buying and possessing weapons and ammunition illegally.110 China’s Minister of Defence, Chi Haotian carried out an inspection of military units in Xinjiang including units of the corps (bingtuan) from June 21st to 23rd and emphasised the key role of the military in both border defence and social control.111 On June 25th, following the minister’s visit, the PLA and PAP carried out a series of military operations designed to deter any separatist action, following a ‘ﬁerce exchange of ﬁre’ which was reported to have taken place in the Ili valley on June 18th after a group of young Uyghur men has been arrrested. On that occasion, bombs were seized and one police ofﬁcer killed. Many arrests followed throughout the region, often, it was claimed, on the basis of information supplied by the public. A further exchange of ﬁre took place in the hilly Dong Mahalla quarter of Yining/Ghulja on July 1st.112 There was concern that this might be the prelude to a wave of bombing throughout China and there were rumours that bridges, transport and buildings in the economic boom areas of Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai were possible targets caused a state of alert throughout Guangdong province. A bomb threat that was telephoned to a department store in Beijing Road, Guangzhou on July 9th was linked by the authorities to Xinjiang separatists, but no bomb was actually found.113 Hamudun Niyaz, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the XUAR People’s Congress visited Yining in July 1997 and in speeches to rallies of ofﬁcials police and armed police, took a noticeably harder line than other leaders on the suppression of Uyghur demonstrations, calling for a ‘people’s war’ against ethnic separatism and illegal religious activities.114 Excerpts from his speech to a meeting of cadres in Yili on July 15th were not published in Xinjiang Daily until August 23rd. Since the ‘5 February’ incident, a series of violent, terrorist criminal acitivities and reactionary propaganda criminal activities have occurred in Ili. Many innocent people and grass-roots cadres have been killed, and the majority of theim were Uyghur people. In an attempt to carry out a new trial of strength with us, the criminal elements have employed every means to raise money to buy and manufacture weapons, ammunitions and explosives

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. . . in preparation [for] large-scale violent terrorist criminal activity. ‘Our struggle with the national separatists in recent years has enabled cadres and the people to see through [their] true features and the grave harm they can cause . . . Their reactionary propaganda, including the documents seized from some reactionary organisations, show that they are for independence . . . an extremely small number of national separatists have engaged in large-scale illegal religious activities and distortedly interpreted the Koran in an attempt to slander progressive religious ﬁgures and to hoodwink the people . . . [their] criminal objective is establishing the socalled ‘Islamic Kingdom of Eastern Turkestan’.115 Xinjiang Television, broadcasting from Urumqi on July 23rd 1997 reported on the proceedings of a trial conducted jointly by the People’s Courts of Yili Prefecture and Yining/Ghulja City the previous day. ‘Severe judgments [were handed down] on a group of violent terrorists and criminals who participated in the serious disturbances involving assault, damage, looting and arson on February 5’. Of the twenty-nine accused, nine received death sentences, three were sentenced to life imprisonment (technically a death sentence with a reprieve of two years) and others to long prison sentences.116 In the PRC, August 1st, the anniversary of the creation of the Workers and Peasants’ Red Army in the abortive Nanchang Rising of 1927, is celebrated as Army Day. The Workers and Peasants’ Red Army was renamed the People’s Liberation Army on May 1st 1946 at the start of the civil war with the Nationalist Guomindang, but August 1st is still regarded as its founding date and speeches are given and functions held throughout the country to commemorate the central role of the military in creating and sustaining the People’s Republic. Nowhere was this more the case than in Xinjiang on the seventieth anniversary of the foundation of the CCP’s ﬁrst armed units. Wang Lequan, the party secretary spoke at length to a rally in Urumqi on August 1st 1997 and his speech was reported in full by Xinjiang Daily. He was absolutely clear about the importance attached to the military by the CCP leadership: Today is the glorious day marking the 70th founding anniversary of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The Autonomous Region’s party, governement and army as well as people from all circles are gathered here to warmly celebrate . . . On behalf of the party committee of the autonomous region, the people’s government of the autonomous region and the party committee of the Xinjiang Military District, I extend warmest holiday greetings to all ﬁghters and commanders, to the forces on reserve duty of the PLA and to the Armed Police based in Xinjiang as well as to the militia. Wang recounted the early history of the PLA and its entry into Xinjiang in 1949 under the command of Wang Zhen and listed the key industrial

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construction projects it had been involved in, including steel and textile mills, power plants, cement factories and coal mines. He reminded his audience of the road and rail construction it had contributed to including the Sino–Pakistan Friendship highway, the main road from Urumqi to Korla and the Lanzhou– Xinjiang and Nanjiang [southern Xinjiang] railways. He then went on to give special mention to the massive demobilisation of PLA in the 1950s from which the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps emerged and also to the more gradual process of demobilisation ever since then and the pool of loyal and qualiﬁed party and government cadres that this provided.117 Wang Lequan reminded his listeners of the special place that the military occupied in Xinjiang and the special privileges in schooling, healthcare, and so on, enjoyed by servicemen and their families, before turning to the main task they were facing, the resistance to ‘western hostile forces, ethnic splittist forces and religious extremist forces both in and outside the country’ and their support for a holy war and ethnic hatred.118 There were reports that three police ofﬁcers and two informers were killed in the town of Korgas in northwestern Xinjiang by separatists and that this was followed by the arrest of a dozen young Uyghur men who were taken to the main regional city Yining.119 This appears to have been part of a wave of attacks against members of the police and other security organisations and their families. Provincial party leader Wang Lequan and Abdulahat Abdurixit, the chairman of the Autonomous Regional government warned in a report that the struggle of the authorities against separatist groups and Islamic political organisations was becoming more and more intense.120 The policy of the government and party on religious matters was clearly to exploit the differences between the orthodox mosques and registered Islamic organisations and those that were considered to be illegal or heretical such as Suﬁ orders and religio-political groups such as Hizb’allah, some of which were the traditional spiritual and political enemies of mainstream Islamic groups in Xinjiang. Yusup Eysa, Vice-Chairman of the Xinjiang Regional Islamic Association, an ofﬁcially registered group, addressed a meeting of its Standing Committee on August 14th. Taking his cue from CCP and government policies, he called for a resolute struggle against ‘national separatists, illegal religious activities and religious fanatics’. He argued that Muslims in Xinjiang should act in accordance with instructions from the ofﬁcially approved Islamic associations so that Islam and other religions could be accommodated within a socialist society. He condemned the illegal building of mosques, Qur’anic classes where illegal material was taught and the existence of ‘backward concepts and practices’ and ‘outdated customs and habits’.121 President Jiang Zemin visited Xinjiang in July 1998 on his way back to Beijing from a summit conference of the Shanghai Five group in Almaty. An article in the Hong Kong newpaper Xinbao interpreted Jiang’s visit as an expression of his and the CCP’s concern at the deterioration of the situation in Xinjiang. It blamed the history of political campaigns underaken in Xinjiang as in the rest of China since the 1950s, but singled out the policies of Wang Zhen

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as having been particularly oppressive towards religious and political minorities. This, claimed the author of the article, had led to the separatists adopting terrorist tactics which had so affected the Han residents of Xinjiang that they were afraid to go out at night and felt they had to be extra vigilant even during the day. The newspaper reported that the next aim of the separatists was the establishment of an urban guerrilla force, which could act in cities throughout China.122

10 Underground ﬁres The conﬂict continues

One of the unusual environmental hazards that occurred in northern China during the 1990s was a series of naturally occurring ﬁres in the coalﬁelds with ﬂames that spread underground into the coal seams and burned invisibly for many miles. This phenomenon, attributed to the dry and hot climate, also occurred in Inner Mongolia and Shanxi but the problem was particularly acute in Xinjiang, where ﬁres were described as ‘consuming [a] vast area of coal resources’. Fires had broken out in forty-two out of Xinjiang’s eighty-eight mining areas.1 These underground ﬁres are a timely and apposite metaphor for the Uyghur resistance movement after the ‘Strike Hard’ campaign: smouldering, impossible to extinguish and ﬂaring up from time to time in unexpected places. The Chinese military rushed in to douse the ﬂames only to be faced with another ﬂare-up in a completely different part of the region. Following the brutal suppression of the protests in Yining/Ghuja in February 1997, the separatist movement has gone underground and since then there have been no disturbances on the same scale but there have been many reports of clashes between small groups of Uyghurs and Chinese police and also a series of robberies which appear to be designed to acquire arms or funding for the independence movement. Reports of armed partisans in the mountains abound. The newspaper Golos Vostochnogo Turkestana (Voice of Eastern Turkestan), which is published in Russian by Uyghurs living in Kazakhstan, carried reports of the latest news from ‘Uyghurstan’ in its edition of August 29th 1997 including details of a number of clashes between Uyghurs and the Chinese authorities. In Aksu on August 10th, four Chinese court ofﬁcials returning home from a restaurant were killed by what were described as Uyghur radicals. On August 17th, the authorities in Yining/Ghulja arrested Ibrahim Ismail, widely believed to have been the leader of the Ghulja Liberation Movement, who had been hiding in the mountains with members of his guerrilla unit. He was one of the most wanted men in the region and the local television station had broadcast a number of appeals for information leading to his capture, for which a reward had been offered. On August 20th, two unnamed Chinese ofﬁcials were reported to have been killed when a car, in which they were travelling, was blown up by Uyghur guerrillas. Three days later, a railway bridge and 2 kilometres of track on the railway line from Korla to Kashghar and Tarim were blown up near Korla

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necessitiating the despatch of a military unit to reopen the line. Armed robberies involving people of different ethnic groups were reported on August 18th and 19th and there were a number of deaths and injuries. It is not clear whether these robberies were politically inspired or simply criminal.2 Golos Vostochnogo Turkestana carried an appeal to international human rights organisations in its September 1st edition, drawing their attention to the execution of Uyghur militants. It alleged that three Uyghur men in their early twenties had been executed publicly in Yining/Ghulja on April 24th and that a demonstration to protest against these executions had taken place outside the Chinese embassy in Almaty after which dozens of protestors were arrested by the Kazakhstani authorities. A further six men were executed on July 22nd and a planned protest to the PRC’s Almaty embassy on July 30th was blocked by the authorities and there were reports of at least another ﬁfteen executions in Ghulja and Urumqi between March and July 1997. Reports emanating from Ghulja on July 29th suggested that the Chinese authorities were preparing to execute a further group of prisoners including the nationalist political leader Ismail Ibrahim and Abdushkur Hajji said to be an important intellectual and spiritual ﬁgure in the Ili region. At least twenty arrests of men protesting against these planned executions were reported in the second half of August.3 Executions in China, including Xinjiang, are not normally carried out in public although there are often public sentencing rallies before the executions. A leading article in the same newspaper on September 28th 1997 carried an interview with Abdulghappar Shahiyari, identiﬁed as Commander Shahiyari, in which he described the ongoing struggle for an independent state in the face of ‘merciless reprisals against the insurrectionaries’ and invoked the memory of the Karakhanid chief Karakhan in a letter to Alexander the Great. The article ends, May Allah turn the great will of our legendary warrior Abdulghappar Shahiyari, who spent 18 years of his life in Chinese prisons after a bold attack on the Chinese nuclear test-site, who has won many victories, and who now commands a division of many thousands of volunteers – may Allah turn his will into the unyielding eternal will of our Homeland – Uighuristan! Amen!4 The issue of the paper that appeared in October 1997 gave an account of a press conference held in Almaty on September 15th at which Uyghur e´migre´ organisations issued a statement condemning the severe repression of the nationalist movement, in particular what they described as the unending public executions of the participants in the peaceful demonstrations in Ghulja on 5th February 1997 by the Chinese totalitarian regime . . . Since the beginning of February 1997 to the present day alone the number of patriots killed during clashes or from torture in prisons or ofﬁcial executions in Uighuristan, amounts to more than 500 acccording to incomplete data and the number of those arrested, tried and exiled to remote districts amounts to 62,800 people.5

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As the newspaper suggests, it is impossible to be at all precise about the number of executions, arrests or exiles that took place. Although the Chinese media report trials and convictions, there is a widely held belief that many more executions have taken place than have been reported and that many Uyghur activists are dealt with outside the judicial system. Reports in the Hong Kong press in October 1997 spoke of large-scale unrest in Xinjiang (and also in Inner Mongolia) in the run-up to the celebrations for National Day on October 1st. The magazine Dongxiang (Trend) quoted from a circular apparently issued jointly by the Xinjiang government and the Xinjiang Military District on September 30th, reporting riots in the Tuksun, Shawan, Shanshan, Kutubi, Hejing, Hoshut and other areas of the region. According to this source, the riots lasted for six days and involved over 3,000 people. Some separatist organisations and hostile forces armed with sub-machine guns, automatic riﬂes, grenades, incendiary bombs and other weapons looted local party and government organs and state warehouses and destroyed local railways, highways and communications facilities. On September 24th, people from Hejing and Hoshut, some of them armed, surrounded the local party and government compound and called for the establishment of an independent Xinjiang and for the CCP and PLA to get out of Xinjiang. After several warnings from the PLA the insurrectionists opened ﬁre on the troops and over thirty were killed or injured before the ‘armed rebellion’ was suppressed. Rapid response units of troops were deployed and martial law and curfews imposed. According to the circular, over 270 people were killed or wounded in the disturbances. Of the casualties, eighty were killed, including seventeen soldiers, police and ofﬁcials, and 829 armed separatists and demonstrators were arrested.6 Even in Urumqi itself, a predominantly Han Chinese city heavily guarded by the PLA, the police were waging a campaign against separatists by going through public and private buildings with a ﬁne tooth comb. ‘[A] number of crime suspects, national separatists and terrorists were arrested . . . [and they] cracked down . . . on a number of illegal religious venues and underground scripture classes’.7 Wen Wei Po, the Hong Kong newspaper reported an interview with an unnamed ofﬁcial of the Xinjiang regional govenrnment in its October 30th 1997 edition. The ofﬁcial acknowledged that separatists had ‘caused a series of terrorist events since last year’, including ‘explosions, homicide and robbery to harm patriotic religious personages, grassroots cadres and innocent masses’. He outlined three key measures to deal with separatist violence. The ﬁrst was to attack illegal religious activities, which he described as a cover for pan-Islamism and the aim of establishing an Islamic state. Secondly, measures, not however speciﬁed, should be taken to prevent sabotage. Thirdly, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps should be allowed to fulﬁl its multiple roles as a military force, production force, and propaganda force.8

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Voice of Eastern Turkestan, published in Russian from its base in Almaty was establishing itself as the leading newspaper expressing the views of the Uyghurs in former Soviet Central Asia in the 1990s and reﬂecting at least to a certain extent the development of the separatist movement within Xinjiang. Yusup Mukhlisi, the editor, wrote a leading article on the Chinese economy on October 16th in which he sought to demonstrate the systematic exploitation of Uyghurs by Beijing since 1949, including the conﬁscation of private resources in the immediate aftermath of the Communist Party’s coming to power, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which he described as the experiments of the 1950s and 1960s, widespread forced labour which Mukhlisi claimed led to the deaths of thousands of Uyghur peasants and payments demanded from Uyghur businessmen during the reform period.9 The newspaper published an open letter to the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Russia to protest against a tour of Uyghur musicians, ﬁnanced partly by pro-Chinese Uyghurs living in the former Soviet states of Central Asia. The letter outlined the exploitation of the Uyghurs by the Chinese and complained that 22 million Uyghurs10 living within the borders of China were not being supported as they deserved by the governments of related peoples in Central Asia and that because of the ‘Shanghai agreements’11 between China and its Central Asian neighbours, tens of thousands of Uyghurs had been arrested in ethnic purges, at least ﬁfty had been executed publicly or had died in prison, in addition to the 103 unarmed protesters killed by the police and army in the disturbances in Yining in February 1997.12 This is an indication of the frustration felt by many e´migre´ Uyghurs at what they perceive as their betrayal by their ethnic cousins in Central Asia and the failure of pan-Turkism to unite Uyghurs, Kazakhs and others. It was also the ﬁrst public acknowledgment that there is a split within the e´migre´ community with the emergence of a pro-China faction, although it has been common knowledge for many years that divisions within the separatists have weakened the movement. The ofﬁcial attitude to separatism towards the end of 1997 continued to be uncompromising. Kasim Mamut, Deputy Chief Procurator of Xinjiang, wrote an article entitled ‘Eliminate traitors to the country, remove the woes from the people’, which was published in Xinjiang Daily on October 27th. After observing that the majority of ‘patriotic religious personages’ had proved themselves trustworthy over the decades, he described them and loyal ethnic minority cadres as a ‘thorn in the side’ of the handful of separatists, who had engineered a series of arson attacks, robberies, homicides and explosions against grassroots cadres and patriotic religious personages in a vain attempt to use violence and terrorism to sever the links between the party and government and the masses, render the grassroots organs of political power paralysed, and the mosques administered by patriotic religious personages incapable of normal religious activities; and ultimately realise their sinister goal of weakening and breaking down the grassroots organs of power, seizing the power of religious leadership and facilitating a takeover.

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Mamuti, from his position within the community, here displays a clear understanding of the strategy of the separatists. He then went into detail about the operations of separatist organisations: they disseminate reactionary religious ideas; preach the ideal of jihad; attack non-religious people; run underground centres for the study of the Islamic scriptures and martial arts; they ‘interfere with administrative, judicial, educational and planned parenthood activities in the name of religion’; they preach and teach outside authorised centres and use religious activities to organise gangs. Clearly separatist and unofﬁcial Islamic teachings have penetrated to the grassroots of Xinjiang society and are causing serious concern to ofﬁcials loyal to Beijing.13 Erken Alptekin, one of the e´migre´ Uyhgur leaders with the highest proﬁle, was interviewed by the Italian journalist Fausto Biloslavo for Il Giornale and referred to Xinjiang as a time-bomb and argued that guerrilla war could break out throughout the region if Beijing were not prepared to negotiate with Uyghurs who supported an independent state. He spoke of twenty-four hour patrols of armoured cars and special police units and claimed that Uyghurs were rationing food and medicine in preparation for a large-scale insurrection and that paramilitary units such as the ‘Tigers of Lop Nor’ had already attacked a number of Chinese military installations.14 The Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary, Wang Lequan, appears to be in complete agreement with him. Addressing units of the People’s Liberation Army and People’s Armed Police in Aksu on November 24th, he made it clear that ‘the struggle between separatists and anti-separatists will be a protracted ﬁerce and arduous one. We must by no means act in rashness, be weary of the struggle, nor lower our guard’.15 He continued this theme in a speech published in Xinjiang Daily on December 27th 1997. ‘At present the national separatist forces and the the ultra-religious forces, supported and abetted by reactionary forces at home and abroad are still very rampant. Criminal offences are relatively serious. Our tasks of struggling against criminal elements will remain long and arduous’. He drew attention once again to the tactic of the separatists in targeting ‘our patriotic religious personnel and basic-level cadres. They will attack whoever remains close to the government. They call such acts “bombing the bridge”. This is their plot’.16 The Chinese authorities were becoming increasingly aware of the growing inﬂuence of religious movements in general in their rapidly changing society, and, in particular, of foreign religious organisations which were gaining unprecedented access to large sections of the population as China became more and more open. The Ministry of Public Security and the Bureau of Religious Affairs of the State Council issued a joint circular in December 1997 warning that local ofﬁcials be aware of the possibility of religious inﬁltration in the period of Christmas, and the Spring Festival. The circular drew attention to foreign broadcasts, imported propaganda materials, and missionaries and the danger that they might encourage illegal religious activities and undermine social stability.17 However, to balance this, Li Ruihuan, Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee met religious leaders in Beijing on

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January 23rd 1998 to reafﬁrm the commitment of the leadership to freedom of religious belief as long as it did not threaten national unity and social stability.18 A spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zhu Bangzao, responding to an American report on the issue of religious freedom throughout the world, criticised Western use of religious issues to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries and pointed to the right to the freedom of religious belief enshrined in Article 36 of China’s constitution.19

Anniversary of the Yining riots The Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao reported that the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing had issued a circular in the run-up to the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), which was also the ﬁrst anniversary of the Yining uprising, warning that local Public Security (police) units should be on their guard against a repetition of riots and explosions both in Xinjiang and Beijing. The report reminded its readers of the depth of feeling in Yining at the execution of local people accused of participation in the riots and that the Beijing police and security authorities had not yet charged anyone with the bus bombing in Beijing in March 1997.20 The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps was ordered to remain at a high state of alert during this period which also coincided with the celebrations of the end of Ramadan, the major festival of ’Id ’al-Fitr.21 There were reports of a serious disturbance at the main mosque of Kargalik on the ﬁrst day of the ’Id festival when a group of Uyghurs tried to prevent three others, who were said to be informers for Chinese security organisations, from entering the mosque. The conﬂict escalated after the intervention of armed police and three alleged informers were killed, many more injured and a number of arrests were made.22 Public Security ofﬁcials in the Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, which covers a large area of southeastern Xinjiang including many places where the population is mainly Uyghur, reported their success in uncovering ‘reactionary organisations and reactionary gangs and arrest[ing] a number of national separatists.’23 Wang Lequan and Tomur Dawamat, former Xinjiang Government Chairman and now Vice-Chairman of the National People’s Congress, visited police units in Urumqi on the morning of February 5th to give moral support to ofﬁcers and men working over the holiday period. The head of the city’s police force, brieﬁng the two leaders, said that the security situation in the city was generally stable and Tomur Dawamat acknowledged that the police force needed greater public support because of its inadequate numbers.24 Xinjiang Daily carried an article on ‘improvements in public security’ in its edition of February 5th, revealing that nearly 18,000 public security staff had been sent by the regional government to towns and villages throughout the region to assist local ofﬁcials. They organised many meetings at which party members, model workers, loyal members of non-Chinese ethnic groups and others were brought in to stress the importance of national unity and the struggle against separatism. Special funds werre allocated for transport and communications

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equipment and the number of police stations was increased so that each small town would now have one.25 The e´migre´ Russian-language paper Voice of Eastern Turkestan published in the former Kazakhstan capital of Almaty on February 2nd 1998, carried reports of a number of executions of Uyghurs in the Yining region, in particular what it claimed was the public execution of eleven people in the centre of the village of Jelil-Yuzi on January 20th.26 The executions apparently arose out of disturbances that occurred in July 1997 after the execution of six Uyghurs. Police (the report says military police and presumably refers to the paramilitary Peoples’s Armed Police) arrested a number of villagers including Abbas Kari, ﬁfty years old and described as ‘the local school’s spiritual teacher’ although it is not clear whether he was a teacher in an ofﬁcially recognised school or an underground madrasa. In a clash that followed his arrest, two Chinese soldiers or police were killed and four others injured and their vehicle was burned and Abbas Kari and his students were arrested and they were the ones executed in January 1998.27 Protest demonstrations took place in Turkey outside the Chinese Consulate General in Istanbul against the executions and in commemoration of the 1997 rising.28 The two key political leaders of Xinjiang, the Han party secretary, Wang Lequan and the Uyghur regional government chairman, Abdulahat Abdurixit spoke at a joint meeting of the People’s Armed Forces Commission and the National Defence Mobilisation Committee in the Xinjiang Military District Headquarters in Urumqi on January 23rd. Wang Lequan, as was his wont, was pessimistic about a short-term solution to the crisis in Xinjiang and argued that, ‘The struggle between splittism and anti-splittism and between subversion and anti-subversion in our region is extraordinarily complicated and arduous at present and will be so for a considerable . . . time to come’. He commented on the problems created for local military units by a shortfall in both personnel and funding. Abdulahat concentrated on more positive developments in military technology and organisation but emphasised the need for developing the army reserve and militia units in Xinjiang in order to combat the separatist threat.29 A bomb placed on the number 1 bus exploded on February 1st 1998 as the bus was crossing the Hanyang bridge across the Yangzi River at Wuhan destroying the bus and killing at least thirty-eight passengers. The carnage was blamed on Xinjiang separatists because of the timing – it was a year after the Yining riots, the similarity to the Urumqi and Beijing bombings of February and March 1997 and threats by some e´migre´ groups, although separatist groups denied any responsibility for the attack.30 Later, Regional Governor Abdulahat Abdurixit, when questioned by a reporter for Agence France Presse, denied that the bombing was anything to do with Xinjiang.31 Public security organs in Beijing were placed on alert in March 1998 after reports that a separatist group from Xinjiang had entered the capital, under the cover of selling kebabs and raisins, to bomb and carry out disruption during the National People’s Congress.32 During the session of the National People’s Congress held in Beijing in March 1998, the by now familiar political double act of Wang Lequan and Abdulahat

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Abdurixit gave a press conference. Much of the reporting of the conference emphasised the stability of Xinjiang and positive aspects of economic development, but some substantive issues were raised in questions by reporters. Abdurixit claimed that the police had proved that the bus bombing in Wuhan had been carried out by people from Jiangxi and that it had nothing to do with the situation in Xinjiang.33 Wang Lequan was asked why Rabiya Qadir, the popular and wealthy Uyghur businesswoman had not been elected to the national committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the united front advisory body. He replied that her business activities had not been very successful in the past few years and that she owed tens of millions of RMB to state banks. However, the political activities of her husband, Sidiq, who lives in the USA were also a major factor. He was alleged to have been involved in separatist activities and Rabiya Kadir had failed to repudiate her husband’s views.34 At what was described as a united front work conference in Urumqi on March 24th, Wang and Abdurixit were joined by the deputy secretary of the Xinjiang Party Committee, Zhou Shengtao. Wang warned that separatists and hostile forces were still active and called for heightened vigilance. Zhou emphasised the need for government and religion to be separated and for guidance to help religions adapt themselves to a socialist society.35 Meanwhile, the repression in Xinjiang continued: Voice of Eastern Turkestan in its edition of April 2nd 1998 carried an article entitled ‘The latest developments in Uyghurstan’. Among the events of March 1998 chronicled by the report, it claimed that houses in the Bay area of Aksu were searched by police and that audio tapes and Uyghur-language material including works of literature were conﬁscated and destroyed. Political propaganda leaﬂets distributed by separatists were also found and destroyed. Houses in the Lop area near Khotan were also searched and thirty-two guns, 200 cartridges and 38 kilograms of explosives were discovered. A large group of Han Chinese was to be resettled in the Kashghar region and the Shanghai municipal authorities had apparently agreed to build a Chinese school to take up to 1,200 pupils. In particular, the authorities were concerned about maintaining stability in the run-up to the feast of Kurban (’Id ’al-Adha) the Feast of Sacriﬁce, which takes place on the tenth day of the last month of the Muslim calendar, during the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and is one of the most important festivals of the Muslim year. They ordered that the morning prayers which normally take place before sunrise should not be said earlier than 9 a.m.; that the prayers could only be performed inside the mosque so that any overﬂow into the streets from the smaller mosques was prohibited; believers were not to be allowed to call out Allahu Akbar (God is Greatest) on their way to the mosque to alert fellow Muslims to the prayers as had been their custom and no mosques were to be allowed to use loudspeakers to broadcast prayers. All military and police units in the cities of Urumqi, Yining, Aksu, Kashi, Yecheng and Khotan were said to have been placed on the highest state of alert.36 The festival was celebrated on April 6th by the authorities and 1,000 invited guests as a festival of national unity and political stability.37

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The campaign against unauthorised publications continued apace. Xinjiang Daily on March 13th 1998 reported on the efforts of the Xinjiang Regional Press and Publications Bureau to combat the spread of pornography and ‘illegal publications’, lumped together in this way to suggest a spurious connection between pornography and religious and separatist material. The Hualong Colour Printing Mill in Urumqi had its equipment and factory conﬁscated for having printed audio cassette inserts for ten illegal cassettes with a total circulation of 50,000 copies. The report does not indicate what was on the illegal cassettes but it is most likely that they were recordings of Uyghur popular music. Police in Urumqi also conﬁscated from a book dealer eighty-six copies of nineteen separate titles of illegal books. They ruled that fourteen of the titles were ‘pirated books which [had] serious political problems’, two had been speciﬁcally banned and the other three were ‘lewd’. No detailed information is given in reports such as this so it is not clear whether they were religious tracts, translated foreign works or books by banned authors such as Turghun Almas. However during a wider sweep, the police conﬁscated and destroyed ‘a number of illegal religious publications which distort the party’s nationality policy and undermine national unity’, the usual phrase for underground religious and separatist publications.38 Xinjiang radio, broadcasting from Urumqi on April 21st reported that the Intermediate People’s Court of Hami prefecture in the eastern part of Xinjiang has held a rally to announce sentences passed on three Uyghurs who were accused of having taken part in separatist activities. Mahmut Abdulla was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment and the loss of his political rights for active participation in a separatist organisation and for sheltering separatists, Ablimit Hapiz was sentenced to three years for the same offences and Ismail Yakup to eighteen months in prison for separatist activities.39 The e´migre´ United National Front of East Turkestan (the political group behind Voice of Eastern Turkestan) issued a statement from its base in the former Kazakhstani capital of Almaty on what it claimed were a new series of repressive measures against Uyghurs. The town mosque in Kargalik (Yecheng) was surrounded by troops and armed police on April 8th and many Muslims attending the mosque were arrested under suspicion of being ‘fundamentalists’. Outside Xinjiang, the authorities in two neighbouring Central Asian states acted against expatriate Uyghurs activists in the spirit of the Shanghai Agreement made with the Chinese government. Four were arrested in Bishkek shortly before a planned visit to Beijing by the President of Kyrgyzstan, Akayev, in what the government of Kyrgyzstan described as a clampdown on Islamists and a prominent Uyghur writer and Chairman of the Uyghur Cultural Centre in Tashkent was arrested by the security forces of Uzbekistan. Chinese ofﬁcials were quoted as likening the separatist movement in Xinjiang to the situation in Afghanistan.40 On April 19th 1998, according to the Japanese news agency Kyodo, a Chinese police ofﬁcer and two Uyghurs were killed during a police attempt to arrest a group of separatists in the Yining area.41 Two days earlier, according to Xinjiang

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Daily, a joint meeting of senior ofﬁcials of the Xinjiang government and party committees to assess the state of public order in the region had been told by told by Wang Lequan that separatist activities were on the increase. National separatists inside China and hostile forces abroad have worked, colluded with and responded to each other from afar; a few crimianl offenders are still at large and [committing] crimes, while violent terrorist activities are escalating; illegal religious activities have returned to some places, while reactionary propaganda [has] appeared in others.42 The Vice-Chairman of the Xinjiang regional government, Abdukadir Nasirdin, whose speech to a meeting of the regional Nationalities and Religious Affairs Commission was reported by Urumqi Radio on May 12th 1998, condemned separatists who were carrying out anti-Chinese acts ‘under the cloak of religion’. He continued, ‘To ensure social stability, we must demonstrate concern for and protect patriotic religious personalities and normal religious activities, and . . . resolutely oppose illegal religious activities . . .’43 Xinjiang Radio in Urumqi reported that Yarkant county courts had tried and sentenced a group of thirteen separatists for an attack on peasants who had come from eastern China to work in Xinjiang. Three peasants were robbed and killed on October 23rd 1997. Three of the attackers were sentenced to death and the others to life imprisonment or long prison terms at a rally attended by over 20,000 cadres and other people from the various ethnic groups of Xinjiang.44

Wang Lequan’s brief history of Xinjiang separatism In an interview with Tseng Shu-wan and Da Wei, journalists with the Hong Kong daily newspaper, Wen Wei Po, Wang Lequan, the Regional Party Secretary gave a rare and candid glimpse into his view of the development of the struggle in Xinjiang. Previous ofﬁcial statements had been ahistorical and played down the signiﬁcance of separatist activities. Wang’s view ﬁts in far more closely with available documentary sources than anything before and puts the problems he was facing in Xinjiang in historical context. He began by saying that separatism in the past had been primarily propaganda. In the 1950s it turned into out and out rebellion, which took three years to suppress. At the time, he noted, the rebellion had been attributed to bandits, but it was in fact the work of separatists. Relative stability followed, he continued, apart from the ﬂight of people living in the border regions in the early 1960s and some unsuccessful attempts to take advantage of the Cultural Revolution. Stability and unity were maintained for some time, he said, after the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee (the meeting in December 1978 which inaugurated the ‘reform and opening’ policy of Deng Xiaoping), but problems developed after Han cadres were transferred out of Xinjiang because the remaining village level cadres were unable to speak Chinese well enough to communicate with more senior ofﬁcials.

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This is a signiﬁcant admission of the failure of the PRC government to bridge the gap between the Han majority and the ethnic minorities. Wang was of the opinion that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was highly signiﬁcant, as it had heightened the ‘sense of independence and separatism’ in Xinjiang. The Baren riot of 1990 was, he agreed, a turning point and was followed by a series of explosions and riots in Urumqi, Kashghar and Yining. He drew attention to the fact that news of even the smallest incidents could spread rapidly with the development of modern communications technology and admitted that the government’s previous practice of not reporting incidents allowed external media to report and distort them. He rejected the reports originating outside of Xinjiang that there had been as many as 1,000 arrests and many deaths in the February 5th incident in Yining in 1997.45 The Taiwanese Central News Agency, reporting from Ankara in June 1998, quoted an unnamed Uyghur leader in Turkey as saying that if the government of the PRC took military action against Taiwan or in Tibet, Uyghurs in Xinjiang would seize the opportunity and rise against Beijing.46 Uyghur e´migre´s in Kazakhstan reported a serious act of sabotage in Xinjiang in their newspaper Voice of Eastern Turkestan. It occurred on May 27th at ten-forty p.m. when an Uyghur group known as Shaniyaz blew up a large bridge over a river which carries the highway from Turpan to Urumqi and on to Dabancheng. Construction of this road began in 1994 and should have been completed within three years. However there were many demonstrations against this road, during which hundreds were arrested. The road was unpopular for two reasons: its construction meant the destruction of farms owned by thousands of Uyghur peasants who received very little in compensation and it was also seen as a means of transporting Chinese troops and settlers deep into Xinjiang. On the morning of May 28th, according to the same sources, Radio Urumqi reported that a bridge in the Dabancheng mountains had collapsed after a ﬁerce storm.47 On July 15th, Xinhua News Agency in Urumqi reported that a 42-kilometre long section of the key Lanzhou–Xinjiang railway line was undergoing intensive repair by over 1,000 railway workers drafted in specially and that more than 8,000 passengers had been stranded at Lanzhou railway station overnight. The damage to the track was blamed on torrential rain ﬂooding down the mountains, but the railway has also been the target for separatist sabotage in the past.48 Voice of Eastern Turkestan on June 8th 1998 reported a major conﬂict on May 31st that took place between thirty Uyghur radicals and two platoons of the People’s Armed Police in Aydong Street, Yining, near an electicity generating

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station. At least ten were killed on each side. There had been similar clashes in the Yining suburb of Khudiyar-yuzi in April. The same edition of the newspaper carried summaries of news items broadcast on Urumqi Radio: a meeting had been held in Kashghar on May 31st to attack national separatism and celebrate the friendship of the peoples of Xinjiang; a compulsory course on ‘Indivisible Xinjiang’ had been introduced into all secondary schools in Xinjiang; as many as 134,000 people had been dismissed from their jobs in various state organisations and were being redeployed to the rural areas. It is not clear whether this last item refers to the sacking of separatist sympathisers in government organisations or whether it is part of the plan to move reliable cadres to the countryside.49 The ofﬁcial Xinjiang Daily, in its edition of May 22nd reported from a regional conference on radio and television. ‘Radio and television are the mouthpiece of the parth and the people’, noted the deputy regional CCP secretary Keyum Bawudun, and much effort should be directed to production and training to ensure that public opinion was correctly informed and guided. He also demanded a crack-down on ‘illegal radio and television stations and networks’.50 The People’s Armed Police contingents stationed in Xinjiang underwent a month-long period of special training in Urumqi in late May and early June 1998, directed by senior national ofﬁcers of the PAP and the regional commander of the Xinjiang PAP. The content of the training was described in Xinjiang Daily as ‘analysis of the enemy situation, summation of battle examples, theoretical study, study and discussion of tactics, sectional operations and simulated confrontational exercises with actual troops.’51 On May 10th 1998, a family planning ofﬁcial was murdered in the Aksu region. Shajimuhan Momin, the director of the Yengierik township planning ofﬁce in Awat county was visiting the family of Reyimjan Sadir to ‘propagandise and educate his wife about family planning measures’. At about 17.30 Urumqi time, Reyimjan attacked the ofﬁcial and stabbed her with a dagger, ﬂeeing as the woman lay dying. The assailant was arrested on May 13th and brought to trial at the Aksu Prefecture Intermediate People’s Court, sitting in Awat County, where he was sentenced to death. Mamatmin Zak, deputy chairman of the regional government, speaking on June 18th after the verdict had been announced, blamed the attack on separatists who had been carrying out a long-running campaign against the family planning policy, which they saw as designed to reduce the Uyghur population of Xinjiang.52 The nationwide policy of reducing the size of the workforce in the stateowned enterprises and its implications for the security of Xinjiang were raised in a conference on June 1st 1998. The keynote speech by the regional CCP secretary, Wang Lequan, warned about the dangers in mismanaging large-scale layoffs and the possibility of these being exploited by separatists. His solution was to redeploy redundant workers, including graduates, to the agricultural sector, and for the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and other rural organisations to create temporary and seasonal jobs to absorb the excess labour.53

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Concern at the continuing widespread availability of explosives in the region surfaced during a campaign by the police in the Dongshan district of Urumqi to increase control over explosives for non-military use, namely in the mines and quarries of the area. According to Xinjiang Daily, ‘At present, public security remains grim, while all types of national separatists and criminals, who use civilian explosives as a major means to commit crimes, are waiting for an opportunity to steal civilian explosives’.54 President Jiang Zemin visited Xinjiang after the ﬁve-nation summit in Almaty in July 1998 (see Chapter 12 for details), an indication of the serious concern that central party and government ofﬁcials felt over developments in the region.55 The prefectural government in Hotan organised an exhibition of picures and artefacts that illustrated the most negative aspects of the separatist struggle. It opened on July 13th and the authorities claimed that over 200,000 visitors saw the collection of ‘reactionary books and magazines’, weapons used by separatist organisations and photographs of their victims. The exhibition toured a number of towns and villages in the prefecture.56 August 1998 saw a renewed emphasis on the militia as a weapon in the struggle against separatism. An intensive three-week training programme was organised to ensure that the militia were both aware of their military missions and politically reliable.57 The threat to the established order that the militia were being mobilised to combat was vividly illustrated by a coordinated series of attacks on three towns between Kashghar and Khotan in the south of Xinjiang on the same day, August 10th. A weapons’ store was attacked in Pishan; a police station in Kargilik was ﬁred on with sub-machine guns and eight armed police ofﬁcers were killed in Kashghar, according to a Hong Kong-based human rights group. A news blackout made it impossible to obtain precise information about the number of casualties or the quantity of weapons and ammuntion taken.58 A police ofﬁcer in Xinjiang, interviewed over the telephone by journalists of the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao, conﬁrmed that there had been violence in Kashghar and other areas but refused to conﬁrm that there had been raids on ammunition depots or that ofﬁcers had been killed. He did however agree that the tactic of the separatists was to create small-scale local incidents.59 Incidents of violence had continued in the northwest of the region, according to a reporter from Renmin gongan bao, the police newspaper, whose article was published in Xinjiang Daily on August 2nd. Since last year violence and terrorist crimes have been quite rampant in Ili Prefecture. Offenders repeatedly planned explosions, assassinations, robbery and other criminal activities and seriously endangered public security . . . Since the beginning of this year, Public Security and Armed Police units killed quite a few violent offenders who used guns to resist arrest, destroyed more than 10 criminal gangs, arrested a number of suspects and conﬁscated guns, hand grenades and other tools for committing crimes . . . Public security forces have carried out a 24-hour patrol system in urban areas and key townships and villages.60

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Party Secretary Wang Lequan spoke to a conference of the Xinjiang Armed Police CCP on August 24th and emphasised their key role in keeping down the threat of separatism.61 An indication of the how sensitive the authorities are to foreign interest in the activities of the separatists was the arrest in late August of a journalist from the leading Taiwanese newpaper Central Daily News. Lee Fu-chung was attending a trade fair in Urumqi and arrived there on August 26th. He was detained on August 31st after faxing a number of stories to his ofﬁce in Taibei and was accused of using his attendance at the trade fair as a cover for investigating separatist activities. He was released and told that he could continue his planned coverage of the trade fair but left Urumqi earlier than planned.62 Reports surfaced in Taiwan at about the same time that there had been a raid on a prison in Yining city and the Zhaosu area of the surrounding prefecture and that, as a result, as many as 100 political prisoners had escaped. The reports were also carried in the Hong Kong press but were described by Xinjiang sources as ﬁctitious stories, fabricated by the Central News Agency in Taiwan. Wang Lequan, Xinjiang CCP Secretary dismissed the reports as rumours and claimed that the authorities had recently wiped out a base used by armed separatists for training.63 On August 24th, Xinjiang Daily published an interview with the director of the Public Security (police) Bureau in Yining, Wang Mingshan, who claimed that his force, supported by local people, had successfully cracked down on violence and terror in the region. An additional thirty-three police stations had been established in outlying rural parts of the Yining region, including the farms run by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and more police were recruited. During the year, Wang continued, the local police had smashed a dozen ‘criminal gangs’, arrested a number of their members and conﬁscated weapons and ammunition.64 On August 31st, the Yining authorities held a public meeting to honour members of the police and related organisations, who had performed heroic acts in the battle against the separatists. The meeting was told that the Ministry of Public Security had decided to confer the title of ‘Heroic National Model of Public Security Units, First Class’ on Long Fei, platoon leader of the ﬁrst detatchment of the Yining Public Security Bureau riot squad and ‘Heroic National Model of Public Security Units, Second Class’ on Kong Yongqiang, platoon leader of the second detachment of the unit, and Nurtay and Wu Huanyao, detectives in the Yining Public Security Bureau. All three were also designated ‘revolutionary martyrs’. Zhang Xiuming, a prominent regional CCP member, told the meeting that ‘Since the beginning of last year, the . . . struggle against the enemies in Ili Prefecture has been grim. Public Security police and Armed Police there fought heroically’ against the separatists.65 He did not give precise details of when and how these men died but Xinjiang Peoples’s Broadcasting Station in Urumqi carried a story on October 8th 1998 that the China Life Insurance Company had paid a sum of RMB 20,000 to the family of Nuertai, who had ‘heroically sacriﬁced his life during an operation to arrest violent terrorists’. The amount was twice what was due under the policy and was

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to support the two-year old son of the deceased ofﬁcer.66 The deaths of eight further police ofﬁcers on October 7th or 8th in Khotan/Hetian was announced by e´migre´ sources, who said that the separatists who killed them, had escaped and were the subject of a major manhunt.67 There was no conﬁrmation at the time from ofﬁcial Chinese sources, but the Hong Kong newpaper Ming Pao and the Central News Agency in Taipei cited a report on rioting in the Ili area that had appeared in the ofﬁcial Chinese publication Xinjiang Fazhibao in late January 1999. According to the Director of the Public Security Bureau in Yining, Wang Minshan, there were as many as eight outbreaks of violence of varying degrees of seriousness in different parts of Ili in the early part of 1998 and hundreds of ‘terrorists’ had been arrested. Yining had been placed under curfew for a lengthy period of time since the disturbances, but ‘violent actions against the Han people, government ofﬁcials, police and the military continued.68 The religious dimension of the anti-separatist struggle was discussed at a four-day meeting of united front, nationality and religious affairs ofﬁcials, which began on August 21st. Zhou Shengtao, deputy secretary of the regional party committee pledged CCP support for legal activities and those who were coming under ﬁre from the separatists who regard them as traitors for running statesponsored mosques: ‘We should protect patriotic religious personages and normal religious activities and oppose illegal religious activities in a clear-cut manner’. Other speakers drew attention to the need to allow the freedom of religious belief and to prevent foreign inﬂuence in Chinese religious affairs. Ismayil Tiliwaldi, a member of the CCP regional committee’s standing committee, outlined seven key issues in religious affairs work in Xinjiang: radical religious forces; religious teachers and administrators; religious groups; pilgrimage; Protestant Christianity and Catholicism and atheist education and propaganda.69

Xinjiang, September 1998: eyewitness impressions Urumqi in 1998 was superﬁcially far more prosperous than it had been in 1992. The road network had been improved beyond recognition and the system of ringroads that had been developed in Beijing in the same period was obviously the model, the expressway from the airport to the centre of the city being the most obvious example. Most of the new construction consisted of commercial and public buildings with modern hotels being the most striking. Behind this facade, however, housing for the majority of the citizens remained very poor and has hardly been improved. Street markets were even busier than they had been six years previously and the area around Youhao (Friendship) Road was almost impassable on a Sunday because of shopping crowds. Traders and buyers were of mixed ethnic origin, but with a high proportion of Hans. The Uyghur bazaars such as Erdaoqiao seemed little changed and were as busy and as noisy as ever. The 1998 Urumqi Trade Fair held in the ﬁrst two weeks of September was less successful than had been expected and the volume of trade had declined

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signiﬁcantly. Since the main emphasis of the fair was on cross-border trade, the tribulations of the Russian economy may well have been the reason for the disappointing performance. Urumqi’s main role is still as the administrative capital and central garrison town for Xinjiang. There is a major military and government complex in the northwest of the city, some way to the north of Hongshan Park and just off the airport expressway and close to the Crown Plaza hotel. The Communist Party, the regional government and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (the bingtuan) all have ofﬁces in this part of the city, as do the police and the courts. The compound of the Military Administrative District (a branch of the Lanzhou Military District) stands in spacious grounds with many buildings and training facilities including a parachute training tower. The sign to the military hospital had been defaced with a handwritten poster, which had been torn off so that it was impossible to read and was cleaned away completely a few days later. Huge signs on the top of the military buildings were placed so that they would be seen clearly by passers-by read ‘Follow the traditions of the Red Army’. Opposite the hotel there is a branch of the Chinese Agricultural Bank, the Urumqi Corps Branch in the Corps Wages Company Building. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps was emerging from its secretive and even sinister past to play an important role in the economy of the region. The Hong Kong newspaper, Ming Pao, interviewed the deputy political commissar of the corps on August 27th 1998. He revealed that the corps was planning to establish the China Xinjiang Production and Construction Group as a major part of the central government’s strategy for developing Xinjiang and gave detailed information on the strength of the corps at that time: 2.3 million people, including 900,000 ofﬁcials, live and work in fourteen divisions of an institution with ﬁxed assets worth RMB 70 billion.70 A similar kind of development but on a much smaller scale had been taking place in Yining/Ghulja with the appearance of many brash new public buildings including hotels and departmental stores, but the contrast with the poor housing and facilities in the south of the town was very much greater than in Urumqi. The majority of the population of the town, particularly the Uyghur and Kazakh population, do not have access to the new development and seem to live and work almost in a separate world. Yining/Ghulja is the garrison town for the Ili region which borders on Kazakhstan and which has seen serious disturbances in the towns and villages around the town, particularly in those of 1995 and 1997. As in Urumqi, there is a military and government complex in the northwest of the town with many of the shops proclaiming themselves army and civilian stores of one kind or another. In September 1998, there were police road blocks all round the airport and ﬂights across the border to Almaty and between Yining/Ghulja and Urumqi were retimed to leave late at night or the early hours of the morning, apparently for security reasons, although the ofﬁcial version was that there was too much demand for tickets during daylight hours. The atmosphere in Yining in September 1998 was unusually tense. The airport was ringed by police

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motocyclists and when ﬂights arrived in the early hours of the morning cars and buses were checked at roadblocks.71 An eyewitness account of a visitor to the Yining area in August 1998 also gives some idea of the tension in the region: The whole area of Yining was under curfew during the beginning of August and whilst I was in Urumqi, all phone lines had been cut to the north for a period of ten days or so. There was also a strict curfew under way in Khotan for several weeks and when I actually managed to get there myself, the police and military presence was absolutely astonishing. I also witnessed several incidents of the hostilities on the streets between these forces and the Uyghurs. It was a very strange atmosphere indeed. It was particularly tense as only a few days before my arrival there had been some rioting at a funeral apparently and several people were arrested. I also visited Yarkand which was very tense. The local army units had a very big presence and there was some very intense road construction going on, bull-dozing the traditional areas of the town. I was told there by [someone] that there was currently a contract in existence which was being used in schools including primary schools which students and their parents were forced to sign to declare that they would not receive any religious teaching at home, they would not make any attempts to learn Arabic language for any religious reasons, they would not practice any elements of the Islamic religion etc. It was really shocking to me to hear that even such young children were being treated in that way. I was also told of arrests of school children who had failed to sign and return this contract or children who were believed to have contravened these rules. The man claimed that it had been in existence for some time and that every single child was forced to sign it as soon as they entered the school system. This man also informed me of several arrests and executions of ‘criminals’ who they knew were actually being punished for their participation in the nationalist movement. This had happened in May of this year. As is always the case, many stories or elements of stories told are much exaggerated but it does seem entirely believable that the hostilities have reached a frightening level. The government is obviously worried – hence the huge military presence. I didn’t manage to travel up to the north this time but I heard many times that the situation up there was far worse than ever before. People were very scared but some were particularly courageous and frank with their information and opinons. It was, on the whole, a very disturbing and far more detailed insight into the current situation than I have ever had. It was very frightening and saddening to see what is really happening in Xinjiang. The people there are so desperate and have so little chance to do anything to improve their situation.’72 Ahmad Baghlan, a leader of the separatist movement in Xinjiang was said to have escaped from Xinjiang in late November 1998 and to have reached

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Badakhshan in Afghanistan after travelling through Wakhan. His ﬂight followed the arrest and brief detention of another separatist leader, Abdurasul, after he was due to give a press conference in Islamabad to protest against what he claimed was a decision not to allow Muslims from Xinjiang to participate in the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.73 As 1998 drew to a close, senior ofﬁcials of the CCP were becoming increasingly concerned about the likelihood of ‘heretical organisations and Tibet . . . and Xinjiang independence forces outside the borders’ taking advantage of the Spring Festival holiday period to increase their impact in China.74 Customs ofﬁcials in Urumqi reported that over the course of the year they had been successful in intercepting contraband coming over the borders from Kazakhstan, including ‘20,000 items of reactionary printed materials’.75 Police and customs ofﬁcers at the Khorgos Pass border post had conﬁscated six pistols, a sub-machine gun and 2,000 rounds of ammunition being brought into Xinjiang by truck from Kazakhstan, the largest recorded single case of arms smuggling in China.76 There were no riots or demonstrations on the scale of the Yining/Ghulja events of February 1997, but that did not mean that the problem of separatism had been solved.

1999 The conﬂict between separatists and the Chinese authorities continued throughout 1999 although the details were rarely reported in the ofﬁcial press until the authorities brought a group to trial and secured a conviction which could be used in anti-separatist propaganda. According to Kakharman Khozhamberdi, leader of the Association of Uyghurs, which is based in Kazakhstan, in the course of 1999, China executed a total of sixty-one people charged with crimes related to separatism. In addition, he alleged that Chinese forces had killed twenty to thirty more in clashes during September. Khozhamberdi criticised Beijing’s policy of resettling the Xinjiang region with ethnic Chinese and claimed that, since 1949, the 300,000-strong Han Chinese minority has grown to 10 million so that it constituted nearly half of the region’s population’.77 Xinjiang People’s Broadcasting Station announced on January 7th that a special 100-day ‘Strike Hard’ campaign had been launched in Urumqi on the ﬁrst day of the month because of concerns about public order over the Spring Holiday and in particular the festival of ’Id ’al-Fitr. The aim of the campaign was to alert the population of the city that public security organisations were targeting separatist activities which they feared would be on the increase during the holiday period.78 Linked with this was a campaign against ‘pornography and illegal publications’, scheduled to last for the ﬁrst six months of 1999 and targeting ‘illegal publications with political problems’, a code for separatist or unofﬁcial Islamic material.79 There was renewed emphasis on the militia as a key element in the struggle against separatism. An article in People’s Daily on January 6th went beyond the

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familiar rhetoric to boost morale, indicating speciﬁc ways in which resources had been redeployed to strengthen militia units in Xinjiang. Various local governments cancelled planned orders of cars and new ofﬁce buildings and new buildings were instead provided for militia and other military units. These included weapons stores, military schools and militia training centres equipped with the latest technology.80 Disturbances in Urumqi during February 1999 were reported by the Information Centre of Human Rights and the Democratic Movement, which are both based in Hong Kong. Pro-independence slogans were shouted by a group of thirty young Uyghurs after an evening’s drinking and crowds closed in on the police who tried to arrest them. Over 150 were said to have been arrested and ﬁve people were injured in the clashes.81 Two Uyghurs were sentenced to death by the Ili Prefectural Peoples’s Court on February 11th. Ibrahim Ismayil was accused of having joined a terrorist organisation in 1991 and of having instigated illegal demonstrations on August 14th (1995), of having taken part in the February 5th disturbances (presumbly 1997) and the June 26th ‘terrorist serial murders and attack on the police in Yining county’. Abdurehim Eysa was accused of having been involved in terrorist activities for many years and of having stolen explosives including sticks of dynamite in 1997 for terrorist purposes. They were taken to the execution ground and shot immediately after the trial. Nine others received lesser sentences at the same trial.82 Further trials were reported by Xinjiang Radio to have taken place in the Ili counties of Korgas and Nilka during February. Eight ‘violent terrorists’ were sentenced to death and immediately executed and over forty others sentenced for lesser offences.83 China’s military establishments in Xinjiang, and especially those connected with the nuclear industry, which many Uyghurs blame for serious health problems in the region, have been a regular target for separatist groups. This is a particularly sensitive issue for the Chinese government and such attacks have rarely been acknowledged, although e´migre´ groups have reported them on a number of occasions. The Eastern Turkestan National Centre in Istanbul issued a statement on February 27th, based on the account of an Uyghur businessman who had travelled to Turkey from Xinjiang, claiming that a guided missile base near on the road to Lop Nor near Korla in the south of Xinjiang had been attacked earlier in the year. Twenty-one soldiers were reported to have been killed and six others injured in an assault that had also destroyed eight military vehicles and many supplies.84 Local political leaders claimed that there had been no serious outbreaks of violence in the region in late 1998 and early 1999 and Xinjiang Daily documented a major public security exercise that was being mounted continually to ensure that this remained the case. Key areas that were potential targets were selected and residents’ committees formed in the towns and villages to combat separatist activities. Town and village leaders were made responsible for the security of the areas under their control in a structure very similar to the traditional imperial Chinese baojia system of mutual surveillance and collective

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responsibility. Cadres from the local ethnic minorities and religious ﬁgures deemed to be loyal were sent to talk to people in the towns and villages. Students returning to their home areas during vacations were closely monitored and sent to evening classes run by the CCP or local government. The police claimed that, with the help of local informants, they had wiped out a number of criminal gangs, seized weapons and ammunition and had uncovered clandestine Qur’anic schools and military training centres run by Islamists or separatists.85 Border police at the Korgas trading post discovered weapons hidden beneath cow and horse hides on April 6th after reports that arms were being smuggled into Xinjiang by that route. The vehicle and its cargo were conﬁscated and the people due to collect the weapons were arrested by the Ili police.86 In July 1999, police in Tekes, a county in the Ili region reported that they had seized over 4,000 rounds of ammunition that had been part of a larger consignment smuggled in from Qinghai province in March and a Qi 90 riﬂe.87 A training programme for Islamic clerics throughout Xinjiang, which was formally launched on May 16th, was designed to bolster the status of those who were formally registered and recognised by the Chinese state and to indicate clearly the limits of religious tolerance in Xinjiang. The main points emphasised were that there was to be no interference by international religious bodies in the way that China managed religious affairs and that religion must be kept completely separate from government, administrative and judicial bodies, the latter being a clear attack on Islamic law and the persistent inﬂuence of the traditional Muslim qadi, the Islamic judges who ruled on shari’a law rather than on the laws of the Chinese state.88 Xinjiang Radio on March 31st 1999 reported on a meeting at which Wang Lequan and other local political leaders had met members of a special team that had been put together to be sent to the towns and villages of southern Xinjiang to ‘rectify public order’. Their main tasks were to intensify the ‘Strike Hard’ campaign, assist in the construction of new grassroots organisations in the rural areas, and carry out a mass education programme to counter separatist and Islamist propaganda.89 A very practical effort to ensure that the word of the party reached even the remotest outposts of Xinjiang was the despatch from Urumqi on June 2nd 1999 of twenty truckloads of television and radio equipment, including satellite dishes, television transmitters, ﬁbre optic cables and tuners, destined for towns and villages throughout the region.90 The struggle continued and ten Uyghurs, apparently members of a separatist organisation, were brought to trial in Urumqi on May 12th, indicted on a number of counts of treason, murder, robbery and the possession of and illegal dealing in ﬁrearms. They were found guilty, sentenced to death and executed by ﬁring squad immediately after the trial.91 On August 1st 1999, the Hong Kong journal Zheng Ming carried a report, which it claimed originally appeared in a newsletter of the Lanzhou Military Region, that a power station at a military base in Hejing in Xinjiang had been blown up and that as many as twelve soldiers had been killed or injured in the

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incident. Twelve separatists were also reported to have been killed when they were pursued by troops after the bombing.92 The underground ﬁres continue to smoulder in Xinjiang as repression breeds resentment and imprisonment and executions create a new generation of martyrs.

Part III

The changing international context

11 New great games in Central Asia Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan

The opening up of Central Asia after the collapse and fragmentation of the Soviet Union in 1991 gave rise to intense competition by Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia and to a lesser extent (at least initially) Pakistan for political, economic and spiritual inﬂuence in the region. Because Beijing has encouraged these mainly Muslim countries to invest or trade with China it has therefore felt it necessary to demonstrate its tolerance of Islam and show that its Muslim population was able to live and worship in ways that were acceptable to the rest of the world of Islam. While Turkey, as a modernising Muslim nation with a secular government, might be seen as its most natural ally, the potential threat of pan-Turkism has led China to turn also to the radical Islamic state of Iran as a countervailing force. In the nineteenth century, the Great Game was the competition between the expanding empires of Russia and Great Britain for hegemony in the heart of Asia. In the late twentieth century the new Great Game had new players and new prizes, both secular and spiritual.

Turkey Turkey has continued normal diplomatic relations with China, including discussions about economic cooperation, but, conscious of a certain level of domestic support for pan-Turkism and the potential beneﬁts of a wider Turkicspeaking community, has shown an interest in Turkic minorities in China. Isa Yusuf Alptekin, the most prominent Uyghur e´migre´ leader, whose inﬂuence in Xinjiang was feared by Beijing in spite of his advanced age, met Turkey’s Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel and other senior political ﬁgures on a number of occasions. In 1991, Prime Minister Demirel is reported as having said that he would ‘not allow the Chinese to assimilate their ethnic brothers in Eastern Turkestan’ and would make representations to the United Nations.1 Alptekin was received by President Turgut Ozal in 1992, and in an emotional meeting presented the president with a traditional Uyghur coat and cap and an Eastern Turkestani ﬂag, symbolising his handover of the Eastern Turkestani cause to the Turkish president because at ninety-one, he was too old to continue himself. President Ozal is reported to have said, I declare that I have taken delivery of the Eastern Turkestani cause. The

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The changing international context Turkic republics under former Soviet rule have all declared their independence. Now it is Eastern Turkestan’s turn. It is our desire to see the ancient homeland of the Turkic peoples a free country.2

Some of the accounts of these meetings are from e´migre´ Uyghur sources, which would obviously wish to emphasise the importance of their organisations, but the Chinese response suggests that they are taking the exiles very seriously. Alptekin met government leaders again in Ankara on December 22nd and 23rd 1992, to ask them to bring the issue of increased Han Chinese immigration in Xinjiang to the United Nations, and the Turkish parliament was also asked to send a mission to Xinjiang to investigate alleged human rights abuses to report to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.3 In response, an article in People’s Daily in November 1992 apparently claimed that the Turkish President Turgut Ozal and Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel openly accepted a Turkic homeland extending ‘from the Great Wall of China to the Balkans’ and treated Isa Yusuf Alptekin as President-in-Exile of East Turkestan.4 Alptekin died on December 17th 1995, having ‘lived out his last days in Istanbul, in a modest ﬂat overlooking the railway line once used by the Orient Express’.5 Qiao Shi, Chairman of the Standing Comittee of the National People’s Congress, and widely believed to have been China’s most powerful security minister at the time, met Turkish visitors including Dorgan Gures (Chief of General Staff) and Nevzat Ayaz (Defence Minister) to discuss defence links.6 Qiao Shi visited Turkey again in November 1996, and, during talks in Ankara with his opposite number Mustafa Kalemli, made it abundantly clear to the Turkish authorities that the Chinese government was implacably opposed to the activities of separatist movements based in foreign countries including Turkey. He addressed the Turkish National Assembly on November 7th and praised the Turkish government for its non-interference in China’s internal affairs and for restricting the acitivities of Uyghur separatist organisations in Turkey.7 The following month, according to reports circulating in Taiwan, Turkey and China signed an agreement on military cooperation, under which Turkey would be able to buy ground-to-ground missiles and would acquire a licence to produce them in Turkey with technology transferred from China.8 Turkish governments have had to perform a delicate balancing act to deal with the incompatible demands of pan-Turkism and trade with China. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Central Asians were interested in the possibility of following a Turkish model of development. The Presidents of both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan declared their intentions of taking ‘the Turkish route’. Turkey capitalised on this goodwill and signiﬁcant resources were invested in linking the newly emerging states with Turkey. Turkish Airlines was one of the ﬁrst foreign carriers to establish air links with Almaty and the capitals of the other Central Asian States. Turkey provided moral support to the nascent states and offered to educate students from Central

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Asia and Turkish television was beamed to the region. Ankara established an agency speciﬁcally to coordinate Turkish aid to Central Asia, although in reality that aid was severely restricted by Turkey’s relative lack of ﬁnancial resources. The Turkish president, Turgut Ozal organised a summit of the Turkic nations in October 1992 but political and cultural differences between the states and the degree of Russiﬁcation that had taken place in Central Asia over the previous century-and-a-half made communication and mutual understanding far more difﬁcult than either side had expected.9 In September 1994, I made a visit to Almaty in Kazakhstan to collect information on China–Kazakhstan relations, the rapidly developing cross-border trade and on the Uyghur and Dungan communities that live in Kazakhstan. I met many members of the Institute of Oriental Studies and Institute of Uyghur Studies of the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences and was struck by the importance attached to relations with Turkey at the time. Many members of the academy and government ofﬁcials were either in Turkey or were shortly about to visit Turkey. The Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey, Bulent Ecevit, after a week in China in June 1998 expressed a strong interest in developing economic ties including joint ventures and announced that Turkey had established a trade and information centre in Shanghai.10 Reports from the Taiwanese Central News Agency at the same time claimed that Turkey had granted permanent residence status to about 1,000 Uyghurs who had recently arrived there from Xinjiang to join the 50,000 already in the country.11 A previously unknown directive from the ofﬁce of the Turkish Prime Minister was published in February 1999 by the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet. It had been distributed to governement organisations during the premiership of Mesut Yilmaz, the conservative anti-Islamist founder-member of the Motherland Party, who was Prime Minister for three terms during the 1990s and urged ministers and government ofﬁcials not to take part in any political activities organised by East Turkestan and Uyghur organisations based in Turkey as Xinjiang was part of the territory of the PRC and that e´migre´ activities were creating difﬁculties in Turkey’s relations with China.12 The speaker of the Turkish parliament, Hikmet Cetin, received Li Peng on April 5th 1999 when he visited Ankara in his capacity as Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, a position seen to be broadly similar to that of Cetin. The ofﬁcial Chinese news agency, Xinhua, reported that Mr Cetin had reiterated Turkey’s opposition to separatist activities, and this was reinforced in a meeting Li Peng held with Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit.13

Iran Cooperation between Iran and China on atomic energy projects was conﬁrmed in 199114 and a delegation from the Centre for Strategic Research of Iran visited China in November 1991.15 Higher level visits took place, by the Speaker of the Iranian Majlis, the parliament, in December of the same year16 and the Foreign

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The changing international context

Minister Ali Akbar Velayati in April 1992.17 Arms sales by China to Iran have been controversial: Chinese ofﬁcial sources have played them down or even denied that they took place at all, but there is general agreement that tanks, artillery, surface-to-air missiles, ﬁghter aircraft and a nuclear reactor have been sold.18 It is widely assumed that Iran has bought Silkworm missiles from China and there have been regular reports of visits of high ranking Iranian military ofﬁcials to China. Qin Jiwei travelled to Iran at the end of October 1992 on what was the ﬁrst visit made by a Chinese Foreign Minister since the 1979 revolution in Iran. He had meetings with President Rafsanjani and the Iranian Minister of Defence.19 The Chinese government denied that it was cooperating with Syria and Iran on the development of cruise missiles. Foreign Ministry spokesman, Wu Jianmin, at a press conference on February 4th, 1993 denied US Defence Department claims that China was cooperating with Syria and Iran to develop cruise missiles.20 The Iranian President, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani visited China in September 1992 after the Non-Aligned Movement conference in Jakarta. After meeting central government leaders in Beijing and signing a nuclear cooperation agreement,21 he met Tomur Dawamat, the regional government chairman in Urumqi for discussions on economic, commercial, scientiﬁc, technological and cultural exchanges, including talks on joint Xinjiang–Iran projects, rail links via Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and a new air route.22 President Rafsanjani visited Kashghar on Friday September 11th and led afternoon prayers in the Id Gah mosque. Crowds of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Hui Muslims crowded outside the mosque and when he walked brieﬂy around the square after the service there was tremendous applause from the crowd in spite of a massive police presence.23 Controversy over China’s arms sales to Iran was renewed in August 1993 when the 19,000-ton freighter, the Yinhe en route from China to Dubai, and under suspicion of carrying chemicals which could be used in the manufacture of nerve and mustard gas and similar chemical weapons, was shadowed by the United States Navy destroyer Chandler through the Gulf of Hormuz. After initially refusing to allow the ship to be searched, the Chinese authorities changed their minds when it was refused permission to dock in Dubai, and the Yinhe changed course for Saudi Arabia.24 The Yinhe was subsequently found not to have been carrying the chemicals alleged by the United States authorities but Washington declined to pay the compensation demanded by Beijing in respect of the delay. The Iranian newspaper Jomhuriye Eslami (Islamic Republic) reported on the suppression of the Yining disturbances in February 1997 and criticised China’s policies as an attempt to separate Xinjiang’s Muslim’s from co-religionists across the borders.25

Pakistan Relations between China and the individual states of South Asia have been complex. China has been in a constant state of conﬂict with India over territorial

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disputes, especially since the India–China war of 1962. This enmity has been further exacerbated by the question of Tibet and India’s willingness to provide a haven for the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and his followers in Dharamsala. These considerations have led China into an alliance with India’s main political rival since independence in 1947, Pakistan. Pakistan and China agreed to open the Khunjerab Pass for border trade from May 1st 1993.26 On August 25th 1993, the United States imposed sanctions on China and Pakistan after months of enquiries into allegations that China had supplied Pakistan with components for the M-11 missile in violation of international agreements, principally the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). The sanctions could cost China up to US$500 million. The M-11 missiles, which China denied exporting to Pakistan at all, are reported to have a range of 190 miles and a payload of half a ton which would have a serious effect on the balance of power in the region. Defence analysts believed that the missile would enable Pakistan to hit targets in India, Iran and the former Soviet Union, but there has been a difference of opinion within the US intelligence and defence establishment on the precise degree of threat it poses. Both China and Pakistan initially denied that transfer of missile technology had taken place, Pakistan later claiming that the last shipment had been in February 1992. Technically, the missiles may be only just outside the parameters of the MTCR which restricts the transfer of missiles which have a range of over 187.5 miles and the range of the M-11 is 190 miles. China’s response was a ﬁrm rebuttal. Deputy Foreign Minister Liu Huaqiu lodged a ﬁrm protest in a meeting with the US Ambassador Stapleton Roy and alleged that ‘This naked hegemonic act has brutally violated the basic norms governing international relations’. He argued that China was not violating the terms of the Missile Technology Control Regime but that US sanctions left China ‘with no alternative but to reconsider its commitment to MTCR’.27 Washington announced on August 25th that sanctions in response to China’s alleged arms sales would include a restriction on the transfer of satellite and other advanced technology for two years. China did not sign the agreement on MCTR, but had said early in 1992 that the guidelines would be respected as part of an agreement on the removal of earlier US sanctions that were imposed after the crackdown on the democracy movement in June 1989. China denies that the arms sales to Pakistan break international rules as, according to defence analysts in Beijing, the missiles are only designed for short-range use and the PRC feels a grave sense of injustice, contrasting its own arms sales policy to what it claims was a grave threat to Chinese security when the USA sold 150 ﬁghter aircraft to Taiwan in 1992. Arms sales are an important source of foreign currency for China although they have dropped from an estimated annual value of US$4.7 billion in 1987 to US$100 million in 1992 as a result of the chaos in the Chinese economy, and a way of cementing relations with its Asian neighbours. As this was the ﬁrst action against China by the Clinton administration, the suspicion in Washington was that it was a decision based on domestic political considerations to demonstrate that the administration had a decisive foreign

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policy. American manufacturers of satellite launching equipment resent the loss of sales for which they will not be compensated.28 However the sanctions do have a certain logic in that they would tend to restrict China’s growing aerospace industry which also makes a major contribution to the PRC’s defence capabilities. They can also be seen as a form of retaliation for the alleged shipment of chemical weapons to Iran in the Yinhe, which the US government was unable to prevent from docking in Dubai. China and Pakistan signed an agreement in Rawalpindi on December 4th 1993 in which China agreed to provide Pakistan with credit facilities for the procurement of defence equipment. At the same time, Li Ruihuan, a member of the Standing Committee of the politburo of the CCP and Chairman of the CPPCC visited Islamabad with a high level delegation and stayed there a week. General Zhang Wannian, Chief of the General Staff of the PLA also toured the Afghan–Pakistan border and the Khyber Pass and reiterated China’s habitual support for Pakistan.29 Pakistan television, broadcasting from Islamabad on July 3rd 1997 carried a response from the Pakistani Foreign Ofﬁce to concerns raised about the deployment of Indian missiles on the border and the test of a Hatf medium-range surface-to-surface missile which has a range of 800 kilometres. He said that nuclear cooperation between Pakistan and China was purely for peaceful civilian use of the technology and that there were no military implications. Reports from the United States, however, clearly indicated that the CIA sill believed that China was providing much technical assistance to the nuclear weapons’ programmes of both Pakistan and Iran.30 The question of Xinjiang has rarely been raised publicly in discussions between political leaders of the two countries, even though there is a close trading connection between southern Xinjiang towns such as Kashghar and Pakistan via the Karakorum Highway. Pakistan is also one of the sources of copies of the Qur’an and other Islamic materials coming into Xinjiang, either directly or as a gateway for materials coming from Afghanistan or further west. General Pervez Musharaff, at the time chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee of the Pakistan armed forces, but later to take over the government of Pakistan in a coup d’e´tat and have himself designated Chief Executive, visited China in May 1999 as the guest of the Chief of the General Staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, General Fu Quanyou. He also met President Jiang Zemin who reafﬁrmed China’s ‘friendship in adversity’ with Pakistan and stressed the importance of the military ties between the two countries. If the Xinjiang question was discussed at all, there was no hint of this in any of the ofﬁcial press statements.31 Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, also made a state visit to China in June 1999, but decided to return to Pakistan early in view of the growing tension between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir issue.32 It was later revealed by the Urdu language newspaper Jang, published in Rawalpindi, that during these talks, the Chinese government agreed to supply Pakistan with 80 F-7 PRC ﬁghter aircraft as an emergency measure. The F-7 is one of the most up-to-date aircraft

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in China and had previously been used exclusively by the Chinese air force and the ﬁrst examples were due to be delivered to the Pakistan air force in August 1999, during an ofﬁcial visit to Beijing by the Chief of Staff of the Pakistan air force.33 The initial response of the authorities in Beijing to the 1999 military coup in Pakistan was to adopt a wait-and-see policy, and there was much discussion about the need to maintain stability in the sub-continent and the long-term prospects for improving trade between China and Pakistan. Stability is what matters to Beijing, not the nature of the regime in Islamabad or whether it is military or democratic and that is consistent with Beijing’s policy towards other Third World countries since 1949. The added tension between India and Pakistan does not cause China any real problems and indeed it helps to make Pakistan a more reliable ally. A military government in Pakistan is also likely to be a positive asset in terms of weapons’ sales. However, since separatism and unrest in Xinjiang have been major preoccupations of Beijing since the mid-1990s, there must be serious concern that any kind of instability in Pakistan could cause an upsurge in support for political Islam there and a consequent boost for Islamic insurgents in Xinjiang. The role of the Pakistani military in this is complex. On the one hand, there is considerable support for militant Islam within its ranks and there has been support for the Taliban, particularly from Inter Services Intelligence, the military intelligence body that is credited by many analysts with bringing the Taliban to power. However, the army also has a long-term commitment to a stable Pakistani state and this stability is clearly threatened by Islamist militancy.

The Afghan connection The connection between the separatist struggle in Xinjiang and the rise of the Taliban has often been raised by both Chinese and Western analysts, but it is shrouded in mystery. Beijing has claimed on a number of occasions that members of the Pakistani security forces were providing combat training in Afghanistan for groups of Uyghurs who were then travelling back to Xinjiang to use this training against the Chinese authorities there. Chinese sources claimed that concrete information had been obtained about this training from a party of sixteen Uyghurs who had been arrested and interrogated after crossing back into Xinjiang but no details were made public. There is evidence that Uyghurs fought with Juma Namangani’s Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan based at Mazar-eSharif in northern Afghanistan and some suggestion that the Uyghurs were moved there from training camps near Kabul at the insistence of Beijing.34 According to Moheyuddin Kabir of the Tajik Islamic Renaissance Party, speaking in Dushanbe on March 16th 2001, the IMU was proving extremely attractive to Uyghurs seeking outside support for their own jihad. He claimed that hundreds of Uyghurs had studied in madrasas in Pakistan and had then been trained in Afghanstan and had fought in the Taliban army.35 Additional support for this

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came from evidence given at a criminal trial in the Kyrgyzstan capital, Bishkek, in February 2003. Sheraly Akbotoyev, was sentenced to twenty-ﬁve years’ imprisonment for membership of the IMU and terrorism and revealed a plan to establish a ‘foreign legion’ of Chechens, Pakistanis, Kosovars, Tajiks and Kashmiris under Juma Namangani the leader of the IMU. It was also to include the Uyghurs who had been training with the IMU.36 There have also been allegations that the Chinese military itself sent Uyghurs for combat training in Afghanistan during the 1980s as part of an alliance with mujaheddin units against the Soviet Union’s offensive there. It has also been suggested that the PLA was involved in training mujaheddin both within Pakistan and in camps inside Xinjiang.37 While this might have seemed a sensible strategy to build up Chinese credibility in Islamic Central Asia during the Sino–Soviet dispute, it must have been obvious that it could have serious repercussions for Beijing given the history of Uyghur militancy in Xinjiang. Chinese ofﬁcials quoted in 1998 were reported as having said: ‘We closely follow developments in Afghanistan where Islamic fundamentalism is strong. This is very dangerous for Xinjiang’.38 Ahmad Baghlan, a leader of the separatist movement in Xinjiang, was said to have escaped from Xinjiang in late November 1998 and to have reached Badakhshan in Afghanistan after travelling through Wakhan. His ﬂight followed the arrest and brief detention of another separatist leader, Abdul Rasul, after he was due to give a press conference in Islamabad to protest against what he claimed was a decision not to allow Muslims from Xinjiang to participate in the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.39 China concluded a military agreement on December 10th 1998 with the Taliban, or more accurately with its government, formally known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. China agreed to train military pilots from Afghanistan and in return, the Taliban agreed to allow Chinese scientists to examine unexploded American cruise missiles that had landed in Afghanistan.40 More information about the Uyghur connection emerged in the wake of the US invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11th 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. In October 2002, China’s Deputy Prime Minister, Qian Qichen, claimed that the United States government was detaining at least a dozen Uyghurs in its Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba. Some reports claimed that they had been captured in the battle to take the town of Mazar-e-Sharif. This claim ﬁtted neatly into Beijing’s insistence that separatists in Xinjiang are linked to the Al-Qaeda network of Osama Bin Laden, and this in turn reinforced China’s case for supporting the USA’s global war on terrorism. China has claimed that, between 1990 and 2000, as many as 100 Uyghurs who were trained in Afghanistan had returned to Xinjiang and carried out paramilitary operations, which had resulted in many deaths and injuries.41 The extent of the Afghan connection with the Uyghur separatists remains far from clear. The Chinese military have wished to play it down in the past as it reveals poor judgement in its dealings with the Taliban and its predecessors during the Sino–Soviet dispute. Diplomats and politicians felt the need to draw

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attention to the link as part of the justiﬁcation for participation in the ‘war on terror’. It seems that the connections do go back to the 1980s and that a small number of Uyghurs have been trained by organisations in Afghanistan, which may have some links with the Al-Qaeda organisation.

12 China and the newly independent Central Asian republics

The Chinese government moved swiftly to formalise relations with the new Central Asian republics as they gained their independence after the collapse of Soviet power in 1991.1 The independence of these states and China’s relationship with them is important for China in general but of particular signiﬁcance for Xinjiang. On the one hand they are Xinjiang’s closest neighbours and vital for trade and communications. On the other, they are the home of ethnic groups related to the Turkic and other peoples of Xinjiang from whom they had been separated for decades. Political stability in Central Asia could lead to unprecedented economic development for China and the former Soviet states, but there is still potential for serious conﬂict in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and the impact of the end of the war in Afghanistan remains unclear. Some refugees, ﬂeeing the ﬁghting in Tajikistan in 1992, moved into the Pamir mountains near to the regions of Xinjiang where the Tajik-speaking and Shi’a Ismaili Wakh people live. In Uzbekistan, there is growing support for militant Islamic groups, particularly the rigid Saudi-backed Sunni Wahabbi sect which is funding the building of mosques and madrasas (Qur’anic schools), some of which may be providing military training. The Wahabbis are opposed both to Suﬁsm, long established in Central Asia and China, and to the Islamic Renaissance Party, which is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.2 The Chinese Foreign Minister, Qian Qichen, interviewed in November 1992 after a visit to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation, made it clear that he was aware of the problems they were experiencing in trying to achieve economic independence as they had been tied so closely to the Russian economy. He was optimistic about trade prospects because of the improvements that there had been in transport and communications across the border, but pointed out that, ‘since China had neither contact nor economic and trade cooperation with Central Asian republics in the past, there was no mutual understanding’. He underlined China’s policy of maintaining ‘good-neighbourly, equal and mutually beneﬁcial cooperation between China and the CIS’.3 Similar problems of lack of mutual understanding had also emerged in negotiations between China and Mongolia.4 Xinjiang’s political leaders were intitially very positive about the beneﬁts to China of the break-up of the Soviet Union. Song Hanliang, the Xinjiang CCP

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Regional Secretary, speaking at the National People’s Congress in Beijing in March 1992, was enthusiastic about the possibility of export opportunities.5 Formal relations between Xinjiang and CIS states were judged to be a high priority: Tomur Dawamat, Chairman of the Autonomous Region government visited Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in November 1990 and, after signing a trade agreement with China, the Kazakhstan President, Nursultan Nazarbayev predicted that there would be considerable economic and political beneﬁts from the developing rail network.6 Border security meetings with joint delegations to China from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan discussed troop reductions,7 as did President Yeltsin during his visit to China in December 1992. The Russians continued to play their traditional role of senior partner in Central Asia and a joint Russian and Chinese memorandum outlined a series of phased reductions up to the year 2000, on the lines of troop withdrawals from Mongolia.8 Meetings to discuss a variety of border issues continued on a regular basis and a document on the principles for the compilation of a topographical map of the border was signed in 1992, but discussions were to continue for some years. The Joint Border Survey Commission of China and Kazakhstan met in Beijing from July 29th to August 5th 1996 and agreed on a series of working arrangements for progress on border demarcation and in particular for ﬁeldwork that was scheduled to begin in 1997 to provide accurate data for the determination of the borders.9 In December 1993, a Chinese diplomatic and military delegation met a joint delegation from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan in Beijing to continue discussions on the reduction of armed force. A further round was scheduled for February 1994. A Russian delegation visited Heilongjiang province to discuss border defence in November and December 1993.10 The ﬁrst session of the working group on drafting border agreements between China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan took place in Beijing on April 15th 1993. The discussions were conﬁned primarily to legal issues relating to the terms of delimitations of the western sector of the Russo–Chinese border.11 These discussions continued on a regular basis and the eighteenth meeting took place in Beijing from November 26th to December 6th 1996. The formal report of the meeting announced that the issue of the alignment of the boundary line between China and the [other] four countries had been discussed in ‘a conscientious and realistic atmosphere’, but it was clear that the issues had by no means been resolved.12 The detailed work on border demarcation between Kazakhstan and China did not in fact begin until July 1997. It had however been agreed that the two sides would collect detailed information, including data on geographical features, meteorological conditions and transport over a period of three years.13

Touring Central Asia: Li Peng in 1994 and Jiang Zemin in 1996 The Chinese Prime Minister, Li Peng, embarked on a major tour of the Central Asian republics in April 1994, emphasising the importance that Beijing attached

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to the region. He addressed the Uzbek parliament in Tashkent on April 19th and spoke of a new era in Chinese–Central Asian relations characterised by stable political relationships, economic cooperation, non-interference by China in Central Asian domestic affairs and the creation of a New Silk Road, the highly popular metaphor for cross-border economic cooperation. After talks with President Karimov, agreements were signed on bilateral trade and economic cooperation, air trafﬁc control, and material and technical aid. China also agreed to grant Uzbekistan a loan but details of the amount and terms were not disclosed.14 After the conclusion of his visit to Uzbekistan, Li Peng arrived in Ashkhabad on the afternoon of April 20th for talks with the President of Turkmenistan, Saparmyat Niyazov. Although Xinhua and the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS reported that there had been ‘discussions on regional and international issues of common concern’, this was essentially a courtesy visit.15 From Turkmenistan, Li Peng travelled to Kyrgyzstan on April 22nd. China offered the Kyrgyz government a loan, reported to be in the region of RMB50 million (US$5.8 million)16 and signed agreements on economic and cultural cooperation. Although there was no agreement on the delineation of the China– Kyrgyzstan border, both sides agreed that a convention would be drafted in the near future. Li Peng left Kyrgyzstan with presents of ‘a thoroughbred horse, a snow leopard skin and a fur coat and traditional hat’.17 Prime Minister Li’s visit to Kazakhstan was more signiﬁcant. He arrived in Almaty on April 25th 1994, the ﬁrst senior Chinese politician to visit Kazakhstan. After talks with President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the two signed a document deﬁning the border between China and Kazakhstan and also initialled agreements on passenger and freight rail transport, business cooperation and the sale of iron and fertiliser to China. This agreement established the Joint Border Survey Commission of China and Kazakhstan, with responsibility for survey work including the preparation of topographical maps to deﬁne the borders.18 China also agreed to make available to Kazakhstan a state loan of RMB50 million and what was described as humanitarian aid to the value of RMB1.5 million. In return, President Nazarbayev afﬁrmed that the Kazakhstan government would not interfere in Chinese domestic affairs and in particular that there would be no support for Eastern Turkistan separatists, an important consideration for Beijing. The Kazakhstan government has also agreed to restrict travel to the areas bordering on the PRC, again a matter of some concern for Beijing which fears the spread of militant Islam and arms from its western neighbour.19 During the discussions the question of the 1 million ethnic Kazakhs in China was raised and Li Peng is reported to have assured Nazarbayev that they would be allowed to travel to Kazakhstan and to settle there permanently if they wished to. President Nazarbayev even spoke of the possibility of Kazakhstan opening a consulate in Urumqi to make it easier for Xinjiang Kazakhs to apply for visas.20 The Chinese President, Jiang Zemin, paid a two-day state visit to Kyrgyzstan starting on July 3rd 1996 and signed a joint declaration on bilateral relations with the Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev. The declaration included agreements

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on security, border demarcation and economic cooperation. A separate and more detailed agreement on border demarcation and economic cooperation was signed on July 4th.21 Jiang then travelled to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan where similar agreements were signed. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which both have signiﬁcant populations of ethnic Uyghurs, publicly stated their opposition to any form of separatism and agreed not to allow any separatist organisations to operate in their territories.22 In the wake of the Chinese ‘Strike Hard’ campaign of summer 1996, the governments of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan moved to support China’s clampdown on Uyghur separatists. The leader of the Attan organisation, Amantay Asilbekov, was warned to stay at home on June 28th during the visit of Jiang Zemin to Almaty as his group had planned to stage a demonstration against China’s nuclear test programme at Lop Nor. On the same day, a radio journalist, Batirhan Darimbet, was arrested by the police and held for six hours, as it was believed he would support the demonstration, and he was only released following the personal intervention of the Almaty city prosecutor. In Kyrgyzstan, the Uyghur community’s newspaper Ittipak (Solidarity), which is critical of China’s policies in Xinjiang, was banned from publishing for three months in March 1996 by the Justice Ministry and not allowed to resume until June 25th.23 Jiang Zemin and the Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev took the opportunity of a ﬁve-nation conference in Moscow on April 24th on border region arms reduction to issue a joint statement on separatism in China. Both leaders emphasised the importance of economic cooperation between China and Kazakhstan, in particular cooperation on oil, rail and other transport links. President Nazarbayev reiterated Kazakhstan’s opposition to the use of its territories by any organisation advocating separatism in China and Jiang urged him to oppose the separatists vigourously. There were similar exchanges between Jiang and his Kyrgyz opposite number Askar Akayev. Peoples Daily on April 21st congratulated the leaders present at the conference on major achievements in the reduction of military forces in the border area, the reduction of tension and increased security in the region.24 Economic relations between China and the Central Asian republics have also played a key role. On August 4th 1997, it was reported that the China National Petroleum Corporation had successfully bid for the exploitation of the Uzensk oilﬁeld in western Kazakhstan and that a joint venture company would be set up with the Kazakh corporation Uzenmunaigaz. The Chinese organisation had also invested in another ﬁeld, Aktyubinskmai, in the same part of Kazakhstan. Economic relations between China and Kazakhstan were discussed when Li Tieying, Chairman of the Chinese State Commission for Economic Restructuring visited Almaty in September 1996 and plans for an increase in bilateral trade were made.25 One of the most important economic agreements made between China and Kazakhstan was signed on September 24th 1997. It provided for cooperation in the oil and gas industries and followed talks in Almaty between President Nazarbayev and Li Peng the Chinese Prime Minister. The agreement included

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one oil pipeline 3,000 kilometres in length from Kazakhstan to western China and a second, which would cross Turkmenistan into Iran. China would also drill for oil in Kazakhstan. As well as the contract on oil extraction and transport, which was viewed as the key economic agreement between the two countries, it was agreed that trade in general should increase and the Kazakh side clearly expressed the hope that China would become a major market for Kazakhstani products.26 In September 1996, China and Kyrgyzstan signed an agreement to establish an extra frontier checkpoint between the Osh district of Kazakhstan and the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang, the area in which the Baren insurrection had taken place in 1990.27 President Askayev at a press conference in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek on July 4th 1997 spoke of the improvement in relations with China but said that there was still much work to do. After the resolution of border issues, which he said had been completed, he looked forward to major communications projects including rail and road links that he saw as the key to economic prosperity for Kyrgyzstan.28 The two countries signed a Treaty for Judicial Assistance on Civil and Criminal Affairs on August 28th 1997, in which each side agreed to recognise the decisions of the other’s courts and to share legal information.29 The prime minister of Kyrgyzstan, Apas Dzhumagulov and several members of his cabinet, visited the key border post of Korla on September 2nd, accompanied by Abdulahat Abdurixit and attended a local trade fair there and visited an economic development area in Urumqi.30 His delegation left China on September 3rd after a formal banquet given by the Xinjiang party secretary Wang Lequan.31 Bilateral relations between China and Kyrgyzstan developed further in April 1998. General Fu Quanyou, PLA Chief of the General Staff received his Kyrgyz opposite number, Major General Essan Toboev, in Beijing on April 8th32 and he met the Chinese Minister of Defence on April 9th.33 Between April 10th and 13th, a meeting of a Sino-Kyrgyz committee on economic and commercial cooperation was held in Bishkek and an agreement signed on joint ventures, border trading posts and many other issues including China’s loan of RMB 100 million to Kyrgyzstan.34 These meetings were precursors to the ﬁve-day visit to China of President Askar Akayev, which began on April 26th. Akayev met President Jiang Zemin the following day and formally repeated his pledge of opposition to separatism and political Islam in Xinjiang.35 The presidents of China and Kyrgyzstan signed a major joint statement on bilateral relations in Beijing on April 27th 1998 of which Clause 11 pledged cooperation against separatism. The statement reinforced the commitment of the two states to the series of agreements signed from 1992 onwards on political and economic cooperation and border demarcation.36 Similar discussions, reinforcing economic and political ties, were held with Kazakhstan in the same month. Chen Xinhua, Deputy Minister of State for Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, led a delegation to Almaty, and, although he emphasised the positive aspects of cooperation, including the

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successful Chinese bid for the Aktyubinsk and Uzen petroleum and gas companies, he drew attention to the fact that there were shortcomings and problems in commercial and economic relations between the two countries.37 The Kazakhstani Prime Minister, Nurlan Balgymbaev, began an ofﬁcial visit to Beijing on May 7th 1998 with a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Zhu Rongji, which was followed by the signing of a bilateral agreement on space, tourism, sport and culture, meetings with Jiang Zemin and Li Peng and visits by Balgymbaev to Jiangsu province and Xinjiang.38 A summit meeting of the political leadership of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan took place in Almaty in early July 1998, the Chinese President Jiang Zemin arriving in the former Kazakh capital on July 3rd to a warm welcome by the Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev. The main focus of the summit was to be regional security and economic cooperation, but from China’s perspective the signing of an additional agreement on border demarcation issues was of particular importance. Tang Guoqing, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry is quoted as saying that the agreement, known as the Second Supplement to the Border Demarcation Agreement signed in April 1994 would ‘comprehensively and thoroughly resolve border issues and . . . [would] be of great signiﬁcance in promoting friendly bilateral ties between the two countries’.39 Kazakh ofﬁcials also emphasised the importance of the agreement, arguing that it had completely resolved all remaining differences on border demarcation between the two governments.40 On August 25th, China and Kazakhstan held a ceremony to mark the agreement on border demarcation and the setting up of the ﬁrst boundary posts at the Alataw pass on the border between the two countries. The Joint Border Survey Commission of the two countries had come to an agreement on a total of 503 boundary markers, 254 on the Kazakhstan side and 248 on the Chinese side along their border of 1,700 kilometres. The two that were formally inaugurated on August 25th were numbers 280 and 281 on the Kazakh and Chinese sides of the border respectively. Ofﬁcials said that the work of border demarcation would be completed by the year 2001.41 The agreement attracted protests from e´migre´ Uyghur supporters of the United National Revolutuionary Front of East Turkestan who claimed that China had no right to sign a border agreement for that area which they were occupying illegally.42

Origins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation The joint statement issued by the ﬁve parties to the Almaty summit meeting is a useful summary of the state of relations between China and her Central Asian neighbours. After the predictable preamble on mutual respect for territorial integrity and bilateral and multilateral cooperation, several speciﬁc points of agreement were reached. Agreements made in Shanghai (April 26th 1996 and Moscow (April 24th 1997) on conﬁdence building in the border regions and mutual reduction of military forces in the region were re-afﬁrmed. The 1996 meeting was retrospectively considered to have be the ﬁrst meeting of the

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Shanghai Five which later became the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the main regional body linking China and its Central Asian neighbours. It was agreed that regular high-level meetings on cooperation and security would be held and there was general support for Kazakhstan’s proposal to establish a Conference on Interaction and Conﬁdence-Building Measures in Asia and for a Central Asian nuclear-free zone. Of particular relevance to the Xinjiang issue was Clause 5 of the statement, which reafﬁrmed a principle raised at all meetings between China and Central Asian states. The parties were unanimous that any form of national ‘splittism’, ethnic exclusion and religious extremism was unacceptable. The parties agreed that they would take steps to ﬁght against international terrorism, organised crime, arms smuggling, the trafﬁcking of drugs and narcotics, and other transnational criminal activities and will not allow their territories to be used for the activities undermining the national sovereignty and social order of any or the ﬁve countries. The remainder of the statement dealt with economic cooperation, the tensions in Afghanistan and the nuclear arms race in South Asia.43 Reports from Hong Kong in 1996 suggested that the Chinese Foreign Ministry had been engaged in talks with the Kazakhstan government, that the Kazakhs had agreed to withdraw some of their territorial claims over parts of Xinjiang and that, in return, ethnic Kazkhs in Xinjiang would be permitted to migrate to Kazakhstan.44 To underline the importance and relevance to Xinjiang of the agreement between China and its Central Asian neighbours, the President of China and Chariman of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin visited the region on his way back to Beijing from the summit conference. He was formally welcomed at Urumqi airport by Wang Lequan, the Secretary of the Xinjiang CCP Committee, Abdulahat Abdurixit, Chairman of the Xinjiang regional government and by ofﬁcers of the Lanzhou Military Region command, which has responsibility for security in the region.45 Between July 5th and 9th he then visited various parts of the region including Aksu, the Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, the Changji Hui area to the north of Urumqi and Turpan. He met farmers and herdsmen of all ethnic groups as well as local government ofﬁcials and members of the PLA, police and the paramilitary People’s Armed Police and reiterated the government’s policy on social stability and its opposition to ‘splittism’.46 Xinjiang Daily on July 10th carried a long article on Jiang’s visit and his emphasis on the need for the application of Marxist nationality policies in Xinjiang. Jiang was accompanied on his visit by, among others, Yu Yongbo a member of the Central Military Commission and Director of the General Political Department of the PLA.47 By the beginning of 1998, a great deal of conﬁdence had developed in relations between China and Kazakhstan and the Kazakhstani ambassador to Beijing, Kuanysh Sultanov, was able to announce to a press conference in the Chinese capital that, in addition to the general improvement of bilateral relations

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and the oil agreement, Kazakhstan was planning to hold a symposium in Hong Kong to attract inward investment. He also announced progress with the construction of the China International Trade Centre in the new capital of Astana and noted that Chinese-language courses were becoming increasingly popular in schools and colleges.48 This can be seen as an important development as in the recent past there had been hostility to the Chinese language and fear of Chinese encroachment on Kazakhstan. Military contacts between Kazakhstan and China continued and in June 1998, it was announced that the Chinese navy was planning to buy torpedoes from Kazakhstan to arm its Kilo class (Varshavyanka) submarines.49 The Shanghai Five nations, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan, held a summit meeting on regional security and cooperation in Almaty from July 3rd 1998. Bilateral talks between the Chinese President (since March), Jiang Zemin and the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia were also scheduled to take place, with the resolution of remaining border issues high on the agenda.50 Jiang left Almaty on July 4th and returned to Beijing via Xinjiang. Before leaving, he described his visit to Kazkahstan as fruitful and was very positive about the future of relations between China and Kazakhstan, particularly since the second supplementary agreement on border issues (following the ﬁrst agreement in April 1994 and the ﬁrst supplementary agreement in July 1996) had also been signed and this resolved all exisiting disagreements over border demarcation. Kazakhstani ofﬁcials were equally positive about their meetings and the importance of the border agreement.51 The formal statement issued by the ﬁve nations after the Almaty summit on July 3rd reinforced decisions taken at earlier meetings, in particular the Shanghai meeting of 1996 and the Moscow agreement of 1997 and agreed to ensure the implementation of agreements on border troop reduction, hold regular bilateral and regional meetings on security and support Kazakhstan’s proposal to hold a major conference on these issues. The statement also agreed to outlaw ethnic exclusion, national separatism and religious extremism and declared war on international terrorism, arms smuggling and drug trafﬁcking.52 The same issues were included in the Sino–Kazakh bilateral agreement with the greatest emphasis placed on separatism and the solution of the border demarcation issues.53 A practical illustration of the growing closeness of China and Kazakhstan came on August 20th 1998 in the wake of renewed separatist violence in northwestern Xinjiang when a delegation of Kazakh border defence troops made a four-day visit to Xinjiang to discuss the separatist threat and the maintenance of order in the cross-border trading posts and to agree on a cooperative strategy.54 In February 1999, Kazakhstan deported three Uyghur refugees from Xinjiang who had requested political asylum from the Kazakhstani government when they crossed the border on August 30th 1998. Uyghurs resident in Kazakhstan, including the President the local Association of Uyghurs, Kaharman Hozhamberdi, protested strongly against this deportation but the men were sent back to China and their fate was unknown.55

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Border agreements made news on Kazakhstan Television Channel 1 broadcasting from the new capital Astana in May 1999, but on this occasion it was rivers rather than land frontiers that were the subject of discussion. The Ili and Irtysh rivers ﬂow across the border of south and southwestern Kazakhstan into China and the May talks were the ﬁrst acknowledged discussions on the use of water from the rivers to assist in the irrigation of Xinjiang.56

Five-nation summit August 1999 Heads of state of the Shanghai Five nations who had been cooperating most closely on Central Asia relations, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Russia and China, held a one-day summit meeting in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek on August 25th 1999. Jiang Zemin spoke about the progess made in regional cooperation since the pioneering 1996 Shanghai meeting and obliquely criticised attempts by the USA to dominate post-Cold War political structures. Since the 1996 Shanghai meeting, the heads of state have also met in Moscow (1997) and Almaty (1998). Jiang put forward a ﬁve-point document on regional security; the struggle against religious extremism, national separatism and international terrorism; economic cooperation; the revival of the Silk Route and to increase the joint role of the ﬁve nations in international affairs. These points were supported by the presidents of the other states, and a joint statement, the Bishkek Declaration, was signed by all the participants.57 The following day, Jiang Zemin met separately with the President of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Akayev to sign the Supplementary Border Agreement between the two countries, which was said to have marked the complete settlement of differences over the border demarcation of more than 1,000 kilometres between the two states.58

Civil war in Tajikistan Tajikistan was the Central Asian country that suffered the most when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. While the Turkic-speaking republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan were able to create stable, albeit authoritarian, regimes to replace the governments of the Soviet republics, Tajikistan in 1992 plunged into a bitter civil war that for a time threatened to engulf the whole of Central Asia. The conﬂict in Tajikistan escalated during July and August 1993 when it was reported that Russian forces assisting the Tajik government had been shelling rebel bases over the Oxus river in Afghanistan in response to cross-border raids. President Yeltsin of Russian and the leaders of the Central Asian states were determined to defend what they regarded as a common southern border in spite of the degree of support that the rebels, mainly members of the Islamic Renaissance Party, appeared to have. Comparisons were inevitably drawn with the USSR’s ten-year intervention in Afghanistan from 1979–1989. The National Front government of Tajikistan, which was composed mainly of former communists, had very weak armed forces and was supported by the Uzbek government, which provided air cover for its military operations.

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Uzbekistan has a large Tajik minority and this accounts for its interest in its neighbour. Troops from Kazakhstan were also present in Tajikistan but the main outside support came from Russian forces. Reinforcements sent after twenty-ﬁve Russian border guards were killed in July 1992 brought the total up to 15,000. Russian forces regard their role as one of maintaining order, providing a forward defence line and preventing the smuggling of drugs and arms into Russia. Essentially this war is about clan and regional rivalries and the government in power in Dushanbe is made up of groups representing the north the [Koljat] region and [Yazhni Kolyar] which is a region in the south and its main opposition comes from its clan and regional rivals in [Herkuli], in [Korgan Tube] which is another region in the south, from Dushanbe itself and from eastern Tajikistan which is controlled by the Pamiri people made up of Ismaili or Shi’a Muslims.59 So the opposition is divided with Islamic factions including Ismailis, Tajik nationalists and democratically inclined liberals. Family and clan factions based in the Leninbad and Khulob regions played key roles in both Soviet and postSoviet Tajikistan, but the main political forces to emerge were the government of President Rakhmonov which was formed in 1992, the Islamic Renaissance Party which was the dominant group in the opposition, the Democratic Party – a banned secular opposition group, and a ‘third force’ around exiled former Prime Minister Abdullajanov. President Yeltsin of the Russian Federation called for the government to hold talks with the opposition as part of his policy to reassert Moscow’s inﬂuence over the former Soviet Union. Afghan sympathy and support for people of a similar cultural background against what they see as a continuation of the regime that invaded their country is a major factor. Tajikistan’s instability is due to poverty, clan rivalry, the slow development of a national identity and the absence of an independence movement.60 The potential for serious conﬂict remains great and the Chinese government and the ex-communist regimes of Central Asia clearly wished to cooperate to control unofﬁcial religious and nationalist organisations, but there was great uncertainty about the political and religious groupings that were emerging in the region.61 The peace process that was launched involved international organisations including the United Nations and its agencies and two regional security bodies, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Organisation of Islamic Conference. A peace-keeping force made up of troops from former Soviet states was established in 1993. Part of the success of the peace process was clearly due to the parallel non-ofﬁcial inter-Tajik dialogue, which began in March 1993 when representatives of the various factions in the civil war met in Moscow. As a result, more positive news about the civil war in Tajikistan emerged in the early part of 1994 with the news that the government of Uzbekistan had called for a regional peace conference to be held in March if possible and was asking the Tajik government to negotiate with the opposition

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and hold new elections under United Nations or similar supervision. The agreement of Turkmenistan to this process suggested that it had a chance of success.62 However reports from Dushanbe in June 1994 suggested that the deaths of Russian soldiers on Tajikistan’s southern border with Afghanistan towards the end of May had increased tension in the country, and that military units which supported the Islamic Renaissance Party had ‘a well-developed communications system and a command structure’ in the mountainous region of Gorno-Badakhshan.63 The war ﬁnally came to an end in 1997 when it became clear that there was no possibility of a military solution to the conﬂict. After talks in Bishkek and Tehran, the opposing parties signed a peace treaty in Moscow. This was the General Agreement on the Establishment of Peace and National Accord in Tajikistan and a new body, the Commission on National Reconciliation was established to oversee its implementation. The peace agreement was comprehensive and dealt with political issues such as the reform of government, elections, political parties and the mass media; military issues including the demobilisation of the opposition’s armed forces; the return and reintegration of refugees; and the implementation of an amnesty for prisoners of war and those convicted of political offences. This agreement has held and Tajikistan is relatively stable today although there have been sporadic outbreaks of political violence including kidnappings and murders.64 China’s Deputy Prime Minister, Qian Qichen visited Tajikistan during a tour of Central Asia in June 1999 and after meeting the Tajik President, Emomali Rahmonov, an agreement was signed to open a temporary trading post between the two countries. President Rahmonov also indicated that a major road linking Tajikistan with China would be completed in spite of serious funding difﬁculties in his country.65

Chinese migration into Central Asia In an ironic echo of the fears of a Han repopulation of Xinjiang, there has been concern in Central Asia that Chinese bilateral agreements with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan on joint ventures and the exchange of delegations have led to a large-scale resettling of Chinese in the Central Asian republics. Many Chinese who originally came to give economic assistance are reported to have stayed on after the expiry of their visas. Some have married local women and acquired property. Figures given by Kazakh newspapers for Chinese immigrants are: Almaty 150,000; Uzbekistan 100,000; Kyrgyzstan 75,000. The Central Asian authorities have not moved to expel the illegal settlers for fear of antagonising the Chinese government, but the degree of concern is apparent in this extract from an article in a leading Kazakh newspaper. Being a major Soviet nuclear testing site, until now our major concern was ecological disaster in Kazakhstan. But now the Chinese settlers in our country have become an even greater problem than ecological disaster. The

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number of the Chinese, those who came to help us out of our economic difﬁculties is growing day by day. They come with a lot of money. They seek out attractive Kazakh women and offer money to marry them. Then they buy houses and land and settle here. In the past, Russians occupied our country using similar methods. Now there are more than six million Russians in Kazakhstan. As most of them do not want to return to their own country we are obliged to live with them now. Are we going to be living with millions of Chinese in the future also? It is true that we have a large territory. Our neighbour Eastern Turkestan had a large territory as well, but today that country is overrun by Chinese settlers. We should also not forget that the Chinese have always had territorial demands of us. It is time that our government take steps to curb the number of Chinese settlers in this country.66 Staff of the Exit, Entry and Border Administration of the Ministry of Public Security have changed their border control procedures and inspections to take into account the increased demand caused by the policy of opening and their priorities appear to have been transformed. Heilongjiang and Xinjiang have been authorised to issue exit certiﬁcates so that students returning from studies in Eastern Europe to visit their families do not have to go to Beijing ﬁrst to get the necessary documentation.67 Kim Georgi, Chairman of the Kazakhstan National Council on State Policy visited China in June 1996 and discussed trade relations and ethnic minority issues with Rong Yiren, PRC Vice-President, and Ismail Amat, head of the State Nationalities Commission. The meeting was a follow-up to Nursultan Nazarbayev’s visit to China in April 1996 when an agreement on cooperation was signed.68 Military cooperation between China and Kazakhstan also developed in this period. General Alibeg Kasymov, Kazakhstan’s defence minister visited Xinjiang in October 1996. He was received by Lieutenant-General Fu Bingyao, commander of the Xinjiang Military District and deputy commander of the Lanzhou Military Region, which has overall command of Chinese troops in Xinjiang. Fu Bingya is quoted as having said that ‘China and the Republic of Kazakhstan are friendly neighbours sharing the same mountains and waters . . .’ Kasymov then went on to Beijing where he was met by China’s Defence Minister Chi Haotian and by Prime Minister Li Peng, who emphasised the importance for the stability of the border region of building conﬁdence between the two armies.69 On December 26th, Nursultan Nazarbayev, President of Kazakhstan issued a decree announcing the ratiﬁcation of the agreement on conﬁdence-building in border areas that had been signed in Shanghai on April 26th by representatives from China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The Kazakhstan authorities attached a great deal of importance to this agreement. Under the treaty, the military forces of the different nations agreed not to attack each other, to inform each other of any major military activities occuring within 100 kilometres of the international boundary line and to invite each other to observe

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military exercises to prevent problems on the borders.70 On December 27th, China and the four former Soviet republics signed an agreement on mutual force reduction in the border region.71 According to the Russian News Agency ITAR-TASS, China’s Minister of Public Security Tao Sijiu met his Kyrgyz opposite number, the Internal Affairs Minister Omurbek Kutuyev in Beijing in November 1996. Cooperation between the security services of the two states was agreed on, in particular joint operations on drugs and arms smuggling.72

Nuclear weapons in Central Asia After the collapse of Soviet power, many people in the West became increasingly concerned about the stockpiles of nuclear weapons remaining in the former Soviet Republics, particularly in Kazakhstan, where nuclear tests were carried out in Semipalatinsk from 1949 to 1990. It is less well known in the West that China was equally concerned about the proximity of weapons to its borders. This concern had existed since the Sino–Soviet dispute of 1960–1969 when border clashes had given rise to the fear of all-out war and even nuclear strikes by one side or the other. This is the background to an extraordinary exchange of messages between Kazakhstan and China in the opening weeks of 1995. The government of the PRC gave an undertaking not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states or nuclear weapon-free zones, indicating clearly that this applied to Kazakhstan although at that time the status of nuclear weapons in Kazakhstan was still unclear. Beijing also reiterated its respect for the independence and territorial integrity of Kazakhstan.73 President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan sent a personal message to the Chinese Prime Minister, Li Peng, thanking him for this pledge on Kazakhstan’s security.74 When China announced a moratorium on nuclear testing from July 30th 1996, President Nazarbayev responded rapidly, welcoming the decision as a major contribution to building a safe and stable world.’75 The nuclear issue was raised again during the ﬁve-nation Central Asian summit in Almaty in July 1998 in the wake of the nuclear tests carried out by India and Pakistan. Jiang Zemin gave the ofﬁcial Chinese response when questioned by reporters during the conference. He said that, China [has] always [stood] for a comprehensive ban and the complete destruction of nuclear weapons and opposes their proliferation in any form. The nuclear tests, either by India or Pakistan, go against world trends. China is deeply worried and uneasy about the sudden rise of regional tensions caused by the nuclear arms race in South Asia. The current tension in South Asia was triggered by India single-handedly.76 Diplomats and nuclear specialists from the countries of Central Asia and the ﬁve declared nuclear powers, together with representatives from the United

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Nations, met in the Kyrgyzstan capital of Bishkek on July 9th 1998 to discuss proposals to make the whole of Cental Asia a nuclear-free zone.77 Reports from Chinese and e´migre´ sources suggest that the main Chinese nuclear test site at Lop Nor 800 kilometres southeast of Urumqi was damaged in the most serious protest ever staged against it in mid-March 1993. One thousand demonstrators demanded the closure of the installation and units of the PLA opened ﬁre to disperse them. Fighting erupted. Some of the protesters broke into the compound and damaged equipment, set ﬁre to military vehicles, including tanks and aircraft, and pulled down a perimeter electric fence. Reinforcements dispersed the demonstration and there are reports of casualties including deaths and hundreds of arrests. Radioactive material and explosives were reportedly stolen.78 Concern about the effects of years of testing atomic weapons has rarely been expressed openly in China, but since the ﬁrst nuclear test in 1967 there have been constant reports of deaths and injuries attributable to the tests. The reports point to increases in cancer, birth defects and deaths and paralysis from undiagnosed illnesses in Kashghar, Hotan, Yarkand and other cities. There are no ofﬁcial Chinese ﬁgures available but the picture is similar to the one uncovered in Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Soviet Union.79

13 Xinjiang and the ‘war against terror’

Many people were surprised at the speed with which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) moved to support the coalition against terrorism led by the United States after the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11th 2001. Relations between China and the USA had been strained for some time: US aircraft had bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and many in China still believe that this was not an accident; Chinese-American scientists had been accused of passing nuclear secrets to China; a US reconnaissance plane had made a forced landing on the island of Hainan after a mid-air crash with a Chinese ﬁghter aircraft; and the thorny issue of American support for Taiwan’s anti-missile defences remained. One reason for China’s enthusiastic espousal of the campaign against terrorism became clear when the Foreign Minister of the PRC, Tang Jiaxuan, claimed in a telephone conversation with his Russian opposite number Igor Ivanov on October 10th that China was also a victim of terrorism by Uyghur separatists in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on its northwestern frontier. At a press brieﬁng in Shanghai on October 19th during the Asia-Paciﬁc Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit, Zhu Bangguo, speaking for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, identiﬁed ‘Eastern Turkestan terrorist forces’ as part of the global terrorist movement that the US-led coalition was ﬁghting against. Foreign Minister Tang alleged on October 21st that Uyghur separatists in Xinjiang had close links with Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda movement and that some militants had been trained in his camps in Afghanistan. Both Tang Jiaxuan and his deputy Li Zhaoxing called on the international community to help China to crack down on the separatist terrorists in Xinjiang. The political stability of Xinjiang and the conﬂict there between Uyghurs, many of whom yearn for an independent state, and the political and military forces of Beijing have preoccupied the PRC government for many years. In a classiﬁed paper, Document Number 7, published by the CCP Politburo in 1996, Xinjiang was identiﬁed as the most serious threat to the stability and territorial integrity of China. In other words it was considered to be more of a problem than either Tibet or Taiwan. Rumours that Uyghur separatist militants have trained in Afghanistan have been circulating for some time. There is some evidence that Beijing itself sent

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Uyghurs to liaise with the mujaheddin during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989, China and the Soviet Union having had a long-running and bitter political dispute since 1960. In October 2000, Russian sources claimed that Uyghurs were being trained in camps in Afghanistan alongside Uzbeks, Tajiks and Chechens but the Taliban authorities rejected these claims. Various ﬁgures have been given for the number of Uyghurs in Afghanistan from 300 to 3,000 but these are impossible to verify. On November 24th, the Xinjiang branch of the Chinese Democratic Party, an illegal opposition party in China, reported that it had been told that 300 mujaheddin from China who had been ﬁghting for Osama Bin Laden had surrendered at the siege of Kunduz and were desperate not to be sent back to China. They were appealing for assistance to get to Turkey via Iran, Pakistan or Central Asia. The scale of repression in Xinjiang since October 2001 is difﬁcult to assess as access to the region is more difﬁcult than usual. Even before October there were reports of illegal, unregistered, mosques being demolished. China News Service on October 10th reported that police in Urumqi had stepped up their antiseparatist activities. Du Jianxi, chief of the city’s Public Security (police) Bureau said that a ‘campaign to clear up cases’ aimed at ‘smashing the bloated pride of violent terrorists’ was under way. Religious leaders at an annual training session were ordered to oppose separatism as part of a new political re-education campaign. Emigre´ sources suggest that over 3,000 Uyghurs have been detained in Xinjiang since the September 11th attacks on the USA. There have also been reports that local authorities have banned fasting during Ramadan and have outlawed the wearing of headscarves by women. Although all the Central Asian societies are Muslim, all are opposed to being governed by Islamists, particularly after the experience of the civil war in Tajikistan. Kazakhstan under Nursultan Nazarbaev has a resolutely secular government and Uzbekistan and, to a lesser extent Kyrgyzstan, have been under threat from Juma Namangani’s Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, so there was a strong incentive for them to ﬁnd common cause in resisting political Islamist or separatist movements.1 Supporters of Uyghur independence were deeply disappointed and frustrated. There has been no legitimate means of expressing separatist views within China since 1949 and once potential support from outside had been neutralised, the temptation to use armed force or terrorist tactics was strengthened. By deﬁning all separatist activity in Xinjiang as terrorist, the government of the PRC is hoping to obtain carte blanche from the international community to take whatever action it sees ﬁt in the region. To date there are no reports of repression any more severe than there has been since the ‘Strike Hard’ campaign began in 1996 but it is likely that in the near future there will be large-scale arrests and administrative detentions and more unregistered mosques and madrasas will be closed down. Over the past twenty years, Beijing has gone to great lengths to demonstrate that China’s Muslim population was being treated properly and allowed religious freedom: this was linked with the development of diplomatic and commercial relations between China and the Middle East and in

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particular Middle Eastern investment in China. While the coalition against the Taliban and Al-Quaeda exists and is supported by some of the more inﬂuential Muslim states, this concern may be less important, but in the longer term China cannot afford to alienate countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia and this is likely to moderate Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang to some extent. In addition to the military and political repression of separatism, China is banking on a major economic development programme to defuse demands for independence. The Western Development Xibu da kaifa initiative has been launched to deal with the enormous disparities in income and standards of living between the rapidly developing east and the poor and underdeveloped west, including Xinjiang. This programme can only succeed if there is substantial foreign investment and Beijing will be conscious that in the long term it will have to demonstrate that it is respecting international conventions on human rights if it is to obtain that investment. Whether the Western Development initiative will in fact have the desired effect, even if it is successful, is debatable. Uyghurs and other non-Han people in Xinjiang claim with some justiﬁcation that they are excluded from new developments and see new employment opportunities going to Han Chinese, many of them brought in from the east. Unless this issue is addressed, the social and economic divide between Han and non-Han will be exacerbated and this will increase rather than decrease ethnic and religious conﬂict.

US military bases in Central Asia: the impact on China After the September 11th 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the Bush administration embarked on an unusual bout of diplomatic activity with the aim of establishing military bases for the ﬁrst time ever in a number of the countries of former Soviet Central Asia. The Central Asian states are situated just to the north of Afghanistan, close to those areas in which the remnants of the Al-Qaeda organisation are believed to have gone to ground. Mounting operations from the north avoids the political difﬁculties associated with basing US military forces inside Pakistan where there is still considerable sympathy for the ousted Taliban and its Al-Qaeda allies among the poorer sections of the rural population. This unprecedented move by the US government and military has profound implications for regional stability in an area where post-Soviet dictatorships and radical Islamist movements seem to be the only political options available to communities searching for national identities and economic stability. In particular, the US presence in Central Asia poses a challenge for China, which has come to regard the region as its own ‘backyard’, and in which it has exerted a considerable inﬂuence in the last decade. China has never had any concrete conﬂict of interest with the USA in Central Asia before and the outcome is difﬁcult to predict. The status of Russia, which was formerly the regional overlord and retained a primus inter pares role among the governments of Central Asia even after they became independent, is also called into question.

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Before September 11th, Central Asia had a very low proﬁle internationally. Under the Russian empire it had been regarded as a remote and inaccessible colonial frontier, considered with some justiﬁcation to be too dangerous for most travellers because of its wild and uncontrollable Muslim tribesmen. During the Soviet period, it was off limits to all but the most trusted foreign observers for strategic and security reasons, and its distance from Moscow and the problems of transport over difﬁcult terrain increased its isolation. Few people outside the region had any knowledge of its peoples, their languages (mostly belonging to the Turkic family) or their Muslim culture. After the October Revolution of 1917, there had been various movements for independence in Central Asia, some on the basis of individual ethnic groups, others hoping to build a broader state based on a common Turkic and Islamic identity. These movements failed and the existing political elites of Central Asia were either eliminated in Stalin’s purges or brought under the control of Moscow in the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics (ASSR) that were created for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. These republics were not genuinely autonomous and, more problematically, were artiﬁcial creations that ignored or overrode the complex ethnic geography of the region. These colonial fabrications are the basis for the independent states of post-1991 Central Asia which are having to deal with the legacy of Russian and Soviet imperial policies. Power in the Central Asian ASSRs was in the hands of local Communist Parties, organisations which were frequently dominated by members of the old political, social and religious elites. However, these local parties were clearly subordinate to Moscow and to the central Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The ofﬁcial policy of the USSR was to eradicate ethnic and religious differences and treat all its citizens equally and for that reason the Kremlin was not enthusiastic about the outside world becoming aware of the very real differences and the complex ethnic identities that had existed in the region that had been known as Turkestan to the Russians who conquered it under the Tsars, differences that remained in Muslim Central Asia in spite of decades of Stalinist nationality policies. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it rapidly became apparent to the outside world that these ethnic identities had not been eradicated (this had, of course, always been clear to those living in the region) and when the states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan were formed out of the ruins of the USSR, the new regimes were created on the basis of ancient social and religious structures and clan loyalties which had remained alive, sometimes underground and always unacknowledged publicly, throughout the centuries of rule from Moscow by the Tsars and the CPSU. Nevertheless, the Central Asian states remained relatively isolated and disinclined to move too swiftly towards Western-style democratisation. Soviet-era attitudes and social structure persisted as did the use of Russian as a lingua franca. There were serious attempts to build closer ties with Turkey which was seen as the senior partner in the Turkic world and which had had relatively little contact with Central Asia during the Soviet period. A growing interest in the

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English language and in Western business practice was developing slowly but before September 2001 any American military presence was completely unthinkable and the long-term impact of the presence of US troops in Central Asia is therefore difﬁcult to assess. During the Cold War the region was under the absolute control of the USSR and even since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has continued to see itself as the major outside power with a legitimate interest in the region: this has been recognised to a certain extent by its inclusion in the Shanghai Cooperative Organisation although a rivalry with China has developed. Central Asian states were initially reluctant to accept the idea of US and allied troops on their territory in the war against the Taliban and it will be interesting to see whether in the long term some limited military contact will remain as a contribution to aiding the resistance of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to the rise of political Islam in the Ferghana valley.

US bases in Kyrgyzstan The ﬁrst deputy interior minister of Kyrgyzstan welcomed the presence of US troops in his country when they were allowed to use Manas airport and suggested that members of the coalition might have a long-term future in Kyrgyzstan ‘if the situation in the region deteriorates.’2 Two hundred US servicemen had arrived at Manas by December 25 and were preparing for a more permanent base in Kyrgyzstan.3 It had been agreed that airﬁeld security would be the joint responsibility of US and Kyrgyz forces with US troops guarding the outer perimeter.4 The Kyrgyz defence and foreign ministers visited the base on January 14 2002.5 A high-level delegation of US senators led by the Democratic leader Thomas Daschle visited Bishkek for discussions on the situation in Afghanistan and the future of US–Kyrgyz relations and inspected US troops stationed at the airﬁeld.6 Although the initial agreement for the US presence was for one year, local commentators thought it was likely to be longer than this.7 The ﬁrst ever programme of US–Kyrgyz joint military exercises, code-named Black Knight, began on February 5th in the Chonkurchak district 30 kilometres outside Bishkek. The US military provided ten instructors, presumably from detachments of special forces. Key units of the Kyrgyz armed forces including ‘special subdivisions of the Kyrgyz Defence Ministry and the National Guard’ and the National Border Service underwent specialist training in counter-terrorist operations and mountain warfare. This included landing in combat zones, surveillance and reconnaissance, ambush tactics and the evacuation of wounded personnel and training was carried out in poor mountain weather conditions. Speciﬁc counter-terrorist training included combat operations in populated areas, dealing with the taking of hostages and techniques for clearing buildings. Although the Kyrgyz armed forces are generally regarded as less well trained and inexperienced compared with their US counterparts, these units included troops with combat experience against armed groups associated with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which had penetrated the Batken region of southern

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Kyrgyzstan in 1999 and 2000. US ofﬁcers were, however, highly critical of the lack of organisation of the Kyrgyz units and their Kyrgyz counterparts felt that they had learned to be more professional as a result of the exercises.8 Public radio in Bishkek announced on February 25th that the ﬁrst stage of the exercises had ended. By the spring of 2002 it was estimated that approximately 1,500 US or coalition troops were based at an airﬁeld outside the Kyrgyzstan capital, Bishkek.9

US presence in Kazakhstan Discussions on the establishment of a US military presence on Kazakhstan also began in January 2002.10 Kazakhstan is less useful as a forward base for operations against Al-Qaeda as it does not share a common frontier with Afghanistan and its military airﬁelds are reported to have deteriorated severely since independence. However it is the largest Central Asian state and is politically stable and the most ‘Westernised’ or at least Russiﬁed of all the Central Asian countries and is not involved in the same kind of conﬂict with radical Islamist movements that affects Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The degree of US military involvement in Kazakhstan remains somewhat shrouded in mystery but The Times reported that a special forces unit of the US army had been training soldiers of the Kazakh Mountain Chasseur battalion in counter-terrorist techniques since February.11Both China and Russia are deeply concerned at what they perceive as this serious threat to their inﬂuence in Central Asia. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the creation of new sovereign states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan changed cross-border relations dramatically. China needed to forge diplomatic relations with the new states, and discussions on long-standing border demarcation issues and troop reduction began almost immediately. The border routes across the mountains were open to trade: informally they opened straight away, ofﬁcially they were authorised from 1992 onwards. Families and communities, which had had little contact for many years, renewed their acquaintance and trade developed at a rapid pace. The new links were not restricted to commerce. Religious connections were also renewed and there were exchanges of political views. Independent Turkic Islamic states were immensely attractive to Uyghurs who looked to them for assistance in their own bid for independence. Initially there appeared to be serious and genuine support from other Turkic states, including Turkey, but as China’s conﬁdence in dealing with its Central Asian neighbours grew, Beijing made it perfectly clear that this support would be treated as unwarranted interference in China’s internal affairs and would not be tolerated. Beijing negotiated with the stick of its overwhelming military superiority and the carrot of lucrative trade and energy deals, and persuaded the Central Asian states that they should curb any political activities by their own Uyghur communities or on behalf of Uyghurs in China. The new Central Asian governments complied readily. They were concerned about the threat to their own stability from

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The changing international context

political Islamist movements (particularly in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan). The demise of communist regimes in Central Asia had led, not to the hoped for democratisation of the region, but to the emergence of authoritarian governments based partly on pre-Soviet clan and regional ties and partly on Soviet political culture. Although there was still distrust of China, they shared many common values.

Part IV

Conclusion

14 Xinjiang in the twenty-ﬁrst century

The fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was celebrated on October 1st 1995 with a series of meetings and seminars, and the construction of a 100-foot high monument to commemorate the arrival of the Peoples Liberation Army and the ‘peaceful liberation’ of Xinjiang in 1949. An eighty-strong delegation of senior political ﬁgures from Beijing, several of them with Xinjiang connections, arrived in Urumqi on September 29th. The delegation was led by Jiang Chunyun who is a Deputy Prime Minister and member of the Politburo. It included Tomur Dawamat, now Vice-Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, but formerly Chairman of the Xinjiang regional government, Ismail Amat, member of the State Council, Vice-Chairman of the Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and Minister of the State Nationalities Affairs Committee and the veteran Seypidin Azizi (Saifuddin) CPPCC National Committee Vice-Chairman and founding titular head of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region government when it was established on October 1st 1955, all three of them Uyghurs. Yu Yongbo, member of the Central Military Commission and member of the General Political Department of the PLA was the other senior member of the delegation, reﬂecting the importance of the military in Xinjiang.1 At the meetings, the accent was, as might be expected, on the positive achievements of Xinjiang, and the cooperation and common purpose of the various ethnic groups was emphasised. A communique´ issued by Xinhua (New China) News Agency also stressed the progress made in the previous forty years and the glowing prospects for Xinjiang’s economic development in view of the new opportunities opened up by the ‘corridor of international trade between China, Europe and Central Asia which passes through Xinjiang’. However, it also pointed out the need for a stable political environment and the strengthening of ‘solidarity among people of all ethnic groups from generation to generation’, identifying ‘hostile forces abroad and separatists at home’ as the main threats to this.2 A second report compiled by journalists from Xinhua and Peoples Daily stressed the key role of the military in ensuring social stability.3 Even at a time of great celebration, Beijing and Urumqi were keeping an eye open for the resurgence of separatism.

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Conclusion

Control over Xinjiang is vitally important to the Chinese government. In addition to Beijing’s insistence that Xinjiang has always been a part of China’s national territory and the implications of this for patriotism and maintaining ‘face’, it is a source of mineral and other natural resources, potentially on a very large scale, over which China must retain control both for domestic economic development and to attract overseas investment. Investment, and the development of commerce, industry and tourism require political stability. Xinjiang is in a highly sensitive border area, susceptible to geopolitical changes in the rest of Central Asia. The majority of the population has a distinctive Muslim religious and ethnic identity with a growing interest in independence. With the increase in cross-border trade, the isolation of Muslims in Xinjiang has come to an end, and closer political and religious connections are being forged with Turkic (and Tajik) Muslims throughout Central Asia. This is reinforcing their religious and ethnic identity and their sense of separateness from the Chinese. Beijing is attempting to control Xinjiang by introducing rapid economic reform, increased military domination and Han immigration. Because reform is increasing contacts with other Muslim communities, the stabilising effect of economic beneﬁts may well be outweighed by an increase in the inﬂuence of political Islamic movements. Both military repression and Han immigration will cause deepening resentment, and, while militarisation of the border regions may prevent separatism from being successful in the short term, it is difﬁcult to see how Beijing can retain control over southern Xinjiang, the Altishahr, and the Ili region indeﬁnitely without brutal repression on a massive scale, especially if the governments of the newly independent Central Asian states become destabilised. In a worst-case scenario, this could lead to an inter-ethnic bloodbath, with Chinese military units held responsible. This would incur international condemnation, particularly from Muslim countries, from which Xinjiang still hopes to attract investment. Much depends on the policy of the government towards the regionalisation of China’s economy. Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou are a powerful economic grouping in south China, and are increasingly independent of Beijing, and if Xinjiang and the other northwestern provinces and regions are given the kind of freedom envisaged by Hu Yaobang and allowed to develop as a semi-autonomous economic unit looking west, unrest on a large scale could be avoided. People’s Daily on July 24th 1996 carried an article by its reporter Chen Feiyu with an Urumqi dateline, detailing increased central government investment in Xinjiang since the beginning of the ninth Five Year Plan in 1996. With a total investment of RMB43billion, this was said to be one of the greatest investment programmes since the establishment of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.4 There are also implications for the political stability of Tibet and for other parts of northwestern China, particularly Gansu and Ningxia, which have large Hui Muslim populations, are similarly underdeveloped, and are also heavily garrisoned. An unstable Xinjiang would alter the uneasy balance in Central Asia

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and, since there are also tensions between China and Mongolia, has disturbing implications for Northeastern Asia as a whole.

Beijing’s response to Uyghur militancy The Chinese Communist Party and its government’s strategy to deal with nationalist, Islamist and separatist movements has been twofold. On the one hand, separatism is to be suppressed ruthlessly. On the other, economic development and investment designed to improve the living conditions of the population of Xinjiang are seen as the long-term answers to the Xinjiang question. First, the fear of and the need to suppress ‘splittism’, as separatism is often called, is a constant theme in the political discourse of Xinjiang. There have been countless statements, speeches and articles attacking separatism in Xinjiang, both in the region itself and centrally, including those associated with Jiang Zemin’s visit in July 1998. Perhaps the clearest expression of the degree of concern felt by the central government is in the classiﬁed Central Committee Document No. 7 of 1996. Within our national borders, illegal religious activities are widespread, sabotaging activities such as the instigation of problematic situations, the breaking and entering of party and government ofﬁces, explosions and terrorism are occurring sporadically. Some of these activities have changed from completely hidden to semi-open activities, even to the extent of challenging the government’s authority . . . If we do not increase our vigilance and strengthen work in every respect, large-scale incidents might suddenly occur and confusion and disruption could break out and affect the stability of Xinjiang and the whole nation.5 Second, to counter the threat of separatism, the central and regional governments are pursuing the economic development of Xinjiang through investment and trade both with Central Asia and other regions of China. Regular trade fairs are held in Urumqi to encourage investment and commerce, particularly with the former Soviet Union and in general most of the border posts opened in the early 1990s still remain in use. The grand plan to develop the whole of China’s western region is a further extension of this policy. While this development does have the effect of creating jobs these jobs are not made available equally. There is considerable anecdotal evidence that the Han in the region easily ﬁnd employment while the Uyghurs and others are marginalised.

Development or separatism? The authorities in Beijing believe that economic development is the complete answer to separatism but there is little evidence to suggest that this is the case. Development and urbanisation are increasing the polarisation between social groups. The gap between the rich and the poor in the cities is growing. There is

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ethnic and cultural conﬂict between Han Chinese and Uyghurs and, perhaps most signiﬁcantly, a growing gap between the cities and the countryside. Separatism is strongest in the rural areas, both in the county towns and the villages away from the garrison cities, such as Kashghar and Yining/Ghulja, which are dominated by Han Chinese. It is especially attractive to the poorest sections of the population in the countryside, and Islam, which is becoming increasingly politicised, is a major conduit for separatist sentiment in a way that is completely different from its role throughout the ﬁrst forty-ﬁve years of the PRC. Given the history of the Chinese Communist Party and the strategy it used to construct a power base in the 1930s and 1940s, it is hardly surprising that they are conscious of, and alarmed at, the threat posed by a build-up of opposition forces in the rural areas. Assessing the degree of support for the separatist organisations and the likely extent and success of their activities is extremely difﬁcult. One of the most intransigent problems in investigating separatist groups is that on the whole, ‘those who know don’t talk and those who talk don’t know’. Nevertheless it is fairly clear that protest and terrorist actions are continuing and are likely to increase. Executions create martyrs and family members replace those killed. Separatist activity in Xinjiang will not go away. It cannot, on its own, succeed in overthrowing Chinese control over Xinjiang. While China is strong and central control is ﬁrm, Beijing will probably be able to keep sufﬁcient troops in the region to keep down its nationalist and Islamist opponents. If China is weakened by economic problems or social disorder on a large scale this may not be the case.

Military control The key to China’s political control over Xinjiang, apart from the long-term economic development strategy, is the military force that China can deploy in the region. In the later years of the Chinese empire there were a number of strategically located garrison towns in Xinjiang, including Dihua, as Urumqi was then known, and this tradition continues under the People’s Republic. The armed forces stationed in Xinjiang are under the command of the Lanzhou Military Region which is based well to the east of Xinjiang in Lanzhou, the administrative capital of Gansu province, in an area in which there is no question of a separatist threat although Gansu does have a sizeable Muslim Hui population. It is interesting that Lanzhou remains the ﬁnal command of the Xinjiang forces in spite of the professed stability of Xinjiang and the reasons for this are not hard to fathom. It may represent a genuine lack of conﬁdence in the security of Xinjiang or just a long-term strategic view of providing a fall-back position should the unthinkable happen and the PLA in Xinjiang ﬁnd itself in an unwinnable situation and be forced to make a strategic withdrawal. The local command of PLA troops on the ground in Xinjiang is based in the northwest of Urumqi in a major military and political complex just off Beijing Road. Yining City, the capital of the troubled Ili region on the border with

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Kazakhstan also has a military complex in the northwest of the town, mostly on Jiefang (Liberation) Street. As has been shown, towns in the Yili region have been at the centre of some of the most serious and violent protests against the Chinese authorities and it is from Yining City that troops are deployed to put down these disturbances. Kashghar in the far southwest of Xinjiang also functions as a garrison town for its region and many buildings there, including schools are called militarycivilian to indicate the cooperative relationship between the PLA and the local population that the Chinese government is keen to foster.

Shanghai Cooperation Organisation As China developed relations with its Central Asian neighbours and Russia following the break-up of the USSR, bilateral meetings on border and trade issues were found to be inadequate to deal with the changing geopolitical environment of East and Central Asia. As political Islam became more powerful in Afghanistan and Tajikistan and posed a threat to the new governments of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, all regional powers perceived a common interest in combating this new force. The ﬁrst meeting of what was to become a major regional grouping took place in Shanghai in 1996 when the foreign ministers of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan met to discuss common concerns. An agenda was constructed around border security, combating insurgent Islamic forces and the smuggling of Islamic literature, weapons and narcotics. The grouping which met regularly became known as the Shanghai Five but was renamed the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in June 2001 when Uzbekistan was admitted, the name change being sufﬁciently ﬂexible to allow for the admission of other members, although Pakistan, the only other state being seriously considered for membership was not permitted to join as there were serious doubts about the government’s relationship with political Islamist groups. Until the autumn of 2001, the SCO appeared to be enjoying a remarkable degree of success, but the deployment of US military units in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan as part of the war on the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan altered the balance of power in the region to such an extent that the inﬂuence of the organisation was signiﬁcantly reduced.

Notes

Preface 1 Kazakhstan has since moved its capital to the north of the country, to the city that was known in Russian as Tselinograd, was renamed Akhmola and is now known as Astana, the Kazakh word (and also one of the words used in Uyghur) for capital city. Although this has visibly loosened the grip of the government on Almaty and allowed a more relaxed atmosphere, many residents of Kazakhstan appear to regard the creation of this new capital as an unnecessary extravagance. 1 Xinjiang’s geographical position 1 Xinjiang Weiwuer Zizhiqu Renmin Zhengfu waishi bangongshi (Foreign Affairs Ofﬁce of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region People’s Government) Xinjiang gailan (Survey of Xinjiang), Urumqi, 1988. 2 Uighur is often pronounced inelegantly as ‘Wigger’ or ‘Wee-ger’ which does not really represent the spoken form in any known language although it is probably a corruption of the Chinese name for the Uyghurs, Weiwuer. 3 The other Autonomous Regions are Tibet (1965), Inner Mongolia and Ningxia Hui (1958), all in the northwest and north of China and Guangxi Zhuang (1958) in the southwest. There are also autonomous prefectures and counties within these regions and in Chinese provinces where there are concentrations of ethnic minority groups. 4 There is no deﬁnite agreement on which six cities comprise the Altishahr. Schwarz (1992) gives Kashghar, Khotan, Yarkand, Yengi Hissar, Uch Turfan and Aqsu. However, sometimes as many as eight are listed. Fletcher (1968) pp. 218, 362–363 has the fullest account of the possible permutations. In Chinese the region is known simply as Nanjiang (Southern Xinjiang). 5 L. Dudley Stamp Asia: A Regional and Economic Geography Methuen, 1966 pp. 583–601; T.R. Tregear China: A Geographical Survey, Hodder and Stoughton, London 1980, pp. 320–327. 6 FE 3317 August 28 1998. 7 FE 2451. 8 FE 2777 November 23 1996, FE 2778, November 23 1996. 9 FE 2824 January 23 1997. 10 FE 2857 March 3 1997, 2858 March 4 1997. 11 FE 2886 April 7 1997. 12 FE 2891 April 11 1997. 13 FE 2922 May 19 1997. 14 FE 3181 March 31 1998. 15 FE 3264 June 27 1998, FE 3292 July 30 1998.

Notes 16 17 18 19 20

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FE 3298 August 6 1998, FE 3318 August 29 1998. Uyghur Information www.uyghurinfo.com December 26 2002. FE 2989 August 5 1997. FE 3184 March 25 1998. FE 3211 April 27 1998.

2 Xinjiang before 1949 1 Barber (1999) is a popular account of the mummies based on ﬁeldwork and documentary research. Mair (1998) is a substantial two-volume collection of conference papers based on presentations at the 1996 Philadelphia Conference on the Bronze and Iron Age peoples of the eastern region of Central Asia and enables the Xinjiang mummies to be seen in historical and geographical context. For a concise introduction to Tocharian, see Adams (1988) pp. 1–6. 2 Menges (1968) pp. 16–18. 3 Mackerras (1972) pp. 1–14; Menges (1968) pp. 24–25. 4 Tekin (1968). 5 Tekin (1968) pp. 9–12. 6 Barthold (1956) p. 11. 7 Mackerras (1972) pp. 12–15; Joseph Schacht and C. E. Bosworth (ed.) The Legacy of Islam, Oxford 1974 pp. 116–130; Twitchett, Denis (ed.) Cambridge History of China, Volume 3 Sui and T’ang China 589–906 Part 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979 pp. 36, 443–444. 8 Barthold (1956) pp. 11–16. 9 Menges pp. 45–46. 10 Dankoff (1983) p. 2. 11 Barthold (1956) p. 99. 12 Schacht and Bosworth op. cit. pp. 122–126; Barthold (1956) p. 20. 13 Janos Eckmann ‘Eastern Turkic Translations of the Qur’an’ Studia Turcica Budapest, 1971. pp. 149–159. 14 Dankoff (1983). 15 Menges pp. 46–47. 16 David Morgan The Mongols. 17 For an account of the complex relationships between China and Central Asia in the Ming and Qing dynasties see Joseph F. Fletcher ‘China and Central Asia 1368–1884’ in John K.Fairbank (ed.) The Chinese World Order, Cambridge: Harvard,1968, pp. 206–224. 18 ibid p. 127. The ulema is the collective name for the body of religious and legal scholars and imams in Islam. 19 Esposito (1998) pp. 118–119. 20 For the history of the migration of the Hui and their settlement in China, see Dillon (1999). 21 Schimmel (1975) p. 167; Sura 33:40; 13:28. 22 Trimingham (1971) pp. 62–64; Schimmel (1975) pp. 363–373 23 Polonskaya and Malashenko (1994) pp. 30–31. 24 Carrere` d’Encausse (1988) pp. 33–35. 25 Bennigsen and Wimbush (1985). 26 Carrere` d’Encausse in Allworth (1994) pp. 167–171. 27 Fletcher (1978) pp. 361–394, Jarring (1937) pp. 5–8, 12–13. 28 Schimmel (1975) p. 364. 29 Fletcher (1995) XI pp. 1–46. 30 On the Hui in general, see Gladney (1991), Lipmann (1997) and Dillon (1999). 31 Ma Tong (1983) p. 107. 32 Mian (1981) pp. 19–21.

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33 Fletcher (1995); Trippner (1961) is based on material collected by the author in Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai in the period 1929–1935. He cites some written sources including local newspapers and provincial and prefectural gazetteers but does not give precise references, especially for the histories of the menhuan, and much of his information appears to come from interviews with local Muslim leaders and is therefore part of the oral tradition on which Ma Tong also draws. 34 Aubin, Franc¸oise ‘En Islam Chinois: quels Naqshbandis?’ in Naqshbandis: Cheminements et situation actuelle d’un ordre mystique musulman, edited by Marc Gaborieau, Alexandre Popovic and Thierry Zarcone Varia Turkica XVIII, Institut Franc¸ais d’E´tudes Anatoliennes d’Istanbul, Istanbul 1990, pp. 515–520, Fletcher (1995). 35 The use of Ishan may be compared with the way pir is used in the Indian sub-continent and indeed in Xinjiang as it also appears in the dictionaries of Uyghur produced by Gunnar Jarring and Henry Schwarz. 36 The Shi’a Ismaili Tajiks of the Pamirs also use the term Ishan for their religious leaders, not surprisingly as Tajik is part of the Persian family of languages. 37 Fletcher (1988) pp. 87–90. 38 Fletcher 1988 pp. 35–39. 39 Fletcher (1988) pp. 60–62. Millward (1998) is by far the most complete study of this since Joseph Fletcher’s chapters in the Cambridge History of China. 40 Fletcher (1988) pp. 54–59. 41 Kokand is in present-day Uzbekistan between the capital Tashkent and the city of Ferghana. 42 Joseph Fletcher ‘The Heyday of the Ch’ing Order in Mongolia, Sinkiang and Tibet’ in Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank (general editors) The Cambridge History of China Volume 10: Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part 1 p. 374. 43 Chu, Wen-djang The Moslem Rebellion in North-West China 1862–1878: a study of government minority policy, Mouton 1966, pp. 163–196. Aspects of the ‘Great Game’ of Russo-British rivalry in southwestern Xinjiang are described in C.P. Skrine and Pamela Nightingale Macartney at Kashghar, OUP 1987. 44 Lattimore Inner Asian Frontiers p. 187. 45 Forbes p. 113. 46 Forbes p. 122. 47 For detailed accounts of this period of Xinjiang’s history, see Andrew D.W. Forbes Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia: a Political History of Republican Sinkiang 1911–1949, Cambridge University Press, 1986 and Linda Benson The Ili Rebellion: the Moslem Challenge to Chinese Authority in Xinjiang 1944–1949, M.E. Sharpe, New York and London, 1990. Fleming (1936) and Maillart (1936) and (1940) are lively ﬁrst-hand accounts of travel in the region during this period. 3 Ethnic groups in northwest China on the eve of CCP control and Uyghur language and culture in twentieth-century Xinjiang 1 Thomas Hoppe Die ethnischen Gruppen Xinjiangs: Kulturunterschiede und interethnische Beziehungen Mitteilunen des Instituts fur Asienkunde, Hamburg 1995. 2 Xinjiang gailan, p. 16. 3 Lattimore Pivot of Asia, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950 pp. 103–110. 4 Figures from the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau quoted in Xinjiang tongji nianjian (Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook) Beijing: China Statistical Publishers, 2001 pp. 108–113. 5 ibid. pp. 108–113. 6 There is no real agreement on whether it is appropriate to use the term Uyghur (Uighur or the French form, Ouigour) at all for either the people or the language of the whole or indeed of any part of Xinjiang, especially before the twentieth century. Robert Barkley Shaw in his Sketch of the Turki Language as spoken in Eastern

Notes

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23

173

Turkestan (Kashghar and Yarkand) published in 1878 quotes one Valikhanoff ‘(the son of a Kirghiz chief in the Russian service, whose name Valı´ Kha´n, with the afﬁxed Russian patronymic ending off, is signiﬁcant of Russia’s progress among those tribes)’ as saying that ‘The language . . . spoken in Ka´shghar is altogether unknown to European savants’. Shaw continues: ‘In the Turkish of Ka´shghar and Yarkand (which some European linguists have called Uighur, a name unknown to the inhabitants of those towns who know their tongue simply as Tu´rki, we can obtain a glimpse backwards [to an early form of Turkish]. The term ‘Uighur’, he concludes, ‘would seem in many case [sic] to be a misnomer as applied to the modern language of Ka´shghar’. However, Shaw in this pioneering grammar, chrestomathy and lexicon of the language is by no means consistent in his own use of the term. In the classic dictionary of Mahmud al-Kashghari Diwan Lughat at-Turk which was published in the eleventh century and was an attempt to record the usage in all the Turkic languages spoken at the time, (Ankara: Alaˆeddin Kiral Basimevi, 1941) the term Uyghur appears as the name of a principality composed of ﬁve cities so it is of considerable antiquity. Its twentieth-century revival may not be unconnected with its similarity to words meaning to arise or reawaken. (Jarring Eastern Turki–English Dialect Dictionary pp. 212, 322). Jarring Uzbek Dialect of Qilich pp. 5–8, 12–13. For standard contemporary Uzbek as a comparison with Uyghur, see Khayrulla Ismatulla Modern Literary Uzbek, Bloomington: Indiana University 1995. Personal observation, September 1992. Personal observation after discussions with members of the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, Urumqi March 1991, September 1992. Personal observation, villages outside Turpan, March 1991. Personal observation, New China bookshop on Jiefanglu, Yining September 1998. See also Dillon Studying Uyghur. Personal observation Urumqi, February1991. FE May 29 1998. FE 2925 May 22 1997. Joanne Smith Changing Uyghur Identities in Xinjiang in the 1990s unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds; Becqeulin (2000) p. 85. Comrie Languages of the Soviet Union pp. 44–45; Hahn Spoken Uyghur pp. 102–104. Colin Mackerras ‘Uygur Performing Arts in Contemporary China’ China Quarterly 101, March 1985, pp. 58–77; Donald MacMillen ‘Xinjiang and Wang Enmao: New Directions in power, policy and integration’ China Quarterly 99 pp. 569–593, September 1984; S. Robert Ramsey The Languages of China, Princeton University Press, 1987 pp. 182–194; Ildiko´ Belle´r-Hann ‘Script changes in Xinjiang’ in Shirin Akiner (ed.) Cultural Change and Continuity in Central Asia, Kegan Paul International, 1991; Personal observation Urumqi, Turpan and Kashghar 1991/2, Urumqi and Yining 1998. Ironically the ‘new script’ would have been more useful for contact with Turkey. Personal observations, Urumqi 1992. For the importance of Uyghur traditional music and dance see Mackerras op. cit. FE 2821 January 20 1997 and personal observation in Urumqi, Turpan, Kashghar and Ghulja. Eastern Turkestan Information Volume 3, Number 2 April 1993. Ruth Cherrington ‘Mosques and Coffee Bars’ China Now No. 142 pp. 16–17. For the complex process of script reforms in the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union and particularly Uzbek and Uyghur, see William Fierman Language Planning and National Development: the Uzbek Experience, Berlin/New York 1991, and Ingebord Baldauf Schriftreform und Schriftwechsel bei den Muslimischen Russland und Sowjettu¨rken (1850–1937) Budapest 1993. BBC World Service News 1500 GMT March 9 1993.

174

Notes

24 Feng Jinyuan pp. 53–59 for general information on mosques in Xinjiang; Liu Zhiping pp. 163–165 on ’Id Gah mosque. 25 ‘Zhonghua renmin gonghegguo tudi gaige fa’ (Land Reform Law of the People’s Republic of China) in Jianguo yilai zhongyao wenxian xuanbian, Collection of important documents since the estabishment of the PRC) Volume 1, Beijing: Central Document Press, 1992 pp. 336–337. 26 Wu Dongyao cited in Wang Jianping ‘Islam in Kashghar in the 1950s’. 27 Jianping Wang ‘Islam in Kashghar in the 1950s’ unpublished paper. I am grateful to Wang Jianping for a copy of this paper and for discussing 1950s Kashghar with me at great length. One of his most important sources for this paper was Wu Dongyao, a cadre in the Kashghar Committee of National Affairs, who wrote articles on Islam in the region based on local archives. 28 Personal observations, Almaty 1994. 29 Konstantin (K.L.) Siroezhkin’s Kazaki v KNR: Ocherki Sotsialno-ekonomicheskovo i kulturnova razvitiya (Kazakhs in the PRC: Studies on Socio-Economic and Cultural Development) (Almaty: National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Kazakhstan 1994), is a good example of this work. In the West, Linda Benson of the USA and Ingvar Svanberg of Sweden are the pre-eminent writers on China’s Kazakhs and their history. Linda Benson’s The Ili Rebellion (New York: M.E.Sharpe, 1990) is one of the few authoritative works on the independence movement in northwestern Xinjiang in the 1940s and Benson and Svanberg also co-edited a volume, The Kazakhs of China: Essays on an Ethnic Minority (Uppsala: 1998) and have produced their deﬁnitive study China’s Last Nomads; The History and Culture of China’s Kazakhs (New York: Sharpe 1998). This section also draws on discussions about cross-border relations between China and Kazakhstan with members of the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences in Almaty in the mid-1990s. 4 The Three Districts Revolution and ‘peaceful liberation’ 1 Xinjiang lishi cidian p. 12; a fuller account appears in Xinjiang jianshi Chapter 9, pp. 335–423. 2 Xinjiang jianshi pp. 351–352 3 Xinjiang jianshi p. 353; Forbes pp. 174–176. 4 Wang (1999) pp. 9–12. 5 Xinjiang lishi cidian p. 13; personal observation September 1998. 6 Lanzhou continues to be important to CCP control over the whole of northwestern China as the headquarters of the Lanzhou Military Region which ultimately commands all PLA units deployed in Xinjiang. 7 Mackerras Chronology pp. 436, 437. 8 Burhan (Shahidi) Xinjiang Wushinian pp. 355–361; Feng Dazhen p. 12. 9 Personal communication, Almaty September 1998. 10 For Chinese policies in the strongly Islamic south of Xinjiang, see Wang Jianping ‘Islam in Kashghar in the 1950s’ (unpublished paper). 11 FE 3055 October 21 1997, quoted in Voice of Eastern Turkestan. 12 Burhan Shahidi, honorary president of the China Islamic Association, died in August 1989. His body was ﬂown from Beijing to Urumqi for burial, accompanied by ofﬁcials of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, the Chinese People’s Political Comsultative Conference and the China Islamic Association. SWB/FE 0551 2/9/1989. The Aksu which is his place of birth has often been confused with the region of Aksu in Xinjiang. 13 Andrew D.W. Forbes Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia: A Political History of Republican Sinkiang 1911–1949, Cambridge University Press, 1986 pp. 215–218; Donald H. McMillen Chinese Communist Power and Policy in Xinjiang 1949–1977, Westview, 1979 and ‘Xinjiang and Wang Enmao: New Directions in

Notes

14 15

16 17

175

power, policy and integration’ China Quarterly 99 pp. 569–593, September 1984; Stanley Toops ‘Recent Uygur Leaders in Xinjiang’ Central Asian Survey, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 77–79, 1992. Wang Zhen died in 1993. For more information on the political leaders of Xinjiang, see Chapter 8. MacMillen (1984) p. 570. Becquellin (2000) pp. 68, 77–80. Although the Xinjiang bingtuan is the best known and longest lasting, there were many others established in the 1950s, in, among other areas, Lanzhou and Inner Mongolia. Most were short-lived and in any event did not survive the Cultural Revolution. McMillen (1984) op. cit.; Yan Ruiding ‘Historical Storm on the Pamirs’ Minzhu Zhongguo, No. 8, February 1992, pp. 22–24 in JPRC-CAR-92-039. Ruan Ming ‘Missed Historic Opportunity Recalled’ Minzhu Zhongguo No. 8, February 1992, pp. 17–18, Paris (translated in JPRC-CAR-92-039).

5 The economy of Xinjiang in the reform and opening era 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

FE 2760 November 4 1996. FE 2681 August 3 1996. Personal observation during tour of factory March 1991. FE 2973 July 17 1997; Becquelin pp. 80–83. FE 1095 June 11 1991, 1097 June 13 1991; FE/W0232 May 22 1992; FE 2911 May 6 1997. FE 2945 June 14 1997, FE 3137 January 29 1998. FE 3460 February 16 1999. FE 3463 February 19 1999. FE/W0225 April 8 1992. Extensive research by author in Turpan, March 1991 and Urumqi and Yining 1998 by which time the quality of wines had not improved signiﬁcantly. Commercial Section, British Embassy ‘Xinjiang Today: The West Opens Up’ China– Britain Trade Review July, 1992 pp. 3–9. Personal observation, March 1991. Soviet technicians had drilled for oil in the 1930s and a small amount was produced. See Forbes (1986) p. 147. Commercial Section, British Embassy ‘Xinjiang Today: The West Opens Up’ China– Britain Trade Review July, 1992 pp. 3–9; ‘Onshore Oil and Gas Seminar’ China– Britain Trade Review October 1992 p. 3. Ofﬁcials of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Corporation, the Tarim Petroleum Prospecting and Exploitation Command Post and the Northwest China Petroleum and Geological Bureau in FE/0628 November 30 1989. China Daily September 3 1992. FE/1207 October 19 1991. Xinjiang Television February 5 1993 in FE/1608 February 9 1993. FE/1618 February 20 1993. Information from oil industry specialists who prefer to remain anonymous. Karamay Supplement China Daily September 18 1998; World Oil magazine cited in Turkestan Bulletin (Internet edition September 1998). Renmin ribao December 25 2002. IHT June 6 1997. FE 2686 August 9 1996. FE 3192 April 3 1998. FE 1552 December 1 1992. FE W0239 July 15 1992,W0215 January 29 1992, W0226 April 15 1992. FE 2679 August 1 1996. China Xinjiang Airlines timetable and route map, Urumqi, September 14 1998.

176 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Notes

Urumqi airport, September 16 1998. Flight International March 31–April 6 1996 p. 108. FEW0249 September 23 1992. FE 2429 October 9 1995. China Today September 1991 pp. 27–29. FE W0238 July 8 1992. Earlier reports spoke of a passenger service operating from February 1992 FE W0221 March 11 1992. FE 2429 October 9 1992. FE 3433 January 15 1999. Becqellin (2000) p. 68. Beijing Review August 3–9 1992 p. 8; SWB/FE/W0241 29/7/92. FEW0246 September 2 1992. Eastern Turkestan Information, Vol. 2, No. 3, June 1992; SWB/FE/W0236 24/6/92. FE 2879 February 2 1997. FE 2688 August 12 1992. FE 3594 July 23 1999, FE 3625 August 28. Commercial Section, British Embassy ‘Xinjiang Today: The West Opens Up’ ChinaBritain Trade Review July, 1992 pp. 3–9. China Daily September 9 1992, September 21 1992. FE 2429 October 9 1995. Eastern Turkestan Information, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 1991. Personal observations March 1991, September 1992, September 1998. FE 1622 February 25 1993. FE 3553 June 5 1999. FE 1686 May 12 1993. Beijing Review March 9–15, August 24–30, 1992. FE W0248 September 16 1992. Xinjiang Television October 17 1991 in FE 1208 October 21 1991. In the early 1990s, there was a strong preference in Xinjiang bazaars for goods from the Muslim states of the former Soviet Union and Pakistan over Chinese goods, not only in the markets of border cities like Kashghar, but even the regional capital Urumqi. Michael Dillon ‘Sinology in Mongolia’, Bulletin of the British Association for Chinese Studies, 1991, pp. 71–74. FE W0247 September 9 1992. Yu Zhengui and Zhang Yongqing (ed.) Da Xibei duiwai kaifang de xin silu (New Thinking on Opening the Great Northwest to the World) Yinchuan, 1989. China Daily September 25 1992. China Quarterly 131, September 1992, ‘Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation’ p. 848 citing Ta Kung Pao Hong Kong. Xinjiang Ribao September 4 1992, China Daily September 7 1992. Xinjiang Ribao September 4 1992, FE 1480 September 8 1992. Karin Malmstro¨m ‘Travellers Tales’ Far Eastern Economic Review December 10, 1992, p. 30; personal observations, Kashghar, September 1992. China Daily September 12 1992; China Daily Business Weekly January 10–16 1993. China Daily September 25 1992. FE 2872 March 20 1997. China Daily September 12 1992. Xinjiang Ribao September 11 1992. Xinjiang Ribao September 4 1992, Xinjiang Junken Bao (Xinjiang Army Land Reclamation News) September 7 1992. Zhongguo tongxun she, (China News Agency) cited in FE 1506 October 8 1992. FE 1284 January 22 1992.

Notes 72 73 74 75

177

Xinhua News Agency in FE 1516 October 20 1992. FE 2706 September 2 1997. FE 2809 January 6 1997. FE 2835 February 5 1997.

6 Political and religious opposition to Han Chinese control (1949–1996) 1 Until the late 1990s, there were very few reports of clandestine political opposition in the Chinese media and most information came either from e´migre´ supporters or by inference from statements of Chinese policy on the suppression of this opposition. The only exception to this is the reporting of trials of separatists, portrayed as criminals, often in great detail in the Xinjiang press and on Urumqi television. Western journalists, particularly those accredited to Beijing, have found it extremely difﬁcult to get permission to visit Xinjiang. 2 Seypidin Aziz (Saifuddin), quoted in FE 0214 July 27 1988. 3 Xinjiang Ribao June 3 1991, June 7 1991, June 14 1991 in JPRS-CAR-91-04; July 21 1991 in JPRS-CAR-91-049; Xinjiang Television, Urumqi February 1 1991 in FE 0988; FE 1100. The Uyghurs was serialised in the Uyghur language paper Uygur Avazi (Uyghur Voice), published in Almaty in Kazakstan in 1991, Eastern Turkestan Information Vol. 1, No. 2, July 1991. Rudelson pp. 157–159 discusses the impact of Turghun Almas’s work on Uyghurs, especially in Turpan. 4 Xu Yuqi pp. 114–116. 5 Xu Yuqi pp. 117–119. 6 Amnesty International People’s Republic of China Secret Violence: Human Rights Violations in Xinjiang London 1992. On the persistence of pan-Turkist sentiments in Turkey and their revival in the 1960s and 1970s, see Jacob M. Landau Pan-Turkism in Turkey: a Study in Irredentism, Hurst & Co, London 1981, and being reissued a new edition in 1994. 7 Eastern Turkestan Information Vol. 2, No. 5, October 1992. 8 Mehmet Emin Hezret writing in Zaman (Time) May 30 1992, cited in Eastern Turkestan Information, Vol. 2, No. 3, June 1992. 9 Forbes pp. 247–248 and passim. 10 Xu Yuqi pp. 72–74. 11 Xu Yuqi pp. 75–76. 12 Zhang Yuxi pp. 333–334. Ishan is simply the third person plural personal pronoun, ‘they’, in the Persian language, but in Xinjiang it has come to acquire the special meaning of a Suﬁ devotee. 13 Zhang Yuxi pp. 333–334. 14 Xu Yuqi’s Xinjiang fandui minzu fenliezhuyi douzheng shihua (History of the Struggle against Ethnic Separatism in Xinjiang) which was published by Xinjiang Peoples Press in Urumqi in 1999 pp. 77–93. 15 Zhang Yuxi pp. 334–336. 16 Heidaye is derived from the name used by Uyghurs for the Han Chinese before 1950 – Khitay (see Jarring 1964 p. 130). This is also the word from which the old English name for China, Cathay, and the current Russian name, Kitai were taken. After 1950, the ofﬁcial press and literature adopted the more neutral term Hanzu. Heidaye is highly pejorative and nowadays used with strong political and nationalist overtones by Uyghurs to express anger towards the Chinese who consider it insulting (the use of the term Yanqui in South America is perhaps parallel). In Chinese characters, the word Khitay can be transcribed as either Hei dayi (black robe, or overcoat in the modern idiom) or Hei daye (black master or uncle) both in everyday usage and ofﬁcial Chinese documents. It may also be related to the Mongolian word for China, Hyatad. 17 Zhang Yuxi pp. 334–336.

178

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18 Zhang Yuxi pp. 336–338; Xu Yuqi pp. 94–101. 19 Young city people ‘transferred downwards’ xiafang to the countryside in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the programme to bring the Cultural Revolution under control and deal with surplus urban labour. 20 He Pin ‘Why Do Rebellions Occur So Frequently in Xinjiang?’ Nanbeiji, Hong Kong in JPRS-CAR-92-011. 21 Xu Yuqi pp. 102–106. 22 Xu Yuqi pp. 106–110. 23 Xu Yuqi pp. 110–113; Becquelin (2000) p. 66. 24 He Pin ‘Why Do Rebellions Occur So Frequently in Xinjiang?’ Nanbeiji, Hong Kong November 18, December 18, 1991, JPRS-CAR-92-011. 25 FE 0347 December 31 1988. 26 FE 0462 May 22 1989. 27 FE 0491 June 22 1989. 28 Xinjiang Radio July 1 1989 in FE 0509 July 15 1989. 29 Urumqi radio in FE 0520 July 28 1989. 30 FE 0550 September 1 1989. 31 FE 0713 March 15 1990. 32 FE 0728 April 2 1990. 33 Jihad is almost always translated in the west as ‘holy war’. However, in Islam, a jihad is also a struggle against unbelief, which can be at a personal level as well as, at its most serious, a holy war or crusade. 34 Islamic warriors in a jihad, from which the word is derived. 35 FE 0745, 0746, 0747, 0748, 0749, 0751, 0753, 0763, all April 1990; Simon Long The Guardian May 10, 1990. Uyghur documents are cited from an English translation of the Chinese broadcast: the originals are not available. 36 He Pin ‘Why Do Rebellions Occur So Frequently in Xinjiang?’ Nanbeiji, Hong Kong November 18, December 18, 1991, in JPRS-CAR-92-011. 37 Zhang Yuxi pp. 338–341; Xu Yuqi pp. 129–131. 38 Xu Yuqi p. 131. 39 Xu Yuqi p. 132. 40 Xu Yuqi pp. 132–133. 41 Xu Yuqi pp. 134–136. 42 FE 0830 July 31 1990. 43 FE 0831 August 1 1990. 44 FE 0842 August 14 1990. 45 FE 0832 August 2 1990, FE 0873 September 19 1990. 46 Zhengming July 1 1991 in FE 1114 July 3 1991. 47 The hajj is one of the ﬁve Pillars of Islam and is a pilgrimage to Mecca undertaken during the Month of Pilgrimage, the last month of the Muslim calendar, which every Muslim is obliged to make once in a lifetime if health and ﬁnance permit. FE 0294 October 28 1988. 48 Linda Benson ‘Uygur Politicians of the 1940s’ Central Asian Survey Vol. 10, No. 4, 1991, pp. 91–93; report by Hugh Pope Independent 21 April 1990. 49 Zhengming, Hong Kong, cited in FE 1581 January 1993. 50 Gao Chaoming ‘National Splittism is the main danger in Xinjiang’ Xinjiang Ribao, cited in FE 0928 November 22 1990. 51 Eastern Turkestan Information Vol. 1, No. 2, September 1991. 52 Yengi Hayat (New Life) Almaty November 5 1991, cited in Eastern Turkestan Vol. 1, No. 4, November 1991. 53 Eastern Turkestan Information Vol. 2, No. 2, March 1992, Vol. 2, No. 5, October 1992. 54 Interviews with staff of Institute of Oriental Studies and Institute of Uyghur Studies, Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences, Almaty, September 1994.

Notes

179

55 Catherine Sampson ‘Bombers Raise Chinese Fears’ The Times February 22, 1992; Carrie Gracie The Guardian March 9, 1992. Eastern Turkestan Information Vol. 2, No. 4, August 1992. 56 For an account of the leadership of the Front in Almaty, see Andrew Higgins ‘Tremors in the Chinese Empire’ Independent on Sunday April 19, 1992. Uyghur organisations associated with Isa Yusuf Alptekin have condemned the bombings and have even suggested that they were a Chinese provocation to justify further repression, Eastern Turkestan Information Vol. 2, No. 2, March 1992. 57 FE 1724 citing Kyodo news agency. 58 Eastern Turkistan Dispatch (European Edition) October 1993 Vol. 1, No. 4, page 4. 59 Eastern Turkistan Dispatch November 1993, Vol. 1, No. 5, pp. 1–3, citing in part Der Spiegel September 13 1993. 60 Xinjiang ribao May 31 1995 in FE 2330 June 15 1995. 61 In Chinese, Yili, (Ili in Russian), the name of the river that runs through the area and out into Kazakhstan is used of the region in general, while the main city and garrison town is called Yining in Chinese and Ghulja in Uyghur and Kazakh. 62 Dongxiang (Trend) Hong Kong No. 118, 15 June 1995, pp. 13–14, in FE 2336, June 22 1995. An Uyghur scholar who would normally have had access to classiﬁed information about such unrest had heard nothing by August 1995 (personal communication), but the degree of detail in the report made it highly plausible even at that early date. 63 Amnesty International (1999). 64 Xu Yuqi pp. 152–154. 65 Eastern Turkestan Information Vol. 2, No. 3, June 1992. 66 FE 0245 September 1 1988. 67 FE 0873 September 19 1990. 7 Beijing’s response to opposition in Xinjiang (1980–1995) 1 Donald H. McMillen ‘Xinjiang and Wang Enmao: New Directions in Power, Policy and Integration’ China Quarterly 99, September 1984 pp. 569–593. 2 SWB/FE/0628 November 30 1989. The main functions of the Corps are strikingly similar to the military settlers sent to the border regions by the Ming government in the sixteenth century. 3 Personal observation September 1998. 4 FE 2451 November 3 1995. 5 FE 2430 October 10 1995. 6 FE 0797 June 22 1990. 7 FE 0628 November 30 1989. 8 FE 0703 March 3 1990. 9 FE 0779 June 1 1990. 10 Commentary on Xinjiang TV June 4 1990 in FE 0785 June 8 1990. 11 FE 0842 August 14 1990, FE 0859 September 3 1990. 12 FE 0770 May 22 1990. 13 FE 0784 June 7 1990. 14 The Guardian May 25, 1990. 15 FE 0905 October 26 1990, FE 0908 October 30 1990. 16 FE 0954 December 22 1990 citing Xinjiang Ribao. 17 FE 0929 November 23 1990. 18 FE 0929 November 23 1990. 19 FE 0934 November 29 1990. 20 Xinjiang Television in FE 1045 April 13 1991. 21 FE 0596 October 25 1989. 22 FE 0604 November 3 1989.

180

Notes

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

FE 0782, 0800, 0814 June 1990. Xinjiang Ribao in FE 1154 August 19 1991. FE 1271 January 7 1992. Eastern Turkistan Dispatch November 1993, Vol. 1, No. 5, p. 3. FE 0623 November 25 1989. FE 0786 June 9 1990. FE 0626 November 29 1989. FE 0620 November 22 1989, FE 0634 December 8 1989. FE 1601 February 1 1992. FE 2203 January 17 1995. JPRS-CAR-92-011 March 6 1992. See Harry Hongda Wu Laogai: the Chinese Gulag, Westview, 1992. Guangming Ribao April 1 1992 in FE 1371 May 4 1992. China Daily December 5 1992, Zhonggu tongxun she (China News Agency), cited in FE 1558, December 8 1992. Various ﬁgures for the number to be resettled have been quoted including half a million and one million, but the China Daily ﬁgure is 100,000. 37 Uli Schmetzer ‘Chinese drop plan to resettle half a million’ Chicago Tribune December 211992, FE 1570 December 22 1992, FE 1569 December 21 1992. 38 FE 2975 May 22 1997. 8 Political leadership in Xinjiang during the People’s Republic 1 Klein and Clark pp. 892–893; Bartke (1990) p. 230. 2 Liang Ming ‘Jiefangjun jinjun nanjiang shimo’ (The complete account of the advance of the Liberation Army into Southern Xinjiang) Kashi wenshi ziliao 1 pp. 87–91. 3 Klein and Clark pp. 892–893. 4 Burhan 1986 p. 1. 5 Klein and Clark pp. 5–9. 6 Klein and Clark pp. 742–747; Bartke p. 181. 7 Stanley Toops ‘Recent Uygur leaders in Xinjiang’ Central Asian Survey Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 77–99, 1992. 8 FE 3160 February 25 1998. 9 FE 1601 February 1 1993. 10 FE 1609 February 10 1993 from Xinjiang Ribao January 19 1993. Xinjiang Ribao January 21 1993 reported the election of Yang Maoquan on January 20. 11 Xinjiang television, Urumqi, December 7 1993, FE 1867. 12 Xinjiang television December 9 1993 in FE 1871. See also FE 1890 January 8 1994 and Liu Jen-Kai ‘Data on Changes in PRC Main Leadership’ China Actuell December 1993 p. 1214. A Xinjiang News broadcast on Xinjiang television on January 26 1994 still referred to Tomur Dawamat as Deputy Secretary of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Party Committee in its report on a speech he had made on stability in Xinjiang. FE 1912 February 3 1994. 13 FE 3156 February 20 1998. 14 FE 3170 March 9 1998. 15 FE 3176 March 16 1998. 16 FE 3176 March 16 1998, FE 3178 March 18 1998. 9 ‘Strike Hard’ 1 ‘Dang zhongyang zhishi quanguo xunsu zuzhi kaizhan yanli daji yanzhong xingshi fanzui huodong gonganbu zhaokai gongzuohui zuochu juti buzhi’, Xinhua news agency in Renmin Ribao April 29 1996, reprinted in Xinhua yuebao Vol. 5, 1996, pp. 5–6. 2 Xinjiang Television Urumqi in FE 2604 May 6 1996.

Notes 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

181

Xinjiang Television Urumqi in FE 2607 May 9 1996. Xinjiang Ribao April 17 1996 in FE 2610. Xinjiang Ribao June 6 1996 in FE 2631. FE/2614 May 17 1996. FE/2618 May 22 1996. FE 2628 June 3 1996 citing Xinjiang Ribao May 15 1996. Xinjiang Television Urumqi, FE 2623 May 28 1996. FE 2631 June 6 1996. FE 2683. WUNN 25/6/96. FE 2626 May 31 1996, citing Hong Kong newspapers. FE 2628 June 2 1996, FE 2667 July 18 1996. FE 2823 January 22 1997. Xu Yuqi pp. 168–171. Urumqi Radio June 22 1996,Voice of Eastern Turkestan, via WUNN. FE 2641 June 18 1996. WUNN July 16 1996. WUNN July 13 1996. WUNN June 16 1996. FE 2628 June 3 1996 FE 2631 June 6 1996 FE 2635 June 11 1996 FE 2681 August 3 1996, FE 2696 August 14 1996. FE 2664 July 15 1996. FE/2635 June 11 1996. Xinjiang Ribao in FE 2642 June 18 1996. FE 2639 June 15 1996. FE 2632 June 7 1996. WUNN July 18 1996. FE 2700 August 26 1996. FE 2206 September 2 1996. FE 2713 September 10 1996. FE 2748 October 21 1996. FE 2737 October 8 1996. FE 2816 January 14 1997. FE 2816 January 14 1997. Divine land, shenzhou is a common name for China used in newspapers and magazines but is rarely translated into English as anything but China. FE 2837 February 7 1997. FE 2637 May 27 1996. FE 2640 June 17 1996. FE 2739 October 10 1996. FE 2806 January 1 1997. FE 2759 November 2 1996. FE 2816 January 14 1997, FE 2818 January 16 1997, FE 2833 February 3 1997. FE 2833 February 3 1997. FE 2825 January 24 1997. FE 2822 January 21 1997. Xu Yuqi p. 177. FE 2814 January 11 1997. Xinjiang Television broadcast in Chinese from Urumqi, FE 2825 January 24 1997. FE 2841 February 12 1997. FE 2840 February 11 1997. FE 2841 February 12 1997.

182

Notes

56 It is not possible to corroborate this evidence but it is quoted here in an edited version as it is both graphic and convincing. 57 Eastern Turkestan Information Centre March 18 1997. 58 FE 2846 February 18 1997. 59 FE 2909 May 3 1997. 60 AFP July 28 1997 via WUNN; Xinjiang Television July 23 1997. 61 FE 2846 February 18 1997. 62 FE 2847 February 19 1997. 63 Xu Yuqi pp. 177–178. 64 Xu Yuqi p. 178. 65 Xu Yuqi pp. 178–179. 66 Xu Yuqi pp. 179–180. 67 Xu Yuqi pp. 180–182. 68 Xu Yuqi pp. 183–184. 69 WUNN August 19 1997. 70 FE 2854 February 27 1997. 71 FE 2855 February 28 1997. 72 Kyodo in FE 2909 May 3 1997. 73 FE 2855 February 28 1997. 74 FE 2858 March 3 1997. 75 FE 2856 March 4 1997. 76 FE 2858 March 4 1997. 77 FE 2858 March 4 1997. 78 FE 2858 March 4 1997. 79 FE 2858 March 4 1997. 80 FE 2860 March 6 1997. 81 FE 2860 March 6 1997. 82 FE 2862 March 8 1997. 83 FE 2863 March 10 1997. 84 FE 2864 March 11 1997. 85 FE 2864 March 11 1997. 86 FE 2870 March 18 1997. 87 FE 2870 March 18 1997. 88 FE 2869 March 17 1997. 89 FE 2869 March 17 1997. 90 FE 2875 March 24 1997. 91 FE 2877 March 26 1997. 92 Xinjiang Ribao in FE 2882 April 1 1997. 93 Xinjiang Television April 5 1997, FE 2887 April 8 1997. 94 FE 2893 April 15 1997. 95 FE 2898 April 21 1997. 96 FE 2902 April 25 1997. 97 Xinjiang ribao April 4 1997 in FE 2898 April 21 1997. 98 FE 2899 April 22 1997. 99 Xinjiang television April 25 1997 in FE April 28 1997, Xijiang Ribao in FE 2915 March 3 1997. 100 FE 2906 April 30 1997. 101 Xinjiang Television Urumqi April 29 1997 in FE 2909 May 3 1997. 102 Xinjiang Television April 30 1997 in FE 2909 May 3 1997. 103 FE 2915 March 10 1997. 104 FE 2916 May 12 1997. 105 FE 2920 May 16 1997. 106 Xinjiang Television March 15 1997 in FE 2923 May 20 1997. 107 FE 2951 June 21 1997.

Notes 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122

183

Xinjiang ribaoMay 15 1997 in FE 2957 June 28 1997. Xinjiang ribao June 21 1997 in FE 2964 July 7 1997. Xinjiang television May 29 1997 in FE 2934 June 2 1997. FE 2955 June 26 1997. FE 2967 July 10 1997. FE 2970 July 14 1997. FE 2987 August 2 1997. FE 3029 September 9 1997. FE 2980 July 25 1997. This created a sizeable and inﬂuential class of people living in and loyal to a Xinjiang under CCP control, the equivalent of the pieds noirs in Algeria. August 7, in FE 3008 August 27 1997. WUNN August 19 1997. AFP via WUNN August 21 1997. Xinjiang Television August 16 1997 in FE 30002 August 20 1997. Xinbao Hong Kong July 15 1998 in FE/3281 July 17 1998.

10 Underground ﬁres 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

FE 2917 May 13 1997. FE 3011 August 30. FE 3015 September 4 1997. FE 3044 October 10 1997. FE 3048 October 13 1997. Dongxiang, Hong Kong in FE 3060 October 27 1997. FE 3064 October 31 1997. FE 3064 October 31 1997. FE 3055 October 21 1997. Much larger than the ofﬁcial ﬁgure but one often quoted by e´migre´s who accuse the Chinese authorities of deliberately underestimating the number of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. ‘Shanghai agreements’ was the name given to the negotiations between China and its Central Asian neighbours beginning with the meeting in Shanghai in 1996. For more detailed information on this, see Chapter 12. FE 3069 November 6 1997. FE 3082 November 21 1997. FE 3090 December 1 1997. Xinjiang Daily November 26 in FE 3095 December 6 1997. FE 3124 January 14 1998. FE 3124 January 14 1998. FE 3134 January 26 1998. FE 3137 January 29 1998. FE 3144 February 6 1998. Voice of Eastern Turkestan February 12 1998 in FE 3153 February 17 1998. Voice of Eastern Turkestan February 18 1998 in FE 3156 February 20 1998. FE 3153 February 17 1998. Xinjiang Daily February 6 1998 in FE 3160 February 25 1998. FE 3163 February 28 1998; FE 3170 March 9 1998. Executions in China are not normally carried out in public. There is often a public rally at which the sentences are read out and the executions carried out at an execution ground outside the town afterwards. FE 3142 February 4 1998. FE 3148 February 11 1998. Xinjiang Daily January 24 1998 in FE 3157 February 21 1998. FE 3152 February 16 1998, FE 3153 February 17 1998.

184

Notes

31 FE 3175 March 14 1998. 32 Pingguo (Apple) Daily Hong Kong March 6 1998 in FE 3170 March 9 1998. 33 This was later conﬁrmed by the Wuhan Public Security Bureau when they announced on May 24 that they had arrested three Han Chinese suspects and that the bombing was connected with a dispute at the Wuchang branch of the Bank of China, FE 3236 May 26 1998. 34 FE 3176 March 16 1998. 35 FE 3187 March 28 1998. 36 FE 3193 April 4 1998. 37 FE 3196 April 8 1998. 38 FE 3195 April 7 1998. 39 FE 3207 April 22 1998. 40 Voice of Eastern Turkestan April 20 1998 in FE 3207 April 22 1998. 41 FE 3219 May 6 1998. 42 FE 3223 May 11 1998. 43 FE 3227 May 15 1998. 44 FE 3236 May 26 1998. 45 FE 3239 May 29 1998. 46 FE 3248 June 9 1998. 47 FE 3252 June 13 1998. 48 FE 3281 July 17 1998. 49 FE 3257 June 19 1998. 50 FE 3257 June 19 1998. 51 FE 3258 June 20 1998. 52 Xinjiang People’s Broadcasting Station, Urumqi in FE 3260 June 23 1998. 53 FE 3262 June 25 1998. 54 FE 3264 June 27 1998. 55 Xin Pao Hong Kong in FE 3281 July 17 1998. 56 FE 3321 September 2 1998. 57 FE 3302 August 11 1998. 58 FE 3307 August 17 1998. 59 Ming Pao August 16 1998 in FE 3309 August 19 1998. 60 FE 3311 August 21 1998. 61 FE 3315 August 26 1998. 62 FE 3323 September 4 1998. 63 FE 3322 September 3 1998, FE 3323 September 4 1998. 64 FE 3330 September 12 1998. 65 FE 3339 September 23 1998. 66 FE 3354 October 10 1998. 67 FE 3372 October 31 1998. 68 FE 3449 February 3 1999, FE 3450 February 4 1999. 69 FE 3331 September 14 1998. 70 FE 3319 August 31 1998; see also Becquelin (2000 pp. 79–80). 71 I was also detained by the police, questioned and escorted out of a bazaar in the northwest of the city (quite close to the garrison area) for taking quite innocuous photographs of market stalls, the ﬁrst time this has happened to me in ﬁfteen years of photography in China. 72 Personal communication (slightly edited) from eye-witness October 13 1998. 73 FE 3395 November 27 1998. 74 FE 3420 December 30 1998. 75 FE 3430 January 12 1999. 76 FE 3437 January 20 1999. 77 AFP cited in RFE/RL Watchlist (AWeekly Checklist Of Events Affecting Civil Societies In Eastern Europe And The Post-Soviet States) Vol. 1, No. 46, 16 December 1999.

Notes 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

FE FE FE FE FE FE FE FE FE FE FE FE FE FE FE

3428 3433 3429 3462 3466 3472 3471 3488 3570 3590 3553 3500 3553 3540 3604

185

January 9 1999. January 15 1999. January 11 1999. February 18 1999. February 23 1999. March 2 1999. March 1 1999. March 20 1999. June 25 1999. July 19 1999. June 5 1999. April 6 1999, FE 3551 June 3 1999. June 5 1999. May 21 1999. August 4 1999.

11 New great games in Central Asia 1 Eastern Turkestan Information Vol. 1, No. 4, November 1991. 2 Eastern Turkestan Information Vol. 2, No. 2, March 1992. Allowance has to be made for the rhetoric in e´migre´ publications. 3 Eastern Turkestan Information, Munich, December 1992. 4 Renmin Ribao (Peoples’s Daily), November 17 1992, cited in Eastern Turkestan Information. The edition of Renmin Ribao of that date circulated within China does not contain such an article, but it is possible that it appeared in the overseas edition which has not been available for consultation. 5 Nicole and Hugh Pope Turkey Unveiled: Ataturk and After p. 284. 6 FE 1666 April 19 1993. 7 FE 2765 November 9 1996. 8 FE 2802 December 23 1996. 9 Pope 1997 pp. 284–290. 10 Xinhua News Agency in FE 3248 June 9 1998. 11 FE 3248 June 9 1998. 12 FE 3455 February 10 1999. 13 FE 3502 April 7 1999, FE 3503 April 9 1999. 14 FE 1225 November 9 1991. 15 FE 1237 November 23 1993. 16 FE 1257 December17 1991, FE 1260 December 20 1991. 17 FE 1355 April 14 1992. 18 Far Eastern Economic Review December 3 1992. 19 FE 1523, 1530, cited in China Quarterly 133 March 1993, p. 205. 20 FE 1605 April 5 1993. 21 China Daily September 11 1992, FE 1484 September 12 1992, FE 1486 September 15 1992, FE 1483 September 11 1992, FE 1484 September 12 1992. 22 Eastern Turkestan Information Vol. 2, No. 5, October 1992; China Daily September 10 1992. 23 Personal observation, Kashghar, September 11, 1992. There were no reports in the Chinese media of Rafsanjani’s Kashghar visit although his discussions in Beijing and Urumqi were fully reported in the press and on television in the Chinese and Uyghur language programmes of Xinjiang Television (personal observation). 24 Independent August 25 1993. 25 FE 2849 February 21 1997. 26 FE 1672 April 26 1993. 27 Reuters August 27 1993.

186

Notes

28 Guardian August 25 1993, BBC World Service News August 25 1993 2000 GMT, Reuters August 27 1993 0703 GMT, BBC World Service News August 27 1993 1100 GMT; Jonathan Mirsky ‘China to defy US sanctions over missiles for Pakistan’ The Times August 27 1993. 29 FE 1865. 30 FE 2963 July 5 1997. 31 FE 3543 May 25 1999; FE 3544 May 26 1999, FE 3545 May 27 1999. 32 FE 3574 June 30 1999. 33 FE 3617 August 19 1999, FE 3619 August 21 1999. 34 Ahmed Rashid Jihad pp. 174, 176. 35 Ahmed Rashid Jihad p. 204. 36 BBC Monitoring February 15 2003 from Vecherniy Bishkek. 37 Cooley Unholy Wars 1999 pp. 67–79 is the origin of many of these allegations but he cites no serious sources and destroys any credibility by recounting a popular myth about the death of Lin Biao. Lutﬁ (2001) is more critical. 38 FE 3207 April 22 1998. 39 FE 3395 November 27 1998. 40 FE 3408 December 12 1998. 41 South China Morning Post October 17 2002 via BBC Monitoring. 12 China and the newly independent Central Asian republics 1 There were suggestions that a new formal confederation to be known as the United States of Central Asia, separate from the Confederation of Independent States (CIS) which succeeded the Soviet Union, might be announced in the near future (BBC TV news report January 4 1993) but this did not materialise. 2 Ahmed Rashid ‘Caught in a cleft’ and ‘With God on their side’ November 19, 1992; ‘Revival of Suﬁsm’ December 17, 1992; ‘Forced to Flee: Civil wars start new wave of migration’ November 12, 1992; ‘Southern Savagery: Civil war drives Tajik refugees to Afghanistan’ January 28,1993, all Far Eastern Economic Review; Hugh Prysor Jones Newshour, BBC World Service December 27 1992; Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush Muslims of the Soviet Empire: A Guide and Mystics and Commissars, Hurst & Co., London, 1985. 3 ‘Principles of Relations with the CIS’, interview by Xinhua news agency correspondents, Beijing Review, December 14–20, 1992. 4 Michael Dillon ‘Sinology in Mongolia’ BBACS 1991. 5 FE 1338 March 25 1992. 6 FE 1284 January 22 1992. 7 FE 1556 December 5 1992. 8 FE 1569 December 21 1992. 9 FE 2684 August 7 1996. 10 FE 1867, citing Moscow Radio. 11 FE 1666 April 19 1993. 12 FE 2789 December 7 1996. 13 FE 2926 July 21 1997. 14 FE 1978 April 22 1994. 15 FE 1983 April 28 1994. 16 There were approximately RMB 8.7 to the US$ on June 1, 1994. 17 FE 1985 April 30 1994. 18 FE 2684 August 7 1996. 19 FE 1985 April 30 1994. 20 FE 1988 May 6 1994. 21 FE 2656 July l5 1996. 22 FE 2657 July 6 1996, FE 2658 July 8 1996.

Notes 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

187

WUNN July 18 1996. FE 2903 April 26 1997. FE 2711 September 7 1996. FE 3034 September 26 1997. FE 2712 September 9 1996. FE 2964 July 7 1997. FE 3011 August 31 1997. FE 3015 September 4 1997. FE 3016 September 5 1997. FE 3198 April 10 1998. FE 3200 April 14 1998. FE 3204 April 18 1998. FE 3214 April 30 1998. FE 3215 May 1 1998. FE 3204 April 18 1998. FE 3222 May 9 1998. Xinhua in FE 3270 July 4 1998. The ﬁrst supplementary agreement was signed during Jiang Zemin’s ofﬁcial visit to Kazakhstan in July 1996. Xinhua in FE 3271 July 6 1998 and FE 3272 July 7 1998. FE 3010 August 29 1997. Golos Vostochnogo Turkestana (Voice of Eastern Turkestan) Almaty, August 29 1997 in FE 3011 August 30 1997. Xinhua in FE 3271 July 6 1998. FE 2720 September 18 1996. Xinhua in FE 3271 July 6 1998. Xinhua in FE 3277 July 13 1998. Xinhua in FE 3279 July 15 1998. FE 3127 January 17 1998. Ambassador Sultanov used the name Akmola, which was intended at the time to be used for the new capital Astana. FE 3259 June 22 1998. FE 3270 July 4 1998. FE 3271 July 6 1998. FE 3271 July 6 1998. FE 3272 July 7 1998. FE 3313 August 24 1998. FE 3469 February 26 1999. FE 3537 May 18 1999. FE 3624 August 27 1999. FE 3625 August 28 1999. Ahmed Rashid op. cit. January 28 1993. BBC World Service The World Today August 11 1993. Stefan Friedrich ‘Neue Konstellationen im Nordwesten: Die VR China und die zentralasiatischen GUS-Republiken’ China Actuel October 1992 pp. 725–739. Ahmed Rashid ‘Push for Peace’ Far Eastern Economic Review February 3, 1994 p. 16. Maria Korolov ‘Religious warriors ready to avenge human rights abuses’ The Guardian June 7, 1994. Kamoludin Abdullaev and Catherine Barnes (ed.) Politics of Compromise: the Tajikistan Peace Process, Accord Issue, 10 London: Conciliation Resources, 2001. FE 3556 June 9 1999. Kazakh newspaper Atamekan (Fatherland) March 13 1993, cited in Eastern Turkestan Information April 1993. FE 0162 April 1 1993. FE 2643 June 20 1996. FE 2753 October 26 1996.

188 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Notes

FE 2804 December 30 1996. FE 2804 December 30 1996. FE 2767 November 12 1996. FE 2223 February 9 1995. FE 2225 February 11 1995. FE 2680 August 2 1996. FE 3272 July 7 1998. FE 3276 July 11 1998. Eastern Turkestan Information 3/3, June 1993, citing Xingdao, Hong Kong. Eastern Turkestan Information 3/3, June 1993.

13 Xinjiang and the ‘war against terror’ 1 Namangani was reported to have been wounded in Afghanistan on November 9th in the battle for Mazar-e-Sharif and to have died several days later, a clear indication of the internationalisation of the conﬂicts involving political Islam in Central Asia. 2 Vecherny Bishkek December 14 2001 BBC Monitoring. 3 Public Education Radio TV, Bishkek, BBC Monitoring December 25 2001. 4 Argumenty i fakty Kyrgyzstan BBC Monitoring January 9 2002. 5 Vecherny Bishkek January 15 2002 BBC Monitoring. 6 Kabar News Agency Bishkek, BBC Monitoring January 10 2002. 7 Komsomolskaya Pravda v Kyrgyzstane, Bishkek January 18 2002 BBC Monitoring. 8 Interfax Moscow, February 5 2002; Kyrgyz Public TV February 15, 20, 25 2002 (via BBC Monitoring). 9 Economist March 23 2002 p. 71. 10 Kazakh TV, Almaty January 18 2002 BBC Monitoring. 11 The Times, London, March 30, 2002. 14 Xinjiang in the twenty-ﬁrst century 1 2 3 4 5

FE 2423 October 2 1995. Xinhua, Beijing September 29 1995 in FE 2423 October 2 1995. Xinhua News Agency in FE 2423 October 2 1995. FE 2695 August 20 1996. Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, Central Committee Document No. 7 (1996), ‘Record of the meeting of the Standing Comittee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Maintenance of Stability in Xinjiang’ (in Uyghur).

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Index

Abbassids 10 Abdimit 53, 54 Abdul Rasul 127, 140 Abdula Damaola Aji 105 Abulaidi 80 Abdurixit, Abdulahat 46, 80, 90, 93, 101, 108, 116, 146, 148 Afghanistan 3, 6, 10, 24, 27, 43, 45, 52, 62, 63, 103, 118, 127, 133, 138–141, 142, 148, 150, 152, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 169, 171, 173; Uyghur separatist militants training in 156 Agricultural Bank of China 72 agriculture 38–39 Ahmedjan 33 air crash 1949 34 aircraft 136, 137, 138, 155, 156 Aksu 6, 35, 39, 57, 59, 61, 70, 87, 91, 110, 114, 117, 121, 148; disturbances in 1980 59; incident 1996 70 Aktyubinkskneft 40 Almaty, Chinese Embassy in 111 Alptekin, Erken 114 Altai 32, 58 Altishahr 4, 15, 17, 18, 19, 24, 27, 28, 63, 65, 67, 68, 73, 90, 166, 176 Amin group 52–55 Ancient Uyghur Literature 51 Andijan 14, 15, 17, 25 Arab armies 10 arms smuggling 127, 148, 149, 154 Army Day 107 Astana 148, 149, 150 Autonomous Region 3, 4, 30, 35, 46, 58, 61, 69, 77, 78, 79, 81, 85, 107, 143, 156, 165, 166, 170, 175, 176 Ban Chao 9 bannermen, Manchu and Mongol 18 Baren 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 71, 73, 120, 146 Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous

Prefecture 115, 148 bazaars 26, 27, 36, 124 begs 18 bomb attacks 67, 87, 89, 96, 99, 100, 101, 106, 114, 116; on bus in Beijing 100, 115; on bus in Wuhan 116; on railway bridge 110 border demarcation 143, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 161; China and Kazakhstan 147 border security 143 Brief History of the Xiongnu (A), Turghun Almas 51 Bukhara 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 19 Bureau of Public Security 84 Bureau of Religious Affairs of the State Council 114 Burhan 34, 35, 78, 79, 170 cadres 25, 86, 89, 101; assigned to Xinjiang 101 Central Asia 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 39, 42, 43, 67, 76, 79, 82, 101, 113, 133, 135, 140, 142–155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173; Chinese immigration 152; Nuclear weapons 154; US Military bases 158 Central Asian Suﬁsm 12, 16 Central Nationalities Institute 60, 79 Central Nationalities University 60 Chaghatai Khanate 12 Changji 38, 61, 148 Chechnya 85 Chi Haotian 106, 153 China National Petroleum Corporation 40, 145 Chinese 26, 51; military presence 51 Chinese Agricultural Bank 125 Chinese embassy, Almaty 111 Chinese Islamic Association 105

Index Chinese language, use of 26 Chinese language courses 149 Chinese migration into Central Asia 152 Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee 66 Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference 79, 86, 117, 165 communications 3, 7, 18, 27, 41, 43, 87, 92, 102, 103, 112, 115, 120, 142, 146 communications satellite 43 cotton 38, 46, 70, 76 crime 84, 85, 87, 91, 100, 105, 112, 148 Cultural Revolution 30, 36, 57, 58, 59, 75, 78, 80, 113, 119, 171 daotang 15 Demirel, Suleyman, Turkish Prime Minister 133, 134 demonstrations 60, 65, 70, 83, 94, 95, 97, 111, 145, 155; Khotan, July 1995 70 Deng Xiaoping 37, 45, 47, 72, 78, 80, 99, 100, 119 dhikr 14 Document Number 7 156 Dungans 20, 21, 24, 135 earthquakes 6, 92 East Turkestan People’s Revolutionary Party (ETPRP) 57 East Turkestan Republic 21, 22, 32, 33, 34, 35, 63, 65, 67 Eastern Turkestan 4, 8, 11, 20, 32, 34, 52, 57, 59, 63, 66, 79, 96, 107, 110, 113, 116, 117, 118, 120, 128, 133, 134, 153, 156 Eastern Turkestan Charity Funds 66 Eastern Turkestan Islamic Party of God 96 Eastern Turkestan Mongolian, Manchurian and Tibetan Peoples’ Federation Committee 66 Eastern Turkestan National Centre 128 Eastern Turkestan Prairie Fire Party 59 Eastern Turkestan terrorist forces 156 Eastern Turkish National Revolutionary Front 66 Eastern Turkish National Salvation Committee 66 Ecevit, Bulent 135 educational programme 91, 103, 104; outlined by Wang Lequan 104 Educational provision 74 e´migre´ communities 4, 24 Erdaoqiao 86, 124 Europe–Asia land bridge 42

197

Evening News 35 explosives 63, 64, 67, 68, 70, 84, 106, 122, 128, 155; availability 122 F-7 PRC ﬁghter aircraft; Chinese supply to Pakistan 138 Ferghana valley 10, 14, 15, 160 ﬁres, in coalﬁelds 110 Fletcher, Joseph 15, 16, 171, 172, 176 fruit 39 Fu Quanyou, General 89, 138, 146 Gansu 3, 7, 10, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 23, 34, 38, 43, 44, 47, 60, 94, 166, 168 Ghulja 4, 6, 18, 22, 28, 30, 33, 37, 39, 43, 56, 57, 58, 67, 68, 69, 79, 88, 92, 105, 106, 107, 110, 111, 125, 127, 168 Ghulja Liberation Movement 110 global terrorist movement 156; ‘Eastern Turkestan terrorist forces’ 156 Golos Vostochnogo Turkestana (Voice of Eastern Turkestan) 110 Great Game 19, 44, 133, 173 Great Leap Forward 29, 35, 53, 56, 113 Guantanamo Bay detention centre 140 Guidelines for an Islamic Republic 53 Guomindang 21, 32, 33, 34, 35, 75, 77, 107 Hainan, reconnaissance plane, forced landing in 156 hajj 66 Hami/Qumul 20 Han Chinese 9, 35 Han Chinese immigration 18, 19, 35, 56, 75, 134 Han dynasty 9 Hanliang 46, 67, 73, 142 Hizb’allah 96 Hu Yaobang 36, 66, 166 Hui 3, 13, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 35, 38, 61, 65, 71, 106, 136, 148, 166, 168, 171, 176 Id al Fitr 93 Id Gah mosque 28, 105 Ili 5, 18, 19, 21, 22, 42, 45, 56, 61, 68, 92, 106, 111, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129, 149, 166, 168 immigration; Han Chinese 18, 56, 75, 134 Iran 45, 103, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 146, 157, 158; arms sales by China 136 irrigation 5, 38, 39, 61, 150 Ishan 14, 16, 17, 30

198

Index

Ishaq Beg 32 Islam, political, in Xinjiang 146 Islamic Dare to Die Corps 63 Islamic Development Bank 44 Islamic law 18, 55, 129 Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan 157 Islamic Reformers Party 68 Islamic Renaissance Party, 142, 150, 151, 152 Islamist movements 6, 158, 161, 162 Ittipak (Solidarity) 145 Jahriyya 16 Jarring, Gunnar 15, 25, 172 Jiang Zemin 83, 92, 108, 122, 138, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 154, 167; Tour of Central Asia 143 jihad 18, 62, 63, 70, 96, 114, 139 Jin Shuren 20, 21 Kandahar 103 Karakhanids 11 Karakorum Highway, trading connection between Xinjiang and Pakistan 138 Kargalik 5, 115, 118 kariz 5, 38 Kashghar 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 38, 42, 44, 45, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, 67, 70, 74, 75, 78, 79, 82, 83, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 105, 110, 117, 120, 121, 122, 136, 138, 155, 168, 169, 171, 172, 174, 176; centre of Islamic religious and literary activity 12 Kazakh Exodus 56 Kazakh Turk Peoples Charity Funds 66 Kazakhs 4, 9, 18, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 45, 56, 57, 60, 65, 66, 68, 76, 103, 113, 125, 136, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 161 Kazakhs, in Xinjiang 148 Kazakhstan 3, 4, 24, 30, 35, 36, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 53, 66, 67, 68, 76, 82, 83, 90, 92, 95, 103, 110, 113, 116, 117, 120, 125, 127, 134, 135, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 159, 161, 169; cooperation with China, oil and gas industries 146; military cooperation with China 153 Khanate of 17, 19, 25 Khokand 14, 18, 19 Khotan 20, 21, 52, 53, 54, 55, 65, 67, 70,

80, 124, 126, 176 Khuﬁyya 16 Khunjerab Pass 88, 137; border trade 137 Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture 6, 62, 146 Korban Id al-Adha 85 Korgas 45, 56, 129 Kurbanjan 98 Kutadgu Bilig or Wisdom of Royal Glory 11 Kyrgyzstan 3, 14, 25, 42, 67, 113, 118, 136, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 169; US bases 160 Land Reform 29, 35, 54 Lanzhou 34, 42, 43, 69, 89, 103, 108, 120, 125, 129, 148, 153, 168 Lanzhou Military Region 69, 89 laogai 53, 72 Laoshawan village 102 Latin alphabet 27, 28 Lattimore, Owen 4, 20, 172 Li Peng 40, 45, 72, 73, 135, 143, 144, 145, 147, 153, 154; tour of Central Asia 143 Li Ruihuan 114, 138 Li Shoushan 73 Local nationalism 36 Lop Nor 114, 128, 145, 155; nuclear test site 155; protest at nuclear test site 155 M-11 missiles, supplied to Pakistan 137 Ma Zhongying 20, 21 madrasa 14, 87, 88 Makhdumzada khojas 17, 18 Manchus 9, 17 Mazar-e-Sharif 139, 140 menhuan 15, 16 Middle East 44, 157 Military cooperation 153; China and Kazakhstan 153 Ming dynasty 12, 17 Ministry of Public Security 66, 114, 115, 123, 153 Mongol conquest 12 Mongolia 3, 5, 9, 10, 17, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 84, 103, 110, 112, 142, 143, 167, 172, 176; cross-border trade 44 mosques 14, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35, 53, 55, 59, 63, 73, 88, 91, 98, 105, 108, 113, 117, 124, 142, 157 Muhammad Amin Bughra 20, 52 mujaheddin 63, 140, 157; in Afghanistan

Index 140 mummies of Taklamakan 8, 9 Namangani, Juma 140, 157 Nanniwan 78 Naqshbandi 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 37 National Peoples Congress 90, 100, 165 Nazarbayev, Nursultan 31, 95, 143, 144, 145, 147, 153, 154 New Eastern Turkish Residents Association 66 new script 27 Nilka 33, 68, 69, 128 Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region 3, 23 Ningxia Islamic Academy 44 Ningxia Tongxin Arabic Language School 44 nuclear test site, protest 155 Nuclear Weapons 154; in Central Asia 154 oil and gas, cooperation between China and Kazakhstan 145 oil pipeline 146 oil reﬁneries 39 Omayyad dynasty 10 Orkhon 9, 172 Osh 14, 146 Pakistan 3, 24, 27, 30, 42, 43, 45, 74, 88, 103, 108, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 154, 157, 158, 169 Pamir 10, 41, 62, 142 Pan-Turkism 35, 113, 133, 134, 175 Parhat Niyaz 94, 95 Party of Allah 96 pastoral nomadism 4, 38 peaceful liberation 32, 34, 165 Peng Dehuai 77 People’s Armed Police 62, 64, 69, 70, 73, 74, 89, 94, 103, 114, 120, 121, 148 People’s Liberation Army 34, 77, 78, 89, 107, 114, 138 Population 24, 175 poverty 5, 37, 38, 46, 47, 75, 151 poverty relief 38 Prison Affairs Conference 102 Public Security (police) Bureau 123, 157 qadi (judge) 29 Qapqal 68, 69 Qarakhanids 11, also see Karakhanids Qian Qichen 140, 142, 152 Qiao Shi 65, 103, 134; visit to Turkey 134

199

Qing dynasty 15, 17, 18 Rabiya Qadir 83, 102, 117 Rafsanjani, Ali Akbar Hashemi 136 railways 42, 108, 112 Ramadan 28, 63, 93, 96, 115, 157 reconnaissance plane, forced landing, Hainan 156 Reform and opening 37, 47, 119 Regulations for Religious Personnel 73 Regulations on Religious Activities 73 religious courts 29 religious publications, illegal 118 Renmin gongan bao 122 Republic of China 19, 23 resistance 10, 14, 18, 39, 52, 57, 58, 77, 78, 110, 160 riot control 74 riots 52, 54, 60, 62, 69, 95, 96, 99, 101, 102, 112, 115, 116, 120, 127 roads 42, 47, 68, 84, 97, 101, 104, 108, 120, 124, 125, 126, 128, 146, 152 Russian ethnic population 21 Saifuddin 35, 78, 79, 80, 165 Samarkand 10, 14 Sanshihangza 86 script 3, 8, 11, 26, 27, 28, 96; Arabic 27; Uyghur 26 Second World War in China 34 separatism 32, 51, 52, 54, 61, 62, 72, 74, 79, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 92, 95, 96, 103, 104, 105, 106, 113, 115, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 139, 145, 146, 149, 150, 158, 165, 166, 167, 175 separatist movement, 85, 99, 110, 113, 118, 126, 140; religious element 85 September 11th 2001 156 Seypidin Aziz see Saifudin, 35 Shahidi, Burhan 35 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation 148 Shanghai Five 108, 148, 149, 150, 169 Shari’a 20, 29 sheep 38 Sheng Shicai 21, 32, 56 Silk Road 44, 144, 174 Silkworm missiles 136 silsila 13, 15 Sino-Soviet dispute 30, 140, 154 Soviet Union 3, 5, 10, 13, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28, 30, 36, 37, 38, 44, 56, 57, 58, 62, 66, 69, 79, 101, 120, 133, 134, 137, 140, 142, 150, 151, 155, 157, 159, 160, 161, 167, 171 splittism 61, 148, 167

200

Index

stockbreeding 38 Strike Hard 84, 96, 127, 129 Suﬁ 11, 12–17, 30, 52, 53, 54, 55, 91, 108 Suﬁ orders 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 30, 53, 91, 108 Sunni Muslims 12 Tacheng 32, 33, 56, 57, 66 Tajikistan 3, 67, 113, 136, 142, 143, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 157, 159, 169, 170; Civil War 150 Taklamakan desert 4, 5, 23, 28, 39, 68 Taliban 103, 139, 158, 173 talibs 87 Tang dynasty 9, 10 Tang Guoqiang 96 Tao Siju 100, 101, 103 Tao Zhiyue 77 Taranchi 4 Tarim 4, 5, 8, 9, 15, 16, 39, 40, 42, 99, 110, 172 Tatar 24, 35, 78 Tekes 68, 69, 129 telegram uprising 34 Tengritagh (Mountains of God or Heaven) 5 Three Districts Revolution 22, 32, 33 Three Gorges Dam 75 Tianshan 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 18, 38, 41, 42, 57, 174 Tigers of Lop Nor 114 Tocharian 8, 170 tombs 13, 17, 29, 30 Tomur Dawamat 60, 62, 67, 73, 74, 79, 80, 81, 115, 136, 143, 165 tourism 44 trade 19, 29, 37, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 76, 84, 101, 102, 123, 124, 125, 133, 134, 135, 137, 139, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 153, 161, 165, 166, 167, 169 travel 15, 41, 74, 76, 126, 144 tribute missions 12 Tsarist Russia 14 Turfan 5, 8, 10, 39, 90, 176 Turghun Almas 51, 52, 58, 118 Turgut Ozal 133, 134, 135 Turkey 3, 4, 24, 25, 27, 28, 36, 44, 52, 63, 100, 116, 120, 128, 133, 134, 135, 157, 159, 161, 173 Turki 4, 25, 172, 173, 174, 175 Turkic languages 23 Turkic-Islamic Republic of Eastern Turkestan 20 Turkic-speaking migrants 9

Turkmenistan 144, 152 Turpan 5, 11, 18, 26, 27, 39, 44, 88, 90, 91, 105, 120, 148 United Front Affairs Department 105 United National Revolutionary Front 87, 88 Urumqi 4, 5, 18, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 51, 52, 57, 58, 59, 60, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 136, 144, 146, 148, 155, 157, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176 Urumqi Evening News 35 Urumqi Military Region 72 Urumqi Trade Fair 43, 124 US–Kyrgyz joint military exercise 160 US military bases, in Central Asia 158, 160 Uyghur language 25; new script 27; script 26; separatist militants training in Afghanistan 156; spelling 3 Uyghurs (The), Turghun Almas 51 Uyghurstan 56, 57, 67, 110, 117 Uzbek 24, 25, 28, 42, 83, 144, 150 Uzbekistan 3, 14, 25, 28, 38, 42, 43, 67, 118, 134, 139, 142, 143, 144, 145, 150, 151, 152, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 169 Wahhabism 12 Wang Enmao 35, 36, 60, 61, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80, 173 Wang Lequan 26, 80, 81, 82, 89, 90, 91, 93, 101, 104, 105, 107, 108, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 123, 129, 146, 148; brief history of Xinjiang separatism 119 Wang Tao 40 Wang Zhen 35, 36, 75, 77, 78, 107, 108 waqf 29, 35, 53 warlords 20 Washington 156; attack, September 11th 2001 156 water 7, 19, 38, 39, 43, 46, 56, 69, 75, 93, 150; shortage 7 Wen Zongren 89 Western Development 46, 47, 158 World Islamic Federation 66 Wu, Harry Hongda 72 Wuhan 19, 116, 117; bus bomb 116

Index Xi’an 23, 77 xiafang 59, 72 Xinjiang fandui minzu fenliezhuyi douzheng shihua (History of the struggle against ethnic separatism) 51 Xinjiang Justice Party 66 Xinjiang Petroleum Administrative Bureau 40 Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps 35, 38, 46, 56, 59, 65, 72, 75, 77, 85, 87, 88, 89, 95, 97, 100, 105, 108, 112, 115, 121, 123, 125; Public Security Department of 88 Xinjiang Regional Islamic Association 108 Xinjiang Ribao (Xinjiang Daily) 43 Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 3, 30, 35, 69, 79, 81, 165, 166, 175, 176 Xu Yuqi 51, 96, 175

201

Yakub Beg 19, 21, 75 Yang Zengxin 16, 20, 21 Yarkant 5, 19, 21, 63, 126, 155, 173, 174, 176 Yemen 16 Yinhe 136, 138 Yining 4, 6, 18, 28, 30, 33, 37, 38, 39, 43, 57, 67, 68, 79, 82, 83, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 136, 168, 169; Public Security Bureau 123 Yining/Ghulja Rising February 1997 92, 115 Yuezhia Empire 8 Yusupbek Mukhlissi 87 Zhang Zhizhong 33, 34 Zhou Shengtao 117, 124 Zhu Bangzao 115 Zhungar Basin 4