Xinjiang in the People's Republic of China
In theory, the PRC shared a Marxist ideology with the Soviet Union, and indeed Stalin never let Mao forget that the USSR had provided a great deal of help to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over the years. Mao, however, was even more of a Chinese nationalist than Stalin was a Russian nationalist, and he did not follow the Soviet model when drafting policies toward non-Han nationalities.
The first constitution of the PRC, adopted in 1954, defined the country as “a unitary multinational state” [Mackerras, p. 145]. While the CCP accepted Stalin’s definition of what constituted a nation, for the Chinese it did not follow that each nation had a right to govern itself within its own, ethnically-homogenous, territory. The Soviets had created theoretically-independent republics, each governed by a majority ethnic population—Uzbeks governed the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), for example. Minority nationalities were entitled to govern their own smaller autonomous regions within the republics; the Karakalpak Autonomous SSR was embedded within Uzbekistan, but Karakalpaks had little influence in the Uzbek government. In contrast, the PRC did not allow minority nationalities to claim independence, even on paper. The Chinese also divided political power among all the nationalities of a given region rather than allow a majority nationality control over local power structures. Xinjiang was re-named the “Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region” in October 1955 in recognition of the clear Uyghur majority (which was increased by re-categorizing the Taranchi as Uyghurs), but power was shared among the fourteen nationalities that had been categorized by Sheng Shicai in the 1930s, including Han Chinese [Millward, pp. 244–245].
In both the PRC and the USSR the real power was held by the Communist Party, which was controlled by Han or Russians. In China the party’s major instrument for asserting control on the ground was the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which was also dominated by Han. While Uyghurs, Kazaks, and other nationalities had extensive rights, according to law, to organize militias and teach in their own languages within their autonomous regions, in reality they had no power independent of the Communist Party and the army. The policy of dividing political power proportionately among all nationalities also meant that non-Han progressively lost power as more Han moved into autonomous regions [Benson and Svanberg, pp. 88–93]. For the first several years after the establishment of the PRC, the Chinese Communist Party did not have the resources to start any major ideological campaigns in Xinjiang. The CCP imposed secular state law and eliminated the Islamic court system. By the mid-1950s mosques and mazars (sacred shrines) had been stripped of their waqf land resources and had to depend on the state for financing. The state was willing to pay mullas’ salaries, on the condition of political cooperation, and the state did not try to destroy Islam as unscientific and anti-Communist. The party began to promote as many non-Han people as possible into its ranks, in order to diffuse any sense of disenfranchisement, but it did not engage in a systematic program of nation-building, as the Soviets had. The CCP did lay the groundwork for more radical change, however, in the form of settling over 100,000 demobilized soldiers, mostly non-Turks, in Xinjiang, and beginning to encourage the immigration of thousands of Han civilians.
Maoist disasters
Mao catastrophically up-ended China with twenty years of shock campaigns, beginning with the Hundred Flowers Movement in 1956 and the Great Leap Forward in 1958, and culminating with the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976. Although central authorities did not initially target national minorities during these campaigns, they came to see political opposition in ethnic terms, and the disasters of these years significantly exacerbated national tensions. The Hundred Flowers Movement, when Mao invited people to speak their minds freely and then cut them down for criticizing the regime, exposed a great deal of resentment at the gap between paper promises of regional autonomy and the reality of Han control. Some Uyghur critics even argued that they should be granted an “independent Uyghuristan,” modeled on the Soviet system [Benson and Svanberg, p. 103]. The party responded by sending several thousand Uyghurs and other Turks to re-education camps for demanding that the CCP actually implement its nationality policies, and by suppressing public respect paid to Islam.
The Great Leap Forward, which killed over 30 million people in the space of a few years, destroyed nomadic clan structures. During earlier bouts of land reform, central authorities had not had the personnel or the inclination to push things too quickly, and so Kazaks had been able to preserve their clan structures within the new land distributions or evade land reform altogether. In 1959, the party was determined to modernize the all of China within a few months. Party cadres pushed multiple Kazak tribes into very large communes that were dedicated to industrial-scale sheep and steel production. These new communes broke down and scrambled traditional tribal relations. People in the communes were under the close supervision of Han party officials, who were charged with eliminating local nationalism and blending all nationalities into one harmonious people, which was a much more aggressive approach than the party had taken before. Beijing also tried to increase the production tempo by sending ever more Han workers into the region, who took the supervisory jobs with the best resources. The exact toll of the Great Leap Forward in Xinjiang is impossible to determine based on currently-available data, but there is no reason to suppose that the region suffered any less than did other parts of China. One spectacular incident did become known to the outside world: in the spring of 1962 more than 60,000 people fled from northern Xinjiang over the border into the Soviet Union. The Sino-Soviet split had recently erupted, and the Soviets aided the exodus for their own propaganda purposes. Anti-CCP anger was so intense that in Ili a crowd physically attacked soldiers and the local party office; according to some reports, rioters shouted that this was their chance to solve the problem of the Chinese [Millward, pp. 259–264]. The Great Leap Forward was such an appalling disaster that the party was forced to moderate its policies for a few years. References to Islamic holidays returned to Xinjiang newspapers and the hysterical push for industrial production subsided. On the other hand, the railroad first reached Urumchi in 1962, making it that much easier for Han workers to move in. Tensions between Han and non-Han remained high. Then, in September 1966, the first brigade of Red Guards arrived to inaugurate the Cultural Revolution in Xinjiang.
The Cultural Revolution unfolded on two different levels in Xinjiang: on the political and military level there was fierce opposition to the revolution from local Han officials, to the point where there were open street battles between Red Guard brigades and established authorities. Non-Han participated little in this fighting, however, in part because many of them were being removed from the party apparatus under suspicion of “local nationalism.” It was on the level of culture and daily life that most indigenous Xinjiang residents felt the revolution. Madame Mao reportedly despised non-Han cultures, and encouraged the Red Guards to ban “foreign” music, dress, languages, and all religious practice. Traditional Uyghur marriage and family life practices were outlawed, and people were attacked for speaking their native language in public. As always with the PRC, there is very little reliable documentation of events during this period, but Western scholars have heard reports of pigs living in mosques and Muslim clerics publicly humiliated [Millward, pp. 271–276].