ABSTRACT
Between 1962 and 1991 China's northern and western boundaries were both fraught and frozen. The deepening dispute between the USSR and China was exacerbated by the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward. In 1961 several thousand Kazakhs and Uighurs fled across the Xinjiang frontier into Kazakhstan to escape from persecution and hunger. From then on, the SinoSoviet frontier was turned into a serious obstruction to the nomadic herds that had previously roamed relatively free. In 1969 bloody border clashes at its eastern end nearly provoked nuclear war, or at any rate a pre-emptive strike by the USSR against China's own nuclear test facilities in Xinjiang. After that, until detente began in the mid-1980s, the borders were guaranteed with nuclear missiles. As a result some of the nationalities who lived in Soviet Central Asia were separated from their kin in Xinjiang, chiefly the Kazakhs and the Uighurs.
