ABSTRACT
Xu Liang was another member of the important group of CCP members and cadres who were detailed by the party centre to work in Xinjiang during Sheng Shicai’s time as governor of the province. The CCP’s aim was to ‘assist in the construction of political power’ in Xinjiang and, it goes without saying, to increase its influence in this important region on the frontier with the Soviet Union. Xu Liang, whose original name was probably Yang Rongjue, was from Jianyang County in Sichuan province where he graduated in Chinese literature from Sichuan University in 1937. The following year, he decided to throw in his lot with the Chinese Communist Party and moved to Yan’an where he formally joined the Party at the North Shaanxi Public School, where he might have been working as a teacher. In March 1938, he was sent to work in the Xinjiang Education Department as director of the translation and publications committee and teacher of social science and Chinese history in both the Xinjiang College and the Urumqi Teachers’ College. In January 1939, Xu became County Head [xianzhang] of the mountain town
of Tashkurgan [Puli] which was on the border with India and in June 1940 he was transferred to the small town of Meket [Maigaiti] to serve as County Head there. Together with the other CCP members in Xinjiang, he was arrested on the orders of Sheng Shicai in February 1943, released in the amnesty of June 1946 and allowed to return to Yan’an. After 1949, his party and government service ensured him senior positions in the educational sphere and he was Principal and Deputy Party Secretary of Chengdu Geological College in his home province of Sichuan until his retirement in 1983. He was considered by his peers to have been a model of the hardworking, frugal and self-effacing Communist official, sacrificing his own personal ambitions and comforts for the good of the cause.
