ABSTRACT
In the 1870s, through an effective deployment of military and diplomatic means that rather surprised Russia and the Western powers, the Qing conquered Xinjiang for a second time. By 1884, when Xinjiang became a province, several things had changed since the first conquest a century earlier. They regarded Xinjiang as an inalienable part of Qing, soon to be Chinese national-territory. In keeping with this shift, the Qing court, too, had come to support the more assimilations approaches to controlling Xinjiang that had been much discussed in unofficial and semi-official circles since the 1820s. These entailed abandoning those eighteenth-century imperial policies that permitted political diversity in the Chinese and Inner Asian Empire built by Qing emperors Kangxi through Qianlong. The rebellion was an administrative holdover from the Qing period, Jin's effort to eliminate it, and tensions engendered by Chinese migration into eastern Xinjiang.
