ABSTRACT
A mere five days after Mao Zedong uttered these remarks, the commander of the KMT’s Xinjiang garrison and civilian governor, General Tao Zhiyue and Burhan Shahidi respectively, severed all connections to the KMT government (now in Guangzhou) and declared their allegiance to the PRC (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949: 1062). By mid-October 1949, the PLA 1st Field Army (FA) under the command of Peng Dehuai, began to enter the region, reaching Ürümqi on 20 October (McMillen 1979: 23-5; Wang 1999: 383). The extension of CCP power into Xinjiang through the agency of the PLA brought to a close an era of great autonomy for the region. As we saw in the previous chapter, Xinjiang largely remained autonomous from the Republic of China for the majority of the 1911-49 period and during this time witnessed the rule of a series of successively Sovietinfluenced Han warlords and two attempts (in 1933 and 1944) to establish an independent East Turkestan Republic. Indeed, Xinjiang at the time of its ‘peaceful liberation’ in 1949 was, ‘an underdeveloped, divided, Muslim and ethnically and attitudinally non-Han “province” of China’ (McMillen 1981: 67).
