ABSTRACT
China’s ethnopolitics in a new international milieu Since mid-1937 the embattled Nationalists had searched for a change in the international status quo that could provide a way out of their military predicament. As described in the previous chapter, at the early stages of the SinoJapanese war Soviet Russia was the only foreign power that substantially assisted the Nationalists. Yet Nationalist high officials were in reality hoping for a direct confrontation between the Japanese and their Soviet patrons, believing that such a conflict would relieve pressure on their own thinly-stretched forces.1 This hope was partly realized when in July 1938 the Russians clashed with the Japanese on Zhanggufeng Hill in the disputed area between Siberia and Japanese-controlled Korea. This incident was followed by another short, albeit bitter, battle in the summer of 1939 in Nomonhan (Khalkin Gol), another disputed section of the Manchuria-Mongolia border.2 The Nationalists watched these incidents in North Asia with rapt attention, for they hoped that these clashes might flare up into a full-scale war between Russia and Japan. Yet in April 1941, to Chiang Kai-shek’s great disappointment, Tokyo and Moscow entered into a nonaggression pact, which ruled out the possibility of war between Japan and Soviet Russia.3 The year of 1941, however, saw two striking developments that would dramatically change the political landscape of Central Asia and shift the position of the Nationalists in China’s frontier regions. In June, Nazi Germany launched its blitzkrieg against Soviet Russia. At first, the Germans appeared to be unstoppable; by November 1941, they had begun the siege of Leningrad, pushed to within 30 miles of Moscow, and thrust deep into the Ukraine. On December 7, one month later, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, precipitating the American declaration of war on Japan. These events brought together Nationalist China, the United States, Soviet Russia, and Britain as allies united against the Axis Powers. These events had a great impact on China’s frontier and ethnic territorial policy. China’s war with Japan and the changing international situation reshaped the power balance between the Nationalist center and the warlord regimes in China’s western frontiers. It also changed the priorities and strategies of the
Nationalists in Chongqing as well as those of the border provincial leaders, thus bringing China’s frontier and ethnic politics to a new stage. The Soviet Russians, now struggling to repel the German onslaught, were forced to concentrate all their available military power on the European front, and as such were no longer able to play a significant role in Asian developments. By contrast, the beleaguered Nationalists in China’s southwestern corner, now backed by their new military, economic and diplomatic American ally, were no longer alone in their battle against the Japanese. Anticipating that Germany would soon defeat Soviet Russia, Sheng Shicai, the governor of Xinjiang, changed from a pro-Moscow to an anti-Communist stance and endeavored to patch up his relationship with Chiang Kai-shek. The Nationalists were thus given yet another unexpected opportunity to move further west, extending their previously tenuous authority into the Central Asian peripheries. Their perennial goal to bring Xinjiang into the Nationalist fold now had a chance to materialize. In the spring of 1942, while the Soviets were launching an ill-fated counteroffensive against the invading Nazis, covert negotiations between Chongqing and Urumqi were underway to return Xinjiang to Nationalist control. Shortly thereafter, when the Caucasus and Crimea successively fell to the German army in July 1942, Sheng Shicai was visited by two powerful emissaries from Chiang Kai-shek: General Zhu Shaoliang, then commander of the Nationalist Eighth
Figure 5.1 The KMT party headquarters holding its political activities in Urumqi, c.1942. The Nationalist authority was greatly strengthened in Xinjiang as a result of Sheng Shicai’s shift of political stance in 1942 (source: KMT Party Archives).
