ABSTRACT
Prior to 1949, the Chinese Communist Party appears to have given relatively little thought to how it would handle minority regions once it gained power. One result of this was that the PRC’s minority policy evolved through several distinct phases after 1949—more reactive than ideological and more pragmatic than planned. As the following discussion illustrates, minority policy flowed along channels that allowed broad and then narrow interpretations of Marxist thought on the “national question,” leaving uncertainty and distrust among peoples like the Kazaks by the 1990s.
