ABSTRACT
The arrival of the People’s Liberation Army and its commissars of the Chinese Communist Party in Xinjiang at the end of civil war in 1949 was by no means Kashgar’s first experience of the Chinese Communist Party. CCP members had operated in Xinjiang at least as early as the 1930s and the proximity of the province to the Soviet Union made it a much higher priority for the CCP than would otherwise have been the case for a poor region distant from the main centres of political activity in China. The contributors to Kashgar Culture and History (Kashi wenshi ziliao) may have been inclined to exaggerate the importance of the political work carried out by CCP activists in the region before 1949 as part of the Communist Party’s subsequent attempts to legitimise Beijing’s control over Xinjiang – many of them were after all friends and colleagues of the writers. However, the presence and activities of CCP members in southern Xinjiang is clearly and thoroughly documented in Kashi, which is the main source of information and provides an insight into the attitudes of Party members towards Xinjiang and its development both before and after 1949. Kashgar, located in the far south of Xinjiang, was not close to the Soviet border
but it was still subject to influences from the USSR as well as the Chinese Communist Party. A strong contingent of Party activists had been sent by the Party centre to work in the region. Many of them operated in mundane trades and professions while carrying out political activities which were their main reason for being in the region, although some were assigned to relatively senior posts in local government. The political work that they were involved in was often clandestine although the allegiance of some activists was an open secret. For a member of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s, an assignment to Kashgar was an opportunity to serve on the front line of the struggle against British imperialism. Border posts had been established close to Kashgar to regulate trade across the mountainous frontier between China and British India (most Indian border areas close to Kashgar are now within the boundaries of Pakistan after partition in 1947). Traders from India are described by the Chinese contributors to Kashi sometimes as British and sometimes as British Indian Ying-Yin. This description does not necessarily imply Anglo-Indian, either in the sense of mixed race or long-term British residents of India. It indicates that the Indian traders, some of whom were long-term residents of the Kashgar region, especially
Yarkand, were subjects of the British Empire and under the protection of the British Consulate in Kashgar. Manning the border posts to control trade or smuggling was seen, both at the time and in retrospect, as a vital and noble patriotic duty.1
