ABSTRACT
Hu Jian, who used the name Hu Dong while working in Xinjiang, was born in 1916 into a poor peasant family in Xuanhan County in Sichuan province.1 He joined a Communist guerrilla troop in 1932 and the main Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army in 1933 and achieved steady promotion through the ranks ‘because of his military ability and courage’. During the Long March, which marked a turning point in the fortunes of the CCP, he served with Zhang Guotao’s 4th Front Army [si fangmian jun] during its tortuous operations in the mountains and grasslands of western China where it suffered heavy losses in battles with the forces of Ma Bufang, the Muslim warlord of Qinghai Province. The remnants of the 4th Front Army, renamed the Western Route Army [silu jun], attempted to reach Xinjiang where Zhang Guotao hoped to join forces with those of the Provincial Governor, Sheng Shicai, who was politically close to the Soviet Union and at least temporarily prepared to cooperate with Chinese Communists, but Zhang’s forces were harried and eventually annihilated by Ma’s troops. Hu Dong appears to have been one of the few survivors. By 1937, Hu was the political commissar of an artillery battalion in Sheng
Shicai’s army based in Urumqi (usually called Dihua at that time) and in the winter of 1938 was appointed commander of the Border Brigade at Tashkurgan with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel [zhongxiao]. In January 1941, he enrolled in an Advanced Military Research Group [gaoji junshi yanjiuban], presumably a staff or command course, but after finishing the course in 1942 was imprisoned in 1943 on the orders of Sheng Shicai, who had suddenly turned against the Soviet Union and the CCP, and was not released until June 1946 in a general amnesty of Communist political prisoners in Xinjiang. In May 1949, he took command of a PLA 4th Field Army, special armoured regiment. and led that unit to follow the 1st Field Army No. 1 Corps into Xinjiang. From 1964, he was deputy staff officer to the Military Commission Armoured Force Headquarters, where he made important contributions to the development of armoured units in the wider PLA. Hu is a good example of how experience and knowledge of Xinjiang in the 1930s was carried over into the administration of the region, and into central government, after 1949. He was hounded to death in the Cultural Revolution but after the ‘smashing of the Gang of Four’was posthumously recognised as a martyr.
