ABSTRACT
Education and the status of women are sensitive and controversial topics in Muslim societies, especially those at a lower level of economic and social development, and southern Xinjiang is no exception. Introducing new programmes for the education of women is therefore highly problematic. One female Chinese Communist Party member, Wu Naijun, a Han from southern China, became something of a legend to other members of the CCP in Xinjiang where she worked as a teacher in girls’ schools and as an activist among local Uyghur women. Wu Naijun was born in 1914 in Taishan County in Guangdong Province as was
her husband Li Yunyang, who became County Head in Maralbashi. She was educated at the Guangdong Province Teachers College and continued her studies in Japan where she met her future husband and joined the Chinese Communist Party. In 1937, the couple returned to China and headed straight for the revolutionary base of Yan’an. She was sent by the party to Xinjiang, and, in June 1939, was given the task of developing the party’s organisation in southern Xinjiang. She was initially assigned to Shule County in the district of Kashgar, nominally as a dependent of her husband although she soon established herself in her own right. She worked in Shule for three years and then moved to Maralbashi [Bachu] after her husband was transferred there, taking responsibility for organising the local Women’s Federation. After the political split between the Xinjiang governor Sheng Shicai and the CCP in 1942, she left southern Xinjiang and was arrested while on her way back to Urumqi in September of that year. She was released in the general amnesty of CCP prisoners in 1946 and after 1949 worked as the head of education for the All-China Women’s Federation and editor of the journal Zhongguo funű [Chinese Women]. She also held positions on the academic staff and the party committees of several universities, including the Jiangxi Engineering College, the China University of Science and Technology and Huanan (South China) University of Technology in Guangzhou, retiring in 1985. The educational system in Kashgar during the 1930s was poor and undevel-
oped and activists in the CCP attributed this backwardness to the isolation and marginalisation of the town, the stagnant economy and the illiteracy and generally low cultural level of the population. The educational system was mainly the public and secular system that was controlled either by the district and county governments or by the Uyghur Culture Association that was sponsored by the
government. The question of the madrasas, the religious schools attached to the mosques of the shrines of the Sufi orders, was not addressed in the same way. Criticisms of the low cultural level of the local people may have referred to illiteracy only in Chinese, which is still not widely used in southern Xinjiang outside the schools, although some CCP members recognised the need for enhancing people’s knowledge of their own Uyghur language.
