In spring and summer 1962, turmoil engulfed the region today commonly known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.Footnote 1 In early April, hundreds of individuals from Ili prefecture (Yili 伊犁) in Xinjiang's far northern tip began to cross into Soviet Kazakhstan. By the end of the month, the scale of the exodus had grown significantly. In a dramatic display, thousands upon thousands of people left their homes in several Ili counties, including Qoqek (Tacheng 塔城), Dörbiljin (Emin 额敏), Toli (Tuoli 托里), Hoboksar (Hebukesai'er 和布克赛尔), Usu (Wusu 乌苏), Saven (Shawan 沙湾) and Qorghas (Huocheng 霍城). Those fleeing China first did so quietly at night, but as the flight swelled in size, those crossing the border became more daring, traversing the international boundary during daylight hours and bringing with them livestock, farm tools and oxcarts (most of which were, by that time, officially the property of state communes). When the final tally was made, Chinese officials estimated that more than 60,000 men and women, mostly Kazakhs and Uyghurs, had fled Xinjiang for the Soviet Union. Despite many protests from the Chinese government, the majority of these individuals never returned to Chinese soil.
The crisis did not end here. Chinese statesmen feared that the exodus in the far north of Xinjiang would have a ripple effect across the entire autonomous region and destabilize the predominantly Uyghur oases in the south, including Kashgar (Kashi 喀什). Partially in response to these concerns, when the unrest in Ili deepened on 29 May, the Chinese government chose to employ brute force to deal with it. In the prefectural seat of Ghulja (Yining 伊宁), more than 2,000 people blockaded the city centre after discovering that no more buses would go to Qorghas, a major gateway on the Sino-Soviet border. The would-be border crossers seized the Prefectural People's Committee building and ransacked warehouses, small shops and even the local archives. They held the prefectural governor hostage and issued a demand for transportation to the Soviet Union.Footnote 2 The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) soon authorized the use of force to disperse the protestors. Troops from the Fourth Agricultural Division of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (Xinjiang shengchan jianshe bingtuan 新疆生产建设兵团), a paramilitary organization, as well as local police forces swarmed across Ghulja, executing what was almost certainly a bloody crackdown.Footnote 3
The mass exodus and the violence that followed have come to be collectively known in China as the “Yi–Ta” incident (Yi Ta shijian 伊塔事件).Footnote 4 These dramatic events drained the region of precious labour and material resources, and exposed and exacerbated the difficult economic situation in northern Xinjiang in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward. Yi–Ta, as will be described below, also irritated Sino-Soviet relations and accelerated the Sino-Soviet split. Finally, from a historical perspective, Yi–Ta offered concrete evidence both of the CCP's failure to resolve the “ethnic issue” (minzu wenti 民族问题) in Xinjiang and of the tensions between the region's indigenous peoples and the still young party-state.
For these and other reasons, Yi–Ta has long been of special interest to observers of Xinjiang's modern history and politics as well as China's relations with the Soviet Union.Footnote 5 Yet a dearth of Chinese-language primary sources has hindered many inquiries into the causes and consequences of the Yi–Ta incident. In China, moreover, much of the public commemoration and academic scholarship on the subject is highly politicized: the Yi–Ta incident is remembered mainly as a Soviet-inspired counterrevolution that compromised China's ethnic harmony.Footnote 6
This article utilizes declassified Chinese documents from the Foreign Ministry Archive (Zhonghua renmin gongheguo waijiaobu dang'anguan 中华人民共和国外交部档案馆) to argue that, in 1962, the Chinese government recognized several causes of the Yi–Ta incident besides Soviet instigation.Footnote 7 The documents analysed in this article include a great deal of cable traffic between Ili, Urumqi and Beijing, communications that show a clear distinction between the Chinese government's immediate internal reflections and its subsequent external pronouncements. Other files found in China's provincial and municipal archives and “internal” (neibu faxing 内部发行) reference volumes and collections substantiate the claim that Chinese officials had a nuanced understanding of the 1962 violence in Xinjiang. Although the Chinese government did still place the blame on the Soviet Union for the flight of 60,000 Kazakhs and Uyghurs from northern Xinjiang into Soviet Kazakhstan, it quietly recognized and tried to rectify other precipitating factors.
The Foreign Ministry documents analysed in this article also include the verbal jousting matches between Chinese and Soviet officials which took place in the aftermath of the Yi–Ta incident. These records of conversation, as well as corresponding sources from Russian repositories, show that developments in Xinjiang seriously strained the relationship between the one-time socialist allies. But if the Chinese government believed that the Yi–Ta incident arose out of a complicated milieu, why did it so angrily accuse the Soviet Union of orchestrating the crisis? The accusations made against the Soviet Union reflect Mao Zedong's 毛泽东 continuing influence over foreign policy decision-making during this period. Mao's emphasis on conflict and confrontation with the Soviet Union remained the dominant theme in China's foreign relations, even after the Great Leap Forward and the 7,000 Cadres Conference (qiqian ren da hui 七千人大会).
This article highlights the differences in the Chinese government's public and private responses to the Yi–Ta incident and considers the implications of these divergences. However, there remains the question of whether the Soviet Union actually played any role at all in fomenting the Yi–Ta incident. Although Moscow flatly denied any wrongdoing in its official representations with the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the historical record prior to 1962 contains many instances of Soviet interference in Xinjiang, including attempts to pry the region away from Chinese control. It would therefore be unsurprising if Moscow was guilty as charged in 1962. The Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives, moreover, contain some evidence of Soviet misbehaviour during the Yi–Ta incident; however, the investigations which unearthed the incriminating evidence were overtly politicized and their reliability is uncertain. A stronger case against the Soviet Union must await further research in the archives in Moscow, Xinjiang and Beijing, as well as interviews with the individuals who fled from Chinese Central Asia in 1962. Given how difficult it is to access some of these sources at the time of writing, it may be some time before scholars may know the full extent of Soviet involvement.Footnote 8
Sino-Soviet Relations in Xinjiang, 1949–1962
In 1962, the CCP had controlled Xinjiang for only 12 years. Even prior to the turbulent events of spring and summer that year, the long-term durability of the CCP in the region was by no means certain. The Kuomintang (KMT) and many dynasties before had routinely failed to secure the political unity of the region with the rest of China. Warlordism was rampant in the province for several decades following the 1911 Revolution and, consequentially, the KMT's governing reach largely fell short of Xinjiang. It was not until 1944, the tail end of the Republican era, that the Nationalist government finally reasserted central control over Xinjiang, but even then the situation was tenuous.Footnote 9 Not long after the central government ousted provincial governor Sheng Shicai 盛世才, the three northern prefectures of Xinjiang – Ili, Qoqek and Altai (Aletai 阿勒泰) – rose in revolt. This rebellion divided Xinjiang almost in half and led to the creation of what was, on paper, an independent state. Recent research in English, Russian and Chinese, however, strongly suggests that the Soviet Union bankrolled and directed the entire affair.Footnote 10 In exchange for providing critical logistical, military and economic support to Uyghur and Kazakh rebels, the Soviet Union gained lucrative access to natural resources, including oil and various strategic minerals, in the newly founded East Turkestan Republic (ETR).Footnote 11 This attempt to pry Xinjiang away from Chinese control stands as the most prominent example of Russian/Soviet interference in the region.
Joseph Stalin changed his calculus towards Xinjiang in 1949 when it became clear that the Chinese Communist Party would emerge victorious in the nationwide civil war and that the People's Liberation Army would probably reach Xinjiang at some point in the very near future. Wanting to cultivate a positive relationship with the new Chinese regime and maintain some special privileges in Xinjiang, the Soviet Union abandoned the ETR and agreed to help the CCP establish itself militarily, politically and economically in China's far north-west.Footnote 12 This included providing economic and technical assistance through several Sino-Soviet joint ventures, the dispatching of Soviet experts, and the sharing of information and expertise on local leaders and international adversaries.Footnote 13 In exchange, the Soviet Union was allowed to retain its consulates in Urumqi, Ghulja, Qoqek, Altai and Kashgar, and gained exclusive access to Xinjiang's natural resources and trade markets.Footnote 14
This cooperation, often celebrated as proof of Sino-Soviet friendship, was tested from both above and below during the so-called “honeymoon period” of China's alliance with Moscow. In the late 1950s, a frustrated Mao Zedong famously blamed Stalin for turning Xinjiang into a Soviet “sphere of influence” and semi-colony.Footnote 15 Nikita Khrushchev, who was more than happy to criticize the former Soviet leader, agreed that Stalin had overstepped the boundaries of the Sino-Soviet partnership in 1949–1950. In the wake of Stalin's death, Moscow relinquished its stakes in Xinjiang's oil and mineral industries. Although the Soviet Union retained most of its consulates in Xinjiang and continued to aid the Chinese in other ways, Sino-Soviet cooperation was reduced in Xinjiang in the mid-1950s for the sake of salvaging the overall relationship.Footnote 16
There were further strains on the relationship originating from within Xinjiang. The thousands of individuals living in Xinjiang who claimed Soviet citizenship or some other affiliation with the Soviet Union were probably more irksome to Sino-Soviet relations over the long term than even Stalin's alleged transgressions. The actual number of these individuals in Xinjiang is hard to account for, but the late scholar Bruce Adams reported that, according to Soviet sources, in 1950 over 12 per cent of Xinjiang's population had formerly resided in the Soviet Union.Footnote 17 The new Chinese regime in Xinjiang gradually became familiar with this population after 1949 through land reform and other mass political campaigns: it tabulated 91,000 “Soviet nationals” (Russians, Kazakhs, Uyghurs, Uzbeks, Tatars, and others) in 1953.Footnote 18 This figure more or less matches Soviet data provided by other scholars, although it does not account for thousands of individuals who lacked formal Soviet citizenship status but claimed or simply desired it. Nor does it account for “stateless” peoples with ambiguous citizenship status, a phenomenon which Chinese sources also recognize.Footnote 19
The Soviet Union began encouraging return migration among its citizens in Xinjiang in the mid-1950s. This campaign coincided with several developmental initiatives in the Soviet Union that required substantial labour resources, such as the “virgin lands” programme.Footnote 20 According to Soviet consular reports, the opportunity to return was attractive because many Soviet citizens in Xinjiang fretted that the People's Republic of China (PRC) was destined to repeat the same deadly mistakes as the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 21 The number of Soviet citizens in Xinjiang shrank dramatically during China's land reform and collectivization campaigns, as thousands of individuals returned to the Soviet Union to take part in that country's post-war economic reconstruction. By 1956, the size of the Soviet community in Xinjiang hovered between 30,000 and 40,000 individuals, less than half its size in 1953. The Great Leap Forward provoked even more legal and illegal migration, although retrospective Chinese accounts allege that the Soviet consul in Ghulja and the Soviet Nationals Association in Xinjiang aggravated the situation further by distributing Soviet citizenship papers, even to Chinese citizens.Footnote 22 Whatever the case, by 1962, the Chinese government reported that only about 3,500 Soviet citizens still resided in Xinjiang.Footnote 23
Domestic Sources of the Yi–Ta Incident
It was against this background that the Yi–Ta incident unfolded in spring 1962. The vast majority of Soviet citizens had already departed Xinjiang through legal but sometimes testy waves of migration, and smaller numbers of Chinese or “stateless” citizens had begun to cross the border.
Beijing initially struggled to stay abreast of this new development in cross-border migration. The central government relied on reports from Xu Huang 徐晃, the director of the Xinjiang Foreign Affairs Department (Xinjiang waishi ban 新疆外事办), who was hastily sent to Ili after learning that Kazakhs and Uyghurs were illegally crossing into Soviet Kazakhstan in early April.Footnote 24 Xu's initial reporting painted a frightening picture for the central leadership. He revealed that entire communes of people had fled across the border, even during “broad daylight [and] with horse carriages and livestock from cooperatives.” The border crossers wielded “knives and cudgels” against local officials while announcing that CCP cadres should “not try to persuade [us]” to stay in China. According to Xu, they pleaded “if [you] are willing to help, then please give us horses.”Footnote 25 In a second report, sent early in the morning of 21 April, Xu described the growing streams of people crossing the border, despite the “vigorous political propaganda work” of local cadres and commune leaders.Footnote 26
Even at this time, when the number of people crossing the Sino-Soviet border remained relatively small, authorities in Xinjiang believed that the illegal flight in Ili could spur unrest elsewhere in northern Xinjiang. The Xinjiang Foreign Affairs Office speculated that “class contradictions will sharpen” as a result of the exodus, and that “landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists and, especially, reactionary local nationalists will take the opportunity to join up with the revisionists and make trouble, even engaging in riots.”Footnote 27 Some CCP cadres suggested that Yi–Ta would reverberate all the way down the spine of the great north-west and enter into Kashgar, then the Uyghur cultural centre of China. “According to the initial trial confessions, there are seven cliques preparing or organizing to run away in Kashgar city,” the Xinjiang Foreign Affairs Office cabled to Beijing.Footnote 28 After completing his tour of Ili, Xu Huang returned to Urumqi only briefly on 21 April before heading out to monitor the situation in southern Xinjiang.Footnote 29
In addition to speculating about future unrest, officials from the CCP began to deliberate over the origins of the flight. Xu Huang's preliminary assessment, shared with the Foreign Ministry in Beijing, focused on shortages of “livelihood supplies” (shenghuo gongyinpin 生活供应品) in northern Xinjiang. Xu noted that consumer goods were in short supply and that material deficits were generating considerable consternation among residents near the borders. “Some daily necessities cannot be purchased, and the masses have a view [on this],” Xu reported.Footnote 30
Xinjiang was certainly hit hard by the Great Leap Forward, and many sources paint a grim picture of agricultural shortfalls during this period.Footnote 31 Existing agricultural, industrial and material deficits within Xinjiang were compounded by the huge numbers of unsanctioned refugees arriving in the region from Zhejiang and the other interior provinces left utterly devastated by the famine.Footnote 32 Unfortunately, even as agricultural production declined and more hungry citizens arrived, Xinjiang had to continue to fulfil its delivery quotas for agricultural goods and cash crops to the interior of China.Footnote 33 The situation in Xinjiang became so desperate that, according to officials from Hubei Province, there was eventually a reverse exodus of Han Chinese refugees returning to the interior in search of food and work.Footnote 34
Local authorities in northern Xinjiang did eventually take measures to alleviate the economic catastrophe caused by the Great Leap Forward. In late March 1962, the Ili District Party Committee issued a directive on the “proper arrangements for peoples’ livelihoods in border regions.” At that time, grain rations generally hovered between 22 and 25 jin per month, depending on the county, with the highest distribution recorded as 30 jin. Recognizing that “the original standards were quite low,” the committee vowed to increase the supply of food, including meat. The directive stated that special efforts should be made to improve the provision of foodstuffs, cotton cloth, sugar and tea specifically “in the communes near the border.” In line with Xu Huang's observations, which were offered a month later, the Ili District Party Committee concluded that “effective planning for the livelihood of border peoples has immense political significance.”Footnote 35
From 15 May through 22 May, the Xinjiang Party Committee convened a special work conference to address the sudden mass exodus. While the cadres in attendance declared that the Soviet Union had certainly plotted the unrest, they also made pledges to improve the livelihoods of residents in the border areas.Footnote 36 Once the cross-border exodus had largely subsided, the CCP Central Committee heeded this advice.Footnote 37 In June 1962, the State Council announced that “in order to appropriately remedy the provision of commodities for ethnic minorities, while taking steps towards strengthening harmony between all minority groups and consolidating border defence, we will allocate an additional 3 million yuan worth of commodities for [Xinjiang].”Footnote 38 The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a paramilitary organization composed of former soldiers, also stepped forward and volunteered to help the Ili–Qoqek area with farming, grazing and production in the wake of the mass exodus.Footnote 39 Later in September 1963, Mao Zedong himself announced that “[we] must often pay attention to and understand the situation at the border [in Xinjiang], and strengthen the border's struggle against revisionism.” Chairman Mao's advice for how to do so was simple: “the first thing is to do economic work well.”Footnote 40
Some officials, including Xu Huang, offered more daring explanations of the Yi–Ta incident by identifying continuing ethnic tensions in Xinjiang. In his 21 April diagnosis of the exodus, Xu claimed that on top of material shortages, “rumours” (yaoyan 谣言) were afloat that “certain persons who led the ‘three districts’ revolution’” were hiding in a “ravine and ready to lead a Uyghur revolt.”Footnote 41 On top of these already serious rumours, Xu added that “others say that Säypiddin Äzizi [a long-time minority nationality official who in 1962 was stationed in Beijing] has capitulated and only Wang Enmao 王恩茂 is in charge, [so] the Hans must be killed.”Footnote 42 In order to dispel such rumours, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai 周恩来 immediately called upon Säypiddin Äzizi to go back to Xinjiang and “return to work.”Footnote 43 Many of the most important policy decisions regarding Xinjiang issued in the subsequent months were done so in Säypiddin's name, perhaps in an effort to establish that the pre-eminent Uyghur official remained an important figure in Xinjiang's political leadership and decision-making bodies.Footnote 44
The internal correspondence and external policy pronouncements of the Chinese government described above show a multifaceted understanding of the causes of and remedies for the Yi–Ta incident. Chinese officials identified several sources of the 1962 unrest in northern Xinjiang, including serious material deficits and tensions between minority peoples and the party-state. To halt the cross-border exodus and stabilize the region, they proposed a package of related economic and political measures. Yet, despite decoupling the Yi–Ta incident from the Soviet Union in many of their internal deliberations, the Chinese government angrily accused Moscow of instigating the crisis. The next section of the article seeks to explain this apparent discrepancy.
Blaming the Soviet Union
In spring and summer 1962, the Chinese government, in numerous verbal jousting matches between its Foreign Ministry officials and Soviet counterparts, blamed the Soviet Union for provoking the Yi–Ta incident. In light of the nuanced reporting and policy responses described in the preceding section, how can one explain China's accusations against the Soviet Union?
To its credit, Beijing did appear to have some evidence that showed either direct Soviet involvement in fomenting the cross-border flight or, at the very least, complicity. Xu Huang concluded his first dispatch on 21 April by noting that, “in one day, the [Soviet] consul [in Ghulja] met with a thousand people in Qoqek, and many of these people discussed, one after another, that they wanted to go to the Soviet Union and register as Soviet nationals.”Footnote 45 According to cadres from the Ministry of Public Security who were later dispatched to Xinjiang, the Soviet consul did not just listen to the plight of these individuals, he also issued passports and other travel documents, enabling them to legally cross into the Soviet Union.Footnote 46 The Xinjiang Foreign Affairs Office also claimed that newly installed radio towers on the Soviet side of the border broadcasted that “life is good” (shenghuo hao 生活好) in the Soviet Union and that livestock was in abundance, thereby convincing many individuals to cross the international boundary.Footnote 47 The Foreign Affairs Office even alleged that Soviet border guards cut down border fences, set up refugee tents and perhaps even sent horses and guns into Chinese territory.Footnote 48
Yet there is still a dearth of reliable evidence that implicates the Soviet Union. Many of the pieces of evidence mentioned above were gathered during highly politicized investigations in the months following the Yi–Ta incident. The Soviet Union, unsurprisingly, flatly denied all allegations of wrongdoing. Without additional forays into hard-to-access archives in Russia, Xinjiang and Beijing, it is difficult to accurately determine the extent of Soviet involvement in this crisis.
Whatever the degree of Soviet instigation, the diplomatic sparring between the two countries must be considered in the broader context of Chinese politics and foreign policy in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward. The Yi–Ta incident took place only a few months following the conclusion of the CCP's so-called 7,000 Cadres Conference. Held in Beijing from December 1961 through February 1962, the mass meeting represented a culmination of debates over the Great Leap Forward and China's economic policies since 1957. During the conference's main address, President Liu Shaoqi 刘少奇 accepted responsibility for the Great Leap Forward on behalf of the Central Committee, partially saving face for Chairman Mao.Footnote 49 Although Liu carefully tiptoed around Mao's primary responsibility for the three years of disaster, any of the 7,000 members of the audience, had they been carefully reading the tea leaves and paying close attention to some of the other reports and discussions, could have easily detected criticisms of the chairman and his radical domestic policies.Footnote 50
The cadres’ meeting was an embarrassment for Mao, and at the close of the conference he staged what appeared to be a political retreat. With the chairman's exit to the provinces, Liu Shaoqi, Chen Yun 陈云, Zhou Enlai and others within the Central Committee endeavoured to resolve China's economic crisis and bring the country, both its rural and urban sectors, out of the darkness. They pushed forward a number of economic readjustments, including a new round of urban-to-rural population transfers, increasing food rations and consumer goods (such as clothing), and shifting state resources from industry to agriculture.Footnote 51 Several scholars suggest that these changes in the economic sphere were mirrored in Chinese foreign policy. Wang Jiaxiang 王稼祥 of the CCP's International Liaison Department pressed for a moderation of China's foreign policy in the aftermath of the 7,000 Cadres Conference, calling for détente with the Soviets, the United States and India.Footnote 52 Wang championed this line both at home and abroad, including at a July 1962 conference in Moscow, where he claimed “it is not appropriate for us to push ourselves forward and to take the lead [in the communist bloc].”Footnote 53
What Wang Jiaxiang advocated was anathema to Mao's worldview and the direction in which the CCP chairman believed Sino-Soviet relations were inevitably heading. Wang's power and influence, however, have been greatly exaggerated. Although for many years political scientists and historians framed August 1962, or the CCP's Beidaihe 北戴河 summer work meeting, as the turning point at which Mao resumed centre stage in Chinese politics and renewed his calls for international class struggle, research by Danhui Li and Yafeng Xia, among other experts, suggests that Mao never really stepped back from handling China's foreign policy, even as he excused himself from domestic policymaking during the spring and summer of 1962.Footnote 54 During the 7,000 Cadres Conference and in the months leading up to the Beidaihe work meeting, Mao continued to promote China's struggle against “modern revisionism.” He did so in private meetings with the CCP leadership, during engagements with the Soviet ambassador and other foreign officials, and, indirectly, through articles published in People's Daily (Renmin ribao 人民日报).Footnote 55 Mao forcefully rejected Wang Jiaxiang's attempts to reconcile with Moscow, believing that conflict and confrontation with the Soviet Union was, at this point, inevitable.
The Foreign Ministry's handling of the Yi–Ta incident in spring and summer 1962 reflected Mao's belief system and his continuing influence over China's foreign relations. Soon after the beginning of the mass exodus, the Xinjiang government reached out to the Soviet Union's border defence authorities.Footnote 56 When these provincial efforts failed to stem the flow of Uyghurs and Kazakhs into the Soviet Union, the Chinese elevated their protestations. On 24 April 1962, the vice-foreign minister, Zhang Hanfu 章汉夫, met with the Soviet ambassador, Stepan Chervonenko.Footnote 57 During the meeting, the two sides exchanged official memoranda on the exodus but otherwise communicated very little.Footnote 58 Chervonenko claimed that it was unthinkable that “the Soviet Union encouraged Chinese residents to cross the border into the Soviet Union.” Zhang retorted that “we know this from our investigations,” alleging that the border crossers were being well received by Soviet authorities. After several minutes of back-and-forth sparring, Zhang motioned for an end to the meeting: “We've made it clear … that if nothing is done about the situation, it's very likely that evildoers will take further advantage of this to drive a wedge in relations between China and the Soviet Union. We must watch out. It's obvious that some bad people are driving a wedge between us.”Footnote 59
The Chinese government was dissatisfied with the Soviet government's reluctance to take responsibility for the Yi–Ta incident, and it conveyed this attitude both internally and externally. Writing to Xu Huang on 25 April on the results of the Zhang–Chervonenko meeting, authorities at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that “it seems that the Soviet Union is still attempting to make excuses” for the mass flight.Footnote 60 Similarly, in a cable to the Chinese ambassador in Moscow, Liu Xiao 刘晓, the Foreign Ministry insisted that the “negotiations [between China and the Soviet Union] must continue” until a favourable outcome for China could be reached.Footnote 61 To this end, the Chinese government began an erstwhile campaign to incriminate the Soviet Union. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a directive for authorities in Xinjiang to “gather specific materials and evidence of their [the Soviet Union's] recent illegal activities.”Footnote 62
As the Chinese government launched this drive to collect evidence, the Soviets still maintained that they had played no part in the unrest in Xinjiang. Chervonenko insisted to Zhang that “it's unnecessary to accuse our comrades on this issue,” even as Zhang claimed to have evidence that “several gaps were opened up in the wire fence near the Qoqek border on your [the Soviet] side, making it very convenient for people to cross the border illegally, and some 20,000 to 30,000 people have left.” Zhang also alleged that Soviet trucks were parked at the border to meet and transport the border crossers. Under these circumstances, Zhang insisted that “the Soviet Union should send back the Chinese residents who have illegally crossed the border into the Soviet Union. This is a customary practice [and] it should be followed.”Footnote 63
Subsequent meetings between Chervonenko and Zhang on 19 May and then 8 June – within days of the crackdown in Ghulja on 29 May – similarly achieved little in the way of compromise.Footnote 64 The Chinese continued to blame the Soviets for initiating the cross-border flight while the Soviet Union denied that it had played a direct role. The Soviet Union noted its frustration at the border crossings and even called China's claims of Soviet instigation the “apex of fiction.”Footnote 65
Despite Moscow's denials, China maintained that the Soviet Union was principally responsible for inciting the unrest in northern Xinjiang. The Chinese government called attention to Soviet involvement in myriad pronouncements and directives, but never publicly broached the economic or social causes of the border crossings, as it sometimes did in its private internal correspondences. In May, the Central Committee concluded that the Yi–Ta incident “was a thorough exposure that some foreign forces have been conducting long-term subversive activities in Xinjiang.”Footnote 66 In response, the Chinese government ordered the closure of Soviet consulates in Xinjiang in June 1962, and in August of that year, it called for all Soviet business and trade offices to withdraw from the region.Footnote 67 Soon after, the Xinjiang government implemented strict laws governing foreign nationals after concluding that there “are some criminals who, with foreign incitement, instigated large exoduses across the border, mobs who made trouble, the walloping of cadres, and the plundering of properties from warehouses, shops, and people's communes in Qoqek and Ili.”Footnote 68
Conclusion
By late May 1962, Chinese officials estimated that over 60,000 men and women, mostly Kazakhs and Uyghurs but also a few Hans, had fled from Xinjiang into the Soviet Union. At a time when China was still recovering from the Great Leap famine, the sudden and unplanned exodus of so many people from an already sparsely populated region shocked the leaderships in Xinjiang and Beijing. More recently produced local gazetteers suggest that 14,000 individuals fled from Qorghas, a border county and major gateway for international trade. In three of Qoqek prefecture's counties (Qoqek, Dorbiljin and Chaghantoqay [Yumin 裕民]), 58,000 “Chinese citizens” jumped the border in a matter of weeks.Footnote 69 The figure for Chaghantoqay accounted for nearly 60 per cent of the county's population, and the workforces at several cooperative farms were completely depleted.Footnote 70
The cross-border exodus came to a conclusion not long after May 29, when troops from the Fourth Agricultural Division of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and local police forces descended upon Ghulja. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps soon established dozens of military farms directly adjoining the Sino-Soviet border and resettled thousands of soldiers from the interior of Xinjiang, effectively garrisoning and sealing off much of the northern region of Xinjiang.Footnote 71 The intensified military presence along the border was followed by a massive multi-year, state-led campaign to relocate hundreds of thousands of young Han Chinese from Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin and other major urban areas in eastern and central China to Xinjiang. This resettlement campaign, created in the wake of the Yi–Ta incident, was the beginning of a demographic revolution in Xinjiang in which the population sizes of the Uyghurs and Kazakhs would gradually come to be rivalled by a large and economically prosperous Han Chinese population.Footnote 72
The Soviet Union, also wanting to bring the crisis to a close and restore some order to Sino-Soviet relations, responded to the 29 May violence by closing its border crossings.Footnote 73 The concurrent efforts by the Chinese and Soviet governments succeeded at stopping the border crossings but did not necessarily lead to any final settlement between the two countries. Indeed, for several months following May 1962, the Chinese and Soviet governments continued a contentious dialogue over the exodus. The Chinese leadership insisted that the Soviet Union should return its citizens, although the Soviets never agreed to do so.Footnote 74
The episode ultimately served to reinforce Mao Zedong's worldview and belief in the inevitability of conflict between China and the Soviet Union. Although a variety of sources lay out or, at the very least, hint at the domestic origins of the mass exodus, the Chinese central government kept quiet when it came to the internal causes of the flight and instead chose to lay the blame entirely in the hands of the Soviet Union. Then and now, this turmoil in Chinese Central Asia is remembered mainly as a Soviet-sponsored counterrevolution, a painful reminder that China had to constantly guard against Soviet military encroachment.Footnote 75 The anti-Soviet struggle in Xinjiang after 1962 took on nearly comical dimensions. In one instance, a transportation official from Kashgar, who was invited all the way to Shanghai to speak on the “struggle with revisionism on the border,” hit back at the Soviet Union by claiming Chinese automobiles were of better quality.Footnote 76
Whether the Soviet Union's involvement in Yi–Ta was in fact extensive or minimal, the Chinese government believed that the flight of over 60,000 individuals from Xinjiang and the subsequent violence in Ghulja were at least partially triggered by domestic instability. This divergence in how the Chinese government privately managed the Yi–Ta incident and how it publicly discussed the event prompts us to reconsider how a regime internally deliberates instances of mass violence, turmoil and displacement, and then turns these internal deliberations into external pronouncements, both for the general public and for foreign audiences. Although China's central government clearly recognized that several factors were at play in the 1962 turmoil, it chose to focus purely on the role of the Soviet Union in its public assessments of Yi–Ta. The CCP responded to the economic and social causes of the incident quietly but earnestly, while engaging in a public campaign designed to showcase the hostile and subversive actions of the Soviet Union.
Chinese authorities likely chose to handle the Yi–Ta incident in this manner in order to avoid bringing attention to the regime's internal weaknesses and shortcomings, as well as its embarrassing failures. The Chinese government, at least publicly, could not take responsibility for the ethnic unrest taking place within its borderland territories. The Yi–Ta incident is thus a reminder that how a regime responds to and seeks to overcome turmoil is often much more exhaustive, complex and nuanced than its public pronouncements may indicate. Even as a government lays the blame for fight and flight with another party, internally it may be arriving at very different conclusions. Given the ongoing turmoil between majority and minority populations within China's borderland provinces today, including in Xinjiang, it is worth bearing these perspectives in mind.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Shawn McHale, Lorenz Lüthi, Joseph Torigian, Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, Justin Jacobs, Sergey Radchenko, Christian Ostermann, Edward McCord, Lanbiao Zhao and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on and support for this manuscript. The Henry Luce Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation provided generous financial support to the Wilson Center's history and public policy programme, which enabled the research behind this paper.
Bibliographical note
Charles KRAUS is the senior programme associate for the history and public policy programme at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. He earned his PhD from the department of history at the George Washington University in 2017. His dissertation, “Xinjiang's 100,000: State-led Urban-to-Rural Population Resettlement in Socialist China,” was based on research conducted at 20 archives in China. The editor of the online Chinese Foreign Policy Database, Kraus has published articles on the history of the People's Republic of China, the Cold War, and East Asian international history in journals such as Diplomatic History, Cold War History and International History Review.
