Pivot of Asia

"Whereas Inner Asian Frontiers examines the whole Inner Asian region from Manchuria right round to Tibet, Pivot of Asia concentrates on the question of Xinjiang which was thought in the 1940s and 1950s to be one of the most significant issues in Asian geopolitics. It’s very interesting that it then lost prominence and people stopped thinking about the region until the 1980s or 1990s. But the question of who really controlled Xinjiang in the 1930s and 1940s occupied the minds of many analysts of Asia. And what Owen Lattimore was able to do then was to assemble a team based in the United States and look at not only the political history of the Xinjiang region, but also its demography, ethnic make-up and the economy. It gives us a clear picture of what Xinjiang was like before the Chinese Communist Party came to take control of it in 1949 and that again reinforces my idea that we shouldn’t look at the current conflict in Xinjiang as a very recent event: it is essential to consider the historical background to begin to understand the reasons behind it. Pivot of Asia reveals a complex and divided society in which there were tensions between the different Muslim communities in addition to a distance from, and disdain for, the central government of China by all, including many local Han residents. By 1949 Xinjiang had undergone its own revolutionary changes which included attempts by Uyghurs and Hui Muslims to establish their own administrations. These were only partly successful and this unfinished business was inherited by the CCP in 1949 which attempted to resolve it according to its own principles. It was a poor, underdeveloped region, remote from the major centres of power, whether in China or in Central Asia. During the Republican era, which is the period between 1911 and 1949, it was considered to be part of China but as the Republic disintegrated—because of civil war between warlords and the occupation by the Japanese—it gradually became more and more independent, initially under its own warlord governors who were of Han Chinese origin. However, towards the end of the Republican period, the Muslim population, both the Uyghurs and the Hui (the Chinese speaking Muslims) gradually began to play a greater role in local politics. There were two independent regimes, the first in the southern Xinjiang city of Kashgar in the 1930s. This was initially an independent Uyghur government, but it was overthrown by the warlord armies of the Chinese-speaking Hui. “The question of Xinjiang…was thought in the 1940s and 1950s to be one of the most significant issues in Asian geopolitics” There was a second, more influential, independent government in the 1940s, this time in the north of Xinjiang in the city that the Uyghurs call Ghulja and the Chinese call Yining. This was promoted as a multi-ethnic republic but in fact it was dominated by Uyghurs: the Hui Muslims who in any case do not have such an important presence in that part of Xinjiang didn’t play a great part in it. So even at this point, in the 1940s before the Chinese Communist Party came to take over that region, the ethnic tensions and political complexity were already apparent. It did as far as Westerners were concerned. From 1949 onwards the West was initially concerned with what they thought of as the Sino-Soviet bloc. Following the Second World War and in the early phase of the Cold War, it was assumed that there was an unbreakable alliance between the Soviet Union and China. Western analysts were concentrating on what Moscow said and what China said and the area in between—Central and Inner Asia—was inaccessible to foreign observers including journalists and academics. Very little was known about what was going on in those regions. Xinjiang was subject to the policies of China in the same way that the Turkic-speaking Muslim regions on the other side of the border in the Soviet Union were subject to the dictates of Moscow. The West was only interested in the general policies that Moscow and Beijing were articulating. Gradually, as the relations between Moscow and Beijing deteriorated, analysts began to look at the dispute between the two, but the smaller regions in between were still ignored, largely because there was no access to these regions and very little reliable information on what was happening there."