Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

X

XINJIANG. Referred to by European contemporaries as Chinese Turkestan, Xinjiang (Sinkiang) is the huge (500,000 square miles) region of northwest China, consisting chiefly of deserts and mountains, that borders the lands of what was known as Russian Turkestan in the imperial and revolutionary periods. Its population, which was estimated at 2,800,000 in 1917, was overwhelmingly Moslem by religion and culture and included Uyghurs, Kazakhs (some of them very recent immigrants from Russian Turkestan, who had fled from the tsarist regime’s suppression of the 1916 uprising in that region), Kyrgyz, Mongols, and Hui and Han Chinese, as well as at least 30,000 ethnic Russians (60,000 by 1921). The region suffered major political disturbances and civil wars of its own in the 1930s, but was also affected, in the era of the “Russian” Civil Wars, by events just across the border in Russian Turkestan, with which it had economic and cultural links that stretched back to the era of the Silk Road. These links had been revivified by imperial Russian incursions into the region since the 1860s and were far stronger than Xinjiang’s ties with the distant cities of coastal China.

Throughout the Russian revolutionary era, Xinjiang was governed by a brutal but efficient Mandarin judge, Yang Zengxin (Yang Tseng-hsin), who personally favored the Whites but at the same time sought to prevent Russian incursions into and domination of his region. Thus, although the Russian consulate at Kashgar and Russian missions in other towns were centers of anti-Bolshevik organization (and sent thousands of volunteers to join the Whites in Semirech′e), they had to act cautiously in their relations with the Chinese, who feared that Red forces might break into Xinjiang to cleanse it of their White opponents. Moreover, the Chinese authorities became less accommodating to the anti-Bolsheviks as it became clear the Reds were winning the civil wars in 1919–1920, and as Red Army forces actually did launch incursions into the Ili and Chughuchaq regions in pursuit of the Whites. Consequently, when the Semirech′e Army of the defeated atamans A. I. Dutov and B. V. Annenkov retreated across the border into Xinjiang in April–May 1920, the Chinese took steps (not always successful) to disarm them. Subsequently, in late 1920, a trade agreement was signed between the Xinjiang governor and the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and, on 23 September 1920, the central government of Republican China ordered the closure of all Russian imperial consulates, including that in Kashgar. Thereafter, White influence in the region waned.