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A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

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Sinkiang as part of China 273<br />

1955, but already in 1954 the Ili segment had been established as an<br />

autonomous sub-section with the name of its principal group as the<br />

determinant: Ili Kazakh Autonomous District.Several other autonomous<br />

districts, such as the Artush Kyrgyz Autonomous District, were<br />

established.This process may have been partly inspired by the razmezhevanie<br />

(delimitation) that in 1924 created the republics and autonomous<br />

regions of Soviet Central Asia, and the goal was no doubt similar: to give<br />

the minorities their due, while retaining control of the area.The subsequent<br />

composition of the regional government, parliament, and most<br />

institutions also followed the Soviet pattern of filling the nominally principal<br />

posts with the natives, while doubling them with Chinese officials<br />

so as to make the system fail-safe.<br />

Sinkiang, the former Chinese Turkestan, has since then gone through<br />

a process that bears many other analogies with its western twin, the<br />

former Russian Turkestan.Like Moscow, Beijing has on the whole sincerely<br />

allowed the natives to assert their cultural identity, speak and use<br />

and teach their languages, and associate with the Chinese on a basis of<br />

personal equality.Economic development has been pursued vigorously,<br />

transportation and communications media expanded, education and<br />

the foundation of schools, including the University of Urumchi, supported.All<br />

of that had a price, of course.To begin with, Beijing imposed<br />

its Marxist system on the province, with collectivization and other measures<br />

of questionable economic soundness.The uncompromising hand<br />

of Communism could not but deprive the people of Sinkiang of those<br />

freedoms which by the standards of Western democracy are deemed<br />

indispensable.Like their brethren across the border, the Uighurs and<br />

other Muslims of Sinkiang lived in the 1960s their years of nightmare,<br />

some two decades after the nightmare in Soviet Central Asia: the<br />

Cultural Revolution hit the natives in a manner not unlike the terror<br />

launched by Stalin in the 1930s to break the native Muslims’ national<br />

spirit.One of the targets was religion, and organized Islam was indeed<br />

put on the defensive; it lived the same marginal kind of existence, carefully<br />

monitored by the Chinese government, to which it had been relegated<br />

by the Soviet government.<br />

Finally one salient feature must be emphasized: the role that the<br />

Chinese language has played as the common medium for the region’s<br />

citizens, especially for its younger generations.Here too the analogy with<br />

Russian across the border is striking.All students learn Chinese at school<br />

and many become bilingual, especially those with greater professional<br />

ambition.Moreover, immigration from China proper has increased to

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