Xinjiang clique

The Xinjiang clique was the line of military strongmen who governed China's far north-western province of Xinjiang from the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911–12 until 1944. Unlike the other regional cliques of the Warlord Era, its leaders were all outsiders to the province: Yang Zengxin from Yunnan, Jin Shuren from Gansu and Sheng Shicai from Manchuria. Formally loyal to whichever government held power in China, they ran Xinjiang largely as their own domain, increasingly in the shadow of the Soviet Union.

Yang Zengxin, a Han Chinese official born in Mengzi, Yunnan, in 1864, had served the Qing as a magistrate in Gansu and was posted to Xinjiang in 1907. When the Xinhai Revolution reached the province and the last Qing governor, Yuan Dahua, fled in 1912, Yang defeated the revolutionaries and took control himself. He relied heavily on Hui (Chinese Muslim) soldiers and commanders such as Ma Fuxing and Ma Shaowu. Yuan Shikai recognised him as governor, and Yang, a committed monarchist, backed Yuan's brief attempt to make himself emperor.

Yang's guiding aim was to shield Xinjiang from the upheavals in the rest of China. He accepted whichever faction ruled in Beijing, executed dissidents and kept communications under his personal control; he is said to have carried the keys of the radio station and read every message himself. Taxes on Kazakhs, Uyghurs and other non-Han peoples were reduced. After the Russian Revolution he took a friendly line towards the Soviet state. More than 30,000 White Russians fled into Xinjiang in 1920–21, and agreements in the early 1920s opened Soviet consulates in the province and Chinese ones in Soviet Central Asia, deepening Soviet economic influence.

On 1 July 1928 Yang recognised the Nationalist government in Nanjing. Six days later his subordinate Fan Yaonan shot him dead at a banquet. Jin Shuren, who had been Yang's deputy, had Fan executed along with his fellow plotters and was confirmed by the Kuomintang as provincial chairman. Jin's rule was harsh and badly managed. He enlarged the secret police, introduced internal passports, gave posts to men from his home region in Gansu, caused high inflation and banned the hajj. In 1930 he annexed the small Kumul Khanate, and in 1931 a revolt broke out there, the Kumul Rebellion, supported by the Hui general Ma Zhongying from Gansu. Further risings followed, including the breakaway First East Turkestan Republic in the south.

In April 1933 White Russian troops and a group of officials overthrew Jin, who escaped through Siberia. Sheng Shicai, a Manchurian-born officer trained in Japan who had arrived in Xinjiang in 1929–30, emerged as military governor, or duban. Besieged by Ma Zhongying's forces, he turned to Moscow. Soviet troops and aircraft helped him defeat his rivals in 1934, and in return the Soviet Union gained wide control over the province, monopolising its trade and exploiting its minerals and oil. Sheng announced "Six Great Policies", among them friendship with the Soviet Union and equality between nationalities, and gave shelter to Chinese Communists. In 1937, alongside the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, he launched purges of his own in which, according to one estimate, some 100,000 people were executed, tortured to death or imprisoned.

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Sheng changed sides. In 1942 he approached the Nationalist government and expelled Soviet military and technical staff, and he later had the Communist cadres in his administration arrested and executed, among them Mao Zemin. When he tried to turn back to the Soviets in 1944, Chiang Kai-shek removed him, naming him minister of agriculture and forestry in August of that year, and Xinjiang passed under direct Nationalist rule. The new administration soon faced a rebellion that produced the Second East Turkestan Republic.

Our maps label the territory simply as Xinjiang and draw it on the 1914, 1920, 1930 and 1938 maps, beside the Republic of China and the Soviet Union.