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Paper abstract:

Ushering in repression which notionally terminated the mass organization conflict of 1966-1968, the extension of the Cultural Revolution’s Cleansing of the Class Ranks Campaign to the indigenous Eurasian borderlands of the People’s Republic of China has been under-researched. This paper seeks to address this gap, focussing on the pastoral Altay subprefecture of the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang. In Altay, the “Class Ranks” eventually constituted not one campaign, but three, fusing with the national One Strike, Three Antis of early 1970 and a hitherto-unstudied regional campaign of pastoral classification aiming to fold Xinjiang’s indigenous Kazakh pastoralists into the Maoist organizational system of class labeling for the first time.

This paper makes two core arguments. Firstly, it integrates existing historiography and political science on the grassroots articulation of Chinese mass campaigns to argue that the rollout of these interlocked movements in pastoral Xinjiang was multileveled and contingent. Altay’s historical experience was contoured by processes at the Beijing (central), Ürümchi (regional), prefectural, and county levels, alongside international Sino-Soviet tension, pulling campaign tempo, acceleration, and deceleration in different directions at different times. The stop-start dynamics that these interactions engendered exacerbated political violence in an unstable non-Han region on the frontline of the Sino-Soviet split. Secondly, this paper draws on a critical theoretical reading of the relationship between temporality and ideology from 1966-1976 to introduce the concept of “temporal struggle” in analysis of the Cultural Revolution. Attempting to fully cleave “New China” from the “Old Society”, through severing relationships between the past and the present, temporal struggle in Chinese Central Asia prompted the abandonment of residual conciliatory state policies towards Altay’s indigenous pastoralists, while the once-historicized caricature of the malign Kazakh “herdlord” was revived as a target for comprehensive elimination from New China.

This interdisciplinary paper constructs its narrative by integrating limited extant Cultural Revolution-era press and documents with a series of post-1976 county, prefecture, and regional annals and Communist Party of China official histories. It consequently represents an example of historical research undertaken via critically examining the Chinese party-state’s own official documentary record, and contends that this remains a viable methodology with which to research sensitive events and indigenous territories where direct research access for scholars is otherwise extremely restricted.