Abstract

Erupting into Central Eurasian politics via a Soviet-backed ‘November Revolution’ against Chinese Nationalist rule in 1944, the Second East Turkestan Republic (ETR) rapidly established a revolutionary state in northwestern Xinjiang which survived until its 1949 absorption into the People’s Republic of China. Although a multi-ethnic regime, the ETR holds particular significance to Uyghurs as the longest lasting Uyghur-led state in the 20th century.

Sources on the ETR have historically been rare. Its archives are inaccessible in China, while Soviet collections on the republic have been closed since the late 1990s. Retroactive autobiographies by ETR leaders, while valuable, are meanwhile shaped by their writers’ post-1949 experiences, as the republic’s cadredom and military split between those remaining in China or opting for exile.

Breaking with a historiography shaped by source scarcity, this paper rethinks the ETR and its absorption into the PRC through a critically underutilized source: the internal publication of the late ETR’s ruling party, the Union for the Defence of Peace and Democracy (abbrev. Ittifaq). Published from October 1948, Ittifaq’s journal (also named Ittifaq) was designed for extensive use in Ittifaq cadre study sessions, featuring direct contributions from the Ittifaq Central Committee and state leaders such as overall 1946-1949 ETR leader Ahmetjan Qasimi. Crucially, it continued publication past PRC takeover in late 1949 until 1951.

This paper argues that Ittifaq represents an almost-unique contemporary source on the ETR, the nature and content of which enables major revisions in understanding the republic.

Firstly, given its nature as a cadre-education tool printing leadership diktat, Ittifaq provides a window into the ETR’s information ecology, particularly how its institutions signalled the republic’s political line to officials. The fact that such a party journal existed, and its resemblance to internal journals in the PRC and USSR, further indicates how the late ETR increasingly resembled a Leninist party-state.

Secondly, shifts in Ittifaq’s content across the ‘1949 divide’ provide a real-time indication of how the ETR transitioned into a subordinate part of the PRC. Ittifaq’s platform shifted over 1948-1950 from messaging nationalist anti-(Chinese)colonial leftism to one emphasising Sino-Turkic unity and explicit socialism. Effectively compensating for the demise of a national project by proclaiming an internationalist socialist one, this rhetoric enabled the reconceptualization of the ETR as a non-state local ‘Three Districts Revolution’, and its folding into ‘New China’. Reading Ittifaq provides a direct contemporary vision into how ‘East Turkestan’ once more became ‘Xinjiang’ in the mid-20th century.