The Ili Rebellion: The Moslem Challenge to Chinese Authority in Xinjiang, 1944-1949

The Ili Rebellion consisted of an attempt by Turkic Muslims in a small region of Xinjiang province, in the far northwest of China, to create an independent Muslim state. The rebels intended that their East Turkestan Republic would control the whole of Xinjiang, after which they would expel the Han Chinese. The rebellion began in November 1944 and resisted efforts to suppress it by the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek; it collapsed only on October 20, 1949, just nineteen days after the People's Republic of China was proclaimed in Peking.

Benson, an assistant professor at Oakland College in Rochester, Michigan, has done a superb job of piecing together information on this consequential but obscure incident. Her research in the British, American, and Republic of China archives was supplemented by readings in Russian and Turkic materials, as well as by a host of interviews. In addition to constructing a narrative of the five-year episode, she shows how the rebellion incubated in the hostility Turks felt toward their alien rulers; that (Chinese suspicions to the contrary) Stalin was not responsible for instigating the rebellion (though he helped it along); and that the short-lived East Turkestan Republic greatly heightened the sense of Turkic nationalism. Benson portrays the incident as ultimately "a part of the post-World War II pattern of breakdown in the old colonialist and imperialist system."

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