Hope everyone is well out there. I know I am. Um been crazy busy lately with work. The semester is now in full swing and I'm not only doing research and studying Chinese as always, but I have to teach an extra class this semester.

And um [sighs and gasps] I've been helping with the IELTS practice exams for our students who are getting ready to um take that particular exam at the end of the semester so they can go study abroad. So I've been quite a busy beaver, but hey, you know, you know what they say, do what you love and you never have to work a day in your life and all that jazz. [clears throat]

Um I had a great time in Chengdu. the capital of Sichuan province, which I definitely will return to. Um, only had about a day and a half to go sightseeing because I was so busy with the conference and whatnot, but I mean, wow, the Sichuan museum's good. I like the Gini andWI night markets and Sichuan cuisine is honestly my favorite Chinese cuisine. It is so spicy and rich. So, I was, you know, I was in high heaven every time I went out to eat or at the big banquets.

Um, [snorts] also my 30th birthday came and went. Not 30th. Uh, 37th, huh? I wish my 30th. But, uh, I'm 37 now. Can't believe I'm almost 40. Oh my goodness.

Uh, so my partner Youkun and I went out and got Korean barbecue and had some birthday cake with some of my neighbors. Uh, which I was genuinely happy about. You know, when you're 37, it's not like your 18th or 21st birthday or your 50th or, you know, 65th birthday where it's a a milestone year. So, you know, I was okay with not with no big party or anything.

um for Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day which overlap this year. We'll be heading to a cabin in the Chin Mountains out in the Sha country side and uh you know that's going to be pretty dope. [clears throat] Um so anyways, now that we finished catching up, let's launch into our introduction today.

Hm yep. Today we're going to launch into our second thematic episode and possibly one of our most controversial episodes to date. This is one that could get some people uh riled up. You know, especially some of the Western liberals and Han Chinese ethno-supremacists, they could get up in their feelings cuz I'm talking about two very contentious regions that we hear a lot about in discourse around China. Yes, my friends, we are going to be talking about Xinjiang and Tibet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. [clears throat] I see you fucking Buddhism fetishizing hippies and National Endowment for Democracy Internship motherfuckers coming outside my window with your goddamn torches and pitchforks. But shut up. This is my podcast and I've got something to say.

I'm about to drop something now on you guys that's going to blow your fucking minds. The cultural revolution in Tibet and in Xinjiang, especially Tibet, was an incredibly popular and organic mass movement that the ethnic Tibetans, Uyghur, and other national minorities of Western China took up enthusiastically in ways that the Han-Chinese didn't. Probably no one went fucking harder for the cause than Tibetan and Uyghur Red Guards. No cap. Full stop.

These people had experienced what Mao had done, lifting them out of feudalism and literal slavery and making them equals with their Han comrades in every way. And the idea that there were people in the party that wanted to bring back the old China terrified them. They were ready to fight tooth and nail to defend the new socialist order.

But that's just the beginning of our story, comrades. So, [clears throat] let's brew up a pot of Tibetan butter tea. Throw some Uyghur kao baozi into the oven. Bring in the dog and the cat. Get into your robe and bunny slippers. And let's tell the story.

Tibet, the mountainous and mysterious land at the roof of the world. After being liberated from theocratic feudalism by the people's liberation army in 1951 and after the democratic reforms of 1959 which launched the new democratic revolution in Tibet, the Tibetan Autonomous Region was the most remote and backwards of all China's provinces.

However, Tibet was kind of - well, it was kind of stunted in its development. One thing you guys should understand is that Mao and the leadership of the Communist Party were aware of the very specific circumstances that Tibet faced compared to the rest of China. While the rest of China was considered by Marxists to be semifeudal, Tibet was still seen as completely feudal. And because of that, the new democratic revolution in Tibet had to be much more gradual than that in in inland China.

Um because of this, by the time the cultural revolution broke out in 1966, collectivization still had not been implemented within agriculture and uh socialist industrialization had not been really implemented in Tibet's few urban areas except for Lhasa.

It did not help [clears throat] that um Tibet's regional party committee and PLA military rel uh region were headed by a guy who was very much part of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping's good old boys club. Lieutenant General Zhang Guohua had made a name for himself as being the commander of the liberation of Tibet in 1951. But he was also a staunch Han nationalist and advocate for China adopting market socialism. He kept Tibet as his own personal fiefdom and was and it was infuriating to the Tibetan masses and revolutionary Han cadres.

So when the cultural revolution was declared in the May 16th circular, the Tibetan people felt it would be a major opportunity to accelerate the revolution in their region. By the end of May, the regional party committee had set up a cultural revolution leading a small group. Zhang Guohua appointed his friend Wang Qimei, a PLA commander who had also helped liberate Tibetan 51 as director.

Immediately, Zhang and Wang Qimei tried to figure out how to keep a lid on the cultural revolution, deciding who would be sacrificed in mass struggle and who would be protected and declared that all struggle sessions and mass rallies were to be orchestrated by him and his gang of cronies and no one else. But as you'll see, thankfully, that turned out to not be the case.

The cultural revolution in Tibet really got going in August of '66, August 12th, 1966 to be exact, when a mass rally in Lhasa in response to the first Red Guard reception in Beijing was held. 1,400 people took part in the rally, which doesn't sound like much to us, but that was pretty big by Tibet standards at the time.

Um, Tibet had only had a population of like a few hundred thousand at most. It's about only about 2 million today. The whole metro to uh Lhasa area. Also, something you might notice is that I had jumped immediately from the May 16th circular to the month of August. There's a reason for that. The rule of thumb with Tibet, and this is still very much true today, is usually Tibet will be about two or three months behind the rest of the country in terms of implementing policy. just, you know, because of the remoteness of that area.

Regardless of the late onset, the first Red Guard rally in Lhasa was a major success that brought thousands of young emancipated serfs to praise Chairman Mao's first big character poster and the August 8th 16th point decision.

Still, Zhang Guohua seemed very much in control of this rally. He gave the keynote speech and declared that the Red Guard should stay loyal to the regional party committee and the PLA's Tibetan command.

Zhang couldn't hold back popular struggle long at all, though, and 5 days later, the Cultural Revolution was already out of his control. On August 24th, 1966, the first mass action of the cultural revolution not initiated by the regional party committee or army took place with the Tibetan masses looting and laying waste at the Joel Kong monastery, an ancient monastery considered one of the holiest places in Tibetan Buddhism. [snorts]

Originally, the Han Red Guards assigned to the monastery were simply going to clear out the monastery, take inventory of its contents, ship the contents to a museum, and turn the monastery into housing. But when the local ethnic Tibetan red guards heard that Jokhang Monastery was going to be cleared out, they called for the masses to march on the monastery, and all hell broke loose.

That day, hundreds, maybe even thousands of Tibetan workers and peasants broke past their Han comrades and tore the monastery to shreds, burning the ancient texts, smashing every Buddha and Buddha statue to pieces, putting every monk and llama through humiliating struggle sessions.

For Tibetans, this was not seen as a destruction of their culture or of priceless historical relics, but a cathartic, intoxicating act of revenge upon a social institution that had oppressed them for centuries. For the people of Lhasa, it was a sign that the cultural revolution was to be a new birth of freedom for their people. The 50s were a time of reform, but the 1960s would be a time of socialist revolution.

The Red Guards of Lhasa High School also [clears throat] took to the streets, making street demonstrations against Han chauvinism and Buddhist theocracy an almost daily occurrence.

The children of the new Tibet loved Chairman Mao and hated the old society with every fiber of their being. And they showed it in the most bombastic ways possible. They began to organize some of the first struggle sessions against members of the old society that still had social influence, even if not so official social power in their communities.

The first public struggle sessions began on August 27th. Across the past prior weeks, the neighborhood committees, which were the people's committees of LOS's various districts, but reconstituted on a hard Maoist line, had been gathering lists of ox, demon snake spirits, as they were called, reactionaries from the old society that were still unrepentant about their past actions.

They were according to Tibetan scholar Tsering Woeser [clears throat] mostly clergymen, nobility, former statesmen, military officers from the old Tibetan army, landlords and merchants. They were gathered and humiliated in mass assemblies where their past employees and serfs and slaves would testify about the horrible oppression they endured at their hands and shame them for refusing to self-criticize and to help build the new China.

Dozens of these struggle sessions, mass struggle sessions took place across Tibet across September and October. Like in other parts of China, some ended in violent beatings and many targets were driven to suicide after their struggle session.

But honestly, the ratio of genuinely bad people compared to innocent people just caught in the crossfire of struggle sessions in Tibet was much more lopsided towards the former than the latter compared to say the rest of inland China. So, it's honestly harder for me to feel sympathy for the people I see in the photos and read about in the testimonies.

I mean, this is going to sound dramatic, but I think of it like this. Um, would I feel sorry if I saw the Taliban being put through struggle sessions by women and tribal people in a hypothetical socialist Afghanistan?

No. So, if I may come across as callous, why should I care about these people? I know that's mean, but it's true. I don't care. After the first wave of struggle sessions and the settling of unsettled affairs pre-liberation, the movement began to proliferate and red guards and rebel organizations began to form not just out of high schools and universities, but out of trade unions, women's committees, peasants committees, and other mass organizations across November through December.

National minorities like the Hui and Mongols began to set up their own rebel groups, too. and the Hui were known for their tenacious and enthusiastic organizers in Lhasa.

Revolutionary networking groups of red guards, mainly Tibetan students who were studying inland but many of them were also Han comrades, came and joined in the struggle. [clears throat] It was quickly a genuine popular movement that the majority of Tibetans were supportive of. One man whose parents died during the cultural revolution later admitted years later in uh one text I read that most of what they did in those days was out of genuine love for the communist party and chairman Mao. There were a lot of people with ulterior motives but most people were in fact of the former type end quote.

And uh Tibetans, this is interesting, they tended to have an almost mystical devotion to Chairman Mao. Uh saying that many held quote superstitious beliefs about him and dogmatically believed his words to quote hold the universal truths.

Uh you know, old habits die hard, I guess. And I'm not just, you know, laying it on thick when I'm saying this. Tibetans took the cultural revolution very seriously, possibly more than their ethnic Han comrades.

Even supporters of the Dalai Lama like John Avedon and the exile accounts acknowledge that the majority of Tibetans supported the cultural revolution.

Just like in the rest of China, old street names, uh, city names, factory names, etc. were changed to reflect the new revolutionary era.

Some Tibetans even change their names, not necessarily to Mandarin names, but to like Tibetan names with less Buddhist and more militant leftist connotations. Uh, many people born between 66 and 69 in Tibet have names like red thunderbolt, left victory, protract the red, and forever red.

And just like the rest of China, Lhasa was subject to a power seizure during the January storm. Well, kind of as always with, you know, Tibet was a bit late to the game due to the inevitable logistical delays with their January storm taking place on February 5th.

Well, okay, let me back that up. On January 10th, rebel organizations from the Revolutionary Rebels headquarters worked together to storm the Tibet Daily newspaper offices, but didn't get much farther than that.

On February 5th, however, red guards and rebel peasants groups were able to seize various municipal and regional offices such as the regional party committee headquarters and the public security bureau.

Zhang Guohua and his gang officially deferred to the revolutionaries and made their usual self-criticisms, but they had something else up their sleeve. Dividing the rebel movement. [sighs]

Well, uh, just like the rest of China, tensions began already mounting between the Red Guard groups.

Zhang was still determined to wrangle the movement back under his thumb and courted the favor of many of the official Red Guard groups to get them on his side.

In the aftermath of the January storm, two major umbrella factions emerged, the hardline Maoist Gyenlo (Rebels) and the conservative military-aligned Namdre. (Alliance)

Gyenlo was founded on the morning of December 22nd 1966 as the revolutionary rebels general headquarters and was originally meant to make up the sole core of the rebel movement in Tibet. Their leader was Tao Changsong, a teacher at Lhasa High School.

Their core membership was around the red guards of Lhasa University and Lhasa High School, the Red Rebels Regiment Red Guards of the Xianyang Tibetan Nationalities Institute, farmers and nomads who were members of the Revolutionary Rebels Commune and workers from the trade union branches of the cement factory, machinery back factory and transportation teams number one and two in Lhasa.

During the cultural revolution, they would consistently be the hardline red faction in Tibetan politics, even after they officially dissolved.

Nyamdre was founded on the evening of February 5th, 1967 by mass organizations and cadres who opposed the February 5th seizure of power and was officially known as the Great Revolutionary Proletarian Alliance headquarters. (Alliance)

They were led by Liu Shaoming, which who was one of Zhang Guohua's right-hand men and their membership mainly consisted of students from the Xianyang Tibetan National Institutes Serf Poleaxes Red Guards, peasants and nomads from the Peasants and Nomads headquarters and workers from several local trade unions that had coalesced into the Lhasa workers general headquarters.

They were notably pro-Zhang Guohua and had the backing of the Tibetan military region of the PLA. So soldiers stationed in Tibet almost universally gravitated toward Nyamdre with the exception of the people's militia and the people's police.

It seems like the militia and the cops sided with Gyenlo. That makes sense though because Xie Fuzhi was Minister of Public Security and as you guys probably know from uh listening to the rest of the podcast, he was [snorts] very hardcore Maoist.

So just remember these two words, Genlo were the left wing and Nyamdre were the right-wing.

The two factions, just like elsewhere in China, fiercely competed for the support of the masses and came to blows often. On March 5th, Nyamdre held an oathtaking rally of 30,000 people in which they called for Gyenlo, who they denounced as ultraleftist reactionary capitalist roaders, to be smashed, followed by a large parade through the city, which resulted in several scuffles with Gyenlo supporters.

Later that month, Beijing issued an order freezing all factional conflict in the border areas next to India in the interest of national security. But the rest of Tibet continued to seethe with low intensity civil conflict between Gyenlo and Nyamdre.

At first things started with fists, but then fighting turned to slingshots, then swords, then knives, then spears, finally guns, rockets, and artillery.

Gyenlo got lucky and got the official approval of the cultural revolution group in Beijing as the main revolutionary organization. But Nyamdre refused to back down. After all, they had the PLA on their side and all the street cred that followed with that.

By May of 67, Gyenlo won a major battle by convincing Beijing to transfer Zhang Guohua from Tibet to Sichuan, leaving a power vacuum among the rightists.

In June, however, Nyamdre counterattacked with PLA provided weapons and street battles between the two factions left dozens dead across the region.

Soon Gyenlo was able to get some support among the troops with the arm the left campaign of August 1967 and there came a saying among soldiers in Tibet at the time. There will be looting in the daylight and giving gifts at night. meaning that, you know, it had inferred, according to my sources, that they were arming both sides at an unofficial level.

Like elsewhere in China, things had become a cluster fuck of highest proportions.

On September 18th, 1967, Jiang Qing and Zhou Enlai met to talk with Gyenlo and Nyamdre leaders and drew up a plan called the five directives of ceasing armed conflict in Tibet, which calmed things down a bit in Lhasa. [clears throat]

But then fighting flared back up in the city of Chamdo, 400 kilometers east of Lhasa and in Nyemo County just southwest of Lhasa.

Fighting became an off again on again thing across autumn of 67 through summer of 68. And after that it seemed like the worst was over in Tibet.

Most struggle between the two factions between these two seasons. Uh, you know, it seems to have been more through debate and line struggle and less through arm struggle except in the more remote areas.

The most dramatic and brutal armed action of the factional fighting happened, however, on June 7th, 1968, when in response to a series of taunting propaganda pro broadcasts via the Gyenlo operated loudspeakers around Lhasa, Nyamdre-aligned PLA troops slaughtered 12 Gyenlo rebels and wounded 361 others in an attack on the Jokhang temple which had become Gyenlo's central offices of the time before being beaten back. [snorts]

While Gyenlo had sustained a severe loss of 12 ranking high-ranking members and permanent damage to their headquarters, Nyamdre was named and shamed in the Chinese press and was seen as having gone too far by even the PLA top brass in Western China.

And so Gyenlo gained the upper hand in terms of political influence. It didn't help that the attack gave uh Namrell a bad name and so many of its lower ranking members actually defected to Gyenlo in the wake of the June 67th incident.

A ceasefire was called and thus negotiations for the building of a revolutionary committee began over the next two and a half months.

On September 2nd, 1968, the Tibetan Revolutionary Committee was founded with Gyenlo firmly gaining a majority of seats in the party and masses section of the 3in1 combination. Nyamdre naturally gained a majority in the army section.

It was a major victory for Chairman Mao and the left wing of the Tibetan Communist Party.

Still, low-level fighting between former Gyenlo and former Nyamdre sections continued in the countryside until mid 1969, including the dramatic Nyemo incident of June 1969, where former Gyenlo activists in Nyemo County, led by a schizophrenic Buddhist nun who claimed that she could channel various Tibetan gods and Chairman Mao. How about that?

Which led to the death of 54 people before the nun and her cohorts were captured and executed by the PLA.

And you know that itself is this crazy story. I love to get into it. Uh I don't really have that much time, but I highly recommend everyone read Melvin C. Goldstein's short book on the Nyemo incident and how a weird Buddhist Maoist uprising happened. And oh, I digress. I wish we could talk more about the Nyemo incident, but we honestly have to keep moving forward. Maybe I can do a mini episode of it later on down the line.

After the September 68 foundation of the Tibetan Autonomous Regions Revolutionary Committee and the holding of the April 1969 9th Congress of the CPC, the revolutionary left within the Tibetan Party apparatus was able to institute large-scale socialist reforms across Tibet.

Tibet was finally able to institute the people's communes like the rest of China had in the 1950s and by early 1970 nearly 700 people's communes were in operation.

The people's communes irrigation uh you know they brought irrigation and drinking water to 80% of Tibet's farmland and many new crops previously impossible to grow in Tibet's rugged terrain were being planted and harvested in record numbers.

While there was some class struggle, uh, many middle class peasants did not want to collectivize and were content with the land reform of the 50s and that interrupted some harvests. Food production in Tibet actually doubled and hunger and starvation was essentially wiped out from Tibet and has never been a problem since. And much of Tibet was lifted out of the actual abject poverty by the people's communes. [clears throat]

A lot of cultural transformation happened on the Tibetan people's communes during the cultural revolution and it was actually a lot more wide reaching and thorough compared to the cultural transformation on the early people's communes in 1950s inland China.

Arranged marriage and polygamy were stopped and women became a majority of leadership of in the people's communes and revolutionary committees in many parts of Tibet.

The famous barefoot doctor's manual was published in Tibetan and used to train thousands of new doctors among the serfs.

Medical colleges in both modern medicine and traditional Tibetan medicine were opened in most major towns.

80% of Tibet's countryside now had access to modern health care with something like half of new doctors being women.

Socialist industrialization also accelerated at a breakneck pace compared to the rest of China and the economy within the Tibetan region thrived.

In 1964, there had only been 67 factories, almost entirely in Lhasa.

By 1975, there were 250 large state-owned enterprises operating across the entire region.

Hydroelectric dams were built and much of the Tibetan countryside began to have electricity.

By the end of the cultural revolution, half of the top leaders were native Tibetans. Half of them were new cadres in their early 30s, often from serf-enslaved backgrounds. Women became leaders at all leadership levels. In one county, the revolutionary committee was all women. And out of 27,000 Tibetan cadres, 12,000 were women.

After the fall of Lin Biao in 1971, Tibet began to run into trouble. Some of Lin's closest supporters were prominent members of Gyenlo and by extension Tibet's revolutionary committee and so many of them were stripped of their power.

In the following power vacuum, Ren Rong, a PLA general who had initially fallen from grace in 1967 because of his involvement in the February countercurrent, suddenly emerged as the new leader in Tibet. And with it, Tibet took a dramatic right-ward turn in late 1972.

Upper class Tibetans reappeared in high posts and Ren Rong wanted to reopen negotiations with the Dalai Lama. By the end of the year, however, a new mass campaign directed against Ren and his clique emerged which criticized quote “bourgeois extravagance, capitalistic profit motive and economic waste.”

In 1973, negotiations with the Tibetan government in exile were halted. In 1974, the criticized Lin Biao and Confucius campaign. And in 1976, the campaigns against Deng Xiaoping were launched and taken up quite enthusiastically among the Tibetan masses.

Sadly, like the rest of the Cultural Revolution, the story of Tibet doesn't have a happy ending. With Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four, the Tibetan Revolutionary Committee and the Tibetan Military Regional Committee declared their allegiance to Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping.

This led to the military suppression of the Tibetan people in the 1980s, the restoration of the monasteries, the whole-scale exploitation of Tibet for things like mineral wealth and lumber and oil, and the use of, you know, commercialized “Tibetan culture” to cater to the rich Western tourists. They also brought back severe Han-centered policies which subjected the Tibetan people to the national and cultural oppression which they are still subject to this very day. (note to Drew - questionable interpretation, maybe with truth but still...)

But let me tell y'all, for those 10 years, something amazing happened in Tibet that, in my opinion, undeniably changed Tibet for the better and really brought them a much better quality of life. So, here, let me get a sip of water.

Crazy story, huh?

And now let's turn our thoughts to Xinjiang.

Xinjiang, the ancient land of the big skies, the heart of the Silk Road and a crossroads for countless civilizations since time immemorial.

One of my favorite places in China to travel to. Honestly, it's China's largest province at 650,000 whopping square miles. And it's also its most ethnically diverse with dozens of ethnic groups scattered around the wide open terrain of mountains, deserts, prairies, and oasis towns.

Um, funny story, when I first got to Xinjiang, uh, last summer, when I got there, the security guards actually mistook me for a national minority. Uh, they didn't say what but they thought I might be a Uyghur or uh one of the ethnic Russians, one of the ethnic Kazakhs, something like that.

Um, but yeah, Xinjiang, it's a magical place. It really is. And alongside Sichuan cuisine, Uyghur cuisine is actually one of my favorite Chinese cuisines. Definitely if you can find a Xinjiang restaurant or a Uyghur restaurant um in your town. A lot of people out on the West Coast, you can actually find them. Definitely check it out. It's delicious.

Now, Xinjiang was not nearly as economically backwards as Tibet was. Mainly because it was far more assimilated into the Chinese Empire during the Qing Dynasty and during the Republican era than say Tibet was. It was still quite a backwater area throughout that time though, including in 1966, and still to this day a lot of Xinjiang is very remote and has a lower income level than most of the inland areas, like in Tibet and other border areas.

The PLA had de facto control of Xinjiang and the province was controlled by an army general who, like Zhou Enlai, just, you know, he was part of the Liu and Deng good old boys' club. He was a massive Han chauvinist, and the thing was, he held on to power because of his OG status. You know, he was the guy who led the liberation of Xinjiang in October of 1949.

His name was Wang Enmao. And let me tell you, just like how I feel about Zhang Guohua. As a historian of China, I am not a big fan of Wang Enmao. And you'll feel it across the next few minutes.

His second in command was a Soviet-educated Uyghur guy named Seypidin Azizi, who was usually known as just Seypidin, who was a moderate-leaning politician who flipped back and forth between Wang and his clique and the revolutionary forces in Xinjiang, although as you'll see he will end up eventually siding with the right wing.

On June 19th, Radio Xinjiang, which was firmly aligned with the left, declared that the Cultural Revolution had come to Xinjiang and the capitalist monsters and freaks that had been running the autonomous region's party apparatus would be swept away by a mass upsurge of people of all nationalities within Xinjiang. Wang Enmao was seriously concerned and asked for the Cultural Revolution to be restricted in Xinjiang, citing fear of the Soviets taking advantage of any disorder in a border region in order to invade.

Xinjiang Daily newspaper, which was much more aligned with Wang, released their own declaration of support of the Cultural Revolution, but declared that the regional party committee must lead the workers and peasants to simply creatively study and apply Chairman Mao's works through education, making it clear that they believe that revolution must always be a top-down affair. [snorts]

During the months of July and August, Red Guard groups sprouted all around Xinjiang, ranging from revolutionary to conservative to ultraleftist. Some attacks on mosques and Uyghur cultural heritage sites were reported during the Destroy the Four Olds campaign of August through December of '67, particularly by official Red Guard groups. But all reports from Beijing seem to report that Mao wanted to constrain overzealous attacks on Uyghur or Hui culture or even Islam for that matter for fear of pushing the national minorities into the camp of the Soviets.

This sensitivity and sense of tolerance towards minority cultures and religions seemed to work. Actually, with my research showing that Hui Muslims overwhelmingly supported the quote ‘rebel Red Guards and the leftist mass organizations after winter of '66.’

On August 20th, 1966, Wang Enmao celebrated a celebration of the August 18th Red Guard reception in Beijing with a military parade in Urumqi to once again establish his dominance over the movement with the usual denunciations of the bourgeois reactionary line, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, Soviet social-imperialist, yada yada yada.

But it's interesting, he himself refused to directly speak about himself at the rally, partially because he didn't want to have to be put on the spot as having to publicly align with the leftists, nor to self-criticize for his support of Liu Shaoqi's work teams.

The last two weeks of August were a tizzy with the Red Guard movement completely sweeping through students and teachers of both high schools and universities in Urumqi, Karamay, Kashgar and Turpan. The big character posters were posted everywhere. Name places were changed to more red names and soon mass organizations of revolutionary cadres and trade union workers were throwing their hat into the ring to support the Red Guard upsurge.

And uh, it seems to me, this is interesting, that teachers and professors, intellectuals in Xinjiang were overwhelmingly supportive and worked under the leadership of the student Red Guard groups, which kind of, you know, flies in the face of the whole narrative during the Cultural Revolution. You know, they killed all the intellectuals, the students murdered all the teachers, but I can tell you in Xinjiang, it doesn't seem like that was the case.

On August 26, a group of Red Guards from the mainland, primarily Han and Hui in their makeup, arrived in Urumqi to take part in revolutionary networking, while another group of Uyghur and Hui Red Guards pulled out of Urumqi's central train station to head east to do their own part in the revolutionary networking.

However, things quickly turned harsh when Wang Enmao refused to receive the incoming Red Guards, resulting in a sit-in protest outside of his offices by 300 Red Guards from inland. Despite attempts to get them to leave, these outsider Red Guards used the events to agitate in the immediate area and won the sympathy of the workers and cadres within the area.

By September 3rd, well over a thousand Uyghur youth came to join the sit-in protest. Wang met with the protesters and told them to call off the demonstration, calling the radical youths from Beijing and elsewhere children of landlords and capitalists and shut down the debate.

This became known as the September 3rd Incident. It was a major public gaffe for Wang because the radicals used his behavior and rigidness towards the protesters against him in big character posters and propaganda posters.

Another 5,500 Red Guards from the rest of China poured into Urumqi in September to help sharpen the struggle against Wang. The PLA was sent out into the factories and fields to work alongside the masses and help make sure production was not disruptive. This helped diffuse a lot of tension between rank-and-file soldiers and the masses, which benefited both the left and right within Xinjiang.

Most importantly, in my opinion, however, is it benefited the people. Serve the people was the slogan and it kept the Soviets from being able to use propaganda to encourage local residents to defect to their side. So, yeah, good on them.

In October, the factionalism between left and right Red Guard groups became far more pronounced. Soon, Wang and his faction set up the Urumqi General Headquarters of Revolutionary Rebels and Red Guards, which was called the First Headquarters. Immediately after that, the radical Maoist split and coalesced into the Xinjiang Revolutionary Red Guard Headquarters, which was called the Second Red Headquarters.

Um, which was called the Second Red Headquarters. So, from now on, I'm going to call Wang's faction the First Headquarters, and I'm going to call the Maoist faction the Second Red Headquarters. Both sides promised to hit hard, pull down, and completely discredit each other.

During the last weeks of December, it seemed that there was an uptick in attacks on religious institutes like mosques and Buddhist temples. Red Guards worked to close mosques and paraded an imam through the streets while covered in paint and subjected them to struggle sessions.

However, it seems that the anti-religious campaign was quite short-lived, possibly for reasons I said above.

And you know, one thing that my research, you know, for this episode really drove home was, you know, the most fanatical and destructive Red Guard factions were always the conservative factions that were indirectly tied with Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

In both the cases of Xinjiang and Tibet, with the exception of some attacks on temples in Lhasa in 1966, it was the rightists who tried to redirect everything during the opening months of the Cultural Revolution into the Destroy the Old World campaign by having their cliques target traditional heritage and cultural relics to bring the national minorities to heel.

For them, it was better for the masses to punch sideways rather than to punch up. And it was better for them to attack already toppled or politically irrelevant feudal nobility, lamas, and imams rather than revisionists who held actual political power within the local party and state apparatuses.

So when Mao, you know, when anti-communists tell you that the Red Guards were being sent by Mao to destroy ancient Chinese, Tibetan, and Uyghur civilization, they don't know what they're talking about. They don't see that the Red Guard movement had a Maoist wing, an ultraleft wing, and a right wing to it.

And you know, these factions all approached the mass campaigns in very different ways. As we always see on this podcast, there's always more than meets the eye when it comes to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The last week of December and the first week of January saw large-scale anti-Wang demonstrations in Urumqi and Kashgar that were put down by the PLA [gasps] and violent clashes between Red Guards and the PLA reported in other places.

However, Wang still had a right to be nervous as now it was seeming some PLA units were beginning to declare their support for the radicals against him in the Second Red Headquarters. On January 25th, the January Storm came to Xinjiang.

At first, the First Headquarters tried their own fake power seizure and started setting up provisional revolutionary committees, but it doesn't seem like these provisional revolutionary committees really went anywhere. Um, within a couple of weeks they were just not seen or heard about.

The Second Red Headquarters and a smaller leftist faction, the Xinjiang Red Guard Revolutionary Rebel Liaison Committee, say that five times fast, teamed up and seized control of Radio Urumqi and Xinjiang Daily.

Then they laid siege to the municipal and regional committee party offices. However, the power seizure seemed to only take hold in Urumqi with the rest of Xinjiang being held by Wang's PLA troops in the First Headquarters.

On January 26, a large bloody clash happened in Shihezi where rebels attempted to seize power only to be greeted by 10 truckloads of PLA troops who opened fire upon them. Dozens were killed and up to 500 wounded.

Power seizure attempts in Karamay, Mosuowan and Dushanzi were also reported to have failed due to PLA opposition.

One commander of the Xinjiang military region claimed, quote, “we will fight to the bitter end in spite of losing our heads,” which I guess he means, you know, Urumqi being seized by rebels. “We shall kill all the rebels within three days and we shall build a new Xinjiang in blood.”

Some PLA commanders even declared the January Storm rebels in Xinjiang to be agents of the Soviets.

The party in Beijing, however, horrified at what they were hearing, called for leftist PLA units to be sent into Xinjiang. 20 PLA commanders in Xinjiang were arrested and Zhou Enlai demanded that both sides come to the negotiation table.

The problem is is that, well, the conservatives in the First Headquarters refused to show up.

In response, on February 11th, the Second Red Headquarters took seven top Xinjiang officials and paraded them through the streets, then brought them to a struggle session in which they were denounced by 40,000 protesters in People's Square in Urumqi, which is just outside the regional people's congress building. It was obvious that the leftists now had the support of the people, and they were not going to back down.

Still, because of the constant threat of the Soviets, a compromise had to be reached. Mao and Zhou decided to let the Xinjiang military region directly maintain control of the region, and Wang was to remain as party chief of Xinjiang.

Some speculated that the revolutionaries in Beijing weren't just afraid of the Soviets, but that Wang might drown the rebels in blood if the top army brass weren't at least partially placated. This didn't mean that the Maoists had capitulated, though.

When it became obvious the Xinjiang leadership were supporting the February countercurrent, the Second Red HQ called for their arrests and street protests once again broke out.

Wang was called to Beijing to be admonished and a large contingent of quote “support the left units” within the PLA, particularly unit 7335 of the PLA Air Force, were called from Lanzhou and Gansu province and placed in command of the PLA in Xinjiang.

Leftist PLA troops from the east also took control of Radio Urumqi, the public security bureau, and all air, road, and rail transport in the region on March 3rd, representing a reshuffling of the deck in favor of the Maoists.

On May 7th, a clash between Red Guards and leftist PLA soldiers against conservative PLA soldiers took place in yet another attempt to seize the offices of Xinjiang Daily with 100 people wounded in the clashes. Similar reports of clashes continued in May.

In June, Mao and Wang reached an agreement that leftist troops from outside Xinjiang would control China's nuclear facilities in exchange for his continued control of Xinjiang.

And on the 14th of June 1967, China successfully detonated their first hydrogen bomb at Lop Nor in the deserts of Xinjiang.

On August 15th, the Xinjiang military region released all imprisoned members of the Second Red HQ. In exchange, the armed left campaign was not officially implemented in Xinjiang, something that Mao, Lin, Zhou, and Jiang thought for the best. Raiding the enemy armories of a region bordering with the Soviets was just too risky at this point.

Wang experienced another setback in September when some conservative organizations denounced his heavy-handed tactics and declared themselves now aligned with the left.

On September 15th, the Second Red HQ set up the September 15th Revolutionary Rebel Liaison Station to help consolidate the newly radicalized group into their wing of the movement. And the new rebel station declared its intention to strike down Wang. With all this factionalism, on National Day of October 1st, there were five different parades and rallies in Urumqi, one for each faction. Even the PLA did not march in a single parade, with leftist factions from Lanzhou and rightist factions from Urumqi holding separate military reviews.

In the wake of this, serious clashes happened in Shihezi, Hami, and Ili. By the end of 1967, 600 armed clashes between leftist rebels, ultra-leftist rebels, rightist rebels, leftist PLA units, and rightist PLA units had left Xinjiang in chaos and serious strains on the ability for the border defense to stave off the Soviets. [gasps] Oh my.

In late December of 1967, Wang and Seypidin flew to Beijing once again to once again try to defuse the situation. They were present at a New Year's Eve party with Mao, indicating that the Central Committee still wanted to keep Wang as the official leader of Xinjiang.

But on the same trip, he was required to attend a series of Mao Zedong Thought study classes, indicating that they had still viewed him as committing serious errors and needing ideological rectification.

Mao was being exceedingly merciful with Wang, in my opinion, especially with so much blood on his hands. But I understand why he did, you know, in the realm of realpolitik considering Wang was still considered one of the best strategists in the PLA in terms of border defense.

Another reshuffling of the Xinjiang military deck occurred, with more troops from Lanzhou pushed in, but clashes continued throughout the winter and spring of 1968.

Yet again, more troops from inland were sent in to force the Xinjiang military and party leadership through Mao Zedong Thought study groups in order to rectify their errors.

In May '68, border skirmishes with the Soviets began, putting more pressure on Mao and the rebels. But Mao was in luck. Across May and June of '68, more and more of Wang's forces began to defect towards the Second Red HQ, or at least created grand alliances with local left PLA units.

In the rest of the country, the Red Guard movement had spiraled completely out of control and Mao had to use the PLA to pull the plug on the Red Guard movement. And in Xinjiang, the Second Red Headquarters was forced to disband at the behest of the “support the left” PLA units flown in from the east coast.

By the end of summer '68, Xinjiang was far more peaceful. Wang and Mao's power base had significantly shrunk down.

And on September 2nd, 1968, the Xinjiang Regional Revolutionary Committee was established. Long Shujin, a general from Hunan who was a close associate of Lin Biao, was elected chairman of the revolutionary committee. Wang and Seypidin were elected as vice chairmen, but their places in the regional party committee and the military region were greatly downplayed.

It seemed like for now the left had been able to win out against Wang and his gang in the end.

Still, there was plenty of strained unity among the rebel groups. Bad blood still ran through people's veins. Like in Tibet, mass organizations might have been disbanded, but people were still sore about how things ended.

Mao Zedong Thought propaganda teams were dispatched across Xinjiang to keep the peace, but scuffles between old enemies were known to break out periodically in the rural areas.

This was bad because Mao knew that attacks by the Soviets were inevitably going to step up. So unity, even if imposed artificially from outside of Xinjiang, was going to be paramount. The propaganda teams were made into armed patrols that were to keep the former factions from tearing at each other and protecting the revolutionary order.

Wang, despite his place as a continued public official, was constantly lambasted in the regional national press, and he became less and less noticeable in terms of appearances at rallies and meetings. [snorts]

In early February 1969, the first 2,500 sent-down youth from the cities were rusticated and sent to the countryside to diffuse their factionalism and learn from the peasantry.

Many of the Red Guards who supported Wang were cleared from Urumqi and other urban areas and brought to the people's communes to be pulled leftward by the peasantry.

By the end of 1970, 70,000 youth were sent down to rural Xinjiang from all over China.

As border clashes with the Soviets continued to be a problem, Wang resigned from his position and disappeared from the public's eye.

In June 1969, a good harvest was reported in Xinjiang, signaling that production was not terribly disrupted in the area. Though a drought in the summer, followed by a blizzard in the winter of that year, disrupted things a good bit and caused harsh suffering in the rural areas.

Several frontier guards were killed and wounded by the Soviets across the summer and winter, with several fearing nuclear war being on the horizon. At one point, the Soviets were regularly entering Xinjiang, sometimes advancing several kilometers before being beaten back.

After the end of the Sino-Soviet border conflict in September of 1969, in which the Chinese successfully staved off a Soviet invasion, life returned to somewhat normal during that time.

Agriculture and industrial output grew by 20% each year with a good bit of help by the PLA in harvesting and production.

Food output in Xinjiang in 1970 was considered to be the highest on record since 1949, and the gross industrial output in Xinjiang in 1970 was considered 29% higher than 1965. Quality of life greatly improved in Xinjiang.

With the fall of Lin Biao in late '71, Xinjiang, just like Tibet, was shaken up. Long Shujin's place as regional party chief and chairman of the revolutionary committee was no longer stable and Xinjiang Press talked about a new wave of counterrevolutionaries trying to derail the Cultural Revolution in Xinjiang.

Many high-ranking posts were transferred to officers from the second and fifth PLA field armies. And by 1973, Wang had quietly resigned from his posts and Seypidin was brought to the forefront. A large-scale people's militia recruitment drive was initiated in Xinjiang by the Maoists to create a buffer against Lin's former associates and Deng Xiaoping's forces who were using the power vacuum to come back into the regional party committee.

The late Cultural Revolution period in Xinjiang was marked by a massive amount of autonomy and empowerment of the national minorities in Xinjiang.

By early 1972, 80% of the region's primary, middle school, and high schools in the rural areas were being taught by Uyghur, Hui, and Mongol teachers. Students were taught jointly in their household languages and in Mandarin.

Han chauvinism was greatly struggled against. 5,000 new doctors were brought into the countryside, and modern healthcare reached much of rural Xinjiang for the very first time.

Sadly, with Mao's death in September of 1976, things fell quickly. In the name of border stability, the classic excuse, Seypidin supported the new leadership of Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping and supported the arrest of the Gang of Four.

On November 7th, Seypidin initiated a wave of arrests of quote “anyone guilty of beating, looting, and smashing,” unquote. A vague way of saying anyone who had taken part in any type of left-wing rebellion from '66 to '69 and consolidated the Xinjiang party committee for the capitalist reformers now in charge in Beijing.

Thus, we reached the end of our long but interesting look at the Cultural Revolution at the westernmost engines of China's frontier.