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Article: China starts to panic over threat of revolt on frontier
- Article from:
- The Independent (London, England)
- Article date:
- May 29, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1996 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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In August 1949, when the Chinese Communists were close to final
victory in China, Mao Zedong invited the Uighur and Kazakh leaders
of the self-styled East Turkistan Republic to Peking, supposedly to
discuss autonomy for the region. Carved out of the north-west of
China's Xinjiang province, bordering what is now Kazakhstan, the
foundation of East Turkistan five years earlier had been the
defining moment for the nationalist movement in Xinjiang.
The East Turkistan leaders boarded the aeroplane, optimistic
about negotiations with Chairman Mao. But the plane mysteriously
crashed. Whether by design or accident almost the whole of the
republic's leadership was wiped out, and with them the only ...