In the West, Xinjiang lacks Tibet\u2019s luster. Here\u2019s one reason why.<\/p>\n
By Charles Kraus
April 17, 2017<\/p>\n
In April 1950, Owen Lattimore, one of America\u2019s most esteemed Sinologists, received a request for a copy of his brand new book, Pivot of Asia: Sinkiang and the Inner Asian Frontiers of China and Russia<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Such requests for Pivot of Asia<\/em>\u2014an insightful work on the history, culture, and economy of Xinjiang (Sinkiang), a province in Northwest China sharing a long land border with the Soviet Union\u2014were probably not rare, but this one was different.<\/p>\n Postmarked from New Delhi<\/a>, the letter was written by a group of three political refugees from Xinjiang. The authors of the letter asked not just for a copy of the book; more importantly, they wanted Lattimore and his \u201cfriends\u201d in the American government to support Xinjiang in the wake of the Chinese revolution.<\/p>\n The names of the letter\u2019s three signatories\u2014Muhammad Amin Bughra, Isa Yusuf Alptekin, and Colonel Adam Sabri\u2014would have been immediately familiar to Lattimore, an expert on China\u2019s ethnic borderlands. Describing themselves as \u201cTurkestanis,\u201d the trio of Uyghur men had long served the Chinese Nationalist Government in Xinjiang.<\/p>\n When the Chinese Nationalist Army in Xinjiang capitulated in September 1949, the three men faced an uncertain future. Accompanied by some 600 other Uyghur politicians and family members, they fled the provincial capital, Urumqi, just days before troops of the Chinese Communist Party arrived.<\/p>\n Writing from India, Bughra, Alptekin, and Sabri styled themselves rather pitifully, telling Lattimore they were \u201cbereft of all valuables\u201d and \u201cpenniless.\u201d Despite their material condition, the men remained committed to telling the world of Xinjiang\u2019s plight under the repressive regime of the Chinese and Soviet communists. For this reason, they explained their delight that Secretary of State Dean Acheson had, at a Press Club address in January 1950<\/a>, publicly shamed the Soviet Union for (allegedly) \u201cdetaching\u201d Xinjiang from China and turning it into a semi-colony.<\/p>\n Although Acheson\u2019s Press Club speech is remembered by historians for what he did not<\/em> say about the US defense perimeter in Asia\u2014whether South Korea was included\u2014Xinjiang\u2019s exile community probably did not notice this blunder. (Neither did Mao or Stalin<\/a>, but that\u2019s a story for a different day.) Acheson\u2019s sharp words about Soviet imperialism in China\u2019s western borderlands\u2014made while Mao Zedong was in Moscow no less\u2014signaled to Uyghur exiles in India that the United States stood by Xinjiang, even as the Cold War descended upon Asia.<\/p>\n From Lattimore, Bughra, Alptekin, and Sabri wanted material and financial support. Addressing the China-expert as an \u201cAdviser to the State Department,\u201d they asked for \u201c[help] from you or your friends,\u201d noting that in the midst of the difficult journey to India, they and their 600 followers had lost all worldly possessions. If they were to survive in India\u2014let alone agitate for the independence of Xinjiang\u2014the three men desperately needed some assistance.<\/p>\n Upon reading the letter, Lattimore did seek out money for Xinjiang\u2026but not in the way Bughra, Alptekin, and Sabri had hoped. The request prompted Lattimore to try to recruit a language and area studies expert<\/a> for Johns Hopkins or another university in the United States. He sent off letters to the Foreign Service Institute<\/a>, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)<\/a>, and the University of Pennsylvania<\/a>, all asking for funds to recruit a Xinjiang specialist.<\/p>\n Why did Lattimore want Xinjiang experts in or near the nation\u2019s capital? He did not exactly say why, but we can speculate his motives.<\/p>\n At the time of Pivot<\/em>\u2019s publication and Lattimore\u2019s fundraising effort, the United States Consulate in Urumqi had closed, a CIA operative named Douglas Mackiernan had been killed while evacuating from Chinese Central Asia<\/a>, and the People\u2019s Republic of China and the Soviet Union had inked a series of agreements to jointly develop Xinjiang<\/a>.<\/p>\n All of this meant that the United States was denied access to Xinjiang, an important listening post in the Global Cold War. Lattimore probably feared that a knowledge gap about this \u201cpivotal\u201d region in Central Asian and Sino-Soviet affairs would develop among policymakers and policy analysts in Washington. So to prepare for after the Chinese revolution, Lattimore wanted the United States to have academics and educators familiar with the languages and locales of Xinjiang.<\/p>\n The Administrative Secretary of ACLS, Mortimer Graves, concurred with Lattimore<\/a> that \u201can expansion westward from your Mongol work is certainly in order, and the Turkish of Sinkiang [Xinjiang] would seem to be a next normal step.\u201d Though Graves was not in a position to shell out the cash, he did volunteer to approach several other philanthropic organizations on Lattimore\u2019s behalf. \u201cI shall not be satisfied until we have an active American development in study of the Central Asiatic Turks,\u201d Graves concluded his letter.<\/p>\n The paper trail mostly ends after Lattimore\u2019s receipt of a lengthy letter from Isa Yusuf Alptekin in November 1950<\/a>. Lattimore did not succeed in bringing a Xinjiang language expert to the United States, in part because he could not marshal the funds do so. Other developments in Lattimore\u2019s personal and professional life also prevented him from aggressively pursuing this initiative. As Lattimore wrote to one American colleague in June 1950<\/a>, \u201cYou may have read in the press that my legitimate work has been greatly interfered with by the disreputable McCarthy.\u201d<\/p>\n The historian Justin Jacobs has recently hypothesized<\/a> that Xinjiang lacks the same name recognition as Tibet in the West because Uyghur elites, once in exile<\/a>, failed to produce a single identifiable leader (their own Dalai Lama). This is probably true, but Lattimore\u2019s correspondence also shows that the failure of American academics and philanthropists to keep the study of Xinjiang alive in Cold War America may have also played a role.<\/p>\n In the end, the most Lattimore could do was send his exiled friends from Xinjiang two copies of Pivot of Asia<\/em><\/a>\u2014although it seems the books may never have arrived.<\/p>\nClick here to read the correspondences of Owen Lattimore on the Wilson Center\u2019s Digital Archive.<\/a><\/em><\/h1>\n