Ghulja in 1912: A Chronicle from the Russian Muslim Press
Introduced, translated and annotated by David Brophy Postdoctoral Fellow, Australian Centre on China in the World, The Australian National University
The Xinhai Revolution
Ghulja in 1912: A Chronicle from the Russian Muslim Press
Introduced, translated and annotated by David Brophy Postdoctoral Fellow, Australian Centre on China in the World, The Australian National University
The Xinhai Revolution was not a single event, but rather a process that played itself out in ways that were as diverse as the population and geography of the soon-to-be defunct Manchu-Qing empire itself. In many places in the north, abortive revolutionary uprisings were suppressed, and only with the abdication of the emperor and Yuan Shikai's proclamation of the Republic of China did holdout officials grudgingly fall into line. Such was the case in Ürümchi, centre of the civil administration of Xinjiang province. To its west in Ili, on the other hand, a concentration of revolutionaries from Hubei province were able to take power and declare their loyalty to the new Republic, holding out against military expeditions dispatched from Ürümchi in the crucial early months of 1912.
Fig.1 Map of the Ili valley
The Ili Valley was, as it is to this day, home to a wide variety of peoples, some such as the Kazakhs and Uyghurs who claim indigeneity, but also many recent arrivals. In the eighteenth century, the Qing occupation saw first Manchu, Chahar Mongol, Sibe, Solon and Daghur communities sent from Manchuria to garrison the new frontier. The nineteenth century witnessed a steady flow of Han Chinese and Hui Muslim migrants, and the opening of trade with Russia from the 1850s swelled the population of Russian subjects, mostly Turkistani and Tatar traders. These well-travelled Silk Road entrepreneurs linked Ili, and in particular the largely Muslim town of Ghulja (Ningyuan 寧遠; now Yining 伊寧), to a Turkophone print culture founded on the intellectual centres of Russian Muslim life on the Volga and the Siberian steppe, places such as Kazan, Ufa, and Orenburg. Pioneered since the middle of the nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century editorial offices in these cities were publishing daily newspapers and weekly journals with large networks of contributors and readers, including among the Muslims of Xinjiang, who could subscribe through the Imperial Russian postal service, or obtain copies brought by trading caravans.
Fig.2 Time front-page banner
At the turn of the century, in the face of Slavic dominance Russian Muslim intellectuals keenly felt the need to develop their own communal resources. Periodicals stood as symbols of cultural strength. Tatars living in Xinjiang frequently expressed a belief that growing Russian strength on China's doorstep might doom China to a colonial fate similar to their own. Hence they identified strongly with the growth of modernising forces in China, and welcomed the Xinhai Revolution of 1911-12. In the collapse of dynastic rule in China they saw a possible harbinger of Tsarism's own decline. The Orenburg daily Time (Vaqıt Вакит) not only translated and reprinted news on the Xinhai Revolution from Russian sources, but published dispatches by three men living in Ghulja at that time. Twelve of these dispatches are offered here in English translation.
These articles are a valuable source on the history of the Xinhai period in Xinjiang; they add detail and perspective to a story that is itself not well known. They also impart something of the complexity of political life on this particular edge of the Chinese-speaking world. They describe; a revolt led by anti-Manchu Han revolutionaries leading to the installation of a Manchu at the head of the new regime; the fissiparous tendencies of local Kazakh and Mongol groups; and, the looming presence of the Russians and the Cossack guards, ready to in