Following the Opium War of 1840, Xinjiang was subject to aggression from Tsarist Russia and other powers. In 1875, Zuo Zongtang, governor-general of Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, was appointed imperial commissioner to supervise the affairs of Xinjiang. By the end of 1877, Qing troops had recovered the areas north and south of the Tianshan Mountains which had been occupied by Yakubbae of Central Asia's Kokand Khanate (Fergana). In February 1881, the Qing government recovered Ili, which had been forcibly occupied by Tsarist Russia for 11 years. In 1884, it formally established a province in the Western Regions and renamed the area as Xinjiang (meaning "old territory returned to the motherland"). The establishment of Xinjiang as a province was a significant reform, on the part of the Qing government, of the administration of Xinjiang by the previous dynasties. From then on, the provincial governor oversaw all military and administrative affairs in Xinjiang, and the military and administrative center of Xinjiang was moved from Ili to Dihua (modem Urumqi). By 1909, under the jurisdiction of Xinjiang Province were four dao (circuit), under which were six prefectures, 10 ting (sub-circuits), three sub-prefectures and 21 counties or sub-counties. The administrative organization in Xinjiang was exactly the same as in the inland areas.

In the year following the Revolution of 1911, insurrectionary revolutionaries in Xinjiang set up the New Di Grand Military Government, marking the end of the political rule of the Qing Dynasty in the Ili region. After the Republic of China was founded, it constantly strengthened the defense of Xinjiang.

Xinjiang was peacefully liberated on September 25, 1949. As the liberation struggle gained momentum across the country and the revolutionary struggle of the people of all ethnic groups surged forward in Xinjiang, Tao Zhiyue, Garrison Commander of Xinjiang, and Burhan, Chairman of the Xinjiang Provincial Government, renounced their allegiance to the Kuomintang and welcomed in the First Army Group of the First Field Army of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), led by General Wang Zhen. The people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang greeted the founding of the People's Republic of China together with the rest of the Chinese people on October 1, 1949.

To sum up, since the Han Dynasty established the Western Regions Frontier Command in Xinjiang in 60 B.C., the Chinese central governments of all historical periods exercised military and administrative jurisdiction over Xinjiang. The jurisdiction of the central governments over the Xinjiang region was at times strong and at other times weak, depending on the stability of the period. The people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang actively safeguarded their relations with the central governments, thus making their own contributions to the formation and consolidation of the great family of the Chinese nation.

IV. Origin of the "East Turkistan" Issue

The term 'Turkistan" appeared in Arabic geographical works in the Middle Ages. It meant "the region of the Turks" and referred to the areas north of the Sir River in Central Asia and the adjoining areas to the east of the river. With the evolution of history, the modern ethnic groups in Central Asia were established one after another. By the 18th century, the geographical concept of "Turkistan" was already very vague, and almost nobody used it again in the historical records of the time. In the early 19th century, with the growing colonial expansion of the imperialist powers into Central Asia, the geographical term 'Turkistan" was revived. In 1805, Timkovsky, a Russian, used the term 'Turkistan" again in a diplomatic mission's report to describe the geographical position of Central Asia and the Tarim Basin in China's south Xinjiang. In view of the different histories, languages, customs and political affiliations of the two areas, he called the Tarim Basin in China's Xinjiang situated to the east of 'Turkistan" as "East Turkistan" or "Chinese Turkistan." In the middle of the 19th century, Russia annexed the three Central Asian khanates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand one after another, and set up the "Turkistan Governorship" in the Hezhong (Samarkand) area of Central Asia. Therefore, some people in the West called the Hezhong area "West Turkistan" or "Russian Turkistan," and China's Xinjiang region "East Turkistan."

In the early 20th century and later, a small number of separatists and religious extremists in Xinjiang, influenced by the international trend of religious extremism and national chauvinism, politicized the unstandardized geographical term "East Turkistan," and fabricated an "ideological and theoretical system" on the so-called "independence of East Turkistan" on the basis of the allegation cooked up by the old colonialists. They claimed that "East Turkistan" had been an independent state since ancient times, its people with its history of almost 10,000 years being "the finest nation in human history." They incited all ethnic groups speaking Turki and believing in Islam to join hands to create a theocratic state. They denied the history of the great motherland jointly built by all the ethnic groups of China. They clamored for "opposition to all ethnic groups other than Turks" and for the "annihilation of pagans," asserting that China had been "the enemy of the 'East Turkistan' nation for 3,000 years." After the "East Turkistan" theory came into being, separatists of all shades raised the banner of "East Turkistan" to carry out activities aimed at materializing their vain wish of establishing an "East Turkistan state."