August 13, 2016
This morning I stumbled upon a large
collection of photographs capturing a variety of events from Xinjiang
during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and decided to make a quick
follow-up to a post I made a few months back on Images of Xinjiang and the Cultural Revolution. They appear to come from a variety of sources, though mostly from a 2014 photo essay by a Xinjiang-based website named Yaxin.
The piece from Yaxin, entitled “Xinjiang History: The People’s Militia
of the Tarim Basin”, also features some brief comments on the wider
context of the time, which I have also included below.
I would just like to add a very
brief note regarding the reception of these pictures on Weibo. I noticed
a number of netizens expressing a sense of nostalgia for what
they perceive to have been a time of ethnic harmony and unity. Now, they
wrote, with the arrival of “religious extremism” in Xinjiang, no one
would dare share weapons of the sort pictured below with Uyghur
people. One comment, which garnered over 40 ‘likes’ had a very different
take and is worth translating in full:
“When many old Uyghur people come to
Beijing, once they get to Tiananmen and see the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong,
they begin to cry. They tell children about the past and how good Mao
was at that time. Later, when they go to sort out accommodation for the
night, people take one look at their ID card (身份证), see they are from
Xinjiang, and refuse to let them stay. In the whole of Beijing, they can
find nowhere to stay. Sigh.”
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1. Yasheng•Kuerban, captain of Laohutai army forces assigning tasks to the militia
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2. The bold and brave women of the militia
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