Oral History of Migration from China to Kazakhstan during the period of “Cultural Revolution” (1966–1976)

Abstract

The article examines the last stage of interstate migration from China to Kazakhstan in 1950–1970, that is, the period of the so-called “great cultural revolution”, which began in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1966 and lasted ten years. Migration of this period from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of the PRC to Soviet Kazakhstan was not mass-scale and took the form of groups of young Kazakhs and Uighurs who crossed the Kazakh section of the Soviet-Chinese state border. They were persecuted by the Chinese authorities as “counter-revolutionaries” and “revisionists.” The events related to the escape of some
groups of young people to Kazakhstan in the early years of the “cultural revolution” are reconstructed in the article based on oral histories recorded during the implementation of the research project “Oral history of migration in 1950–1970s from China to Kazakhstan”, as well as archival materials and memoir literature. The
study of oral histories and other sources revealed specific features of the migration of that time: it affected a limited number of politically active youth from among the local Turkic peoples of the XUAR and represented the spontaneous escape of young people in extreme political conditions, namely, in the conditions of a political struggle for power between different groups of the Communist Party of China (CCP), mass political repression and persecutions. The last group of refugees arrived in Kazakhstan on the eve of 1970, after which the “iron curtain” in Soviet-Chinese relations finally closed.