page_title: East Turkestan
section_title: Late 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: East Turkestan / History of the term / Late 20th century
context_page_description: East Turkestan, also East Turkistan, also known as Uyghuristan varies in meaning by context and usage. The term was coined in the 19th century by Russian Turkologists including Nikita Bichurin to replace another Western term, Chinese Turkestan, which referred to the Tarim Basin in the southwestern part of Xinjiang during the Qing Dynasty. The medieval Persian toponym "Turkestan" and its derivatives were not, however, used by the local population. The Uyghur name for the Tarim Basin is Altishahr, which means "Six Cities" in Uyghur. Besides, China had since the Han Dynasty had its own name for an overlapping area: the "Western Regions." The parts of this area controlled by China were termed "Xinjiang" starting in the 18th century.
  From the 20th century on, Uyghur separatists and their supporters used East Turkestan as an appellation for the whole of Xinjiang or for a future independent state in present-day Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. They reject the name of Xinjiang because of the Chinese perspective reflected in the name and prefer East Turkestan to emphasize connection to other, westerly, Turkic groups.
context_section_description: At the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, with Xinjiang divided between Kuomintang forces and ETR secessionists, the Communist leadership persuaded both governments to surrender and accept the succession of the People's Republic of China government and negotiated the establishment of Communist provincial governments in Yining (Ghulja) and Dihua. On October 1, 1955, PRC leader Mao Zedong designated Xinjiang a "Uyghur Autonomous Region", creating a regionwide Uyghur identity which overtook Uyghurs' traditionally local and oasis-based identities. Although the Soviet Union initially suppressed the publications of its past Uyghur studies programs, after the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, it revived its Uyghur studies program as part of an "ideological war" against China. The term "East Turkestan" was popularized in academic works, but inconsistently: at times, the term East Turkestan only referred to area in Xinjiang south of the Tian Shan mountains, corresponding to the Tarim Basin; the areas north of the Tian Shan mountains were called Dzungaria or Zungaria. Tursun Rakhimov, a Uyghur historian for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the Sino-Soviet split, argued in his 1981 book "Fate of the Non-Han Peoples of the PRC" that "both" East Turkestan and Dzungaria were conquered by China and "renamed" Xinjiang. Occasionally, he used East Turkestan and Xinjiang interchangeably. Concurrently during the Cultural Revolution and the Revolution's campaigns against "local nationalism", the government had come to associate the term East Turkestan with Uyghur separatism and "foreign hostile forces" and forbade its usage. Uyghur nationalist historian Turghun Almas and his book Uyghurlar (The Uyghurs) and Uyghur nationalist accounts of history were galvanized by Soviet stances on history, "firmly grounded" in Soviet Turcological works, and both heavily influenced and partially created by Soviet historians and Soviet works on Turkic peoples. Soviet historiography spawned the rendering of Uyghur history found in Uyghurlar. Almas claimed that Central Asia was "the motherland of the Uyghurs" and also the "ancient golden cradle of world culture". The global trends set by the Dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the rise of global Islamism and pan-Turkism revived separatist sentiments in Xinjiang and led to a wave of political violence that killed 162 people between 1990 and 2001.
caption: According to one definition of East Turkestan, the Tian Shan mountain system separates East Turkestan from Dzungaria in Xinjiang.
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