Shahidi Burhan was a political leader in Xinjiang, China during the 20th century.
Background
Burhan Shahidi was born in Aksu (Aqsu), an oasis trading center in Sinkiang’s Tarim Basin that has the largest concentration of Uighurs in the province. But according to other sources he was born in Kazan, the Volga homeland of the Tatar race, and presently the capital of the Tatar Autonomous S.S.R. in the Soviet Union. Burhan’s Turkic origins are evidenced by his Caucasian features and complexion.
Education
He was reared as a Muslim and is said to speak Chinese, Russian, and German, in addition to his native Turkic language. If he was born in Sinkiang, his parents took him at an early age to Kazan, where he received the equivalent of a high school education.
Career
In 1928, when Chin Shu-jen, who had previously brought about Governor Yang’s assassination, became governor of Sinkiang himself, he made Burhan responsible for foreign affairs in the provincial government. However, he did not long remain in Chin’s government, for the latter was an old-fashioned bureaucrat who preferred to give the important posts to relatives or friends from his native Kansu. Therefore, Burhan spent the years 1928 to 1932 in Germany, where he acted as a purchasing agent for his government in Sinkiang. The job presumably did not keep him entirely occupied, for it is also reported that he returned to his studies at the University of Berlin. He went back to Sinkiang in 1933, the year that Chin Shu-jen was forced to flee to the U.S.S.R. Burhan’s return probably followed Sheng Shih-ts’ai’s coup, making Sheng the successor to Yang in April 1933.
Burhan was in Sinkiang or nearby sections of the Soviet Union during the early years that Sheng controlled Sinkiang, spending most of the time from 1933 to 1937 in the Soviet Union working in the trade centers where the population was related to the peoples of Sinkiang. Immediately after his return from Europe to Sinkiang in 1933, he served briefly as pacification commissioner in the Altai region of Sinkiang but was soon transferred to work for which he was better qualified, becoming consul (chosen from Sinkiang) in the Chinese mission at Andizhan, Uzbekistan, and later at Zaisan, Kazakhstan. About 1937 he returned from Zaisan and became manager of the Sinkiang Local Products Company, the official trade monopoly that managed trade between the provincial administration and the Soviet purchasing agency, Sovsintorg (Soviet- Sinkiang Trading Company). The year was a difficult one as regards relations between Sheng and the Russians, for the effects of the Moscow trials were beginning to influence politics in Sinkiang. Garegin Apresoff, the Russian consul general in Tihwa, was subsequently recalled to Russia to be tried and executed for a “Trotskyite conspiracy,” and Sheng, as he reports in his brief autobiography, sided with the Stalin group. With rather slender evidence to support his charges, Sheng Claims that he uncovered a “Trotskyite plot” that was being organized in Sinkiang and was to begin with an uprising in April 1937. The fantastic charges involved possible connections with Germans and Japanese supposedly trying to establish a central Asian base in the name of anti-fascism, with hopes of putting Trotsky back in power. Though the evidence for Sheng’s supposed “plot” was slender, the effects of his suspicions were serious, and Burhan and 400 others spent the next seven years (1938 - 1944) in prison because they had come under surveillance by his agents.
In the summer of 1942 Sheng made an abrupt about-face from Russia to China, but by 1944 the Nationalist Government, to whom he had transferred his support, had Sinkiang affairs sufficiently under control to dispense with him. In October 1944 Wu Chung-hsin, Sheng’s successor, released Burhan and many others from prison. Burhan was made a deputy commissioner of Civil Affairs, and in 1945 he was commander of the Peace Preservation Corps in Sinkiang, the force with which the Nationalists planned to hold the area. Events did not go smoothly in Sinkiang, where the non-Chinese population resented the control of Nanking as much as they had resented Sheng Shih-ts’ai. In July 1946 Chang Chih-chung, who had headed the Generalissimo’s headquarters for the northwest, replaced Wu Chung-hsin as provincial governor and made Burhan one of his two vice-governors, the other being the Uighur leader Akmedjan’ Kasimov (Kasimi). As a Nationalist official Burhan now became a member of the Executive Headquarters of the KMT (1947) and served for nearly two years as a member of the Nationalist State Council. Also in 1947 he was made director of the Urumchi chapter of the Sino- Soviet Cultural Association (a leftist organization) and chancellor of Sinkiang University.
Early in 1950 the Communists established the multi-provincial Northwest Military and Admin-istrative Committee (NWMAC) to govern Shensi, Kansu, Ninghsia, Tsinghai, and Sinkiang. Burhan was a member of the NWMAC and retained his membership when the NWMAC was reorganized into the Northwest Administrative Committee in early 1953. He continued as a member until the regional administrations were abolished in 1954, serving also during these four years as a member of the regional Nationalities Affairs Committee. In addition, he was the chairman of the Sinkiang branch of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (SSFA) from 1950 to an uncertain date. Burhan was reportedly in Moscow for medical treatment in 1950-1951, but he was back in China in time to deliver a report on Sinkiang affairs before a session of the First CPPCC held in October-November 1951 in Peking. At the close of this session he was elected to the First National Committee of the CPPCC and has since been affiliated with this organization, advancing to Standing Committee membership in February 1953. Then, as a representative of the national minorities, he served during the term of the Second and Third CPPCC’s (1954-1964) as a vice-chairman of the National Com-mittee. He was dropped as a vice-chairman when the Fourth CPPCC was organized in January 1965, but he continues to represent the national minorities as a member of the National Committee. Burhan has also worked on two subordinate committees under the CPPCC, having been a member of both the Study Committee (1956— 1959) and the Local Work Committee (1957- 1959); the former is concerned with the promotion of the study of Marxist works, particularly among the many non-Party members of the CPPCC, and the latter with fostering the activities of the CPPCC in the provinces. Burhan’s primary duties in the early years of the PRC were in Sinkiang, but other responsibilities took him to Peking from time to time. In addition to his affiliation with the CPPCC in Peking, he was named to membership on two public service bodies headquartered in Peking; since April 1950 he has been on the Executive Committee of the Chinese People’s Relief Administration and since November 1951 he has served on the National Committee of a child-care organization known as the Chinese People’s Committee in Defense of Children.
In the interim, Burhan was elected as a deputy from Sinkiang to the First NPC, the legislative body that inaugurated the constitutional government at its initial session in September 1954. He was reelected to the Second NPC (1959-1964) and to the Third NPC that opened in late 1964. Burhan was one of the more active legislators during the term of the First and Second NPC’s (1954-1964); he was a member of both the Budget Committee and the Nationalities Committee (advancing to a vice-chairmanship on the latter in 1956). He additionally served on the ad hoc Motions Examination Committee for the NPC sessions held in September 1954 and July 1955.
At approximately the same time as the Communists were initiating the processes to establish the SUAR, the Preparatory Committee of the China Islamic Association was formed (July 1952). Burhan became the chairman, remaining so after the organization was formally inaugurated in May 1953. Although Saifudin is patently the most important Uighur in China, Burhan’s chairmanship of the Islamic Association presents him to the outside world as the most important representative of China’s millions of Muslims. In this respect his career is similar to that of Ta P’u-sheng, a vice-chairman of the Islamic Association. There is little to suggest that the Islamic Association is important domestically, but it has frequently been used as an instrument in Peking’s semi-official relations with other Muslim nations (e.g., Indonesia), particularly since the mid-1950’s when the Chinese began to exert great efforts to expand their international ties in Asia and the Middle East. As a direct consequence Burhan has frequently represented the PRC abroad and holds posts in several organizations involved in foreign relations, an early example occurring in May-June 1955 when the Communists established the China-Tndonesia Friendship Association with Burhan as chairman. This took place during the state visit to Peking by Indonesian Prime Minister Ali Sastroamidjojo, when the Chinese were attempting to capitalize on the good will they had generated a few weeks earlier at the famous Bandung Conference. Later in June he was a member of the Chinese delegation to the World Peace Congress in Helsinki, he was elected there to membership on the World Peace Council (WPC), a position he presumably still retains. And in July 1955 he became a Board member of the important Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs (see under Chang Hsi-jo). He died in 1989 and is buried in the foothills of the Tian Shan in Xinjiang.
Religion
He was reared as a Muslim
Politics
Concomitant with the PRC’s expanding foreign relations in the fifties and sixties, a number of “mass” or “people’s” organizations were established in Peking to handle various facets of Peking’s foreign affairs. Burhan has been connected with an exceptionally large number of these organizations. From its establishment in February 1956 to mid-1965 he was a member of the Asian Solidarity Committee of China, and from 1958 (when it was renamed the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee) he served as a vice-chairman. In November 1956, during the Suez crisis, the China-Egypt Friendship Association (FA) was formed; Burhan was named as chairman and a year later he was also named to the Council of the C'hina-Syria FA. Then, immediately following the merger of Syria and Egypt into the United Arab Republic, Peking merged its two organizations into the China-United Arab Republic FA (February 1958), naming Burhan as the chairman, a post he still holds. In December 1956 he was appointed as a Standing Committee member of the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. A little over a year later (February 1958), shortly after the government counterpart “Commission for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries” was established under the State Council, Burhan was appointed as a member. In the period from 1958 to 1962 he received still other assignments in organizations concerned with international relations. In July 1958 he was elected a vice-chairman of the reorganized China Peace Committee, and in April I960 he became a vice-chairman of the China-Africa People’s Friendship Association. He was also named as a vice-chairman in April 1962 to the newly established Asia-Africa Society of China, an organization formed to promote scholarly studies on these two continents. Burhan relinquished the Peace Committee post in mid-1965, but he retains the other two.
Connections
His present wife, Rashida (sinicized La-hsi-ta), is a Tatar. In the early fifties she was a vice-chairman of the Northwest Women’s Working Committee of the All-China Federation of Democratic Women, and since 1953 she has served on the Federation’s Executive Committee. She has also represented the Women’s Federation in the CPPCC since 1959 and, like her husband, has been active in the Political Science and Law Association, where she has held a seat on the National Council since 1958. La-hsi-ta has been abroad on at least four occasions, the first of which was in June 1953, when she attended the Communist-sponsored World Women’s Congress in Copenhagen. Later that month she attended a World Peace Council meeting in Budapest, and she was a member of women’s delegations that visited Pakistan in November 1955 and India in December 1956.