During the “Yi-Ta Incident” (the Yili-Tacheng Incident or Ili-Qoqek Incident) of spring 1962, 60,000 Kazakhs and Uyghurs fled from Xinjiang in China's northwest into the Soviet Union. The incident both revealed and exacerbated tensions between China and the Soviet Union, leading to angry accusations on both sides. In the wake of the incident, China waged a fierce struggle against Soviet "revisionism" within Xinjiang and expelled all Soviet diplomats from the Uyghur Autonomous Region. This collection mostly consists of translated Chinese records from the Foreign Ministry Archives in Beijing (PRC FMA). See also the Digital Archive collection "China and the Soviet Union in Xinjiang, 1934-1949." Image: Mao Zedong greets representatives of various ethnic groups from Xinjiang, "Chairman Mao Is the Red Sun in Our Hearts," Gong Jianxin, 1964.
