Text/Kingdom Building
From 1911 to 1928, Xinjiang spent 17 years under the rule of provincial chairman Yang Zengxin. What is surprising is that the rulers of other provinces are desperately expanding their armies, but Yang Zengxin has reduced the Xinjiang army to less than 10,000 people, and such a weak armed force has thwarted the separatist activities of Russia, Britain, Japan and other powers in Xinjiang, cracked down on and suppressed xinjiang rebels, and won 17 years of stability and harmony for Xinjiang. At that time, people called Xinjiang under Yang Zengxin's rule a paradise.
Yang Zengxin, Zi Dingchen, a native of Mengzi County, Yunnan Province, of Han ethnicity, was born on March 6, 1864. In 1888, he was selected in the township examination, and the following year he participated in the examination, and the 127th jinshi of the high school was selected from Zhi County, Zhongwei County, Gansu Province.
Although Yang Zengxin was a scholar, he had a deep study of the art of war. In the late Qing Dynasty, there were many bandits in Gansu, and knifemen were rampant, and the local government was very troubled by this. Soon after Yang Zengxin became the county of Zhongwei Zhi, the people under his jurisdiction rose up because they could not bear the oppression of the government and the rich households, and the momentum was huge. Yang Zengxin did not compromise with the rebels, and sent troops to kill dozens of leaders who led the rebellion, and the rebels immediately disintegrated, and they were promoted to Zhizhou in Hezhou for their merits. Yang Zengxin was also good at mediating contradictions and disputes, coordinated the handling of Contradictions between the Han and The Han Dynasties many times during his term of office, avoided ethnic conflicts, and was very shrewd and capable of local administration, and was appreciated by Song Fan, the governor of Shaanxi and Gansu at the time, and was transferred to Gansu to be an envoy and the general office (principal) of the Gansu Wubei Academy.
In 1907, Yang Zengxin was transferred to the General Office of the Xinjiang Army Academy, and he never left until his death, leaving an indissoluble relationship with the magical land of Xinjiang.
How did Yang Zengxin become the "King of Xinjiang"? In 1911, the revolutionaries revolted in Xinjiang and established the Yili Military Government, and Yuan Dahua, the last governor of Xinjiang, promoted Yang Zengxin to the post of envoy and asked him to help him suppress the revolutionaries. As a result, within a few days, Yuan Dahua fled back to the interior in disguise when the revolutionaries attacked Dihua, leaving the mess in Xinjiang to be handled by his subordinates. The revolutionaries could not conquer Dihua, and under the mediation of the Beijing government, they compromised with the Manchu Qing forces in Xinjiang and publicly promoted Yang Zengxin as the overseer of Xinjiang, and in this way, Yang Zengxin, a native of Yunnan, ascended to the throne of "King of Xinjiang".
Yang Zengxin became the overseer of Xinjiang, facing a fragmented Xinjiang government. The Yili region belonged to the territory of the revolutionaries, many prefectures and counties outside Ofihua belonged to the sphere of influence of the Brotherhood Bian Yongfu and Wei Dexi, in addition to the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Huis, including the remnants of the old Tsar who fled from Russia, each with its own forces and arms, were not fuel-saving lamps. Yang Zengxin gave full play to his specialty of being good at coordinating contradictions and disputes, first appeasing the minority forces and the Russian diaspora, consolidating his ruling position, and then turning back to clean up the revolutionaries and brotherhood leaders who were unfavorable to his rule in Xinjiang. By 1916, the leaders of the revolutionary party and the leaders of the Brotherhood in Xinjiang had been basically eliminated.
When Yang Zengxin became the overseer of Xinjiang, he also had to face the chaotic political situation in China. Xinjiang is sparsely populated, its financial revenue and expenditure are difficult, and successive dynasties have had to be subsidized by the imperial court, so it is impossible to build a strong army to develop inland. To this end, Yang Zengxin's strategy is to "close off and protect himself", only recognizing the government and not recognizing people. He supported Yuan Shikai's government, sun Yat-sen's revolutionary government, including the Beijing government controlled by the three Beiyang factions later, but his support had a bottom line, that is, to maintain his control over Xinjiang and not to participate in warlord melee. This idea of his was welcomed by the people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang and tacitly accepted by the Beijing government and the revolutionary government in Guangdong. The lobby of Yang Zengxin's Governor's Mansion hung a couplet he had made himself: "The republic has just opened its grass, and it is shameful to call it five hegemons and seven heroes, and disputes do not ask about the Central Plains; the border court has a Taoyuan victory, and the twisting rate returns to the north to the north, and the hun is long as the Taigu people." "The political program for his rule in Xinjiang is well portrayed.
During Yang Zengxin's administration of Xinjiang, he reduced the province's regular army to less than 10,000 people to alleviate financial difficulties. Such a weak military force could not have been a big deal, but General Yang Lao (the honorific title of Yang Zengxin by the people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang) had to rely on 10,000 horses without heavy weapons to foil the separatist plot of Russia (including the later Soviet Union), Britain, and Japan against Xinjiang, and recaptured the Altay region from the hands of the Rebel Forces of Outer Mongolia, making Xinjiang one of the few provinces in the early years of the Republic of China that did not fall into warlord melee. Of course, Yang Zengxin's rule over Xinjiang is not without drawbacks, and his policy of self-isolation and ignorance of the people has led to the stagnation of the development of Xinjiang's modern industrial construction, and this harm did not begin to ease until General Wang Zhen entered Xinjiang more than two decades later.
In 1928, the Guangdong Revolutionary Government successfully carried out the Northern Expedition and established the Nanjing National Government, and China was formally unified. Although Yang Zengxin immediately sent a telegram in support of the Nationalist government in Nanjing, he did not intend to give up his rights. Fan Yaonan, who was then the head of the Xinjiang Military Affairs Department and Dihua Daoyin, was quite dissatisfied with Yang Zengxin's feudal imperial rule, and when he heard that Yang Zengxin did not have his own name among the Directors of Xinjiang who had submitted to the Nanjing government, he had a premonition that Yang Zengxin would be unfavorable to himself, and planned to attack Yang Zengxin first and assassinate Yang Zengxin to seize power.
On July 7, 1928, at the graduation ceremony of the first phase of the Xinjiang Russian Law and Politics School, Fan Yaonan killed yang Zengxin, who was unprepared, shot Yang to death indiscriminately, and then led more than 30 rebels to rush into the governor's palace, found the governor's seal, and prepared to take over the military and political power in Xinjiang. One of Yang Zengxin's cronies, Jin Shuren, director of the Xinjiang Government Affairs Department, heard the gunshots, heard that Yang Zengxin had been stabbed, and urgently dispatched troops to suppress it, capturing Fan Yaonan and others, and then executing them with heart-digging torture.
Yang Zengxin, who was 66 years old at the time of his death, was transported to Beijing through Siberia, Russia, and buried on the north side of the Nansha River in Shahe Town, Changping District, a northern suburb of Beijing.