Burying the Herdlord in Pastoral Xinjiang: The Cleansing of the Class Ranks Campaign in Altay, 1968–1972

Abstract: Conducted from 1968 onward during the People’s Liberation Army’s “green dominance” of the Cultural Revolution, the Cleansing of the Class Ranks Campaign reconstituted the grassroots Chinese state by unleashing nationwide repression against imagined counterrevolutionary infiltrators. What happened when those “class ranks” were undefined? In Xinjiang’s Altay Prefecture, the Class Ranks Campaign collided with indigenous pastoral populations who had been exempted from nationwide class labeling since the 1950s. This article traces how the distance between a national movement and local particularity was violently closed. In Altay Prefecture and in Xinjiang more widely, pastoralists experienced the Class Ranks Campaign as three fused political movements: the original Class Ranks Campaign, the related One Strike and Three Antis Campaign, and a pastoral class-labeling campaign that sought to “completely destroy politically” the “herdlord economy,” according to its guiding regulations. Marred by ongoing factionalism, pastoral Xinjiang’s Class Ranks Campaign spiraled into an ethnicized purge.