During the Cultural Revolution, the wives of those soldiers within the PLA experienced another bout of trials and tribulations. With revolutionary fervor spreading to Xinjiang, it took on a form targeting soldiers who had fought with the GMD during the Chinese Civil War, of which the XPCC was full, due to its nature stated beforehand, leading to destitution, though an eventual plateau was reached as local party cadres intervened. Finally, into the 1980s and 1990s, Uyghur women were to be found in their unique struggle, as they were encouraged both by their own families and sometimes the families of their husbands to divorce and separate. These women themselves were sometimes pariahs within their own communities, and this new wave of encouragement of divorce put even more strains on an already lonely population. While the lives of the wives of the XPCC and of the women within it were hard, perhaps what is even worse is how it is remembered within the confines of the PRC. More often than not, interviews given by them tend to be centered around their husbands, how many children and grandchildren they had, and overall, despite having their own rich lives within Xinjiang, center their accounts on the men. The other obvious issue is that they often had nothing else near the end of their lives, with the age disparity and the repeated shocks to the wider social order of both Xinjiang and the wider PRC during the Great Leap Forward, GPCR, and Reform/Opening Up; it is no surprise that they would deem to speak about their immediate families and not much else. The tragedy is just that their story as people is rapidly being replaced with that of the story of their husbands, and as more of them pass through the steady march of time, this seems to only be getting worse.

Life did not become easier after marriage, however. While the XPCC was there to modernize and bring Xinjiang into China proper, the work needed to do such a thing, especially within the confines of the PRC’s war-torn economy, was a tall order, leading to backbreaking labor by those involved, “The capital-construction company had to turn out 650 adobe bricks a day. The men were exhausted, let alone me as a woman. I was so tired I cried. I got through it. I even went down the coal mine in the mining company at the foot of the Kunlun. After the regiment planted cotton I went to work early every morning; by the time the others came on shift my work was already half done. After supper at 12:30 at night I would still go back to the fields for another hour, then come home to sleep. The next morning I was up at six and down in the fields early. I almost never asked for leave.” Living conditions as well were not ideal. Proper care was not always available, and while great strides were being made in care for women and infants, infant mortality and post-natal illnesses and death were still common. It is to be said that this rapidly improved as more and more of the XPCC was built up going into the 1960s.

For hundreds of miles they travelled until eventually they reached the city of Urumqi, here their first steps into their new homes were met less with fanfare and more with a sense of doom, “When we reached Xinjiang a lot of the girls, seeing desert everywhere, empty of people, started to cry. One girl named Huang who enlisted with me cried the whole way, wanting to go home. She had signed up because she saw others signing up; the moment she saw that great Gobi she wept. I said, ‘What are you crying for? Nobody told you to come. You came of your own will. Stop crying.’” From here, naturally, sexual and romantic relationships developed, but on the other half of the equation, of local Uyghur women marrying into the PLA largely through the informal and formal economy of some elements of the Uyghur people supporting the XPCC. More often than not these women, working as babysitters, teachers, additional farm labor along with the myriad of other means by which the newfound PRC colony was developed, provided many points of contact between local women and their male counterparts within the XPCC. Here as well, a striking difference is noted: age differences between female and male relationships are rather pronounced both between those married within the XPCC and of local women marrying XPCC men. More often than not the women would be in their early-20s and the men in their 30s to late-40s. This is due largely to how senior the original cadre of troops within the PLA were, as the bulk of those within the XPCC were veterans of either fighting for or against the GMD during the wider Chinese Civil War. Juxtaposing this with those accounts from women within the PLA, most of whom had signed on for the XPCC in the early-1950s at young ages to escape rural poverty, to serve the CPC, or just a general sense of adventure and want to be on the frontier that infects the mind of every young person.

The origin of these women is varied, as there were relationships within the XPCC; however, there are two primary means in which women were able to interact with men to such a capacity that relationships could be formed. The most obvious is the 1953 to 1954 effort by Beijing to even out the gender disparity within the XPCC, opting to send battalions of units composed of women to the various areas within Xinjiang over hundreds of miles of desert on board trucks that either suffocated with heat or froze the occupants to the seat during the night. As these women were transported, security was still tight even within the later years of the PRC’s war against Nationalist guerrillas in both Xinjiang and the South West. The soldiers of the PLA were told to keep to the trucks so as not to be ambushed by GMD fighters, “From Xi’an to Jiuquan, and Jiuquan to Hami, there was nothing. The leader said there were bandits, so they would not let us off the trucks. We sat inside. They gave each person a steamed bun or a wowotou. If you had to relieve yourself you were not allowed to go far or leave the vehicle; they said it was all sand-dune hollows and if you went far you would be snatched. How did we do it? The people from one truck got down and formed a circle, you holding me and I holding you. Once the circle was closed, the people in the middle urinated and defecated; everyone took turns, then we hurried back on.”

As ever, a note on sourcing and how this is meant to be viewed. This is in no way an academic work; this is an amateur’s attempt at grappling with not just the history of a specific set of women within a set time frame, but also a work in gender studies and other sociological fields. The sources reflect this, as I am drawing from 12 interviews given in 2018 by the 14th Division’s 47th Regiment Political Office detailing the experience of those involved. As such, I would encourage broader reading by better historians on the subject.

Very often, when discussing the People’s Liberation Army as it relates to the armed forces of any nation from the dawn of the state to the modern day, much is made of its men, the battles they fought, and of their own trials and tribulations. But what of their wives? In this overview, I will be covering the women who married and lived with the soldiers of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC). Covering both the women within the PLA who married inside the XPCC and the Uyghur women who married into the organization. Their trials, their tribulations, and to a greater extent their steady marginalization within the wider confines of how the People’s Republic views its history, as well as the local communities these women gave as much effort as their male counterparts.

A Short Overview of the Married Women of the PLA’s Xinjiang Construction Corps