Few political parties have the opportunity to make a fresh start in a new location. An organization is rarely able to leave the environment in which its lessons are learned and apply them in a new one. However, the Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) encountered this situation after its defeat on the Chinese mainland and retreat to Taiwan. From 1950 to 1952, the KMT underwent a thorough organizational restructuring. The result was a renewal of its Leninist origins from the previous reorganization in 1924. During 1950–52, the KMT created a network of Party cells throughout the government, military and society to which each Party member had to belong. The principles of democratic centralism, ideology as guide to policy, hierarchical authority, and Party authority over the government bureaucracy and the military were reasserted.

Before economic reform and political liberalization swept the socialist world, leading to disintegration of multinational states such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, nation-building in socialist economies was primarily studied in the context of modernization theory. This paradigm placed all developing countries along a continuum from tradition to modernity and attributed their movement along the path to domestic factors, with the central assumption that nation-building, assimilation of minority peoples and industrialization followed a linear path of progress. At the beginning of China's economic reforms Donald McMillen used this framework to explain Xinjiang's relations with Han China. McMillen focused on local elites, primarily Muslim minorities, as modernizers working through Han organizations, promoting Xinjiang's development in co-operation with Beijing.

The relationship of the intellectual in China to society and state has been a complex problem throughout this century. An individual's relationship to the state in China is influenced by separate – and often contradictory – sources from within their individual social context, and from traditional political culture. Not the least of these influences was the ancient moral responsibility of the literati to critically advise the emperor on the rule of the country. During the unrelenting crises of the 1940s, people had heightened political concern, and many became politically active. Even those formerly aloof from politics became involved for the first time.

Until the collapse of the Soviet Union ignited an explosion of interest in Central Asia, most outsiders considered the region a political backwater, an amorphous place of exotic peoples whose time of greatest power had long passed and whose future could have little impact on international affairs. This perception began to change during the 1980s when China's concern over the stirrings of ethnic separatism in Xinjiang helped focus international attention on Islamic revivalism in Central Asia.