Xinjiang 61st Regiment Farm fire

Regiment farms at the border Regiment farms (团场) are military settlements resided by veteran families, who formed the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. Frontier regiment farms (边疆农场) were created in Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, along the border to Kazakhstan (then a republic under the Soviet Union), after the Yi–Ta incident in 1962, which saw the flight of 60,000 Chinese citizens, predominantly Turkic and Russian, to the Soviet Union and ended in violent suppression of protests and unrest by Chinese authorities. The 61st Regiment's frontier farm is in Alimali, 9 km off the border city Khorgos. The tradition of soldiers settling in the frontier stemmed from the imperial policy tuntian. of new year were cancelled in an effort to transform new year from a family occasion into a work units-led Maoist event. Without holidays, residents were encouraged to forgo the tradition of visiting relatives afar at new year. but it was made available at the local cooperative in 1977. As ancestor veneration had been outlawed, people instead worshipped portraits of Mao at new year, 1977 marked the first time in 25 years in which the new year could be celebrated with traditional practices. This contributed to the particularly high number of attendants to the movie screening. Pile of flammable Mao wreaths After Mao Zedong died in September 1976, children were mobilized to handmake 1,000 mourning wreaths for him. By folk tradition, the wreaths, made of oil paper, would have been incinerated. However, the regiment felt that any mishandling would be smeared as disloyalty to Mao. Their superiors told them to keep the wreaths until further instructions. The regiment eventually put the 1,000 wreaths on display in the communal hall. The wreaths pile stood 2 meters high and occupied 120 m2 (1,300 sq ft), roughly one fifth of the floor. During the 5 months from his funeral to the 1977 Chinese New Year, under Xinjiang's arid weather, the tree branches and paper in the wreaths dried out. Exits renovation The festival hall was built in 1966, primarily used for Mao-era denunciation rallies against people of the Five Black Categories. It had an area of , with a usable floor space of and a wooden roof, with reeds, two layers of oiled felt and three layers of asphalt. In 1975, to welcome Communist Party superiors coming for a policy information talk, the hall was modified to maintain privacy and order. The hall originally had 17 large windows and seven doors. Three doors were sealed and the other three were either locked or bound with steel wire, leaving only a main door on the south side of the building. They also bricked the lower part of the windows, leaving only seventeen by windowless holes. The height of the holes made it difficult to climb during escape. The unaesthetic modification of the hall led to locals comparing it to prisons and warehouses. ==The day==

Movie showing Maoist new year entertainment was dominated by communist movies, loyalty dances and revolutionary operas. Children who had noticed the fire attempted to alert adult audience members, but the warnings were ignored by the adults, including the regiment's attending leaders, since they wanted to enjoy the first proper new year without disruptions, believing that the children were playing a harmless prank. Other adults who saw the fire believed that it would not spread beyond the wreath pile. deadliest fireworks fire in China, and one of the deadliest disasters in Chinese history. Body recovery The 8th Border Regiment, based in Huiyuan, from the fire site, received a phone call from the Yili Military District. Two companies with a total of 280 soldiers were sent to the site of the fire. The night was dark and locals were under the belief that their loved ones trapped in the collapsed building were still alive. Each soldier came equipped with a pickaxe, a shovel and two masks. Since there was a crowd watching, the soldiers felt it was more respectful to use their bare hands to retrieve the bodies rather than to use the metal tools, but they found it difficult to separate bodies that were sticking to each other using just their hands. It was more difficult to separate the bodies stuck at the top of the pile because snow had frozen on them. The cleanup lasted four hours. The bodies were gathered at the local school, where students with carpentry skills built coffins for the deceased. ==Investigation==

The deputy communist party secretary of the Ili Prefecture, Ma Ji, led the investigation. Ma also became the acting chief of the 61st Regiment farm. By March 1977, the State Council, acknowledged the lighting of firecrackers by children as the principal cause of the fire. Additional blame was cast on the farm regiment's leadership for collectively failing to prevent the mishaps that led to the large-scale fire, such as allowing the projectionist team to relocate to the ill-fitting communal hall, not stopping the children from lighting fireworks, not disposing of the mourning wreaths on their own accord, and not having an existing fire escape plan for the building in place. The 12-year-old boy responsible for setting the firecracker escaped unscathed. Accompanied by his parents, he turned himself in to the authorities. He was sentenced to laogai labor and later to juvenile detention. After his release, he went to Guangdong and as of 2007, his whereabouts are unknown. The regiment farm staff in charge of the movie showing were detained for 29 months until the local court chose not to prosecute. It's presumed that they left Xinjiang for Hubei after release. Several other party leaders, both of the regiment farm and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, were subjected to disciplinary measures and subsequently transferred to different farms and bureaus. The non-disposal of the mourning wreaths of Mao Zedong and the exit renovation as contributing factors to the fire were not discussed on some media reports even many years later. ==Media non-coverage==

The Soviet press picked up the news instantly because the fire was in close distance to the Kazakhstan border. The accident was not reported in China until 1995. ==Remembrance==

Occasionally this accident was used to remind students of the danger of fire. It became an annual tradition by Alimali residents to mourn the deaths on each eve of 18 February by burning hell money at the site of the fire and graves of the victims. A memorial park, named Jianyuan (鉴园) started construction in 1997 after bulldozing the remains of the hall. It was designed to be a theme park on fire safety, but was yet to be finished in 2007. The victims of the fire are buried at Sandapian (三大片; "Three Big Pieces"), so named as this cemetery was formed by joining three pieces of land. ==See also==