Isa Yusuf Alptekin

Isa Yusuf Alptekin (1901 – 17 December 1995) was a Uyghur politician who served the Chinese Nationalist government in the 1930s and 1940s while opposing both short-lived East Turkestan republics, and who after 1949 became, from exile in Turkey, the best-known political leader of the East Turkestan independence cause. ^{1 2}

There is no Arabic or Urdu article on him; this page rests on the English and Chinese articles, as stated in its sources.

He was born in 1901 at Yengisar County in Kashgar prefecture, then under Qing rule. In exile in the Soviet Union he worked on the staff of the Chinese consulates at Andijan (1926) and Tashkent (1928), then moved to Nanjing in 1932 and served the Nationalist government until 1949 — as an advisor in the Ministry of National Defense, as Secretary General of the government of Xinjiang province, and as a member of the Legislative Yuan. During the same years he opposed both the First East Turkestan Republic of 1933–34 and the Soviet-sponsored Second Republic of 1944–49. ¹

With the Communist victory in 1949 he left Xinjiang for Turkey, and from there led the East Turkestan independence movement in exile for the rest of his life, reporting on the condition of China's Uyghur population to international audiences. He died at Istanbul on 17 December 1995 and was buried at Topkapı Cemetery; his son Erkin Alptekin also became an activist. ^{1 3}

His faith is recorded as unknown. No article text names a legal school or order for him; the Chinese article's infobox carries a religion field "Islam, Sunni school", but the English article has no religion field and Wikidata carries no religion value at all. A single infobox in a single source family does not meet the museum's two-source rule, so the Sunni reading is preserved in his data record without settling the segment. ^{2 1 3}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.