The People's Republic of China (PRC) was proclaimed on 1 October 1949, and PLA general Wang Zhen was tasked by his superior Peng Dehuai with taking Xinjiang.

[6][7] The Second ETR, initially led by Elihan Tore, was founded in November 1944 during the Ili Rebellion with Soviet support and was based in three northwest districts of Xinjiang.

The Kuomintang Xinjiang provincial leaders Tao Zhiyue and Burhan Shahidi led the KMT government and army's defection to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) side in September 1949.

Mao Zedong invited the leaders of the Three Districts to take part in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference later that year.

Ehmetjan regarded the current situation as a historic opportunity for Uyghurs and other people of Xinjiang to gain freedom and independence that shouldn't be lost.

On 25 August, the eleven delegates, Ehmetjan Qasim, Abdulkerim Abbas, Ishaq Beg, Luo Zhi, Dalelkhan Sugirbayev and accompanying officers of the Three Districts, boarded Ilyushin Il-12 plane in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, officially heading to Beijing, but flight was diverted for Moscow.

[13] On 3 September, the Soviet Union informed the Chinese government that the plane had crashed near Lake Baikal en route to Beijing, killing all on board.

[14][15] On the same day Molotov sent a telegram to Ghulja to inform Saifuddin Azizi (interim leader of the Three Districts when Ehmetjan Qasim was not in Ili, and a member of Communist Party of Soviet Union) about the Tragic death of devoted revolutionaries, including Ehmetjan Qasim, in airplane crash near Lake Baikal en route to Beijing.

In accordance with instructions from Moscow, Saifuddin Azizi kept the news secret from the population of the Three Districts and it was unreported by Beijing for several months[16][17] until December 1949, when Saifuddin Azizi departed to Moscow to join Mao Zedong's delegation to sign Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship with Stalin and to retrieve bodies of The Three Districts leaders (their already unrecognisable bodies were delivered from the USSR in April 1950) and when the People's Liberation Army had already secured most of the regions of the former Xinjiang Province.

[18] After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, some former KGB generals and high officers (among them Pavel Sudoplatov) revealed that the five leaders were killed on Stalin's orders in Moscow on 27 August 1949, after a three-day imprisonment in the former Tsar's stables, having been arrested upon arrival in Moscow by the Head of MGB Colonel General Viktor Abakumov, who personally interrogated the Three Districts leaders, then ordered their execution.

On 25 September, Tao Zhiyue and Burhan Shahidi, the KMT's military general and political leader in Dihua, respectively, announced the formal surrender of Nationalist forces in Xinjiang to the CCP.

The only organized resistance the PLA encountered was from Osman Batur's Kazak militia and from Yulbars Khan's White Russian and Hui troops who served the Republic of China.

In the People's Republic of China, the five ETR leaders who perished in the 1949 plane crash are remembered as heroes in the struggle against the Nationalist regime.