Masud Sabri (1886-April 1951), Uighur educational reformer in Sinkiang who served the National Government in the 1930's and 1940's. He was governor of Sinkiang in 1947-48. Because he refused to support the People's Republic of China, he was arrested and executed in 1951.

Born into a Uighur family in the Hi district of northwest Sinkiang, Masud Sabri was the son of a prosperous merchant and landlord who was a devout Muslim. After studying at the Muslim Technical School at Ining, the boy was sent to Turkey, where he enrolled at a military school. Upon graduation in 1907, he entered the natural science department of the University of Constantinople; and in 1910 he also became a student in the university's medical college. He completed his science courses in 1911, and he received a medical degree in 1914.

In 1915 Masud Sabri returned to Sinkiang to practice medicine. Having been influenced by progressive ideas during his student days in Turkey, he began to devote much of his time to the creation of educational opportunities for the Uighurs of Sinkiang. These efforts were viewed with suspicion by Yang Tseng-hsin (q.v.), the provincial governor of Sinkiang, who was attempting to consolidate Chinese rule in the Hi district and to prevent the spread of unrest from adjacent Russian areas. Thus, Masud Sabri's first modern school, established in Hi in 1916, was closed by order of the provincial authorities soon after the Russian Revolution. Masud Sabri established new schools, but all of them were closed by the authorities at Urumchi. In 1924 he was charged with having engaged in revolutionary activity and was imprisoned for ten months at Urumchi, but after his release he promptly returned to his eductional projects in Hi. By placing his schools under the nominal direction of men who were deemed conservative, he managed to avoid further confrontation with the provincial government. About this time, he decided to allow a few young men to study under him at his home-clinic; and by 1926 he had trained several young men in basic medical procedures and techniques.

The assassination of Yang Tseng-hsin in 1928 signaled the beginning of a new period of turmoil in Sinkiang. To protect his son and his nephew from possible harm, Masud Sabri sent them to Turkey to study in 1928. Discontent with Chinese rule soon led to movements and uprisings aimed at obtaining a degree of political autonomy for the minority groups of Sinkiang. Masud Sabri became involved in one of these movements early in 1934, when he left Hi for Aksu to serve as a political worker in a Uighur military force commanded by a local leader named Mahmoud. Later that year, when Ma Chung-ying (q.v.), the young Chinese Muslim leader from Kansu, fled to southern Sinkiang, Mahmoud's forces were defeated in battle. Masud Sabri fled to India and sailed from there to Tientsin, which he reached in November. He then went by train to Nanking, where he was welcomed by the city's Sinkiang community and by representatives of the National Government. He served as a Sinkiang delegate to the Fifth National Congress of the Kuomintang in 1935 and became a member of the party's Central Executive Committee. Masud Sabri established residence at Nanking, where younger members of his family, including those who had studied in Turkey, enrolled at Central University and the Central Military Academy. After the Sino-Japanese war began in July 1937, Masud Sabri accompanied the National Government to Hankow and then to Chungking. In 1938-40 he served on the People's Political Council, and in 1942 he became one of two Muslims (the other being Ma Lin, a former governor of Tsinghai) on the 36-member State Council. Toward the end of the war period, when the National Government succeeded in removing Sheng Shih-ts'ai (q.v.) from his position of authority in Sinkiang, Masud Sabri was named supervisory commissioner for Sinkiang. His mission was to explain Nationalist policies to the ethnic minorities of the province and to win their support for the National Government. His task was made more difficult by the so-called Hi rebellion of November 1944. The insurgents soon won control of three northwestern districts adjacent to the Soviet Union, and they established the so-called East Turkestan Republic. In response to this new threat to Chinese rule in Sinkiang, Chiang Kai-shek sent Chang Chih-chung (q.v.) to Urumchi for negotiations with the rebels. In March 1946 Chang became governor of Sinkiang.

After Chang Chih-chung assumed office, Masud Sabri and his associate Mohammed Emin became leading spokesmen for that segment of the Uighur nationalist movement which stood for self-determination within the political framework of the Chinese republic. They worked with Chang in attempting to rally the Sinkiang populace against the Hi rebels. That the two men had considerable political influence was confirmed by the fact that the Hi insurgents were more hostile in condemning them than in criticizing Chang and the other Chinese officials. Chang's plan to name Mohammed Emin deputy governor of a reorganized Sinkiang provincial government was so strongly opposed by the Hi group that he named Burhan (q.v.) to the post instead. In the summer of 1946 a new Sinkiang provincial government, headed by Chang Chihchung and including representatives of the Hi group, was established at Urumchi. Masud Sabri continued to work for self-determination under Chinese rule, and in May 1947 he became the first non-Chinese governor of Sinkiang. His appointment, designed to placate the non- Chinese groups in Sinkiang, served only to increase the hostility of the Hi group and other politically active Uighurs, who regarded Masud Sabri as a tool of the Nationalist authorities at Nanking. New disturbances soon wracked southern and eastern Sinkiang. Although Chinese military forces led by SungHsi-lien (q.v.) were deployed to sustain the Urumchi government, the coalition fell apart in the summer of 1947. The Hi leaders demanded that Masud Sabri be removed from office, but the Nationalist authorities refused. The situation remained deadlocked throughout 1948. At the end of December, the National Government, then under extremely heavy pressure because of the rapid expansion of Communist power in China, removed Masud Sabri from the governorship and named Burhan to succeed him. In the autumn of 1949 Chinese Communist forces commanded by P'eng Te-huai (q.v.) moved through northwest China and occupied Sinkiang. Masud Sabri refused to support the new regime. In April 1951 he was arrested, charged with being a counter-revolutionary plotting against Communist rule, and executed.