100 Yuan 60th Anniversary of the Founding of Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps

The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps — known in Chinese as Bingtuan — was established in 1954 when the People's Liberation Army units stationed in Xinjiang were demobilized in place and ordered to farm, rather than return home. The arrangement was explicitly colonial-agricultural in design: soldiers became settlers, building irrigation networks and breaking desert soil in a region Beijing considered both strategically vital and demographically thin. By 2014, the Corps had grown into a quasi-governmental entity of roughly 2.7 million people operating its own courts, police, and legislative bodies entirely parallel to the Xinjiang regional government.

The commemorative gold issue marks sixty years from that 1954 founding order.