Tao Ren, at the School of Public Affairs of the Zhejiang University, presents an analysis of how Xinjiang has moved from ‘barbaric frontier’ in the 1700s to the ‘inalienable territory of China’ it’s regarded as today.
The shift has a complex history but the discovery of significant mineral resources and territorial horse trading with the former Soviet Union have played a big part in the reassessment.
Oil is the commodity that mattered most historically and as recently as the 1940s China and the Soviet Union were involved in joint venture projects for its extraction.
As the Second World War wound down the territory was de facto traded for Outer Mongolia (to Russia, today just Mongolia) which was at the time regarded as being neither mineral rich nor strategically significant.
The paper reminds along the way that the China we know today would have been unrecognizable to a Chinese person in 1700. At the establishment of the Qing-Dynasty in the 1700s only around a quarter of what we call China today was under their control.
The claim therefore, often repeated by state organs, that Xinjiang is a ‘sacred and inalienable territory of China since ancient times’ is problematic.
Moreover, the notion that China is fundamentally not an expansionary enterprise is to ignore most of the Qing-Dynasty when China was, in many cases violently, incorporating Outer Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang.
The paper brings us up to date highlighting that most of China’s involvement in Xinjiang hasn’t benefited the indigenous population creating a dangerous inequality between Han-Chinese newcomers and natives. It stops short though of suggestions for a prescriptive fix (in fairness, that’s not the point of the work).
Useful and balanced context, the work in full can be accessed here The Making of China’s ‘Inalienable Territory’.
Happy Sunday.