• TheOldRazzleDazzle [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Uighurs are Chinese and have been for centuries.

    True and not true. Xinjiang has been a contested region for going on 1500 years or so. It was decisively controlled by the Qing dynasty (who were foreign rulers and not Han Chinese) for a few hundred years until the Republican era, when it became its own sovereign state, just like Tibet, until the Communists re-conquered it in 1949. It was not "China" as such when the CCP came into power.

    The thing is, "China" has always been a continuous civilization, never a continuous state. To say that Uighurs were "Chinese" in the Qing dynasty is roughly equivalent to saying Polish people were once Chinese because they were part of Pax Mongolia, which of course had its capital in Beijing.

    • ssjmarx [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      the Communists re-conquered it in 1949

      I suppose you think that the CPC "conquered" Beijing too. The communists didn't "conquer" shit, the revolution and subsequent liberation spread to those areas just as it had the rest of China.

      • TheOldRazzleDazzle [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I guess if we're going to be particular about our terms it was ultimately neither conquered nor liberated but more or less passed over to the CCP by the Soviets

        Serious question: Are you pro-Soviet? If so, why did the state have to be liberated from Soviet backing?