The Pentagon doing the Larry David gif going back and forth between “we hate Muslims” and “but these specific Muslims hate China” while trying to figure out how long to fund this proxy group.
The Pentagon doing the Larry David gif going back and forth between “we hate Muslims” and “but these specific Muslims hate China” while trying to figure out how long to fund this proxy group.
its kind of a touch and go situation, theres always been waxing and waning influence from various chinese groups over the area for thousands of years now. even before uighurs were even there. a lot of liberals like to imagine it as a modern settler colonial situation even though china has very strict internal migration laws
you can find a basic summary of this history here https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=-6Wu0Q7x5D0
here’s some old ass mummies from the tarim basin too, theyre of the tocharian material culture which is now defunct (though it survived long enough to have a written language! its very interesting, its indo european but is its own branch), it moved westward at one point and mostly deserted the tarim basin and as far as we know it was the first organized material culture of the basin in 2k BCE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies
the more or less ‘modern’ borders of china were defined by the qing empire during the 1600s-1700s but there were chinese groups there with centralized power as early as 100 BCE, though arguably much earlier than that in terms of migrations and soft influence
Thanks, much appreciated!
unfun fact: there are weird ‘aryan’ neonazis in china that say theyre tocharians because the tocharians were likely ancient north eurasians that later migrated to europe and were ‘white’. generally most research sides with the idea that the tocharians largely vacated the area and didnt intermix much with the current existing population. so yeah… super weird
Ewww.