Content area
Full Text
From Empire to Nation State: Ethnic Politics in China. By Sun Yan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 250 p. $99.99 cloth, $34.99 paper.
China’s governance of its ethnic periphery is both contentious and polarizing among scholars and the public more generally. This is especially the case with Beijing’s policies in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where we can literally speak of competing realities. Communist Party officials say they are combating the global scourge of terrorism through much-needed education and vocational training for the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, whereas critics accuse China of crimes against humanity or even genocide.
It is increasingly difficult to find any common ground in the scholarly debate and discussion on this topic. Yan Sun’s sophisticated new book, From Empire to Nation State, wades boldly in this disputed terrain and offers a range of new insights that deserve to be taken seriously. Some of her views and conclusions might stand in contrast to recent work by Western scholars of Xinjiang (Darren Byler, David Tobin and Sean R. Roberts, for example) or Tibet (Emily Yeh, Charlene Makley, and Benno Weiner), but they are based on more than a decade of careful research that provides what we might call a distinctly Chinese perspective on the modern Chinese state’s approach to managing ethnocultural diversity and nation-building.
Her argument builds on the work of other Chinese scholars, especially Peking University professor of sociology Ma Rong, who has long criticized the ethnic policies of the PRC and whose thinking exerts a strong influence on the book’s argument. Yan Sun herself has roots in southern Xinjiang, where many of her relatives still reside as a legacy of more than a century of Han Chinese colonialism. She has also conducted extensive field research across China’s vast frontier and interviewed leading Chinese officials and scholars, including the jailed Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti,...