A history exhibition in the main museum in this regional capital goes one step further. “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” it asserts, implying that Beijing or Xian or some other imperial capital has for time immemorial held sway over this land at the crossroads of Asian civilizations.

What it doesn’t mention, however, is that this assertion is made about every disputed region that the PRC claims. My students in China could all recite complicated historical stories about why Tibet belonged to China. The Shanghai Museum features a room dedicated to artifacts from minority groups within the empire, and the explanatory signs claim these cultures as an inherent part of the fabric of Chinese society; the framing goes further to suggest that their very cultural identities would not exist without China.

A reader of the New York Times who is not familiar with this aspect of China will have a difficult time seeing that the claims about Xinjiang are just another form of imperial logic, a subject I’ve written about more broadly at Gender Across Borders.

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