Description
This paper explores the genealogy of the contemporary notion of ‘Chinese Central Asia’, central to China’s claim to sovereignty over Xinjiang and provides the first longitudinal analysis linking early Turko-Islamic and modern conceptualisations of China and Central Asia. Specifically, we examine how the region was imagined in both Islamic and Chinese sources from the early Turko-Islamic world, tracing the genealogy of ethno-national classifications in sedentary Central Asia, focusing on the Uyghurs and Uzbeks. Theoretically, we propose a constructivist and postcolonial framework, drawing on the concepts of ‘hybridity’ and ‘othering’. Empirically, we draw on: (1) pre-modern Muslim texts from regions historically described as China in Islamic discourse, (2) historical Chinese materials such as Song-era maps, and two corpora of modern documents analysed through Structural Topic Modelling, including (3) 10,563 contemporary Chinese-language scholarly articles, and (4) 26,391 documents scraped from the website of the Uzbekistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2001–2021). Textual evidence is further complemented by seventy-nine semi-structured interviews conducted in Uzbekistan (2022–2025). We argue that pre-modern texts reveal a fluid imaginary of Sino-Turkic identities and a contested process of boundary-making that informed the hybrid configurations of Sino-Turkic relations under colonial modernity. The subsequent partition of Central Asia between the Chinese and Russian empires operated as a strategy of incorporation, generating identities that were neither fully internal nor fully external to imperial formations. Finally, we maintain that colonial imaginaries underpin the contemporary otherisation of “Chinese” Central Asians, particularly the Uyghurs. In Uzbekistan, this legacy manifests in the construction of Uyghurs as cultural and political outsiders, despite their clear linguistic and cultural proximity.
