China’s ‘ethnic white’ population

The earliest time when they were incorporated into China was when Han Wudi sent an expedition to Dayuan to take their horses in 104 BC, which started a domino effect of Tarim Basin cities surrendering to the Han dynasty in 102 to 101 BC. Dayuan at the time had a Greco-Bactrian population under the rule of the Yuezhi. Ethnhic groups like Uyghurs and Kazahks didn't exist yet during this time, but a significant amount of the population would have looked white or mixed by modern standards.
China then ruled the Tarim Basin area on and off.
The most recent time when the ENTIRE area was incorporated into China was in 1949 when the Second East Turkestan Republic (puppet state carved from Nationalist territory, set up by the Soviets as a buffer state), lost the support of the Soviets when it became apparent that the Communists would win over China rather than the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War. Without Soviet Support, the Second East Turkestan Republic surrendered without firing a shot and negotiated to be re-incorporated into China.

Second East Turkestan Republic:


Contrary to what one may hear in the West, study of the Uyghur language was and is mandatory in Xinjiang. Such news about banning of Uyghur language are meant to fool non-Chinese, but it can't fool Chinese unless if said Chinese lacks any skeptical ability whatsoever. Chinese have their own versions of twitter/facebook/instagram social apps, which do have a bunch of Uyghurs in it making a bunch of videos showing them in school or just normal life, while others simply went to Xinjiang before.

Uyghur culture tend to have a lighter outlook on Islam compared to other Muslim majority areas, for example most Uyghur Muslims would drink alcohol no problem, even if it's out in the open, in fact they have a festival for beer drinking, and women commonly show their hair in public without a problem. So they are allowed to practice their own culture in terms of Uyghur dance/clothing/language/religion/etc.... in fact these practices are openly celebrated. But in terms of fundamentalist Islam, which had been on the increase in Xinjiang, it is outlawed. Ergo people are allowed to wear the Hijab (covers hair but not face) but not the Burqa (covers everything).
The rise of fundamentalist Islam was in part due to the fault of China, as they along with other powers supported the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets during the Sino-Soviet Split and these Mujahideen are now the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

In terms of discrimination, there have been complaints from both the Han majority and the Uyghur minority. The Han complains that Uyghurs (amongst other minorities) could get away with illegal activities that a Han Chinese would not be able to get away with, officials turn a blind eye to minor crimes like theft in the name of ethnic harmony. On the other hand Uyghurs say that they are subject to heavier security checks than Han Chinese, and a Han Chinese probably needs to do a lot more before the government considers him or her to be a security threat, compared to the actions of a Uyghur.

There are 2 Uyghurs in the 19th Central Committee of the CPC and one of them is a member of the 16th member Standing Committee of the National People's Congress. I specifically focus on this organ because it seems to be the only organ that was ever able to have its way over the Politburo itself.

Uyghur standup comedian joking about being a minority in China. She's also asking the audience 'who here's a minority', and when people speak out about their ethnic background, she jokes about it. Which is impressive as you have to come up with the joke on the spot. She's also talking about how wierd learning Chinese is by using Chinese poetry as an example.



At 4:20 she says: "Some people will come up to me and complain 'you minorities get additional points (on college exams), that's so unfair'. Whenever I hear this I feel pretty bad on the inside, these additional points are from all the hardships I had (from learning Chinese), it's something I'm supposed to have. But on junior year the teacher told me I got an additional 50 points. At the time I was thinking '50 (points) I don't think I went through THAT many hardships' "

I haven't been to Xinjiang but two provinces that border it: Inner Mongolia and Gansu. I lived in Heilongjiang, where everyone once spoke Manchurian (older people still can), and where there is a giant Russian Orthodox Cathedral in the provincial capital, Harbin (where you will see Russians everyday, but I don't know if I ever saw any ethnic Russians who were Chinese citizens, thoughh they do exist).

my point being, China is incredibly diverse, and if you wanted to find some people to pass as "white" (why?) you could. Ah, there's Tajiks, guess what language they speak............ an Indo-ARYAN one!!!!!

Yep, AFAIK from previous readings Tajiks are an Indo-Iranic people speaking an eastern dialect of Persian. Quite likely offspring or part-offspring of a Scythian or Scythian-type people, I'm just guessing.

I've met a few in our place. I thought that they were Iranians at first. Until I spoke to them and they told me.

Rumopson said:

i heard that there are sizeable population of non ‘han’ or ‘mongoloid’ ethnic whites in western china bordering central asia and russia. They look clearly european or turkish.

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Just a note on terminology. The terms "mongol", "turk", "tatar" and some others I've forgotten, were all just tribal names for a group of closely related people originating in what is now the Mongolian steppe. In successive waves, these nomadic horseback riders, migrated all the way into central Europe. In Russian they still use a composite word "Tatari-Mongol". So, a Turkic-looking person can looking like a blonde from Izmir, but most people who speak Turkic languages look Far Eastern, Asiatic, or Eurasian. Eventually, "Turk" just became a general exonym for any nomadic raiders from the East coming into Persia, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia --- regardless of which particular Turkic-speaking Tribal Confederation they called themselves (Pechenegs, Cummans, Kipchaks, Seljuks, etc). It is thought they mostly referred to themselves as Turkmen/Turkman/Turkoman/Turcoman.

Dreamhunter said:

Yep, AFAIK from previous readings Tajiks are an Indo-Iranic people speaking an eastern dialect of Persian. Quite likely offspring or part-offspring of a Scythian or Scythian-type people, I'm just guessing.

I've met a few in our place. I thought that they were Iranians at first. Until I spoke to them and they told me.

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well, depending on how you define the word "Iran" and "Tajik"..... Eranshahr and all these knew "stans" (Persian for land/country).

they both speak Persian, and "Tadjik" is a Turkic-language exonym for city-dweller, it's what the nomadic Turks called the Persian town-dwellers.

Just double-checked that, it's been nearly a decade, I didn't remember it quite right, it's much more complicated than that.

As a self-designation, the literary New Persian term Tajik, which originally had some previous pejorative usage as a label for eastern Persians or Iranians,[21] has become acceptable during the last several decades, particularly as a result of Soviet administration in Central Asia.... "settled" in contrast to "nomadic" and was later used to describe a class of land-owning magnates as "Persian of noble blood" in contrast to Arabs, Turks and Romans during the Sassanid and early Islamic period. "

"By the eleventh century (Yusof Ḵāṣṣ-ḥājeb, Qutadḡu bilig, lines 280, 282, 3265), the Qarakhanid Turks applied this term more specifically to the Persian Muslims in the Oxus basin and Khorasan, who were variously the Turks' rivals, models, overlords (under the Samanid Dynasty), and subjects (from Ghaznavid times on). Persian writers of the Ghaznavid, Seljuq and Atābak periods (ca. 1000–1260) adopted the term and extended its use to cover Persians in the rest of Greater Iran, now under Turkish rule "

point being, Rumi, perhaps the most famous Persian-language poet in the world (unfairely in my view, I prefer Hafez) was born 1207 to Persian-speaking parents inside the polity of the Turko-Persian Khwarazmian Empire, but part of a region known back then and for many of the following centuries as "Greater Iran" in English, or Eranshahr ("Iranian lands") in Persian.

So what nationality was Rumi?

(modern-day Tajiks, which didn't even exist as an identity a century ago, claim him. Persian-speaking (Dari) Afghans claim him because he was probably born in Balkh, which is now in Afghanistan. Iranians of course claim him because he spoke and wrote in Persian/Farsi, the language from Pars/Fars, right in the dead center of today's Islamic Republic of Iran. Turkish nationalists also claim him - well, they claim everyone - because of his name, "Rumi", which means Roman, as "Rome" at that time referred to the Eastern/Byzantine Roman Empire based in Anatolia (modern-day Republic of Turkiye), which, incidentally, had been mostly conquered by the Turko-Persian Seljuk Dynasty. Confused?)

HackneyedScribe said:

The earliest time when they were incorporated into China was when Han Wudi sent an expedition to Dayuan to take their horses in 104 BC, which started a domino effect of Tarim Basin cities surrendering to the Han dynasty in 102 to 101 BC. Dayuan at the time had a Greco-Bactrian population under the rule of the Yuezhi. Ethnhic groups like Uyghurs and Kazahks didn't exist yet during this time, but a significant amount of the population would have looked white or mixed by modern standards.

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Btw the following are some snapshots of a cartoon drawn by hotoon that I translated into English. It is about general Ban Chao who pulled a Cortez to retake the Tarim Basin and eventually repulsed a Kushan invasion. Here are some snippets of those pages showing white or Central Asian people:











I haven't finished showing the sourcing/evidence for the below pages yet:

apoweroffacing said:

I haven't been to Xinjiang but two provinces that border it: Inner Mongolia and Gansu. I lived in Heilongjiang, where everyone once spoke Manchurian (older people still can), and where there is a giant Russian Orthodox Cathedral in the provincial capital, Harbin (where you will see Russians everyday, but I don't know if I ever saw any ethnic Russians who were Chinese citizens, thoughh they do exist).

my point being, China is incredibly diverse, and if you wanted to find some people to pass as "white" (why?) you could. Ah, there's Tajiks, guess what language they speak............ an Indo-ARYAN one!!!!!

List of ethnic groups in China - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Would you say that the Culture outside of the Major Chinese cities is much different to Rural China? Just from looking at videos of people in Beijing, it seems pretty homogenous. What would it be like being a racial minority in China?

It's interesting to me how both Ancient China had white-looking people as neighbors just like Ancient Scandinavia had asian-looking living in it too.
The so called Proto-Uralic people that nowadays their closest descendants (the Finno-Ugric people) still habit parts of Northern Europe

Rumopson said:

i was intrigued to know do these ‘white looking’ chinese nationals see themselves as ‘Chinese’ or members of their own ethnic group first? what if they have been living under chinese rules for centuries or millennia? i would guess they speak the language fluently like the chinese nationals

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Depends on the individuals, as always.
Some of them considered themselves Turkestani first, Chinese second. Others may consider themselves part of the Chinese nation or part of the 'Turanic' nations around Eurasia, a small amount rejects the Chinese nationality though.



As another user stated, most of them pass as Eurasian or Turkic nowadays. Same thing happened with the Proto-Uralic people of Northern Europe, many of them resemble your common Scandinavia citizen due to many centuries of intermixing

There were lots of Russian Emigres also known as White Russians living in China but most left after CCP came to power.

The last I recall was the second find of caucasion red haired mummies in tartan dress uncovered in Xinjiang that date back to 2100 B.C. But i did read of a single mummy dated to 2800 B.C. I'm thinking 600 odd mummies have been found.

Rumopson said:

i was intrigued to know do these ‘white looking’ chinese nationals see themselves as ‘Chinese’ or members of their own ethnic group first? what if they have been living under chinese rules for centuries or millennia? i would guess they speak the language fluently like the chinese nationals

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It depends on the individual, but I have met ones who call themselves Chinese, and Chinese people themselves are surprised, but didn't ask too much other than accepting that the person was a white looking Chinese. The notion that these people had a different origin in history really isn't something most people think too much about.

In a nutshell European-looking people like the Sakas and the Yuezhi left their genes scattered across Asia (mostly central Asia). Xinjiang is located in an area where those groups were once present in large numbers. But the concept of a distinct Caucasian race in Asia never really took hold because there was a lot of intermarrying with other groups from the beginning. By Genghis Khan's time the Sakas and Yuezhi were long gone (though their features--blonde/red hair, colored eyes, etc could still be found here and there), and Xinjiang was a melting pot of all sorts of people. And although there was always a Chinese presence there, other groups like the Persians, Sogdians, Tibetans, Turks, and Mongols also took turns ruling the area, which added even more diversity. Modern Uighurs are a reflection of that area's racial mix. The original Uighurs came from Mongolia. They created an empire that included Xinjiang and after that empire fell many of them migrated there and made it their new homeland.

They are probably Chinese Tajik people, an ethnic Pamiri people native to the mountains of the Northwest - Ethnic Tajik life through the lens of a soldier (Part III)[8]- Chinadaily.com.cn

Apparently, they are not actually Tajiks but a separate ethnic group. On Pamiris - Who lives above the clouds? Discussing Pamiriness and Tajikness with Dr. Dagikhudo Dagiev - Central Asia Analytical Network

The Pamiris are people, referred by some as Tajiks and referred by others as a new evolving ethnicity, speaking different Eastern Iranian languages in the Pamir Mountains. The ethnical identity of these communities, who mostly belong to the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam, has been a topic for open and closed discussions both within the communities, especially in Tajikistan, and outside. Scholar researches and materials on the Pamirs and the Pamiri communities written by a group of scholars from the region and the West have been gathered in a recently published book titled “Identity, History and Trans-Nationality in Central Asia. The Mountain Communities of Pamir”. The book has been edited by Dr. Dagikhudo Dagiev and Dr. Carole Faucher. Dr. Dagiev, who kindly agreed to tour our readers through identity self-search of Pamiris and through historical and modern Tajikness, was born and grew up himself in the Pamirs. In the beginning we have asked Dr. Dagiev to introduce our readers with recently published book, as well as ethnicities and languages of the Pamirs, both Tajikistan’s geopolitical part and wider Badakhshan and map communities residing there.

The Chinese were in contact with them long before they met the Russians. They are the most likely descendants of the indigeneous Yuezhi, and while the Han dynasty was fighting the Xiongnu Empire, they discovered that the Xiongnu were attempting to conquer them, persecuting these people with "great cruelty", to the cruel delight of the Greco Bactrians. Seeing this, the Chinese diplomat sought an alliance with them. Eventually the Han were drove off the Xiongnu and the rest is history. They also managed to get off the heavenly horses off the Greeks.

Here's a sad video of two Tajik orphans, they're father was a hero, tragically dying to save others, what could be more heroic than that? For generations his family guarded the western borders. The two children decided to take up his mantle. In the video, you can see the children explain how their names are a formed by connecting their given name with their father's name and they as well as their father sing in their own language. Their father's favorite song was "Why are the flowers so red", and you can see that at least for this family, they are:
i) bilingual, able to speak Chinese as well as their own language
ii) still practice their own culture
iii) are true patriots in the truest sense of the word, even while living in the very harsh highlands



The Chinese majority might not always know so much about the ethnic minorities, especially those from far regions but they don't go out of their way to discriminate them either. In fact, as you can see in that video, many of them including the young children were either tearing up or struggling to hold back tears. You see, everyone in that room have the same motherland, the same 祖国. And that is how the Chinese who've met the Tajiks/Pamiris feel about them, the most admirable of heroes.

From my experience, especially among the younger generation, Chinese generally see minorities as their own people. That's why when they saw the news of the disadvantaged lives children of a village in Liangshan, many did not hesitate to volunteer despite the dangers and hardship. This is one of the more unique aspects of modern Chinese culture, and some say it dates back to Mao's China when he sent youth volunteers known as zhiqing to rural areas. In the modern day, it's more of a civic duty.

Central Asia and Tarim Basin was once populated by Indo-European people, they were polytheist Iranic tribes. The ethnic composition of these lands were changed with the arrival of Mongols and Turkic tribes from Steppes.

Xinjiang & Tibet distance to Beijing & China east coast is like the distance between Lisbon & Moscow.
Same with India Delhi to Tamil Nadu & Indonesia Jakarta to Papua.
China, India, Indonesia, Brazil & Australia are each about the same size as Europe & the United States.

"White" is more of a social and cultural label than a genetic one, and someone living in a remote village in western China would have little in common with the average European or American. Sure they might be able to access a tiny bit of white privilege since if they were to move to a large city along the coast they'd likely be mistaken for a Westerner and thus able to access better opportunities than if they had a stereotypically Central Asian appearance, but that's about it, and it's debatable whether being fetishized for having an exotic appearance is really much of a privilege to begin with.

Rumopson said:

i heard that there are sizeable population of non ‘han’ or ‘mongoloid’ ethnic whites in western china bordering central asia and russia. They look clearly european or turkish.

Are there any studies on them? when did they get incorporated into china? was it during the border clashes with the Russians from the 19th century onwards? or were they there going back to Genghis Khan and before?

Do they speak their local language and practice own culture and religion?
i noticed some are used in the military or border guards so i suppose to work for the state you have to speak chinese. how do they fit into mainstream society? Do they face discrimination like other minority groups? are any in senior positions of the Communist Party it local or central government? or is participation open to ethnic Chinese only?

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Do you refer to Uyghurs from Xinjiang province?

Yes, they have their own culture, music, and speak their own language within themselves.
What do you mean if they fit into mainstream society? Well, they fit in in their own native homeland in Xinjiang, but when they migrate eastwards to the so-called "Chinese proper" they are mostly viewed and stared at by the locals as "foreigners". The fact that they look more different than other Chinese minorities, more culturally distant, and more associated with violent secessionist movements, IMHO, they face more discrimination than other minorities.

Do they face discrimination? When it comes to interpersonal racism, yeah, they often do. Some Han Chinese people discriminate against them, or are sometimes afraid of them, or being near them. I've seen that occurring firsthand.
Are they institutionally discriminated against? In so-called "Chinese proper" not so much, there's even a policy of affirmative action related to them. In Xinjiang? Pretty much, because of the severe government crackdown on separatism and terrorist activities, and the fact that Uyghurs have to go to "reeducation camps".
Is there any sort of innate structural racism? In my view, yes. In my view, there's intrinsic, non-official, and low-key "Han favoritism" in Chinese society as a whole. Although many government measures are trying to ameliorate that. Uyghurs can very well occupy senior positions of the Communist Party, be it local or central government.