Genocide in Xinjiang, old and new

What is Xinjiang, and what is Dzungaria?

Xinjiang, a border province of China, is in the news since 2005, as the Chinese government enforces stricter control over its Muslim Uyghur population. This has been heavily reported and I won't repeat. However these reports miss a historical precedent: the 18th century genocide of Dzungaria by the Qing dynasty.

Map of China with Xinjiang. Source: Wikipedia

That's Xinjiang today. Before that, Xinjiang was controlled by Qing dynasty as its west-most province. And before that, it was an independent Mongol khanate, called the Dzungar Khanate.

"Dzungar" is the name of a group of Mongols that ruled the land called Dzungaria. Dzungaria still exists as the name of a geographical area within Xinjiang, but the Dzungars are gone, thanks to the Dzungar genocide.

Map of Dzungaria around 1700s. Source: Wikipedia

To say that Dzungaria is obscure is an understatement. Even I have not given this place a second thought despite living in China for many years, and reading about the Uyghur situation in Xinjiang. I hope that this post will make their history more known, and give better context for the current Uyghur situation.

The imperialistic conquests of Qing

Before Qing dynasty got imperialism-ed by the West, Qing was busy imperialism-ing the west, and north, and even south. Comparing the map of Ming and Qing and you'd notice several big additions: Taiwan, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet. Imperialism!

Ming and its neighbors, 1409. Source: Wikipedia

Qing map, circa 1820. Source: Wikipedia

(I am not saying that Qing got what's coming for them, since there is no justice in history: the British Empire never got imperialism-ed.)

Qing began life as a confederation of Manchu tribes in the region of Manchuria (duh). In 1644, it occupied Beijing, marking the start of Qing dynasty. For the rest of the 17th century, Qing busied itself with defeating Ming loyalists and peasant rebellions. But even with China firmly in control, the Qing government did not take a break. It instead went on a lengthy conflict with Dzungaria.

TLDR version, from Rowe, William T., ‘Violence in Ming-Qing China : An Overview’ (2014), 85–98 <https://doi.org/10/gg5jdb>:

Qianlong emperor, fed up with the protracted warfare between Zonghar and Qing from the 1690s to the 1750s, opted for the final solution : he sent in a massive military force which killed more than half a million people, deliberately emptied the land for new colonization, and effectively eliminated the Zonghar people from subsequent human history.

Non TLDR version below.

The Dzungar-Qing wars

I base my account on ‘The Expansion of the Qing Dynasty of China and the Zunghar Mongol State’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, by (Peter Perdue, 2017) <https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.7>

Let's set the stage for the start of the Dzungar-Qing wars.

On the west side we have the Dzungars in Dzungaria, a branch of the Mongol people led by Galdan (ruling during 1671–1697). Their religion was Tibetan Buddhism. 

On the east side we have the Manchus in China, led by Kangxi emperor (ruling during 1662–1722).

The two sides fought around the Gansu, Mongolia (Inner and Outer), and Xinjiang regions, neither side achieving total victory, until 1755, when the Dzungars were destroyed forever. With the fall of Mongol Dzungaria, the Qing achieved something that no previous Chinese rulers has achieved: they have utterly wiped out the threat of Mongol invasion.

The death of Galdan Tseren in 1745 touched off a struggle for power that led to the destruction of the Zunghar state... [In 1755,] The exasperated emperor then called for the ultimate weapon: elimination of the fighting men of the Zunghar population by starvation and massacre. Unlike other Mongols, who received support when they surrendered, the emperor had little faith in winning over the tenaciously resistant Zunghars. According to the estimate of the 19th-century historian Wei Yuan, the emperor’s forces killed up to 20 percent of the male population, giving the women and children as servants to other commanders, while 40 percent of the population died of smallpox, and 20 percent fled to Russian and Kazakh regions. By the mid-18th century, of the Zunghar population of around 600,000, not a trace remained who preserved their ethnic identity.

After the Dzungars died out, the Qing government commissioned official histories of the conquests, as a propaganda effort to let people accept that these conquests were legitimate and civilizing missions that the Heavens would approve.

Map 1: The Qing empire during its rapid expansion period, 1750 -- 1800.

This map is from Perdue, Peter C., China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (2005).

Map 2: The Zunghar empire, Ming China, and Qing China, during the 15th - 18th century

The successful genocide

From (Perdue, 2005): 

In 1757, the emperor Qianlong got so frustrated that 

Qianlong rejected all leniency. He now ordered the massacre of all Zungharian captives: “Show no mercy at all to these rebels. Only the old and weak should be saved. Our previous military campaigns were too lenient. If we act as before, our troops will withdraw, and further trouble will occur.” In another edict he declared: “If a rebel is captured and his followers wish to surrender, he must personally come to the garrison, prostrate himself before the commander, and request surren- der. If he only sends someone to request submission, it is undoubtedly a trick. Tell Tsengünjav to massacre these crafty Zunghars. Do not believe what they say.”

In 1756 the court had recommended the use of food relief to win over the Zunghar people by giving them grain, tea, and animals if they surrendered. Now the emperor implicitly recommended the use of starvation tactics, commenting that it would be “easy to exterminate rebels because they had run out of provisions.” Old men, children, and women were to be spared and sent as bondservants to other Mongol tribes and Manchu bannermen, but they would lose their tribal identity; they could not preserve their tribal (otoq) names or their titles, such as zaisang (minister or clan leader). Reliable Mongols designated to supervise these remnants took instead the Chinese official titles 总管zongguan and 副总管 fuzongguan.

The massacre policy was a clear break from previous Qing methods of managing relations with the Mongols. Until this time, the Qing rulers had primarily adopted the time-honored diplomacy of “using barbarians to fight barbarians” by alternately supporting different factions of nomads against one another, or else they executed individual ringleaders of rebellions. But they had never attempted ethnic genocide before. 76 With this policy, the Qing succeeded in imposing a “final solution” to China’s northwest frontier problems, which lasted for about a century. The Zunghars disappeared as a state and as a people, and the Zungharian steppe was almost completely depopulated. In his history of the Qing military campaigns, the 圣武记 Shengwuji (A Record of Sacred Military Campaigns), 魏源 Wei Yuan, who estimated the total population of the Zunghars at 600,000 people, stated, “Of several hundred thousand households, 40 percent died of smallpox, 20 percent fled to the Russians and Kazakhs, and 30 percent were killed by the Great Army. [The remaining] women and children were given as [servants] to others . . . For several thousand li there was not one single Zungharian tent.” Zungharia was left as a blank social space, to be refilled by a state-sponsored settle- ment movement of millions of Han Chinese peasants, Manchu bannermen, Turkestani oasis settlers, Hui, and others.

The Eastern Mongols had given the Qing the right to allocate their pasturelands, distribute relief grain, settle their disputes, and levy troops and animals from them for its wars. They paid the cost of allowing penetration of their territory by Chinese settlers, corruption of the aristocracy by Han merchants and decimation by smallpox and other dis- eases introduced by Han settlers, but they survived as a people to become an independent state in the twentieth century. The Zunghars, by contrast, completely disappeared. Only folk memory kept their struggle alive. 

The original quote from Shengwuji, book 4, is as follows:

一激再激，以致我朝之赫怒，帝怒于上，将帅怒于下，合围掩群，顿天网而大狝之，穷奇浑沌梼杌饕餮之群，天无所诉，地无所容，自作自受，必使无遗育逸种于故地而后已。计数十万户中，先痘死者十之四，继窜入俄罗斯、哈萨克者十之二，卒歼于大兵者十之三，除妇孺充赏外，至今惟来降受屯之厄鲁特若干户，编设佐领昂吉，此外数千里间无瓦剌一毡帐。 

Their repeated provocation enraged our government. The emperor and the generals are all enraged, so they came together to spread a wide net, catching all these chaotic, ravenous folks. Their cries will not be heard by the heavens, and the earth has no place for them. They brought this on themselves, and they surely will have no descendants. Of several hundred thousand households, 40 percent died of smallpox, 20 percent fled to the Russians and Kazakhs, and 30 percent were killed by the Great Army. The remaining women and children were given as servants to others . . . For several thousand li there was not one single Zungharian tent.

The final death toll was somewhere around 200 thousand. From entry "Zunghars" of encyclopedia of GENOCIDE and CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY:

The estimated total Zunghar population was 600,000. Of these, Owen Lattimore estimates that 50 percent were exterminated, 20 percent died of smallpox, and 30 percent survived in exile or slavery. Peter C. Perdue, however, suggests that 30 percent were exterminated, 40 percent died of smallpox, and 30 percent survived in exile or slavery.

I repeat: there is no justice in history. Genocides can really pay. Right here is a profitable, successful genocide.

Xinjiang today

The current suppression of Uyghurs has been called a cultural genocide, and the final result of this cultural genocide is very uncertain. When we consider the last time China assimilated Xinjiang, the outcome for the current Uyghurs is very grim. If history shall repeat itself, then the Uyghur culture will be wiped out at least within China, to be replaced by a population that identifies itself as part of the Han Chinese civilization.