China - Colonialism and Settler Colonialism

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China has been both a victim of foreign imperialism and the center of expanding empires. These facts are not mutually exclusive. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century China suffered invasions, unequal treaties, concessions, territorial losses, and Japanese occupation. At the same time, the Ming and especially the Manchu-led Qing extended rule over non-Han peoples and territories; the Republic of China (ROC) and People’s Republic of China (PRC) subsequently converted most Qing imperial claims into the supposedly natural borders of a modern nation-state.

Bottom line

• “China has no colonial history because it was colonized” is false. Victimhood does not preclude exercising empire over others.
• “Every Chinese frontier is simply a colony” is also too crude. The relevant mechanisms—conquest, migration, land loss, extraction, assimilation, and demographic replacement—vary significantly by place and time.
• Strongest settler-colonial cases: Qing-era Taiwan; Ming–Qing southwest military settlement; late Qing/Republican Inner Mongolia; and, most clearly in the contemporary PRC, Xinjiang through the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC/Bingtuan) and state-backed Han settlement.
• Tibet: conquest, coerced incorporation, unequal political control, developmental territorialization, and cultural assimilation are well supported. Calling it strictly settler colonial is more contested because permanent settler replacement and Indigenous land transfer have been less central and less uniform than in Xinjiang or Taiwan.
• The PRC did not invent the frontier project. It inherited Qing geography, Republican territorial nationalism, and older systems of military agriculture, then added Leninist party organization, surveillance, industrial development, and assimilation.

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Navigate this note

• Definitions and diagnostic
• Empire became nation
• Chronology
• Regional cases
• China as colonized
• PRC machinery
• Competing interpretations
• Limits of the concept
• Consistent comparison
• Claim checking
• Reading map

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1. Definitions and a diagnostic test

Empire

An empire is a political order in which a center rules culturally or politically distinct peoples through unequal, differentiated arrangements. An empire need not have overseas colonies. Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Qing, and the United States’ continental expansion all demonstrate that imperial rule can be contiguous.

Colonialism

Colonialism is durable external domination of a territory or people for strategic, political, economic, or civilizational purposes. Common mechanisms include:

1. military conquest or coerced submission;
2. rule without equal local consent or representation;
3. legal and ethnic hierarchy;
4. appropriation of land or resources;
5. rule by outside officials, garrisons, firms, or settlers;
6. cultural transformation presented as civilization, modernization, development, or security.

Not every empire uses all six. A region can be colonized without mass settlement, and it can experience settlement without total population replacement.

Settler colonialism

Settler colonialism is a more specific structure. Permanent settlers establish a political and social order on Indigenous land, weakening Indigenous sovereignty and control of territory. Patrick Wolfe described its tendency as a “logic of elimination”: Indigenous political presence is removed, contained, absorbed, or made irrelevant. Elimination can mean killing or expulsion, but also reservation, land seizure, coerced assimilation, or dissolving a people into undifferentiated citizenship. The concept must therefore distinguish settlers from ordinary migrants: what matters is not ethnicity alone, but whether migration is joined to state sovereignty, privileged access, land conversion, and the reduction of Indigenous self-rule.

Internal colonialism

Internal colonialism describes a core exploiting or governing a peripheral population within one internationally recognized state. It is useful for China because Beijing calls Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia domestic regions, while critics identify relations resembling metropole and colony. The term highlights unequal power; it does not by itself prove that secession is legally required.

Diagnostic questions

Avoid a category error

Conquest is not automatically settler colonialism; migration is not automatically colonization; development is not automatically liberation. The strongest finding comes from the combination of conquest, territorial settlement, institutional privilege, and the erosion of Indigenous political and cultural reproduction.

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2. The central historical transformation — empire became nation

The territory called “China” changed greatly across history. Han and Tang governments at times established garrisons and protectorates in parts of Central Asia, but control was episodic. It is anachronistic to turn intermittent ancient military reach into continuous sovereignty by a timeless Chinese nation.

The decisive territorial expansion occurred under the Qing (1636/1644–1912), founded by Manchus rather than Han Chinese. The Qing conquered Ming China and built a multiethnic Inner Asian empire encompassing Mongolia, Tibet, and the regions now called Xinjiang. It governed different populations through different institutions: the Chinese provinces through the inherited civil bureaucracy; banner territories, Mongol leagues, Tibetan elites, and Muslim oasis communities through distinct imperial arrangements under Manchu supervision. Scholarship on Qing expansion emphasizes that this was not merely an enlarged version of an eternal Han nation. It was conquest empire.

After 1911, revolutionaries faced a choice: create a Han nation from “China proper,” or claim the full territory of the fallen Manchu empire. The ROC chose the latter. “Five Races Under One Union”—Han, Manchu, Mongol, Hui/Muslim, and Tibetan—converted peoples joined by an emperor into constituent groups of a single nation. Republican governments had little actual authority in Tibet or Outer Mongolia and unstable control in Xinjiang, but asserted comprehensive sovereignty.

The early Chinese Communist movement sometimes endorsed self-determination for non-Han peoples. By 1949, however, the CCP had largely adopted the maximal Republican map. The PLA brought nearly all the former Qing frontier claimed by the ROC under centralized PRC control, except independent Mongolia, territories lost to Russia, and Taiwan, which the PRC has never governed. The result was a historical conversion:

flowchart LR
    A["Qing conquest empire<br/>different peoples, different institutions"] --> B["ROC territorial nationalism<br/>imperial space recast as one nation"]
    B --> C["PRC party-state<br/>autonomous regions under central Party authority"]
    C --> D["Zhonghua minzu<br/>one civilizational-national community"]

This conversion helps explain why the PRC can sincerely understand its actions as anti-colonial national reunification while Tibetans, Uyghurs, and some Mongols understand the same actions as recolonization or internal colonialism.

Sources: Qing expansion and differentiated rule; Republican legal techniques and Tibet; Qing claims converted into the modern national map.

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3. Long chronology

Before the Qing — recurring frontier expansion

• Han and Tang: protectorates, garrisons, military farms (tuntian), tributary relations, and intermittent rule in what Chinese sources called the Western Regions. These are genuine imperial precedents, but not evidence of uninterrupted possession.
• Ming southwest: military colonies (juntun) brought soldiers and farming populations into Yunnan and Guizhou. One scholarly account estimates more than a million Han settlers entered Yunnan in the early Ming, helping transform local landholding and pushing some Indigenous peoples toward mountain areas.
• Native chieftain system: the Ming and Qing recognized hereditary local rulers (tusi) when direct administration was impractical. The policy of gaitu guiliu—replacing native chieftains with centrally appointed officials—gradually made autonomous Indigenous domains into regular imperial territory. It often involved troops, land seizure, schools, extraction, and revolts, but also bargaining, local collaboration, and hybrid institutions. It should not be reduced to a simple one-way racial story. Southwest scholarship and the debate; Ming military colonization and expanded gaitu guiliu.

Qing conquest and colonization

The Dzungar catastrophe must be handled precisely. The Dzungars were an Oirat Mongol imperial rival with their own subjects and coercive labor system, not a passive modern nationality. That does not erase Qing exterminatory policy. Contemporary scholarship describes the destruction of Dzungar society and the subsequent repopulation of northern Xinjiang; one reconstruction reports that of an estimated 600,000 Dzungars, roughly 40% died of smallpox, 30% were killed, 20% fled, and many survivors were enslaved. Exact numbers remain historical estimates, but the scale and deliberate violence are not in serious doubt. Cambridge genocide history; demographic reconstruction and resettlement.

Republic of China, 1912–1949

• The republic inherited nearly all Qing claims while lacking Qing mechanisms of imperial loyalty.
• Outer Mongolia declared independence in 1911 and eventually remained outside China. Tibet operated with de facto independence from 1912 to 1950 despite Chinese claims. Xinjiang was governed by provincial strongmen and experienced two short-lived East Turkestan republics.
• Republican elites used modern maps, international law, development plans, schooling, and racial-national theories to render frontier peoples members of a unitary Chinese nation.
• Nationalist rhetoric alternated between plural “Five Races” citizenship and Han-centered assimilation. The gap between formal inclusion and local consent remained.
• Japan colonized Taiwan after 1895 and established the puppet state of Manchukuo after taking Manchuria. The frontier was therefore contested by several empires, not shaped by China alone.

People’s Republic, 1949–present

• 1949: Communist forces took Xinjiang after negotiations, defections, and the death of senior East Turkestan leaders in a Soviet plane crash. The official term is “peaceful liberation,” but the new government was ultimately backed by PLA force.
• 1950–1951: The PLA defeated Tibetan forces at Chamdo; Tibetan delegates signed the Seventeen Point Agreement under military and diplomatic pressure. Beijing calls this peaceful liberation; Tibetan exile accounts regard the agreement as coerced.
• 1954–1955: the XPCC/Bingtuan was created in Xinjiang and Xinjiang became an autonomous region. The Bingtuan combined farms, industry, cities, administration, militia, police, courts, and border defense.
• 1959: an uprising in Tibet was suppressed, the Dalai Lama fled, and Beijing dissolved the old Tibetan government before imposing socialist transformation.
• Cultural Revolution: religious sites, texts, clergy, and minority cultural authorities suffered enormous destruction. In Inner Mongolia, the campaign against the alleged Inner Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party involved mass persecution, torture, and deaths.
• Reform era: roads, railways, cities, mining, energy, cotton, tourism, and state transfers increased incomes and mobility while drawing frontier regions more tightly into national markets and Han-dominated administrative systems.
• Xi Jinping era: the party has moved from limited ethnic pluralism toward “ethnic fusion,” Mandarin-centered education, religious Sinicization, extensive surveillance, and security governance. In Xinjiang this included mass arbitrary detention and coercive programs; in Tibet it includes intensified political control, boarding education, and constraints on religion and language.

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4. Regional case studies

Case comparison

Xinjiang — the clearest present-day case

Xinjiang’s history has several distinct layers: intermittent ancient Chinese protectorates; Turkic, Tibetan, Mongol, and Muslim polities; Qing conquest; provincialization; Republican fragmentation; and PRC consolidation. “China ruled Xinjiang for 2,000 years” compresses discontinuous episodes into an uninterrupted national story.

The strongest settler-colonial evidence is institutional:

• The Dzungar destruction cleared much of northern Xinjiang, after which the Qing built garrisons and resettled multiple populations.
• Qing and Republican authorities treated agriculture, migration, roads, and provincial administration as ways to make conquest permanent.
• Founded in 1954 from demobilized soldiers, the Bingtuan was explicitly ordered to “cultivate and guard the border areas.” Even the PRC’s own white paper describes its combined production, administrative, militia, and frontier-defense mission and its initial 175,500 members. Official Bingtuan history
• During the Mao era, most Han migrants to Xinjiang were assigned to Bingtuan or state units; settlement was strategically concentrated along sensitive borders. Demographic engineering study
• The Bingtuan remains a parallel quasi-government with farms, corporations, cities, policing, and courts. Tom Cliff describes it as a military-agricultural colony and stresses an important complication: many Han settlers were poor conscripts, refugees, or workers with little individual power. Settlers can be exploited by the colonizing institution and still collectively help secure it. Cliff, “Refugees, Conscripts, and Constructors”
• Oil, gas, coal, minerals, cotton, railways, urban development, and jobs bind Xinjiang to national priorities. Benefits are real, but material development does not resolve who controls land, investment, language, and political authority.
• Since 2017, mass detention, pervasive surveillance, restrictions on religion and language, family separation, and coercive labor programs intensified assimilation. The UN human-rights office concluded that serious violations may constitute crimes against humanity; it did not make a legal genocide determination. OHCHR assessment

Judgment: Xinjiang meets the settler-colonial test more strongly than any other contemporary PRC region because conquest, strategic settlement, military-agricultural institutions, demographic engineering, resource integration, and cultural-political elimination reinforce one another. This does not mean every Han resident is personally culpable, nor that Uyghurs were the only earlier inhabitants.

Tibet — colonial domination, debated settler structure

Tibet was an empire in the seventh–ninth centuries and later had relationships with Mongol and Manchu rulers that do not translate neatly into modern sovereignty. Qing authority increased after its 1720 intervention and through ambans and later regulations, but control fluctuated; central Tibet retained its own government and substantial autonomy. Between 1912 and 1950, Tibet governed itself in practice even though the ROC claimed it.

The PRC’s 1950 military entry and 1951 agreement established a new and ultimately decisive form of control. Beijing’s best case is that it restored inherited sovereignty, abolished a harsh theocratic and estate-based social order, ended foreign interference, provided infrastructure and public services, and created ethnic autonomy. The official history explicitly describes 1951 as “peaceful liberation” and the 1959 transformation as liberation from feudal serfdom. PRC white paper

The colonial critique answers that:

• the PLA victory at Chamdo made refusal of the agreement unrealistic;
• the party-state, not elected Tibetan institutions, decides the scope of autonomy;
• dissent over national status is criminalized as separatism;
• monasteries, clerical education, language policy, and reincarnation are subordinated to Party supervision;
• infrastructure, tourism, urbanization, mining, pastoral resettlement, and cadre migration increase central control even when they improve living standards;
• Mandarin-centered boarding education and religious “Sinicization” weaken intergenerational cultural reproduction. In 2023, the UN economic and social rights committee expressed concern over reports of coercive boarding and the erosion of Tibetan-language education, while China told the committee the schools are voluntary, bilingual, culturally protective, and necessary for dispersed populations. Both the criticism and the official response should be recorded. UN committee concerns; China’s response in the committee record.

Judgment: “Colonial” or “internal colonial” captures military incorporation, external political supremacy, developmental control, and assimilation. “Settler colonial” can illuminate some urban and frontier dynamics, especially in Tibetan areas outside the Tibet Autonomous Region, but it is less exact as a general model because permanent settler land replacement has not been as extensive or foundational as in Xinjiang, Taiwan, or Inner Mongolia. The classification should remain an argued conclusion, not a slogan.

Inner Mongolia — land conversion before cultural consolidation

The Qing initially separated Mongol banners from Chinese provinces and restricted Han agriculture. Population pressure, trade, debt, and informal leases nevertheless moved settlers north. In the nineteenth century, communal Mongol pasture was increasingly commercialized: settlers obtained durable land use while Mongol owners were reduced to collecting rent. In 1902 the Qing actively opened banner land for reclamation, partly to finance reforms and Boxer indemnities. Land, irrigation, and de facto ownership; late-Qing land reform and state centralization.

Republican governments, warlords, and Japanese authorities continued competing settlement and territorial projects. Under the PRC, land collectivization, state farms, mining, ecological programs, urbanization, and the dominance of Mandarin further weakened Mongol territorial and linguistic autonomy. The 2020 reduction of Mongolian-medium teaching illustrates the shift from earlier minority accommodation toward national linguistic convergence.

Judgment: Inner Mongolia is a strong but under-discussed example of continental settler colonialism: pastoral territory was converted into agricultural and later industrial space, Han settlers became the great majority, and “autonomy” exists within a party system that does not permit independent Mongol political organization.

Taiwan — successive colonialisms

Taiwan demonstrates why present ethnicity cannot be projected backward as timeless sovereignty.

• Austronesian Indigenous societies inhabited the island long before large-scale Chinese migration.
• The Dutch East India Company recruited tens of thousands of Chinese agricultural settlers beginning in the 1620s. Settlers helped create a taxable export colony and encroached on Siraya land.
• The Zheng regime expelled the Dutch but continued a Han military-settler project.
• After Qing conquest in 1683, officials tried to restrict movement beyond frontier lines, partly because they feared settlers and Indigenous resistance. Settlers repeatedly crossed the boundaries for land and resources. The Han population grew enormously, Indigenous plains communities lost land, and many were assimilated.
• After the 1874 Japanese expedition, Qing officials more aggressively incorporated the eastern mountains under the policy commonly rendered “open the mountains and pacify the aborigines.” Taiwan became a province in 1885/1887.
• Japan ruled Taiwan as a colony from 1895 to 1945, combining coercion, infrastructure, extraction, assimilation, and violence against Indigenous resistance.
• The ROC takeover in 1945 introduced another mainland ruling elite, followed by the 1947 massacre and decades of martial law. Describing the KMT regime as settler-colonial is debated, but its imposed institutions and Mandarin-centered nationalization were colonial in important respects.
• The PRC has never governed Taiwan. A future PRC conquest would be a new act of external military incorporation, not the continuation of an existing administration.

Large-scale Han settlement dates to the seventeenth century, not antiquity; a scholarly account estimates the migrant population multiplied to about 2.9 million after the Qing takeover. Decolonizing the “One China” narrative; frontier lines and settler advance; successive colonial regimes.

Judgment: Qing Taiwan is among the clearest historical Chinese settler-colonial cases. This fact complicates both Beijing’s timeless-national-territory claim and any Taiwanese history that begins only with Japanese colonialism while marginalizing Indigenous dispossession.

Southwest China — military agriculture and administrative absorption

Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, western Sichuan, and adjacent areas were not empty spaces awaiting national integration. Tai, Miao/Hmong, Yao, Yi/Nuosu, and many other peoples had their own political orders. Ming garrisons and military farms brought large settlement; tusi indirect rule allowed the empire to govern through local elites; gaitu guiliu then replaced them with regular officials.

This was often colonial—outsider armies, land, resource corridors, schools, bureaucratic classification, and “civilizing” ideology—but it was not a simple binary. Indigenous rulers bargained with the state, fought neighbors, held unequal local systems, and sometimes used imperial recognition to strengthen themselves. Cultural mixing and commerce could coexist with violence and dispossession.

Judgment: parts of the southwest experienced settler colonialism, while the region as a whole is better described as a long frontier of imperial expansion, negotiated incorporation, state colonization, and eventual nation-building.

Manchuria — reversed hierarchy and demographic transformation

Manchuria was the homeland of the ruling Manchus. The Qing restricted Han settlement to preserve banner land, forests, ginseng, and frontier security, but enforcement weakened. From the 1890s through the early 1930s, roughly 25 million Han migrants entered the northeast according to one modern study. Manchurian migration and prohibition

Russian railway imperialism and Japanese conquest then overlaid foreign colonial structures on this demographic transformation. Manchukuo promoted its own settler and industrial empire. After 1949 the northeast became a core PRC industrial region rather than an autonomous Indigenous homeland.

Judgment: Han migration demographically overwhelmed Manchu and other Indigenous peoples, but the standard metropole/colony model is complicated because Manchus themselves founded and ruled the Qing empire. This is a warning against treating all Chinese history as a timeless Han master plan.

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5. China as a target of colonialism

Any balanced account must take the “Century of Humiliation” seriously.

Main episodes

• Opium Wars (1839–1842; 1856–1860): British and allied military victory forced open ports, commercial privileges, indemnities, and diplomatic access.
• Unequal treaty system: foreigners received residence and trade rights, low tariffs, most-favored-nation treatment, missionary protections, and extraterritorial jurisdiction. Treaty-port concessions developed municipalities beyond ordinary Chinese jurisdiction. Treaty-system history; status of settlements and concessions.
• Territorial losses: Britain took Hong Kong; Portugal formalized colonial rule in Macau; Russia acquired territories north of the Amur and east of the Ussuri; powers leased ports and claimed spheres of influence.
• Sino-Japanese imperialism: Japan took Taiwan, dominated Korea, seized Manchuria, created Manchukuo, and waged a devastating invasion of China.
• Semi-colonial status: most of China was not directly administered as a colony, and the Qing/ROC state continued to exist. “Semi-colonial” therefore better captures fractured sovereignty, foreign enclaves, economic privilege, and imperial pressure than saying the whole country was formally colonized. Study of treaty-port China’s semi-colonial character.

The narrative consequence

Anti-imperial resistance became foundational to Chinese nationalism and CCP legitimacy. This history explains sensitivity to sovereignty and foreign intervention. It does not logically establish that every Qing frontier claim was consensual or that present rule cannot be colonial toward minority peoples.

The asymmetry in official memory is important:

Selective decolonization

Foreign conquest of Qing territory is remembered as colonial aggression. Qing conquest of non-Han territory is remembered as national unification. The first judgment can be correct without making the second automatic.

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6. The PRC’s governing machinery

Modern colonial relationships rarely look exactly like nineteenth-century overseas colonies. In China, control operates through institutions that are formally domestic and often developmental.

Autonomous regions without autonomous sovereignty

The PRC recognizes 56 ethnic groups and created autonomous regions, prefectures, and counties. Minority citizens received some affirmative policies, cultural funding, language provisions, and—historically—exceptions to birth limits. Yet the Communist Party controls cadre appointments, security, courts, education, and permissible political organization. A local official of minority ethnicity does not create collective autonomy if the Party center can determine policy and punish dissent.

Development as benefit and territorial power

Railways, highways, electricity, hospitals, schools, poverty programs, and fiscal transfers have brought measurable benefits. They also:

• move troops, settlers, tourists, commodities, and administrators;
• redirect land and water;
• integrate local economies into national extraction and supply chains;
• make Mandarin and Party credentials more valuable than local institutions;
• transform pastoral or oasis communities into urban wage labor;
• allow the state to present political submission as the price of modernization.

The correct question is not “Did development occur?” but who chose it, who controls it, who bears its costs, and whether local people may refuse or redesign it.

Classification and assimilation

The state first classified populations into official minzu, then increasingly emphasizes a shared Zhonghua minzu identity. Classification can recognize difference while fixing fluid identities into administrative categories. Current “fusion” and Sinicization policies move further: Mandarin education, standardized history, patriotic religion, boarding schools, controlled clergy, and criminalization of alternative national narratives.

Security and surveillance

Colonial rule often distinguishes a loyal population from a suspect one. Xinjiang’s checkpoints, biometrics, predictive policing, neighborhood informants, political files, and detention system are the most extreme version of tools examined in China - Surveillance State. Tibet and other frontier areas also combine digital surveillance with monastery, village, school, and travel controls. The result is not only policing of acts; it is management of identity, association, memory, and future generations.

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7. Official narrative, critical narrative, and best synthesis

PRC official narrative

1. China has been a unified multiethnic country since ancient times.
2. Qing and later governments exercised legitimate sovereignty over frontier regions.
3. The PLA “liberated” Xinjiang and Tibet from imperialism, feudalism, serfdom, and separatist elites.
4. Ethnic autonomy, development, and poverty reduction demonstrate popular benefit.
5. Migration within China is domestic freedom of movement, not foreign settlement.
6. security policies answer terrorism and separatism rather than ethnicity or religion.
7. Colonial terminology is a Western attempt to divide China.

Strongest points in the official case

• Frontier societies were not idyllic; some had slavery, serfdom, aristocratic domination, warfare, and rival empires.
• Qing relations with Tibet, Mongolia, and Xinjiang were real and historically consequential; they cannot be dismissed as pure invention.
• Modern borders around the world often descend from empires, and international recognition generally favors territorial continuity.
• PRC investment improved life expectancy, literacy, transport, income, and access to services.
• Han migrants are not a single privileged class; many were conscripted, poor, exploited, or born locally generations later.
• Foreign powers have indeed instrumentalized minority conflicts, and violent attacks in Xinjiang were real.

Critical colonial narrative

1. The modern state inherited a Manchu conquest empire, not a consensual ancient nation.
2. Republic and PRC replaced flexible imperial relationships with absolute territorial sovereignty.
3. military force, settler migration, land conversion, and resource development secured the frontiers.
4. autonomy is symbolic because the CCP prohibits independent local power.
5. civilizing, development, anti-terror, and national-unity discourse rationalize cultural destruction.
6. official history recognizes Western colonialism but erases Chinese imperial agency.

Strongest synthesis

China’s frontier history is neither unique innocence nor a carbon copy of European overseas empire. It is a continental, multiethnic imperial formation converted into a centralized nation-state. Its tools changed over time:

This synthesis allows several truths at once: non-Han societies possessed agency and sometimes their own empires; many people materially benefited from PRC rule; China suffered severe foreign colonialism; and the Chinese state has repeatedly used colonial and settler-colonial mechanisms.

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8. What does not fit the category well?

Belt and Road Initiative

The Belt and Road Initiative may generate dependency, opaque debt, elite bargains, labor disputes, strategic infrastructure, and unequal extraction. Those are legitimate subjects for a neo-colonialism test. But most BRI projects do not involve permanent Chinese settlers replacing local peoples or direct Chinese sovereignty. “Settler colonialism” is usually the wrong category; “economic statecraft,” “dependency,” “development finance,” or “unequal exchange” may be more precise. The blanket “debt-trap diplomacy” claim is also weaker than project-specific analysis.

South China Sea

Artificial islands, maritime coercion, resource claims, and military bases can be imperial or expansionist. They are not normally settler colonialism because no substantial Indigenous population is being displaced and replaced. See China - Expansion and Foreign Relations.

Hong Kong and Macau after handover

Hong Kong and Macau were European colonies returned to Chinese sovereignty. Beijing’s tightening of control in Hong Kong is authoritarian centralization and treaty/autonomy erosion; calling it Chinese settler colonialism usually obscures more than it clarifies.

Ordinary internal migration

A Han family moving to Lhasa or Ürümqi for a private job is not automatically a colonizing act. Migration becomes structurally colonial when government strategy, security institutions, land and job priority, and political hierarchy make settlement a means of securing sovereignty and marginalizing local collective control.

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9. Comparison rules for China and the West

The same standards should be applied to China, the United States, Russia, Israel, Japan, and European empires.

The consistent test

If demographic settlement, boarding education, religious supervision, resource corridors, and criminalization of Indigenous sovereignty would count as colonial mechanisms in North America or Russia, they cannot be dismissed merely because Beijing calls them domestic development. Conversely, evidence must meet the same burden before applying the label to every Chinese investment or migrant.

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10. Claim-checking guide

“China never colonized anyone.”

Verdict: false. Qing Taiwan, Dzungaria/Xinjiang, the southwest, and Mongol lands show conquest, settlement, land conversion, and imperial rule. Modern scholarship explicitly analyzes Chinese imperial colonialism.

“The Qing was not China, so Qing conquests cannot be Chinese colonialism.”

Verdict: partly clarifying, ultimately incomplete. The Qing was a Manchu-led empire and should not be retroactively treated as an ordinary Han nation-state. But ROC and PRC governments claimed its territory, institutions, and historical legitimacy. Modern Chinese territorial nationalism made Qing imperial inheritance Chinese.

“Xinjiang has always been part of China.”

Verdict: misleading. Han and Tang power reached parts of the region, but control repeatedly disappeared and many other states ruled it. Durable Qing conquest dates to the eighteenth century; provincial status dates to 1884; PRC control dates to 1949.

“Tibet was always independent.”

Verdict: also too absolute. Tibet had long periods of self-rule and practical independence, especially 1912–1950, but also meaningful relationships of subordination, patronage, or Qing supervision. The modern alternatives “always independent” and “always an integral part” both flatten changing political forms.

“Infrastructure proves the PRC liberated frontier peoples.”

Verdict: non sequitur. Material improvement is evidence of development, not proof of consensual sovereignty. It must be weighed alongside coercion, representation, cultural rights, distribution, and freedom to choose.

“China’s current policies are exactly the same as American extermination of Native peoples.”

Verdict: overstatement. There are comparable structures—continental conquest, settlers, land transformation, boarding education, civilizing ideology—but large differences in mortality, disease, land law, chronology, and regional variation. Structural comparison is useful; identity is not.

“The Bingtuan is just a normal state company.”

Verdict: false. It combines enterprise, territorial administration, cities, militia, policing, courts, and border defense; its official mission and scholarly history make the military-settlement function explicit.

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11. Reading map

Theory

• Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” — foundational structural argument.
• Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview — distinction between settler and franchise/extractive colonies.
• Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview — comparative definition and historical forms.

Qing empire and frontier

• Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia — war, logistics, environment, and Qing–Dzungar imperial rivalry.
• Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China — knowledge production and southwest expansion.
• C. Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier — “middle ground,” commerce, and colonial transformation.
• James A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang — the best broad regional history.
• Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography — Qing travel writing, indigeneity, gender, and colonial imagination.
• David Brophy, “The Qing Extermination of the Zünghars” — focused genocide analysis.

Nation-building after empire

• James Leibold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism — how frontier peoples were incorporated into the Chinese nation.
• Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation — critique of projecting nation-states backward.
• Maria Adele Carrai, “Learning Western Techniques of Empire” — Republican sovereignty and Tibet.
• Uradyn E. Bulag, The Mongols at China’s Edge and Collaborative Nationalism — Mongol identity, Chinese nationalism, and frontier politics.

PRC Xinjiang

• Judd C. Kinzley, Natural Resources and the New Frontier — resource extraction and state-building.
• Tom Cliff, Oil and Water — Han settlers, Bingtuan society, inequality, and belonging.
• Gardner Bovingdon, The Uyghurs: Strangers in Their Own Land — nationalism, resistance, and state control.
• Darren Byler, Terror Capitalism and In the Camps — surveillance, dispossession, labor, and mass detention.
• China - Xinjiang · China - Surveillance State · China - Policing, Public Security and Political Control

Tibet

• Melvyn C. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon and A History of Modern Tibet — detailed and comparatively moderate political history.
• Emily T. Yeh, Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development — development, land, migration, and territorialization.
• Tsering Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows — modern Tibetan political history.
• Ben Hillman, “Rethinking China’s Tibet Policy” — critique of both official and exile scripts.
• Tibet

Taiwan, Mongolia, and Manchuria

• Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography.
• Evan N. Dawley, Becoming Taiwanese — colonialism and identity under successive regimes.
• Uradyn E. Bulag, The Mongols at China’s Edge.
• Christopher P. Atwood, Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia’s Interregnum Decades.
• Taiwan

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12. Research cautions

1. Name the period and governing state. “China did X” can hide the difference among Han, Yuan, Ming, Manchu Qing, ROC, and PRC rule.
2. Do not treat today’s ethnicity as ancient. Uyghur, Han, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, and Chinese identities changed over time.
3. Separate legal sovereignty from historical explanation. Recognition of a present border does not establish that its formation was voluntary.
4. Do not romanticize pre-PRC societies. Indigenous political legitimacy and serious internal oppression can coexist.
5. Record material gains and coercive costs together. A railroad can improve welfare and deepen external control.
6. Disaggregate regions. Northern Xinjiang is not the Tarim Basin; central Tibet is not all ethnographic Tibet; plains and mountain Indigenous Taiwanese experienced different histories.
7. Use official sources as evidence of the state’s case and institutional design, not as neutral adjudication. The Bingtuan white paper is especially revealing because its positive description confirms its settlement, production, administrative, and defense functions.

Best one-sentence formulation

Modern China is a post-imperial nation-state that suffered foreign colonialism while preserving and intensifying much of a conquest empire’s territorial inheritance; settler-colonial analysis is strongest where state-backed permanent settlement, land transformation, and the displacement of Indigenous political authority can be demonstrated, especially in Xinjiang, Qing Taiwan, and Inner Mongolia.

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