The United States and China in Power Transition - Strategic Studies ...

the Chinese, Mongols, and the Turkic ethnic groups.
This land has also witnessed great power interference
from time to time, most notably by Russia and Great
Britain. After a long fight against the Turkic ethnic
groups and Russia since the 1750s, China’s last dynasty,
the Qing, secured control of the entire region
and named it the Xinjiang Province of China in 1884.
However, the Qing Dynasty fell in 1911. Xinjiang once
again fell prey to internal turmoil and external interference.
There were repeated attempts to create East
Turkistan as well. In 1949, the CCP-led PLA “liberated”
Xinjiang, and it has been under the tight control
of the PRC ever since. 194
However, the CCP did not put the Xinjiang problem
to rest for good. The East Turkistan separation
movement did not go away, either. The reasons are
twofold. First and foremost, China failed to develop
a sound political and economic system that could accommodate
the complicated relations in Xinjiang.
Contrary to the CCP’s propaganda, Xinjiang has
never become a melting pot for the Han Chinese and
various Turkic ethnic groups in any measure. Second,
the external environment surrounding Xinjiang provides
“fertile grounds” for the separatist movement to
grow. Indeed, Xinjiang’s unsettling and conflict-laden
neighbors, namely Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the
Turkic republics of the Soviet Union, gave Xinjiang
more than enough reasons to be unsettled as well.
A turning point came at the end of the Cold War.
The collapse of the Soviet Union gave independence
to a number of former Soviet republics in central Asia
bordering Xinjiang. They are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. These are
the countries defined primarily by the kind of people
who bear the name of these new nations (the suffix
“stan” simply means the land).
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