The forgotten violence that shaped modern China - Sarah Paine

# The Forgotten Genocides That Built Modern China

Look at an ethnic map of modern China and a curious pattern jumps out: the Han Chinese occupy almost all of the country's arable land. This is not an accident of geography or a gentle story of demographic drift. According to historian Sarah Paine, it is the residue of a brutal logic that has governed continental Eurasia for centuries — a logic in which conquered peoples are not assimilated peacefully or left to govern themselves on the margins, but systematically erased.

Understanding this logic, Paine argues, is essential to understanding not only the shape of China today but also what is currently happening to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

## The Map Tells a Story of Conquest

The Han occupy the prime real estate because, over centuries, they took it. The borders of "China proper" — the densely populated agricultural heartland — do not mark a natural civilizational extent. They mark the outcome of wars whose losers were eliminated.

The most dramatic case is one most Westerners have never heard of: the Zunghars. The Zunghar Khanate was a powerful Mongol state that controlled a vast swath of Central Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were a serious geopolitical rival to the Qing Dynasty — not a minor tribe on the frontier but an empire in their own right. Today, virtually no one outside specialist circles knows the name. That is because the Qing did not merely defeat them. The Qing destroyed them as a people. Their territory was absorbed into what is now Xinjiang, and the demographic vacuum was eventually filled by Han settlement.

The Tibetan empire met a less total but related fate: an independent civilization broken and absorbed into a larger Han-dominated political order.

The pattern is the point. The places where the Han now farm, build, and live in overwhelming majorities are, in many cases, places where someone else used to live until that someone else was systematically removed.

## The Binary Logic of Continental Warfare

Paine draws a sharp distinction between maritime and continental geopolitics, and the difference matters enormously for how wars end and what happens to the losers.

In a maritime world — think of the British or the Americans operating across oceans — defeated populations are usually left in place. The victor wants trade, bases, influence, and access. Killing or expelling the local population would defeat the purpose. Losers lose sovereignty or autonomy, but they generally keep their lives and their cultures.

Continental warfare works differently. When two land empires share a frontier and one decisively defeats the other, the victor faces a harder problem: a hostile, organized population sitting on contiguous territory that the victor now claims. Leaving them in place means living with a permanent insurgency risk. The historical answer, repeated across the Eurasian steppe for centuries, has been some combination of forced assimilation and physical elimination.

As Paine puts it bluntly:

> In the continental world, you're faced with a binary choice. You either become Han or they will kill you.

There is, she notes, a third option for those who can take it: flight. Populations that could flee south, into terrain unsuited to the conqueror's mode of life, sometimes survived as distinct peoples. But for those who stayed on the contested land, the choice collapsed into assimilation or death.

This is not a uniquely Chinese pattern. It is the pattern of continental conquest more generally — visible in Russian expansion across Siberia, in the histories of various steppe empires, and elsewhere. But it has shaped China's borders with particular thoroughness.

## Genocide as the Default Outcome, Not the Exception

The implication Paine draws from this history is uncomfortable. In our contemporary moral vocabulary, genocide is treated as an extraordinary aberration — a uniquely modern horror associated with the twentieth century. In the long view of continental warfare, she suggests, it is closer to the default outcome for the losing side.

This reframing is not a justification. It is an analytical claim about what has actually happened, repeatedly, when land empires fight to a decisive conclusion. The disappearance of the Zunghars from popular memory is itself evidence: when a people is thoroughly enough eliminated, even the fact of their elimination fades. There is no diaspora to keep the memory alive, no surviving political entity to demand recognition, no descendants to write the history.

That silence is part of how the pattern perpetuates itself. The modern map looks natural because the alternative maps — the ones with a Zunghar state in the northwest, or a fully independent Tibet, or any number of smaller polities that once existed — have been erased from common awareness along with the peoples who would have drawn them.

## Xinjiang and the Uyghurs Today

Against this backdrop, Paine reads the current situation in Xinjiang as a continuation of a recognizable historical script rather than a sudden departure from Chinese norms.

The Uyghurs occupy territory that has been contested for centuries — the same broad region where the Zunghars were destroyed. They are a distinct people with their own language, religion, and historical identity, sitting on land that a continental power claims as integral to its sovereignty. The reports of mass internment, forced cultural assimilation, suppression of language and religion, and demographic engineering through Han migration map directly onto the older binary: become Han, or be eliminated as a distinct people.

Paine's assessment is grim and direct: the Uyghurs are, in her reading, "slated for genocide" — meaning not necessarily mass killing in the twentieth-century European mode, but the systematic destruction of them as a people, whether through cultural erasure, forced assimilation, demographic dilution, or worse.

The contemporary international response treats this as shocking and exceptional. Paine's historical framing suggests it is instead deeply consistent — with how the Qing dealt with the Zunghars, with how continental empires have long handled the problem of conquered peoples on contiguous land, and with the underlying logic of land-based imperial consolidation.

## Why This History Matters

The takeaway is not that China is uniquely evil — continental empires of many ethnicities have followed similar logics — but that the geographic and strategic situation of a land power dealing with a defeated ethnic minority on claimed territory generates strong, recurring pressures toward elimination or forced assimilation.

This has practical implications for how outsiders should think about ethnic conflict in continental Asia, about the durability of distinct minority cultures under such regimes, and about the realism of expecting maritime-world outcomes — peaceful coexistence, autonomy, multicultural accommodation — in a continental-world setting.

It also means that the ethnic map of modern China is best read not as a static description of who lives where, but as a snapshot in an ongoing process. The Han majority's reach is the cumulative result of past eliminations. The current pressure on the Uyghurs is, on this reading, the same process still running. And the peoples who once filled the spaces now marked simply "Han" — the Zunghars first among them — are a warning about how thoroughly such processes can succeed, and how completely their victims can be forgotten.