But now, a series of Chinese and international geneticists have extracted aDNA from these mummies and analyzed it, concluding that these individuals were not “Westerners,” “Europeans,” or “Eurasians,” but “Asian.”⁶⁸ The term “Asian” is obviously chosen as a convenient contrast to the labeling of the remains as “European” or “Eurasians.” Regardless of the validity of the genetics assessments themselves, it is difficult to see the formulations of these conclusions as other than tendentious affirmations of the labels “non-Western,” and “Asian,” which affiliate the remains of humans who predate such concepts with the modern peoples defined by them. This is done as if to provide these ancient humans with an avenue into the families of peoples that—like Uyghurs and others—would later be absorbed into a powerful China.

Here, it is not only the term “China,” but also “Eurasian” and “Asian,” that stand out. With these terms, the international team may perhaps have only geographical considerations in mind, as if they were unaware of how all of these labels are loaded with contemporary significance. None of the presentations of the findings by the original authors or science journalists raise the issue of naming, and none consider what the ideological motivations or repercussions for the terminological choices made may be.⁶⁹ In its report on the archaeogenetic analysis of the mummies, the Hong Kong–based, pro-China newspaper South China Morning Post chose the triumphant headline “Xinjiang Mummies’ Origins Closer to Home than We Thought,” emphasizing that an authoritative “international team” had found that these mummies were not “Westerners” but “Asians.”⁷⁰ In the article, these term are not used as neutral terms, but as distinctly contemporary ethnic concepts alive with controversy in the context of the Chinese claim to dominance.

Conclusions

We do not know the motives behind the Chinese authorities’ mass collecting of DNA data from Uyghur and Chinese people. It is possible that they go beyond known aspects of surveillance, biopolitical management, and sorting for the genocide in Xinjiang, which itself is meant to purify the rejuvenated Chinese race-nation.

Regardless, the pursuit of DNA collection from the living is sure to be accompanied by continued research into aDNA, which itself will continue to be directed by the same party-state policy goals of making China great once again. My prediction is that the state narrative of an ancient and magically coherent China will continue to be promoted with new findings from aDNA research. By the same token, the other peoples and cultures that have inhabited East Asia will continue to be demoted and depicted as merely passive appendages to the body of this enduring “China.” This is an abusive use of the power of naming, which has enormous significance: bolstering the Chinese regime’s nationalist identity claims today, by way of bolstering its bid to fully control the past, as well.

Around the world, non-Chinese geneticists, editors, and other actors involved in the dissemination of aDNA studies in China often seek to be “respectful” of Chinese colleagues. In doing so, they may not understand the politics of archaeology and history in China, and are likely to be coopted into the unquestioned support of the Chinese government’s agenda. This state of affairs is likely to continue unless the Chinese use and abuse of DNA, and of the power of naming, come into focus and receive the attention that they deserve. If not, it is likely that the same abuse of “essential” national identities projected into the past—so as to dominate that past, the present, and the future by way of that past—will continue in other parts of the world as well.

Notes

1.  Daniel Strand, “0.01%: Genetics, Race and the Methodology of Differentiation,” Eurozine, January 4, 2021, https://www.eurozine.com/0-01; David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Susanne E. Hakenbeck, “Genetics, Archaeology and the Far Right: An Unholy Trinity,” World Archaeology 51, no. 4 (2019): 517–527; Anna Källén, “De första svenskarna: Arkeogenetik och historisk identitet,” Fronesis, no. 66–67 (2019): 110–123. See also Jonatan Kurzwelly and Malin S. Wilckens, “Calcified Identities: Persisting Essentialism in Academic Collections of Human Remains,” Anthropological Theory 23, no. 1 (2023): 100–122. An exception is Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner, “How to Define a Population: Cultural Politics and Population Genetics in the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China,” BioSocieties 1, no. 4 (2006): 399–419.

2.  See, for example, Stefanie Eisenmann et al., “Reconciling Material Cultures in Archaeology with Genetic Data: The Nomenclature of Clusters Emerging from Archaeogenomic Analysis,” Nature Scientific Reports 8 (2018), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-31123-z.

3.  Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al., “Ethics of DNA Research on Human Remains: Five Globally Applicable Guidelines,” Nature 599, no. 7883 (2021): 41–46.

4.  Compare in this volume Marianne Sommer and Ruth Amstutz, chapter 2.

5.  See David Graeber’s discussion about the British-Indian realist philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar. David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2001), 51–53.

6.  Dongju Zhang et al., “Denisovan DNA in Late Pleistocene Sediments from Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau,” Science 370, no. 6516 (2020): 584–587; Ann Gibbons, “DNA Tracks Mysterious Denisovans to Chinese Cave, Just before Modern Humans Arrived Nearby,” Science Magazine, October 29, 2020.

7.  Maximilian Larena et al., “Philippine Ayta Possess the Highest Level of Denisovan Ancestry in the World,” Current Biology 31, no. 19 (2021): 1–12.

8.  Bruce Bower, “An Indigenous People in the Philippines Have the Most Denisovan DNA,” Science News, August 12, 2021, https://www.sciencenews.org/article/indigenous-people-philippines-denisovan-dna-genetics.

9.  As in the well-known examples of the outsider Qin invading the Central Plains kingdoms and setting up the First Empire; later also the Mongols; and the Manchus of the last dynasty that ended in 1911.

10.  Magnus Fiskesjö, “The Legacy of the Chinese Empires: Beyond ‘the West and the Rest,’ ” Education about Asia 22, no. 1 (2017): 6–10.

11.  Magnus Fiskesjö, “Rescuing the Empire: Chinese Nation-Building in the Twentieth Century,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 5, no. 1 (2006): 15–44.

12.  Stephan Feuchtwang, “The Chinese Race-Nation,” Anthropology Today 9, no. 1 (1993): 14–15.

13.  Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Struggle for National Survival: Chinese Eugenics in Sino-Japanese contexts, 1896–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2002); Yinghong Cheng, Discourses of Race and Rising China (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Magnus Fiskesjö, “Racism with Chinese Characteristics: How China’s Imperial Legacy Underpins State Racism and Violence in Xinjiang.” China Channel, Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel, January 22, 2021, https://chinachannel.lareviewofbooks.org/2021/01/22/chinese-racism/.

14.  John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).

15.  Thomas Mullaney et al., eds. Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

16.  See, for example, Charleston Wen-Kai Chiang et al., “A Comprehensive Map of Genetic Variation in the World’s Largest Ethnic Group—Han Chinese,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 35, no. 11 (2018): 2736–2750.

17.  Fiskesjö, “Rescuing the Empire,” 15–44.

18.  Such “truths” are set out in the Chinese government’s “white papers.” See, for example, Information Office of the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China, “National Minorities Policy and Its Practice in China,” Office of the Chargé d’Affaires of the People’s Republic of China in the Republic of Lithuania, http://lt.china-office.gov.cn/eng/zt/zfbps/200405/t20040530_2910831.htm.

19.  See Fiskesjö, “Rescuing the Empire”; Fiskesjö, “Legacy of the Chinese Empires,” 6–10. One of the most influential Chinese formulations of this merger of everyone into the Zhonghua (Chinese) is Xiaotong Fei, Zhonghua minzu duoyuan yiti geju [The pattern of China’s nationalities: Multiple origins, single form] (Beijing: Zhongyang minzu daxue, 1989).

20.  The term minzu shi (ethnohistory) refers to a major genre in Chinese scholarship that has little or nothing to do with ethnohistory as understood in other parts of the world, namely history from the ethnic point of view. Instead, it consists mainly of the search to match Chinese historical texts with current ethnicities. While there is no good introduction to the genre in other languages, in Chinese, see Jianmin Wang, Zhongguo minzuxue shi, vol. 1, 1903–1949, vol. 2, 1950–1997 (Kunming: Yunnan Educational Publishers, 1997–1998). The book mainly focuses on ethnology, but also discusses Chinese-style ethnohistory.

21.  Magnus Fiskesjö, “Chinese Autochthony and the Eurasian Context: Archaeology, Mythmaking and Johan Gunnar Andersson’s ‘Western Origins,’ ” in Fitful Histories and Unruly Publics: Rethinking Temporality and Community in Eurasian Archaeology, ed. Kathryn O. Weber, Emma Hite, and Adam T. Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 303–320.

22.  Tao Wang, “Establishing the Chinese Archaeological School: Su Bingqi and Contemporary Chinese Archaeology,” Antiquity 71, no. 271 (1997): 31–39. This addition of several thousand years of Neolithic prehistory to the China story is the basis of today’s official political mantra about “5,000 years of Chinese history” (though written history only extends to about 1200 BCE).

23.  The new global paleoanthropology suggested that even Chinese people ultimately derived from Africans, something that is still largely unacceptable to Chinese people, despite Chinese geneticists at Fudan University confirming that it is in fact true.

24.  Fiskesjö, “Rescuing the Empire”; Fiskesjö, “Legacy of the Chinese Empires.”

25.  On these issues, see Ming-ke Wang, “The Ch’iang of Ancient China through the Han Dynasty: Ecological Frontiers and Ethnic Boundaries” (PhD diss, Harvard University, 1992), and his masterful Chinese book on the subject, Hua-Xia bianyuan: Lishi jiyi yu zuqun rentong [The frontiers of Hua-Xia: Historical memory and ethnic identity] (Taipei: Yunchen wenhua, 1997). See Magnus Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’ Barbarians of Imperial China,” Inner Asia 1, no. 2 (1999): 139–168.

26.  John Makeham, “Zheng ming (Rectification of Names),” in Encyclopedia of Confucianism, ed. Xinzhong Yao (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 813–814.

27.  Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi, First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1992).

28.  A comprehensive overview is found in “The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention,” Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, Policy Report, March 8, 2021, https://newlinesinstitute.org/uyghurs/the-uyghur-genocide-an-examination-of-chinas-breaches-of-the-1948-genocide-convention. More sources, including the collection and use of DNA, is found in my frequently updated online Uyghur bibliography, http://uhrp.org/bibliography.

29.  Mark Munsterhjelm, “Scientists Are Aiding Apartheid in China,” Just Security, June 18, 2019, https://www.justsecurity.org/64605/scientists-are-aiding-apartheid-in-china; James Leibold and Emile Dirks, “Genomic Surveillance: Inside China’s DNA Dragnet,” Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2020, https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/genomic-surveillance-inside-chinas-dna-dragnet; “China: Police DNA Database Threatens Privacy,” Human Rights Watch, May 15, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/05/15/china-police-dna-database-threatens-privacy. See also Sui-Lee Wee, “China Is Collecting DNA from Tens of Millions of Men and Boys, Using U.S. Equipment,” New York Times, June 17, 2020.

30.  Darren Byler, “The Xinjiang Data Police,” Noema, October 8, 2020, https://www.noemamag.com/the-xinjiang-data-police; Yael Grauer, “Revealed: Massive Chinese Police Database,” The Intercept, January 29, 2021, https://theintercept.com/2021/01/29/china-uyghur-muslim-surveillance-police. On the procedures inside the concentration camps, see Magnus Fiskesjö, “Forced Confessions as Identity Conversion in China’s Concentration Camps,” Monde Chinois 62 (2020): 28–43; Darren Byler, In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2021).

31.  Since it was conclusively documented in 2019–2020, the systematic mass sterilizations have convinced many to declare the Chinese government’s acts in Xinjiang a genocide under the United Nations Convention of 1948. On these actions, see Nathan Ruser and James Leibold, “Family De-planning: The Coercive Campaign to Drive Down Indigenous Birth-Rates in Xinjiang,” Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2021; Rukiye Turdush and Magnus Fiskesjö, “Dossier: Uyghur Women in China’s Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 15 no. 1 (2021): 22–43.

32.  Leibold and Dirks, “Genomic Surveillance.”

33.  Nathan Vanderklippe, “China Steps up Internet Censorship of Criticism of Xi Jinping,” Globe and Mail, March 11, 2018.

34.  Munsterhjelm, “Scientists Are Aiding Apartheid in China.”

35.  See Katie Canales and Aaron Mok, “China’s ‘Social Credit’ System Ranks Citizens and Punishes Them with Throttled Internet Speeds and Flight Bans if the Communist Party Deems Them Untrustworthy,” Business Insider, November 28, 2022, https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018-4.

36.  See the controversy over the worldwide harvesting of genomic information by Chinese state-sponsored biotech company BGI. Kirsty Needham and Clare Baldwin, “China’s Gene Giant Harvests Data from Millions of Women,” Reuters, July 7, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-china-bgi-dna/; Joby Warrick and Cate Brown, “China’s Quest for Human Genetic Data Spurs Fears of a DNA Arms Race,” Washington Post, September 21, 2023.

37.  For a history of genetics in China generally (but before archaeogenetics), see Tan Jiazhen and Zhao Gongmin, eds., Zhongguo yichuanxue shi [History of genetics in China] (Shanghai: Shanghai keji jiaoyu, 2002); Laurence Schneider, Biology and Revolution in Twentieth-Century China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

38.  See, for instance, Hai-Guo Zhang et al., “Dermatoglyphics from All Chinese Ethnic Groups Reveal Geographic Patterning,” PLoS One 5, no. 1 (2010): 1–12.

39.  HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium et al., “Mapping Human Genetic Diversity in Asia,” Science 326, no. 5959 (2009): 1541–1545. See also Dennis Normile, “SNP Study Supports Southern Migration Route to Asia,” Science 326, no. 5959 (December 2009): 1470. A similar approach using contemporary DNA data from around the world has been commercialized by companies that pretend to be able to determine individual ancestry based on personal samples. See, for instance, Daniel Strand and Anna Källén, “I Am a Viking! DNA, Popular Culture and the Construction of Geneticized Identity,” New Genetics and Society 40, no. 4 (2021): 520–540.

40.  In “Chinese archaeogeneticists,” I include both Chinese geneticists in China and ethnic Chinese scholars abroad working in the same vein, as is strongly encouraged by the nationalist home regime. In line with the regime’s new racist idea of the Chinese nation, anyone of “Chinese blood” is urged to serve its interests, regardless of citizenship. This pressure is often difficult to resist, including for scholars who still hope to have access to China and risk being denied as punishment for their disloyalty.

41.  Melinda A. Yang et al., “Ancient DNA Indicates Human Population Shifts and Admixture in Northern and Southern China,” Science 369, no. 6501 (2020): 282–288; see also Melinda A. Yang, “Ancient DNA Is Revealing the Genetic Landscape of People Who First Settled East Asia,” The Conversation, September 15, 2020, https://theconversation.com/ancient-dna-is-revealing-the-genetic-landscape-of-people-who-first-settled-east-asia-139458; American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), “Ancient DNA Reveals Genetic History of China,” EurekAlert!, May 14, 2020, https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/708044.

42.  Yang et al., “Ancient DNA Indicates Human Population Shifts,” 282.

43.  For a similar case in Israel, see Megan Gannon, “When Ancient DNA Gets Politicized,” Smithsonian Magazine, July 12, 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-ancient-dna-gets-politicized-180972639/.