The first time I heard of the new, expansive DNA collection was in the incident of a young Chinese man who had created an app to help connect people whose social media messages had been deleted by the authorities. He was quickly sought out at home by the police, who forced him to sign a statement that he would never do such a thing again, and took his blood and DNA without explanation.33
The Chinese state’s DNA database forms part of the build-up of precrime policing, which can combine DNA-based identification with face recognition and personal history for an instant, real-time identification. The technologies are developed by the burgeoning Chinese genomic and surveillance industries, and with the aid of Western counterpart companies, universities, and investors.34 It surely also has to do with the nascent “social credit” system, by which ordinary Chinese people—not members of the party elite—are constantly ranked.35 There are also credible reports that the Chinese regime actively collects DNA on foreigners and harvests vast amounts of personal information abroad. This DNA information can be seen as a tool of global racial profiling that will enable the use of ethnic or “racial” characteristics in the Chinese regime’s biopolitical management of people worldwide.36
Ancient DNA, China, and the “World’s Largest Ethnic Group”
Since its beginnings in China, genetics has been used to try to describe and delineate the nation and its constituent peoples in order to control them and, in the case of the non-Chinese ethnicities, construct a narrative about their necessary, subservient relation to the nation’s majority group.37 Huge volumes of research have been put out in this vein—from earlier descriptive studies of ethnic distinctions (exemplified by the curious body of literature on the dermatoglyphics or fingerprint patterns of minorities) to the current, more sophisticated and AI-engineered study of human DNA variation by ethnicity.38
For this chapter, the two most important aspects of this research are, first, the potential challenge of aDNA to the orthodoxy of Chinese national identity and how this challenge is met in Chinese research and, second, how the story of aDNA is being incorporated into the state narrative mounted to erase the Uyghurs and other targeted minorities.
Recent breakthroughs in genetics and ancient genomics promise new possibilities for the delineation, identification, and possible manipulation of ethnic groups. The stunning successes in collecting and analyzing the DNA from living people, which has been used to build deep “family trees” of populations going from the present back into history,39 as well as the successful extraction and analysis of DNA from ancient remains—all of this might have presented a challenge to the state orthodoxy of Chinese identity. Yet, this orthodoxy seems to be holding up in the same way that it withstood the potentially devastating archaeological discoveries of an unknown, pluralistic Neolithic, which, as mentioned above, was nevertheless coopted into the narrative of an eternal, dominant “China.”
Recent aDNA research in China is framed according to the reigning view of an unstoppable, “natural” expansion of the ancestors of the (superior Han) Chinese, who merged and created a “China” millennia before one existed in written history. Chinese archaeogeneticists are successfully continuing the twentieth-century efforts to extend the concept of China backward in time.40 Instead of the pottery traditions used in earlier archaeology, these scientists build on new genetic data that suggest a similar process of how a Han Chinese genome merged together.
One representative and much-cited piece has Melinda Yang, a scholar of Chinese origin based in the United States, as its main author.41 It draws on genetic material from “26 ancient individuals from northern and southern East Asia spanning 9500 to 300 years ago,” and seizes on how the diversity of an earlier Neolithic decreases through a dramatic “admixture” process which implies the unification of a China-to-be.42 This argument is underpinned by the constant reference to the sites of the samples as derived from “China.” While the geographical term “East Asia” is sometimes used, the article mostly speaks in terms of northern and southern China, as if the ancient south (East Asia south of the Yangtze River) was already Chinese, even though the conquest of this region and the destruction of its previous cultures actually took place in Neolithic and Bronze Age times. This is one of many examples of how contemporary Chinese archaeogenetics projects the term “China” backward in time, not just as a shorthand, but to suggest it existed—a move that we find repeated elsewhere in the world, for similar reasons and in similar nationalistic contexts.43
In the article by Yang and colleagues, we see recently published aDNA data marshaled as confirmation of what earlier population genetics studies of living groups have already suggested: while today’s southern Chinese sometimes carry the same genetic variants of those speakers of Austronesian languages who dispersed from today’s China into the Pacific and beyond, the Austronesian cultures south of the Yangtze were destroyed and replaced during prehistory.44 Austronesian speakers may have been the first East Asian rice-growing people in the Yangtze valley—but their entire language family and their cultures are now completely extinct in mainland China. All that remains are a few obscure loanwords in Chinese.45 Their languages survive today only because the language family spread first to Taiwan and from there to the Philippines, the Pacific, much of Southeast Asia, and even Madagascar. On the mainland, the story is one of Chinese-speaking peoples’ displacement and assimilation of older southern cultures in the south region from the Yangtze and southward, which in prehistoric times was more like an extension of the diversity of Southeast Asia.
Against this background, it is fascinating to see how the new research by the team headed by Melinda Yang is presented to confirm the genetic homogenization of “China’s South.” While Yang’s article uses terms like “human population shifts” and does not contain any explicit statements that the text is about the creation of China, a news release from the American Association for the Advancement of Science jumped to the conclusion that the article “reveals [the] genetic history of China” through aDNA.46 In making this claim, the association goes along with the Chinese researchers’ language and with much common practice. The news release speaks of the great replacement in what is today southern China only as a matter of how “northern populations spread southward, transforming southern China’s Austronesian genetic ancestry,” which in turn “gave rise to modern population genetics.”47 This is a dressed-up way of saying that modern China emerged from the displacement and assimilation of more ancient southerners.
Other ancient DNA studies are even clearer in their objective of reconfirming the ancestry of China and its dominant people today—the Han Chinese—as the “World’s Largest Ethnic Group.”48 In a paper written by population geneticist Charleston Wen-Kai Chiang and colleagues, the ancient coherence and expansion of the Han people are attributed to “their advantage in agriculture and technology,” which led their population “to become the largest ethnic group today in China.”49 This is stated about an identity that was actually constructed in the late nineteenth century in response to European nationalist ideas about unitary nations and national origins. We now see it affirmed—and “confirmed”—by the prestige of genomic science.
Many geneticists who write these treatises are sophisticated scientists who are conversant with the methods and theories in their field. Yet, they cannot easily escape the dilemma inherent in how their research is framed conceptually, as they are dependent on terms such as “China,” “Han Chinese,” “minorities,” and so on. Thus, there is a widespread lack of attention to the potential problems inherent in this type of research.
I suggest that this situation results from two main factors. The first is the inertia of inherited concepts, names, and labels that scholars recycle and apply without thinking. This issue is not unique to China; it exists in other parts of the world, where names and labels are only recently coming under debate. The second factor is more important and insidious. For the reasons I have explained above, political leaders as well as nationalist academics in China will frequently declare what is the “correct” approach to archaeology and genetics. Scholars cannot go against such declarations. In the current climate, there is a shrinking space for public debate and it is unthinkable for a scholar to publish unorthodox ideas or a radical rethinking of a field. Instead, scholars pursue research within the parameters set by government authorities and policies—and this is so even for scholars based outside of China, who can be denied visas if they show themselves too unorthodox.
As archaeologist and anthropologist Erika Evasdottir has described in her 2004 book Obedient Autonomy, archaeologists, just like geneticists and other scientists in China, try to maintain some creative space within these parameters.50 Concretely, this means that in order to preserve limited freedom to pursue their own favorite issues, archaeologists seldom violate the tenets set down by officialdom regarding the sensitive questions of how China came to be, Chinese identity, and so forth. This is especially the case now that China’s top party leader—as we will see below—has personally laid out an agenda on archaeology, culture, and history.
In the case of aDNA, the leading Chinese geneticist Fu Qiaomei is an outstanding example of this “obedient autonomy.”51 In China, she is sometimes featured on state television, cheerfully discussing topics such as “the genetic histories of the Chinese.” Here, she brilliantly navigates the set limits while presenting the new research on admixture events in high antiquity that created the Chinese people, lending this axiom new scientific authority.
The space available in China for public debate and criticism has been cut drastically under the current General Secretary of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping. Since Xi came to power in 2012, he has systematically reasserted and increased the party’s control and censorship of all media and all publishing. He is directly responsible for the atrocious policies in Xinjiang, which he has publicly described as “totally correct.”52 His top priority is making China great again, and he therefore takes a keen interest not only in armaments and aircraft carriers, but also in archaeology and history. While Xi does not get into specifics of genetics, he appropriates the term “DNA” (used interchangeably with the Chinese word for gene, jiyin) to speak of the “DNA” of the Chinese nation—an unexplained but scientific-sounding and therefore seemingly authoritative abstraction of the nation’s enduring essence.53
In November 2020, President Xi published an article in his own name, disseminated throughout official media, where he mobilizes “DNA” to speak of the achievements of the Chinese nation across the millennia, which Xi also specifies as archaeology’s task to describe and glorify.54 He enshrines detailed accounts of archaeological findings and promotes a deeply essentialist idea of a “rejuvenated” China, “the Chinese nation’s undying, everlasting, never-fading cultural DNA” (Zhonghua minzu sheng sheng bu xi, chang sheng bu shuai de wenhua jiyin).55
Such pronouncements cannot be openly contradicted by anyone. Just as in Mao’s and Stalin’s time, they also have an increasing tendency to be copied and integrated into the writings of every scientist as part of an openly and unapologetically politicized science.
There is an inherent tension between the conditions for Chinese scholars operating in China, and those on the outside who can theoretically still critique these Chinese constraints and the state orthodoxy about history. This tension enters a grey zone in situations where, for example, Chinese scholars undertake genetic research in China but are based abroad, or where they have foreign coauthors. As for non-Chinese scholars, their awareness of the nature and consequences of contemporary Chinese nationalism will vary greatly. If they lack sufficient awareness and/or are not fully engaged with the work, they may find themselves inadvertently signing off on or copying not just the essentialized Chinese ethnonationalism, with its framing and vocabulary for talking about its ancestry, but even the general secretary’s guidance, and the genetics abuse in Xinjiang.56 If they should refuse to obey the party line, or dare speak against it, they may be blocked from China.
The Incoherent Other
In this penultimate section, I return to the use of aDNA in the erasure of unwanted ethnicities, and its role in the current Chinese government’s project of unifying the Chinese nation to make it “rejuvenated.” Here I seek to show that, in great contrast with how aDNA has been used to reconfirm the perceived unity and development of the dominant Han Chinese as the world’s largest ethnic group (as discussed above), ethnic minorities are, at the same time, shown as “always already” incoherent and ultimately nonviable. Their inevitable fate is therefore to be assimilated into the unified Chinese nation.
This interpretation of aDNA research in China is no surprise. As we have seen, archaeologists have long been instructed to interpret their findings to promote the glorious history of the nation. Indeed, at the outset of the current genocide in Xinjiang, officials renewed their call on archaeologists to prove in their work that the region has been part of China “since ancient times.”57 The officials already know that in the nationalist climate in China, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for any archaeologist to publish anything that contradicts the narrative of the state (or its leader) about the antiquity and glory of China. In this vein, “minorities” are invariably confirmed as fading appendages who at most can get a nod for having contributed to China’s greatness.
But there is more. The minorities must also be described as inherently incoherent: they do not coalesce into glorious nations. Not only was Xinjiang always Chinese—a statement plainly at variance with the truth—but the peoples who live there now and yearn for genuine autonomy must themselves be described as historical failures.
The tone for this project has been set by the central government itself in one of the many “white papers” issued on Xinjiang.58 This is a fascinating, if repugnant, text that reiterates the state narrative on the formation of China, and in the process even presents the imperial-era Chinese set of terms for the barbarians of the four directions as real, actual “ethnic groups.”59 This is another example of how the alternate reality created by the state’s effort to interpret and name the past is presented as an uncontestable historical fact. On Xinjiang, the paper insists not only that the central Asian region has been a part of China since ancient times, but that any and all of the independent kingdoms (of which there were many) that have ever existed historically in that region “were all local regimes within the territory of China; they were never independent countries.” In particular, the paper states that there was never a “so-called” modern East Turkistan republic (although such a republic was indeed twice set up in the 1930s and 1940s): “Xinjiang Has Never Been ‘East Turkistan.’ ”60
As for Islam, which is widely prohibited and persecuted as part of the genocidal program in the region, the religion is described as having been forced on the people by outsiders, rather than being the choice of the local Uyghurs themselves. Moreover, the paper argues that the people who are called “Uyghurs” today were formed by various migrations and mergers, including “the Han people.”61 That is, the “Uyghur”—today a people of at least twelve million, with a long history of writing, literature, and other distinct cultural achievements—is not really a coherent thing.
As if on cue, new aDNA research can be seen to affirm these guidelines from the powers that be. This research claims that the peoples who have lived in this region, unlike the Han Chinese, never coalesced into enduring nations. Instead, they are mixed, without achieving an essential, Chinese-styled “unity.” For example, one recent article by anthropologist Wenjun Wang and colleagues aims to “understand the genetic history of Xinjiang.”62 It draws on aDNA from 237 samples in the region, suggesting that this shows past “intense admixture with high genetic diversity” and that “future studies with ancient genomic data will reveal more admixture patterns in this region,” that is to say, not cohesion, as in the case of China.63 I believe this can only be read as portraying diversity as hopelessly splintered and not viable, because not “united.”
In genetics proper, genetic diversity as such is not necessarily infused with such politics. It can even be an indicator of antiquity, since a life-form with a long history in a place has had more time to diversify. But I submit that here, outside of the genetic definition, diversity is being used to signify weakness, and mixture disunity. As we have seen, the preferred Chinese story, seemingly confirmed by the new archaeogenetics, is an amalgamation from the center, whose ancestry is ascribed to the core of that center. In this light, the findings of genetic disunity (“diversity”) in the region of the Uyghurs is not coincidental—rather, they are the direct or indirect result of policy directives to scholars.
In another similar example, geneticist Qidi Feng and colleagues speak of a “complex scenario of ancestral origins and admixture history” in the midst of “massive migrations” in ancient times, as part of the (splintered) genetic history of the Uyghur people who today live in the Xinjiang region.64 Back in 2010, Chunxiang Li and colleagues wrote about the “West-East admixed population” that supposedly characterizes Xinjiang—a move that I understand as emphasizing that the Uyghur nation does not stand on its own as a coherent entity, but wavers between West and East.65 And in 2015, Shi-Zhi Gao and colleagues emphasized that Xinjiang is (unfortunately) a “crossroads,” but (thankfully) experienced the in-migration of ancient Chinese people already in the Bronze Age.66
None of this is coincidental. The findings are meant to show that humans in the Xinjiang region have never arrived at anything like coherence or unity. The thrust of these studies is that the region’s people have been unable to achieve an independent existence, at best existing as fleeting, temporary historical appendages to the body of an enduring China. This is the result desired by state officials, produced within the official framing provided by the state, and aided by foreign scientists and publishers who relay it without comment or without examining the life of the labels in use.
Finally, the most recent example is the curious battle over the Tarim mummies. These comprise a series of human remains found in the deserts of today’s Uyghur region, dating back to the second and first millennia BCE and having features that have historically been interpreted as “European.” This has even led some scholars to argue that the mummified people were the forebears of speakers of Tocharian, an Indo-European language also attested from the region.67
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.
