We have always been at war with Eastasia

Updated 5/30/2015

It's really not a secret! Map via Wikipedia.

Via NPR, the violent attack of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on US historians Pamela Crossley, Mark Elliot, James Millward, and others, for work published between 1997 and 2004 suggesting, in the trend known as the "new Qing history" that the Manchu empire of the Qing dynasty is not the same thing as China, the country it conquered in 1644 and occupied until 1912 along with other conquests such as Tibet, Mongolia, eastern Turkestan (now known as Xinjiang), and Taiwan.

Because such a view could give people the idea that Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan were not part of China before 1644 (they weren't) and that Tibetans, Uyghurs, and native Taiwanese are not eternally Chinese (they aren't), and indeed that there can be permanent Chinese communities in places (like Taiwan) that aren't China. Thus historian Li Zhiting writes (cited at the China Media Project, University of Hong Kong),

The so-called “academic breakthrough” of “new Qing history” does not reflect the reality. At its base it is a false and counterfeit good! Absent any academic breakthrough, it has lost the basis for survival. The whole range of views they express are cliches and stereotypes, little more than dusted off versions in a scholarly tone of the Western imperialism and Japanese imperialism of the 19th century!...

As these American scholars spare no effort in selling this “New Qing History,” there are various scholars in China who assist them in pushing it, but the world of Qing research [in China] has paid it little attention, and even less can we say it’s caught on. The “cold shoulder” some scholars have given [the idea] is the true feeling [most share]. . . . When they promote this “New Qing History” to subvert China’s Qing history or even Chinese history, we must take this seriously, looking at the true face of “New Qing History”!

Not that they would deny that the borders of China have changed in the course of 5,000 years in general or from the mid-17th to late 19th centuries in particular (they can't). The idea is really that the borders of China attained a kind of Platonic perfection under the Qing, or realized their eternal character, which can thus be projected forward and retroactionarily backward in time as forever implicitly there even though the residents may not have been aware of it (luckily for Vietnam, it made it out of China several centuries before the Qing conquest), and to refer to it as in some way "not Chinese" just because the rulers and most of the territory weren't Chinese is a way to "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people". If by "the Chinese people" you mean "the Central Committee of the CCP". I mean, what kind of historian would go around hurting people's feelings?

As that reference to "various scholars in China" shows, we are not looking here at a revived Cultural Revolution style of terror-enforced groupthink, but at a conservative establishment that knows its days of being taken seriously are numbered.

They are becoming as laughable as US conservatives who don't seem able to understand or accept that the Southwest from Texas to California used to be Mexico, and that it's not unreasonable for Mexicans to be a little dubious about the idea that crossing the border without papers is a heinous and despicable crime.

It's likely too late to save Tibetan and Uyghur culture from complete marginalization, though, and that's sad.

Rawap player in Khotan, Xinjiang. Photo by Stacey Irvin.

Update:

Pamela Crossley herself has given a generously close reading to this post, for which I am very grateful, but I do want to defend myself on one point, the title, which she reads as having much more meaning than I intended.

It comes, of course, from George Orwell's 1984, and refers to the big lie that replaces the previous big lie ("We have always been at war with Eurasia") in a sudden shift of alliances in the book's background of perpetual war. One thing that struck me as a kid was that the Oceanian authorities were pushing an important lie beneath this lie: that "Eastasia" and "Oceania" and "Eurasia" had always existed, instead of being historical creations (like the US and the various incarnations over the millennia of "China"), and all I meant was a cheap reference to that—to the PRC authorities' implicit denial that the country has ever been different than it now is. I certainly did not mean to sound like some kind of god forbid neoconservative, as I fear Crossley may have thought.

I do not think that the real Oceania (or "Anglo-Saxon" world) is somehow really doomed to conflict with the real Eastasia; I meant specifically to suggest that such an idea, whether it comes from Beijing or Washington, is Newspeak-wrong (and conservative, whether in the CCP or GOP sense). I'm sorry that I put it in such a frivolous way as to give the wrong impression. And also sorry I failed to mention that who's really suffering from the Party campaign against the "New Qing historians" is people in China, with:

 the imprisonments of Ilham Tohti and Pu Zhiqiang, with the discipline and suppression of newspapers and other media of news and opinion aross the country and in Hongkong, and Xi Jinping's general campaigns to eradicate "Western" influence --since that influence tends to agitate new questions of historical inquiry and cultural identity, and to question the new sandy islands of PRC reach.