We are so accustomed to seeing “China” as it is now configured on maps that it is easy to forget how new this geographic entity is. The last ethnic Chinese dynasty, the Ming, was spatially less than half as large as the People's Republic of China (PRC). There has been too little study of how the other countries came to be, and remain, part of China. After all, when most international empires collapse, their constituent nations go their own way—as witnessed by those from the Romans to the Soviet Union. And yet after the Qing Empire (and later the Republic of China) collapsed, the western half of what became the PRC found itself part of a revived empire.
In Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State, Justin Jacobs seeks to explain this anomaly with regard to one such nation, the former Eastern Turkestan (never quite a “country,” but almost...
