Why this dismissal/expulsion of the poor and the minorities of
China? His thesis demands it. The Williams school neglects them.
Europe has been proven guilty. The left has accepted the People's
Republic conviction that the non-Han regions are inalienable parts
of "China". The great Czarist finance minister Sergie Witte had
intended to settle Manchuria with Russians; Japan occupied it from
1931 to 1945, but history was on the side of the mass influx of Han
settlers; China deserved this huge territory.
The "China" you see in maps today is a very recent creation. Outer
China - a vast territory roughly the same size as Inner China,
populated by Mongols, Turkish and Tibetan stockraising peoples,
was taken over politically only during the course of the 18th
century. AND, although the regions of contemporary Inner China
were under imperial control by Ming times or earlier times, roughly
half the land of Inner China was barely colonized before 1500,
particularly the southern provinces; part of Guangdong, "all of
Guizhou, and westward into Yunnan and Sichuan was still largely
non-Chinese in population" In these provinces, or parts of them, the
native peoples were the majority in 1600, including parts of Hunan.
