A just-released new article (“Chinese Archaeology Goes Abroad” by M. Storozum and Y. Li, Archaeologies, 2020) describes how Chinese archaeologists go abroad to places like Uzbekistan and Kenya, to dig for traces of past Chinese presence, in order to “help China achieve its geostrategic objectives,” while “weaving other countries’ past into a more Sino-centric narrative of world history.”
On the semi-hidden agenda of such projects in Central Asia, the article says that “the implicit goal of many of these archaeological projects is to gradually rewrite the history of the ancient Silk Road with China as the historical driver of prosperity, peace, and political stability.”
The article wholly omits the ongoing campaign to physically erase Uyghur culture, including architecture and sacred sites in Chinese-dominated East Turkestan now being bulldozed by the Chinese authorities, even though this, too, explicitly mobilizes an openly politicized archaeology, and is accompanied by a barrage of supporting claims by the Chinese authorities: That the indigenous peoples are not distinct but just an amalgam of whatever, that their religion is actually not the religion of their choice, that China always owned everything anyway, and so on.
Given these recent Chinese efforts, including also the efforts to intimidate and dominate its neighbors, and even unilaterally redrawing the border, if I were the host country of such a Chinese archaeological project I would be wary about the potentially dangerous implications. Everything they said and did to the Uyghurs, they could equally say about Uzbeks and Uzbekistan. (It’s a bit like Putin questioning the existence of Ukraine as a country).
There is something strange about how this article fails to mention the ancestor and closest parallel to this sort of new Chinese archaeology: Gustaf Kossinna (1858-1931), who was famously embraced by Nazi state archaeology, since he elaborated the argument that parts of Poland were really German, because of prehistoric potsherds which he identified with German-Aryan ancestors. Which is strikingly similar to China’s claims for those reefs of the South China sea — and now, beyond.
And when the article does cite a standalone piece by Bettina Arnold on this kind of race-supremacist, nationalist and expansionist archaeology (“The past as propaganda: How Hitler’s archaeologists distorted European prehistory to justify racist and territorial goals. Archaeology 45.4, 30-37), Hitler is miswritten as Hilter — and the point about how that archaeology was distorted, is not taken up. Instead, this and other references are merely used to vaguely suggest that everybody is an archaeological nationalist.
I don’t think so. We clearly need to talk about bias and distortion, and critically examine the race-supremacy ideology at work in the new practice of Chinese archaeology. This article could be a starting point for more of that.
Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>