U.S. Media Audaciously Uses Loulan Beauty to Doubt Sovereignty Over Xinjiang

America’s New York "Times" published an article in recent days that made absurd use of the ancient “Loulan Beauty” to play up the idea that Xinjiang is not a part of China’s territory. The article claimed that the physical characteristics of the Loulan Beauty clearly show that she was not Chinese, and that the era in which she arrived in what today is Xinjiang long predated Zhang Qian’s expedition to the West, in an attempt to prove that Xinjiang is not China’s territory.

The Loulan Beauty referred to in the article is a mummified corpse unearthed by Chinese archaelogist Mu Shunling in Lop Nur, Xinjiang in 1980. At 3,800 years old, it is the oldest corpse unearthed in Xinjiang to date.

The article, published in the New York "Times" on November 18th, was entitled “The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To.” The writer stated that the Chinese government claims that “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” “but […] the ancient corpses […] seem to tell a different story.” He stated that it can be judged from the physical characteristics of the Loulan Beauty that “she is not what one thinks of as Chinese,” and “the very first people to settle the area came from the west — down from the steppes of Central Asia and even farther afield — and not from the fertile plains and river valleys of the Chinese interior.”

The writer also stated that when proving that Xinjiang in China’s territory, Chinese officials frequently make mention of Zhang Qian’s western expedition, but that “the mummies show, though, that humans entered the region thousands of years earlier, and almost certainly from the west.” The writer said the Loulan Beauty is 3,800 years old, while Zhang Qian’s western expedition took place during China’s Western Han period, in the second century BCE.

In an interview with a Global Times reporter, Director of the Central Asian Research Center at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences Pan Zhiping responded to this fallacy, stating that the article had made a “conceptual error.” He says that ethnicity and country are two fundamentally different concepts. While westerners often think that China is comprised entirely of Han people, China is in reality a unified, multiethnic country, and even though the Loulan Beauty was not Han, she can still be Chinese. Furthermore, as early as 60 BCE, China’s Western Han central government had established a protectorate in the Western Regions, the highest administrative organ in the West during China’s Han Dynasty. China’s establishment of a local government here is what marks the Western Regions as having been China’s territory since ancient times; Zhang Qian’s expedition to the western territories was made as an emissary, and his acting in this capacity is not a symbol of Xinjiang’s status as Chinese territory.

Historian Zhang Wei told a Global Times reporter that a territory’s historical status and actual present status are different concepts According to the conventions of international law, current territorial claims are based on a country’s continuing effective administration of a region. The Western Han central government established a protectorate in the Western Regions in 60 BCE, and in the 2,000 years since then, China’s central government has essentially maintained continual effective administration there. Zhang Wei says that New York "Times" article’s trying to compare the 3,800-year-old female corpse from Loulan to the Chinese government’s 2,000 years of continuous effective administration in Xinjiang is illogical, and that if such a claim were accepted, then what is now the United States should be returned to its original inhabitants, the Indians.

Huanqiu Shibao Reporter Shang Bin Reporting.