Ethnic tensions in China have reached unprecedented levels, with more than a million Uighurs now forcibly interned in “reeducation centers” in Xinjiang. Drawing from an impressively rich variety of Chinese and English source material and field research over more than a decade, Yan Sun explores why ethnic mobilization and violence have occurred only in Xinjiang and Tibet, and not in minority areas in China’s inner periphery. In From Empire to Nation State, Sun argues that two historical transitions—first from dynastic empire to modern nation-state in the Mao era (1949–1976) and then to the current system of ethnic governance in the post-Mao era—created institutional tensions between political centralization and ethnic particularism, leading to ethnic strife and outcomes at odds with the goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Sun’s thesis is important and new, though she understates the CCP’s culpability for adopting increasingly brutal tactics to suppress ethnic particularism. Instead, she argues that these institutional tensions, along with state weakness and inability to control the unintended consequences of state-led ethnic revival in the 1980s, best account for the current ethnic violence. Her compelling proposals for viable policy alternati