Before Han-Chinese began to conquest  -the real way how China became China since the last dynasty, the Qing Dynasty-  from their coastal region in the east into the central hinterland and the utmost far west, East Turkestan was  not Chinese, not even when the Chinese Wall became to build. China was at that time just less than a third of its current size and located east of that wall.

The Qing emperor invaded East Turkestan; in 1884, they annexed it as “Xinjiang,” meaning “new territory” in Mandarin. Subsequently, the Qing began to colonize the area by settling Han Chinese and Hui (Chinese Muslims) colonists in East Turkestan. It is the earliest form of Chinese assimilation in its modern history.

In 1949, Mao Zedong also invaded East Turkestan during his Great Leap Forwards. The region was renamed into tXinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in current China. East Turkestan was never recognized by the United Nations.

The people of East Turkestan are often described as "Turks of Central Asia".  That is misleading. Because, a 2012 study in the journal Annals of Human Genetics found that Turkey's paternal ancestry was 38 percent European, 35 percent Middle Eastern, 18 percent South Asian and 9 percent Central Asian. Ottomans dealt with the complexities of ethnicity through what they called the millet system.

Turkish people are people who live in, or come from the country of Turkey. It's a nationality naming, while Turkic is a embrella term, which covers spoken languages, culture and tradition of people described as Turkic.