The Chinese State at the Borders (review)

Reviewed by: The Chinese State at the Borders Emily M. Hill (bio) Diana Lary, editor. The Chinese State at the Borders. UBC Press. xii, 306. $32.95 This admirable book is the result of a conference honouring Professor Alexander Woodside on the occasion of his retirement from the University of British Columbia. Its consistent theme is how the Chinese state has been formed and defined over time in interactions at its edges. Thirteen chapters and an editor’s introduction provide a remarkably coherent survey. The authors present new findings that will fascinate scholarly specialists, while for general readers the book is an accessible guide to understanding contemporary China’s policies toward the regions near its borders. Like other edited collections, this volume invites selective sampling of the chapters. Yet its organization also rewards systematic reading from beginning to end. In the first chapter, Alexander Woodside offers guiding insights. He explains how political unity and centralization have been inseparable in Chinese political theory and how Chinese officials in imperial times were ambivalent about the borderlands. Next, Benjamin Elman focuses on cartographic knowledge in the late imperial era, recounting a gradual ‘inward turn’ away from the maritime frontier during the centuries before European naval assaults began. This chapter provides the framework for the book’s focus on land frontiers. (Despite Lary’s reference to China’s 18,000 kilometres of coastline in the first sentence of her introduction, reasons for the inattention to maritime affairs remain implicit.) Chapter 3 follows logically, as Nicola di Cosmo [End Page 219] explains how the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was rooted in a system of alliances in the same northern frontier region that rulers of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) had sought to secure. Chapters 4 and 5, by Tim Brook and Leo Shin respectively, deal with southern frontier zones during the Ming period. Both offer significant correctives to a conventional idea that the authority of pre-modern Asian rulers was ‘soft’ at the edges of their domains. For the Ming state, firm borders were legally significant, even when their locations on the ground were not precisely known. Further chapters by accomplished historians follow. Peter Perdue’s account compares how official histories recorded successful and unsuccessful military campaigns of the mid-Qing period. He argues that the narrative of dynastic achievement constructed during that era of great territorial expansion formed a foundation for modern nationalist consciousness. Next, Andre Schmid’s study of eighteenth-century border control explodes obsolete truisms about the ‘tributary system’ and Korea’s loyal role therein. Guiding us through a zone where China and Russia meet today, Victor Zatsepine then recounts the process through which the Amur River (Heilongjiang) became an international border. Lingering disagreements about the location of this boundary were not resolved until mid-2008. After excursions to the Chinese-Vietnamese cultural and geographic frontier zone of the early twentieth century in chapters by Van Nguyen-Marshall and Diana Lary respectively, Wang Ning then carries us forward to the 1950s and again to the Northeast. Continuing an ancient custom of banishing bureaucrats to the borderlands for political offences, China’s new government sent cadres who had been accused of rightism into exile in Heilongjiang. A new view of remote regions actually induced a few ‘rightists’ to choose distant locations over closer ones. Idealism about developing the ‘Great Northern Wilderness’ thus lifted the spirits of intellectuals banished there, but their hopes were shattered in a nightmare of exposure to cold and starvation. Chapters by an anthropologist and a legal scholar complete the volume. Stevan Harrell’s fluency in the Nuosu language gives him insight into how an inter-ethnic ‘internal boundary’ is negotiated by leaders who represent both the Han-dominated state and their communities. Finally, Pitman Potter discusses current issues of territorial sovereignty, including the status of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Autonomous Regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, explaining how Chinese ‘patrimonial sovereignty’ differs from the liberal view of a state’s accountability to its people. Lary makes clear in her introduction that she would like to debunk the myth that China’s cultural and territorial unity is an ancient natural phenomenon. The volume succeeds in this goal, providing vivid illustrations...

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