Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T07:57:33.288Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Nature and Nurture on Imperial China's Frontiers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2009

PETER C. PERDUE
PETER C. PERDUE*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Ecologies of production and state classifications shaped Chinese imperial frontier policies. In Chinese classical debates about the effect of environment on human character, the dominant view held that all peoples could become civilised, but a dissenting view held that barbarians could never change their ways. Nomadic pastoralists likewise debated whether to adopt certain Han cultural practices or reject them. Chinese dynasties often accepted diversity, but at certain times tried to eliminate difference by persuasion or by force. Three cases illustrate these processes during the Qing period: the relationship between Manchus and Mongols, Qing policies towards aboriginal peoples and the settlement of Taiwan, and Qing policies towards southwestern mountain peoples. In each case, policies came out of the interaction of ethnic categorization, views on cultural transformation and frontier environments. When Qing rulers lost the ability to recognise such cultural distinctions, they lost a key to the endurance of the empire.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 245 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Richards, John F., The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley, 2003)Google Scholar. This paper was also delivered at the Second International Conference on Environmental History held on November 8–10, 2006 and sponsored by the Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica. I am grateful for the comments received by Profs. Liu Ts'ui-jung, Lin Man-houng and other attendees of the conference.

2 Ibid. 17.

3 Ibid. 12–13.

4 Ibid. 55.

5 Lieberman, Victor B., ed., Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to ca.1830 (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1999). 52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Lieberman, Victor B., Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830. Volume 1: Integration on the Mainland, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar., reviewed by P.C. Perdue in Social History, vol. 31 no. 3 Aug 2006, pp. 394–397.

6 Articles by Lieberman and myself forthcoming in the journal Social Science History will provide some comparative perspectives on China.

7 Cooper, Frederick and Stoler, Ann Laura, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 For example, Crossley, Pamela Kyle, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999)Google Scholar, Crossley, Pamela Kyle, Siu, Helen F. and Sutton, Donald S., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006)Google Scholar, Elliott, Mark C., The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2001)Google Scholar, Giersch, C. Patterson, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006)Google Scholar, Harrell, Stevan, ed., Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers (University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1995)Google Scholar, Hostetler, Laura, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001)Google Scholar, Millward, James A., Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998)Google Scholar, Perdue, Peter C., China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005)Google Scholar, Shepherd, John Robert, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1993)Google Scholar, Teng, Emma J., Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, MA, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Maier, Charles S., Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Stoler, Annlavra, McGranahan, Carole, and Perdue, Peter C., eds., Imperial Formations and their Discontents (School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico, (2007)Google Scholar, Parker, Bradley J. and Rodseth, Lars, eds., Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History (University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2005)Google Scholar, Power, Daniel and Standen, Naomi, eds., Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands 700–1700 (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1998)Google Scholar.

10 Laozi, Tao Te Ching [Daodejing] (Bantam Books, New York, 1990). 39 [80] #30.

11 Elvin, Mark, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004)Google Scholar, Perdue, Peter C., Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Frederickson, George M., Racism: A Short History (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002)Google Scholar. Further discussion in Peter C. Perdue, ‘Erasing the Empire, Reracing the Nation: Racialism and Culturalism in Imperial China’, in Imperial Formations and Their Discontents, eds., Annlavra Stoler, Carole McGranahan, Peter C. Perdue (2007).

13 Jonathan N. Lipman, ‘“A Fierce and Brutal People”: On Islam and Muslims in Qing Law’ in Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China, eds., Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu and Donald S. Sutton (2006).

14 Xian, Zeng, Mingchen zouyi, Shanghai Yinshvguan, Shanghai (1935) 24: 18b–19aGoogle Scholar.

15 Cited in Fan, Fa-ti, ‘Nature and nation in Chinese political thought: the National Essence circle in early twentieth-century China’, in The Moral Authority of Nature, eds., Daston, Lorraine and Vidal, Fernando (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004)Google Scholar.

16 Further discussion in Perdue, China Marches West. 470–476. An engaging narrative of the Zeng Jing case is Spence, Jonathan, Treason by the Book (Viking, New York, 2001)Google Scholar.

17 Elliott, The Manchu Way, Rawski, Evelyn S., The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Barfield, Thomas J., The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, MA, 1989). p. 51Google Scholar.

19 Qian, Sima, Shiji (Taipei, Hangye Shuju, 1976)Google Scholar 110.2189, cited in Barfield, p. 52.

20 Tekin, Talat, A grammar of Orkhon Turkic (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1968). pp. 261–262Google Scholar.

21 For further discussion, see Perdue, Peter C., ‘From Turfan to Taiwan: Trade and War on Two Chinese Frontiers’, in Untaming the Frontier: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Frontier Studies, eds., Parker, Bradley J. and Rodseth, Lars (Tucson, 2005)Google Scholar.

22 Maier, Among empires, p. 102.

23 Perdue, China Marches West, pp. 141–152.

24 Major studies include Rubinstein, Murray A., Taiwan: A New History (Armonk, NY, M. E. Sharpe, 1999)Google Scholar, Shepherd, Taiwan Frontier, Teng, Travel Writing. See also the excellent summary in Richards, The Unending Frontier, pp. 89–111.

25 Dingyuan, Lan, Pingtai Jilue (Taibei, Taiwan Yinhang, 1958)Google Scholar.

26 Donald S. Sutton, ‘Ethnicity and the Miao frontier in the eighteenth century’, in Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China, eds., Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu and Donald S. Sutton (2006).

27 Ibid., 216.

28 Jenks, Robert Darrah, Insurgency and Social Disorder in Guizhou: The “Miao” Rebellion, 1854–1873 (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1994). p. 72Google Scholar.