This special issue of the Journal of Chinese History is dedicated to studies of the connection between migration and the state throughout Chinese history. The special editor's introduction first surveys the major types of migration within China proper, and towards the outside world, including citations to recent scholarship. It brings the eight papers of this issue into dialogue with each other around four major themes: migration and the limits of state power, the violence and trauma of migration, migration and identity, and migration and gender/family issues.

During the century of massive expansion of the Qin state in China (ca. 316–222 BCE), and the subsequent fifteen years of the empire (221–207 BCE), it is recorded that millions of persons were forcibly relocated and resettled throughout the empire and along its frontiers. For example, the historian Sima Qian (ca. 145–86 BCE) states that in just the years between 213 and 210 BCE, the First Emperor relocated more than a million people from interior counties of the empire to settle newly-conquered lands on the northern and southern frontiers. Yet this was only one type of forced resettlement carried out by the Qin. The Qin state also relocated thousands of aristocratic households from conquered states to the Qin capital of Xianyang, captured large numbers of non-Chinese peoples and assigned them to localities as slaves to open up agricultural land, exiled wealthy iron industrialists from the interior to the periphery, intentionally expelled the entire populations of conquered cities to replace them with amnestied criminals, and pooled and redirected the labor of convicts gathered from throughout the empire to labor on huge projects such as the First Emperor's tomb. This article seeks to analyze and categorize these various Qin forced resettlements to uncover the ideological and policy motivations behind them and the role they played in the larger project of Qin imperial expansion and colonization.

In ancient China, as elsewhere, states did not simply occupy a given territory but actively engaged in the production of space by transforming landscapes, moving populations, and enacting territorial hierarchies, thus creating “state spaces,” to borrow a term coined by James C. Scott. In the case of the early Chinese empires of Qin (221–207 BCE) and Han (202 BCE–220 CE), state-induced migration and settlement were key instruments of military control, administrative incorporation, economic intensification, and other processes connected with spatial distribution of state power. This article combines insights from transmitted texts, excavated documents, and archaeological evidence to explore factors and effects of migration in early Chinese empires, discussing the interconnection between state-organized resettlement and private migration as well as their embeddedness in the local geography. As the situation varies according to location, the present article introduces the approach and tests it on a case study, the Guanzhong metropolitan region.

Using received texts and excavated funerary epitaphs, this article examines the intricacies of gender and migration in early medieval China by exploring women's long-distance mobility from the fourth century to the sixth century, when what is now known as China was divided by the Northern Wei and a succession of four southern states—the Eastern Jin, Liu-Song, Southern Qi, and Liang. I focus on three types of migration in which women participated during this period: war-induced migration, family reunification, and religious journeys. Based on this analysis, I propose answers to two important questions: the connection between migration and the state, and textual representations of migrants. Though the texts under consideration are usually written in an anecdotal manner, the references to women, I argue, both reveals nuances in perceptions of womanhood at the time and elucidates the contexts within—and through—which long-distance travel became possible for women.

Historians hold that to preserve the Manchu homeland the Qing court instituted a “policy of prohibition” (Ch: fengjin zhengce), forbidding Han immigrants from settling in the region until the final decades of its rule. Using Manchu-language archives from the garrison of Hunčun (Ch: Hunchun), this article questions whether such a prohibition guided local governance. In some jurisdictions in Manchuria, including in Hunčun, the Qing state did not always have an overarching policy towards Han migrants. Migration, in fact, was often less of a concern to the state than poaching. We can reassess the history of Manchuria accordingly. Modern historians have been preoccupied with the coming of Han migrants to Qing Manchuria; the Qing government in Hunčun was not.

Drawing on physical and textual records of Hunanese and Cantonese active in Guangxi, as well as state archival sources, this article traces the expansion of these two diasporic cohorts in Guangxi from the early nineteenth century, through the mid-century wars, and into the postwar era, when they reintegrated this southwestern frontier province into the late-Qing empire.

When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power, one million mainland Chinese were forcibly displaced to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek's regime. Today, this event is still largely considered as a relocation of government or a military withdrawal operation instead of a massive population movement. Contrary to popular belief, many of the displaced mainlanders were not Nationalist elites. Most were common soldiers, petty civil servants, and war refugees from different walks of life. Based on newspapers, magazines, surveys, declassified official documents produced in 1950s Taiwan and contemporary oral history, this article uncovers the complicated relationship between the regime in exile and the people in exile. It argues that the interdependency between the two, in particular between the migrant state and the socially atomized lower class migrants, was formed gradually over a decade due to two main factors: wartime displacement and the need to face an unfriendly local population together.

Beginning in 1964, the PRC party-state orchestrated the resettlement of thousands of young people from cities to erosion-prone areas in China's Loess Plateau to form “water and soil conservation teams” (shuitu baochi zhuanyedui). Although their ostensible mission was to limit erosion by building terraces and planting trees, documents related to conservation teams emphasized their capacity to thoroughly reform urban youth while mobilizing them to do the work of remaking the environment. Provincial and county archives, along with fieldwork conducted at the site of one water and soil conservation team in Shaanxi province's Baishui county, indicate that conservation teams did not realize either of these objectives. Due to urban youth's inexperience with agriculture and conservation, they did little to promote environmental management. At the same time, unruly teenagers who migrated to the countryside to join conservation teams, as well as the cadres who oversaw them, continued to engage in transgressive behavior.

More than 100,000 people from the city of Tianjin were evacuated to the countryside in a civil defense program during the 1970s. Many evacuees refused to submit to state migration mandates, instead sneaking back to the city illegally or petitioning to regain urban residency. City officials responded flexibly to the evacuees’ pleas, sympathizing with family reunification and treating suburban districts (jiaoqu) on the outskirts of Tianjin as a buffer zone between city and countryside. Dominated by agriculture but home to a growing number of factories, workshops, and offices during the 1970s, jiaoqu became a solution to evacuation headaches. When compared with the recent coerced movement of hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens on national security grounds, the civil defense evacuations of the 1970s suggest that it may be misguided to think of the Mao Zedong years as a faraway time that was more radical or repressive than China today.