In Managing Frontiers in Qing China, historians and anthropologists explore China's imperial expansion in Inner Asia, focusing on early Qing empire-building in Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and beyond – Central Asian perspectives and comparisons to Russia's Asian empire are included. Taking an institutional-historical and historical-anthropological approach, the essays engage with two Qing agencies well-known for their governance of non-Han groups: the Lifanyuan and Libu. This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the Lifanyuan and Libu, revising and assessing the state of affairs in the under-researched field of these two institutions. The contributors explore the imperial policies towards and the shifting classifications of minority groups in the Qing Empire, explicitly pairing and comparing the Lifanyuan and Libu as in some sense cognate agencies. This text offers insight into how China's past has continued to inform its modern policies, as well as the geopolitical make-up of East Asia and beyond. Contributors include: Uradyn E. Bulag, Chia Ning, Pamela Kyle Crossley, Nicola DiCosmo, Dorothea Heuschert-Laage, Laura Hostetler, Fabienne Jagou, Mei-hua Lan, Dittmar Schorkowitz, Song Tong, Michael Weiers,Ye Baichuan, Yuan Jian, Zhang Yongjiang.

Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Qing rulers, officials, and scholars fused diverse, fragmented perceptions of foreign territory into one integrated worldview. In the same period, a single "foreign" policy emerged as an alternative to the many localized "frontier" policies hitherto pursued on the coast, in Xinjiang, and in Tibet. By unraveling Chinese, Manchu, and British sources to reveal the information networks used by the Qing empire to gather intelligence about its emerging rival, British India, this book explores China's altered understanding of its place in a global context. Far from being hobbled by a Sinocentric worldview, Qing China's officials and scholars paid close attention to foreign affairs. To meet the growing British threat, they adapted institutional practices and geopolitical assumptions to coordinate a response across their maritime and inland borderlands. In time, the new and more active response to Western imperialism built on this foundation reshaped not only China's diplomacy but also the internal relationship between Beijing and its frontiers.

Argues that Qing China was not just a continental empire, but a maritime power protecting its interests at sea.

A free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Ginseng and Borderland explores the territorial boundaries and political relations between Qing China and Choson Korea during the period from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. By examining a unique body of materials written in Chinese, Manchu, and Korean, and building on recent studies in New Qing History, Seonmin Kim adds new perspectives to current understandings of the remarkable transformation of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1636–1912) from a tribal state to a universal empire. This book discusses early Manchu history and explores the Qing Empire’s policy of controlling Manchuria and Choson Korea. Kim also contributes to theKorean history of the Choson dynasty (1392–1910) by challenging conventional accounts that embrace a China-centered interpretation of the tributary relationship between the two polities, stressing instead the agency of Choson Korea in the formation of the Qing Empire. This study demonstrates how Koreans interpreted and employed this relationship in order to preserve the boundary—and peace—with the suzerain power. By focusing on the historical significance of the China-Korea boundary, this book defines the nature of the Qing Empire through the dynamics of contacts and conflicts under both the cultural and material frameworks of its tributary relationship with Choson Korea.

With comparative frontier history and pioneering use of indigenous sources, Giersch provides a groundbreaking challenge to the China-centered narrative of the Qing conquest. He focuses on the Tai domains of the Yunnan frontier on the politically fluid borderlands, where local, indigenous leaders were crucial actors in an arena of imperial rivalry.

From about 1600 to 1800, the Qing empire of China expanded to unprecedented size. Through astute diplomacy, economic investment, and a series of ambitious military campaigns into the heart of Central Eurasia, the Manchu rulers defeated the Zunghar Mongols, and brought all of modern Xinjiang and Mongolia under their control, while gaining dominant influence in Tibet. The China we know is a product of these vast conquests. Peter C. Perdue chronicles this little-known story of China's expansion into the northwestern frontier. Unlike previous Chinese dynasties, the Qing achieved lasting domination over the eastern half of the Eurasian continent. Rulers used forcible repression when faced with resistance, but also aimed to win over subject peoples by peaceful means. They invested heavily in the economic and administrative development of the frontier, promoted trade networks, and adapted ceremonies to the distinct regional cultures. Perdue thus illuminates how China came to rule Central Eurasia and how it justifies that control, what holds the Chinese nation together, and how its relations with the Islamic world and Mongolia developed. He offers valuable comparisons to other colonial empires and discusses the legacy left by China's frontier expansion. The Beijing government today faces unrest on its frontiers from peoples who reject its autocratic rule. At the same time, China has launched an ambitious development program in its interior that in many ways echoes the old Qing policies. China Marches West is a tour de force that will fundamentally alter the way we understand Central Eurasia.

The purpose of this book is to examine the strategies and practices of the Han Chinese Nationalists vis-à-vis post-Qing China’s ethnic minorities, as well as to explore the role they played in the formation of contemporary China’s Central Asian frontier territoriality and border security. The Chinese Revolution of 1911, initiated by Sun Yat-sen, liberated the Han Chinese from the rule of the Manchus and ended the Qing dynastic order that had existed for centuries. With the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the Mongols and the Tibetans, who had been dominated by the Manchus, took advantage of the revolution and declared their independence. Under the leadership of Yuan Shikai, the new Chinese Republican government in Peking in turn proclaimed the similar "five-nationality Republic" proposed by the Revolutionaries as a model with which to sustain the deteriorating Qing territorial order. The shifting politics of the multi-ethnic state during the regime transition and the role those politics played in defining the identity of the modern Chinese state were issues that would haunt the new Chinese Republic from its inception to its downfall. Modern China's Ethnic Frontiers will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese history, Asian history and modern history.

During the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the province emerged as an important element in the management of the expanding Chinese empire, with governors -- those in charge of these increasingly influential administrative units -- playing key roles. R. Kent Guy’s comprehensive study of this shift concentrates on the governorship system during the reigns of the Shunzhi, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors, who ruled China from 1644 to 1796. In the preceding Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the responsibilities of provincial officials were ill-defined and often shifting; Qing governors, in contrast, were influential members of a formal administrative hierarchy and enjoyed the support of the central government, including access to resources. These increasingly powerful officials extended the court’s influence into even the most distant territories of the Qing empire. Both masters of the routine processes of administration and troubleshooters for the central government, Qing governors were economic and political administrators who played crucial roles in the management of a larger and more complex empire than the Chinese had ever known. Administrative concerns varied from region to region: Henan was dominated by the great Yellow River, which flowed through the province; the Shandong governor dealt with the exchange of goods, ideas, and officials along the Grand Canal; in Zhili, relations between civilians and bannermen in the strategically significant coastal plain were key; and in northwestern Shanxi, governors dealt with border issues. Qing Governors and Their Provinces uses the records of governors’ appointments and the laws and practices that shaped them to reconstruct the development of the office of provincial governor and to examine the histories of governors’ appointments in each province. Interwoven throughout is colorful detail drawn from the governors’ biographies.

Wang Hui asks what it means for China to be modern and for modernity to be Chinese. Is there a rupture between tradition and modernity in China? How has Confucian thought evolved? Did China become modern in the Middle Ages? A deep intellectual history, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought revises our senses of both modernity and Chinese philosophy.

Provides a new framework for reconceptualizing the historical and contemporary relationship between cultural diversity, political authority, and international order.