[Part 2 Borderlands] China Governance History
Alexander Woodside on Centre and Borderlands in Chinese Political Theory
Alexander Woodside wrote:
The Quixotic Nature of China’s Political Centre
During his presidency in Russia in the early 1990s, Boris Yeltsin asked Russian thinkers to engage in a contest to create a new concept of the Russian nation-state. A newspaper close to the Yeltsin government, noting that both communism and Russian Orthodox Christianity were too weak to supply useful ideologies, even offered a US$2,000 reward for the most acceptable new conceptualization of the Russian polity. To the apparent satisfaction of Chinese observers, the prize went unclaimed; and the “spiritual crisis” in Russian politics remained unresolved.
It is hard to imagine a Chinese newspaper offering any such prize in China. Some sort of notion of a Chinese state, as based upon an eternal civilizing political centre, committed to the unification of ever-widening areas and the peoples around it, has survived for several millennia. It continues to influence the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The notion of an imperial centre was originally mythic and pre-bureaucratic, preceding the actual centralized emperorship of China created in 221 BCE. In the Chinese classics, the political culture’s “Central Domain” (zhong zhuo) was one of the nine regions into which legendary rulers like the Yellow Emperor or King Yu of the Xia dynasty had divided the ancient world, with the other eight regions offering tribute to the region at the core.
During the Chinese Empire itself, the centre received its tribute from the provinces and expelled convicts, deserters, and dissidents to its outer regions, as in the First Emperor’s use of banished prisoners more than two thousand years ago to colonize what is now the south Chinese province of Guangdong. But if Guangdong as a convict colony anticipated the much later history of Australia under British rule, there was no Australian-type romance about this in later Cantonese writings, no celebration of the liberating frontier through which the convict colony would become freer than the metropolis. The historical heroes in Guangdong, for great Cantonese poets like Qu Dajun (1630-96), were two strongman emperors – the First Emperor (221-209 BCE) and Han Wudi (140-86 BCE), who, from a northern power base, had forcibly created Chineseness in the south.
Chinese leaders have found great comfort over the centuries in embracing a cluster of fictive historical continuities concerning a unifying political centre. The ideal of the unifying centre was and is self-validating: its very persistence is taken to be proof of its rightness and objectivity.
In September 1999 the Chinese State Council in Beijing published a detailed justification of China’s ethnic minority policies. This text argued that a unified multiethnic state had existed in China since the unification of the empire in 221 BCE and that such unity had been the “main trend” of Chinese history. What’s more, non-Chinese peoples themselves had contributed to this trend. The great Mongol Yuan government of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had refined China’s system of “provinces” (sheng) as centre-dependent secretariats, and the influence of the Mongol province had survived to the present. China’s Mongol rulers had also established agencies of military control in Tibet, which from this point on had become an “inalienable” part of Chinese territory and had set up patrols to manage the affairs of the Pescadores islands and of Taiwan. The Manchu Qing Empire (1644-1911) had made Xinjiang into a province; had imposed central bureaucratic control over the selection of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas in Tibet; and had introduced centrally appointed officials into the lives of the minority peoples of the southwest. The “mutual dependence” and “common development” of China’s ethnic peoples, furthered by such statemaking, had in turn created “Chinese civilization”.
In 1999, the State Council’s seductive grand narrative placed its faith in the existence of a time-transcending structure inherent in the past, which non-Chinese as well as Chinese agents served. The benefits of the structure supposedly remain available – without needing any complex strategy of accommodation – to contemporary Chinese politicians. Yet it is the centre that really transcends time in this narrative, not the borderlands or their peoples.
Their identities fluctuate. The same 1999 justification of China’s ethnic minority policies conceded, without embarrassment, that, after 1948, the Chinese political centre had not been able to make up its mind about the number of ethnic minorities in China. It had decreed 38 official ethnic minorities in 1954; 15 official ethnic minorities in 1964; and 55 official ethnic minorities in 1979. If the centre is eternal and the borderlands and their minorities are far less certain, there is seemingly less need to study the minorities’ impact upon Chinese culture itself, apart from their service to the centralizing ideal. Not until well into the twentieth century did Chinese scholars begin comprehensively to examine the obvious subject of Central Asian influence in the Chinese core, as in the pioneering effort of the historian Xiang Da (1900-66) in the 1930s to uncover the connections between the Tang dynasty capital of Changan and the “civilization of the Western region.” Significantly, Xiang Da relied heavily upon the research of the British Central Asia specialist Aurel Stein (1862-1943), whose works he translated into Chinese.
The problem with the ideal of the unifying centre is that, even since the first century of the common era, when Han dynasty leaders talked of pacifying the fifty-odd “countries” of pre-Islamic Xinjiang, China’s borderlands have been too big and too various for any political centre, even a semi-mythic one, to control. The quixotic nature of the political centre’s all-encompassing image of itself, and the discrepancies between the self-image and the almost impossible scope of its ambitions, explains why the political problems of the borderlands, in Chinese theory, have so often been disguised versions of political problems at the centre. And political problems at the centre were frequently pressing: in the two thousand years between the First Emperor and the Opium War in the 1800s, China had no real semblance of unity for almost half that time.
There are parallels in European history to the Chinese disjunction between the teleological approach to political power (attributing to the state an inherent ideal purpose) and the functional approach (concerned with the state’s more modest actual behaviour in the exercise of its tasks) …
… However, the Chinese version of such a “double truth” has survived longer and been more potent than has the European version. Unlike the latter, the Chinese version could celebrate centralization without so much attachment to a specific city; and it did not have to mediate the competing claims of politics and religion. This gave it a flexibility that disguised its weakness: the underdevelopment of any critical intuitions that there could be polities that were united without being centralized.
If it survives today, it finds its context in the life of an emerging superpower that has land borders with fifteen countries and maritime frontiers with six more (ranging from Korea to Brunei). Indeed, China now claims a coastline of 18,000 kilometres plus territorial waters – two-thirds of them disputed with other countries – covering 3.6 million square kilometres. And, as the first round-the-world voyage of Chinese warships in 2002 suggests, the whole notion of a limited oceanic “borderlands” for China may rapidly be becoming obsolete.
The Psychological Symbiosis of Centre and Borderlands
Both foreign and Chinese critics of the overweening political centre in Chinese political theory have taken its apparently absolute claims at face value, and they have stressed the malignant effects of the ideal upon China’s development. The sociologist S.N. Eisenstadt, in a stimulating 1978 book about “revolution and the transformation of societies”, proposed that the Chinese political centre, with its strong “Confucian orientation,” was more “monopolistic” and more “rigid” than were equivalent political centres in Western Europe. Its alleged “rigidity” even accounted for the supposedly greater violence of the Chinese revolution compared to the English and French ones. The more extreme Chinese revolutionary violence was a response to the frustration that “major strata” in China suffered from their political centre’s coerciveness.
Chinese critics of the centre ideal have been even more severe. At the outset of the People’s Republic of China, in 1951, the long-time Qinghua University ethnologist Pan Guangdan (1899-1967) published a newspaper article assessing what he called the historic ethnic chauvinism of the Chinese people. Pan attacked the “chronic disease” of the Chinese people, their boastful view of themselves, expressed in the fantasy that their polity contained everything “under Heaven” and that their rulers could convert the entire world into a family.
The strong political centre was a necessary accompaniment of this notion of the legitimate conversion of the world into a household. Such a centre had to be all-encompassing in its view of itself, comprising definitions of its identity that were at once geographical, patriarchal, cultural-ritualistic, and military. But – Pan wrote in 1951 – the geographical element in the centre’s definition of itself was a fabricated value that would become increasingly problematic once it was discovered that the earth was round; and as the Chinese political centre’s fictive geography, patriarchal emotional foundations, and cultural mobilization ambitions hardened over time, that centre would require more and more military force to repress opposition to it.
In Pan’s perspective, the borderlands minorities would be the principal victims. The political centre’s language, in talking about these minorities, resembled the language with which parents “humbugged small children”. The centre’s policy towards its minorities, who were regarded as though they were children, could be described as a policy of “mama-ism” (mama zhuyi) (Pan’s Chinese rendering of the then fashionable American term “momism” … The Chinese Communist Republic was as guilty as was the Empire. Pan scathingly observed that all the new PRC had done, in dealing with its minorities, was to change the bottle in which the anti-minority “medicine” came. The “medicine” itself remained unchanged: the PRC’s Mongolia-Tibet Commission of 1951 was nothing more than the Qing dynasty’s old Court of Colonial Affairs (Lifanyuan), which had administered the peoples of central Asia from the 1600s to the 1800s, in a different guise.
Up to a point there were, indeed, bloody collisions between the “rigid” political centre and the peoples of the borderlands, whose ethnic and cultural and political boundaries (including those of Han Chinese settlers) were shifting and negotiable. When the bureaucratizing centre did try to impose its ideas of administrative integration upon the mutable and pluralistic border world, the result could be something like the Guizhou killing fields of the Ming and Qing dynasties. This was the great slaughter of aboriginal peoples in the Chinese southwest that began roughly about the time of the initial slaughter of aboriginals in the Americas in the aftermath of Christopher Columbus’s voyages.
But the sheer ecological variety of the borderlands dictated that there would be variety in the interaction of central designs and local histories. Of all the border wars conducted by China’s imperial centre in the 1700s, the campaign that lasted longest, cost the most, and probably involved the mobilization of the greatest number of Qing troops, was Beijing’s struggle to subdue about thirty thousand Tibetan Khamba hill people in the mountains of west Sichuan. The terrain here made central Asia’s, by contrast, seem ideal for warfare; and the centre’s effort to control the relative handful of west Sichuan Tibetans – the Chechens of eighteenth-century Asia with regard to their skill at humbling a bigger opponent – probably cost it more than twice what it had cost Beijing to conquer all of Xinjiang in the same century.
Nor were ecological limits the centre’s only problem in managing its borders. The central realm and the borderlands realm were locked into a psychological symbiosis. In this symbiosis, the borderlands might compel institutional change at the centre (as with the creation of the Qing dynasty’s secretive “Grand Council”) or raise subversive questions about the political centre’s own inconsistent bureaucratic culture. In the 1700s and 1800s, for example, the Beijing government’s great project to reduce the hereditary power of almost eighteen hundred minority chiefs (tusi, “local officers”) in the south and southwest inspired academicians in the court to ask why the political centre itself tolerated so many haughty hereditary clerks in its own Six Ministries. The borderlands, in other words, compelled the centre to confront the tensions between its own publicly universalist, but privately counter-universalist, political tendencies.
It was not just the borderlands whose boundaries were shifting and negotiable; it was also the boundaries of what the political centre itself was supposed to be or to mean. To put it in social science language … the centre tried to concentrate different types of political capital: military, fiscal, cultural-informational, and moral-symbolic. But it did so in varying degrees, with the needs for the concentration of one type sometimes colliding with those for another. As the paymaster of one of the world’s oldest bureaucracies, the imperial centre was often insolvent … The centre’s shifting boundaries of action and meaning ensured that borderlands political theory would be part of a long Chinese debate about bureaucracy as a whole …
… The centre’s obsession with the utopianization of place-names was no doubt part of its effort to reconcile the two parts of the state’s “double truth”: the teleological and the functional. The names of countless Chinese administrative bailiwicks, ranging from Changan to Nanning, included vocabulary elements (an, ning, ping) that evoked peace or tranquillity. (Pan Guangdan thought that, in 1951, about one-quarter of Guizhou’s counties had traces of the “pacification” ideology in their names.) In contrast, the naming procedures under European colonialism were far more miscellaneous, being a welter of saints’ names (San Francisco), borrowed aboriginal terms (Toronto), transposed European place-names (New York), sailors’ names (Vancouver), and a small number of names with utopian implications (Philadelphia). But if the Chinese centre’s hope for “tranquilized” borderlands contrasts with the more heterogeneous naming practices of European colonialism, it is clear that its naming game encoded needs at least as much as it did facts. And the primary need was, through subliminal persuasiveness and with little cost, to enable a chronically weak imperial core to achieve an idealized administrative model of space. Significantly, the Chinese state intellectuals who helped make the names were frequently accused of taking an insufficient interest in China’s borderlands.
The Borderlands and State Intellectuals’ Imperial Amnesia
The criticism that Chinese thinkers were indifferent to their borderlands is current in China today. But it also has a long genealogy. If we sample its genealogical layers by beginning in the present and working backward, the first stop must be the China Borderlands History and Geography Research Centre that was set up by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1983 … [In] one of its first works, a 1992 anthology of documents concerning the history of the boundary between China and Vietnam … [it comes] close to substituting a borderlands explanation of Chinese history for the old Maoist class warfare explanation, [because] the preface claims that borderlands crises, and their management, have determined the problem of order and disorder in China as a whole …
… Elite indifference to the borderlands was also a staple complaint in the pre-1911 empire. In 1820, the reformer Gong Zizhen (1792-1841) had attacked people whom he called “stupid literati of shallow experience” and “rustic students down in the villages” for questioning both the Qianlong emperor’s intelligence and his humanity because he expanded China’s borders by conquering Xinjiang. Even earlier than that, in the Ming dynasty, the scholar-official and iconoclast Lü Kun (1536-1618) had denounced the Chinese elite strategists who did think about the frontiers for the complacent staleness of their theories of frontier defence, which privileged the building of brick walls and more brick walls. Women and children all “laughed” at the futility of such schemes, Lü said, yet “border ministers” declined to abandon them …
… [If] there is any truth in the accusations that Chinese state intellectuals did not celebrate China’s expanding borderlands, we have to ask which important political theory traditions in China appeared to be the most imperiled by the Ming Empire’s huge frontier armies or by the incorporation into China of Xinjiang in the 1700s. There were at least two, one of which was the welfare-based approach to political obligation. It went back to the reciprocity principle of the classical pre-imperial period of small political jurisdictions in China, when the people, according to legend, obeyed their rulers because “they ate their princes’ food and wore their princes’ clothes”. The numerous thinkers who wrote about poverty in the Ming-Qing period were quick to blame poverty not on the sinfulness or the shortcomings of the poor but, rather, on the excessive administrative scale of the empire and its corresponding decline in feudal political intimacy. It was thought to foster alienation and to frustrate proposals for the effective redistribution of wealth.
The second tradition that was contradicted by China’s expanding borders was that of the empire’s faith in a salaried bureaucracy that could employ poor but talented officials who lacked private fortunes and that, through its law of “avoidance”, proved its principled indifference to local family or geographical loyalties. The law of avoidance, continuously elaborated since the Han dynasty, compelled officials to serve in government positions far from their homes. It was – when it was enforced (which was not always) – one of the most physically and economically exacting public interest principles ever devised, even if it was a bureaucratic rather than a constitutional one. The bigger the empire, the further officials might have to travel, on inadequate salaries, to their appointments.
Lü Kun, the Ming scholar-official already mentioned, significantly linked the two concepts of “border planning and popular distress” in his dissection of the Ming border crisis at the end of the 1500s. Lü insisted upon looking at the administrative space of the Ming Empire from the viewpoint of its postal relay stations’ sedan chair bearers and horse coolies. They were the suffering peasants conscripted to leave their families in order to move promoted or transferred bureaucrats hundreds of miles or more in compliance with the law of avoidance. (Lü’s writings anticipated George Orwell’s later look at the British Empire’s frontiers in Burma from the perspective of its clerks and policemen.) To reduce the misery of the empire’s conscripted coolies, Lü thought, the distance its promoted officials had to travel must be reduced. His scheme for doing this was to shrink the law of avoidance by subdividing China into three bureaucratic appointment zones (South, North, and Centre) and by stipulating that no civil officials (with his conscripted servants) should have to cross more than one zone to take up an appointment away from home.
Lü Kun – like the other mandarins of the Ming and Qing dynasties who proposed China’s conversion into multiple bureaucratic appointments and travel zones – reflected Chinese political theory’s quest for sub-imperial forms of administrative space. In comparative terms, this was looking for a bureaucratic equivalent of the more feudal low-cost “composite monarchies” of Europe, with their patchwork juxtapositions of realms with separate laws, immunities, and even ecclesiastical establishments. The concern with cost-cutting forms of sub-imperial space creation clearly worked against the emergence of Chinese Horace Greeleys or John Buchans – mandarins with an urge to incorporate distant borderlands. But the high rates of indebtedness of the Chinese civil officials who did have to travel great distances to their posts, without being able to acquire feudal estates (like Spanish officials in the Americas) when they got there, does make their distaste for the borderlands more understandable. And there was another threat to the well-being of mandarins that encouraged them to see the borderlands as a breeding ground of potential catastrophes, whose management – even at the best of times – was a Sisyphean enterprise. This was the threat of imperial overstretch.
The Imperial Overstretch Fear in Views of the Borderlands
The political theory of China’s Ming dynasty (1368-1644), much of it still unexplored, is probably one of the greatest repositories we have of preindustrial wisdom about the only too enduring subject of imperial overstretch. Ming China apparently mobilized something like 4 million soldiers (ranging from hereditary army troops to auxiliary mercenaries) with varying degrees of dependency on the centre’s budget. Globally, at that time, this was probably a unique situation … Frontier armies’ endless drain on the centre’s resources only reinforced the civil elite’s borderlands hypochondria, for reasons both obvious and not so obvious. In 1605 the Ming grand secretary Xu Guangqi (1562-1633), Paul Xu to Chinese Christians, publicly asserted that the two greatest dangers to the stability of China were its monarchy and its frontiers. What they had in common was runaway spending: it was bound to lead to a terminal financial crisis …
… But as with the law of avoidance, the general issue of the performance of China’s civil service was also what was at stake in this frontier-hating debate. The borderlands got absorbed into battles over the theorization of consumption standards in the Chinese core itself. To high officials like Xu Guangqi, only “rich frontiers” – by which they meant economically self-sufficient ones – would permit the political centre to pay salaries to its officials (who were spread all over China) that would be decent enough to keep them free of corruption. The elite’s borderlands hypochondria therefore stemmed from its view of the borderlands as being part of a fiscal zero-sum game. Increased costs on the frontiers were thought to undermine the material upkeep, and thus the behaviour, of the political centres’ administrators … The greater theoretical contingency of consumption standards, in a Chinese empire ruled at least in part by poorly salaried officials, influenced Chinese elite views of borderlands space.
For Chinese political theorists, until recently, the problem was not an imperial centre that created underdevelopment on its borderlands but, rather, imperial borderlands that threatened to create underdevelopment at the centre.
The Qing Empire, in its prime, modified this situation without completely banishing it. In the 1700s, Manchu-ruled China much more resembled a successful empire of the sort that a historian like Immanuel Wallerstein would recognize: that is, an empire with a dominant core and the capacity to transfer wealth efficiently from its peripheries to that core. For one thing, there was more wealth to transfer in the Qing Empire than there was in the Ming, thanks to a more rapidly commercializing economy that China’s rulers could exploit. Demographic trends also made Manchu-ruled China look more like a modern empire: remarkable population growth encouraged a migration of perhaps 10 million Han Chinese settlers, between 1644 and 1799, to the southwest borderlands, to Mongolia and Manchuria, to Taiwan, and even to Xinjiang.
Equally remarkable, Chinese elite thinkers began to take a more benign view of the borderlands as a place where wars and popular welfare could be reconciled. In 1820 Gong Zizhen previewed more modern forms of the utopian production of frontier space with his proposal to make Xinjiang the antidote to a decadent China. In his reform plan, all the rootless poor people in north China, beginning in Beijing, would be rounded up and moved to Xinjiang to make a fresh start. Gong’s version of a mandarin New Jerusalem in the Chinese northwest included the characteristic hope that Xinjiang could be kept pure for such people by restricting the import of corrupting consumer goods from the Chinese core.
But the Manchu emperors themselves still upheld old negative views of the borderlands, and they converted Xinjiang into a banishment site for the officials, both Manchu and Chinese, whom they punished by sending into exile. Even major Chinese scholarly authorities on Mongolia and Xinjiang in the early 1800s, such as Qi Yunshi (1751-1815) and Xu Song (1781-1848), hardly resembled Aurel Stein: both had backgrounds as involuntary Chinese official exiles in the region. Down to the late 1800s, the emerging welfarist definitions of the frontiers coexisted with the old Sisyphean view that saw them as spaces that generated cycles of crisis and catastrophe …
Thus the whole story of the triumphant conquest of Xinjiang could be made to serve the purpose of a much older, more pessimistic theme: that of the vulnerability of the imperial centre. Zuo’s view – if Xinjiang goes, then Beijing goes – has to be one of the most extravagant domino theories ever conceived …
The Decline of the Catastrophic View of the Borderlands
At the end of the 1800s, the Chinese elite began to shift its outlook on China’s borderlands. The Sisyphean, or cyclical-catastrophic, view of the borders faded in favour of a perspective that might be called linear-providential. This entertained visions of frontier development in which frontiers were seen as part of a willed progress towards some emancipatory goal.
Chinese ethnic nationalism promoted the shift. After the Japanese annexation of Manchuria, for example, in 1932 the young Pan Guangdan warned that what China had lost to the Japanese in its northeast borderlands was not just mineral wealth and an outlet for its surplus population but also a “great garden area” in which the superior, more fit elements of the Chinese people could test themselves and improve the race. (Imported theories of ethnic struggle influenced Pan, most notably those of the Yale University geographer Ellsworth Huntington, who had praised Chinese colonists in Manchuria in a study of “natural selection and Chinese national characteristics”.) But Chinese nationalism could combine with another tendency, this one borrowed from Western Enlightenment thought: the tendency to link planned social progress, including the remaking of nature, with ventures in spatial engineering. In this synthesis, frontier space might be imagined more as artificially designed “virtual territory” that could satisfy national needs and less as historically lived space with its own particular identities …
… New models of developmental colonialism accompanied the Chinese elite’s abandonment of the old pessimistic “border planning and popular distress” anxieties of the pre-1911 mandarins and its growing interest in prescribing history-accelerating manipulations of borderlands space. Not surprisingly, Xinjiang was especially vulnerable to this trend. In 1910 one of the last Qing dynasty governors of Xinjiang, Yuan Dahua, summarized the disastrous effects, in this newly created province, of trying, in the spirit of the Qing emperors’ neo-Confucian universalist creed that “all things are of one body” (wanwu yiti), to impose Chinese schooling on a sparsely populated homeland of Turks, Kazakhs, Mongols, and Chinese Muslims. Yuan wrote that the results of forcing the children of Xinjiang’s “turbaned peoples” to go to Chinese schools were that their parents hired the children of “beggars” to go to school in their children’s place; or sold their property and fled to Russia; or rallied at their mosques and talked of vengeance. Chinese teachers had to put Turkic students in fetters and handcuffs to keep them from fleeing Chinese schools …
… But despite the transition to a more providential view of the borderlands, and the use of foreign developmental models, the Chinese political centre, minus its monarchy, remains intact. China’s sufferings in the first half of the twentieth century only strengthened its persuasiveness. Before the 1937-45 Sino-Japanese War, Chinese Communist leaders talked of creating a “Chinese federal republic,” or a China that was a “federation of soviets”. After the war broke out, they became wary of entertaining the idea of even a nominal federalism – the post-1911 version of sub-imperial space creation. What Eisenstadt called the political centre’s “monopolistic” instincts also remained strong; for example, the PRC’s 1995 law for producing and publishing maps gives the Beijing State Council and Foreign Ministry exclusive authority to produce standardized maps of China, going all the way back to 1840.
The quixotic nature of the political centre’s ambition to impose a single normative managerial framework upon its far-flung borderlands is still apparent. Yet the borderland societies are too complex for such a framework. Their past histories are so diverse as to compel the untidy coexistence of different mentalities, from different periods, even among the centre’s own strategists in Beijing (and Shanghai). The contrast between China’s northwest and northeast frontiers underscores this point. In the northwest, almost utopian formulations of multi-state cooperation seem plausible to the Chinese centre; in the northeast, at the end of the twentieth century, multi-state cooperation seems very difficult to conceptualize.
To take the northwest borderlands first, in 1996-97 China joined Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgizstan, and Tajikistan in founding an association of the “Shanghai Five” countries. The “Shanghai Five” were dedicated to multilateral border cooperation, especially in the exploitation of energy resources … But it was surely characteristic that the rise of the Shanghai Five generated quasi-utopian enthusiasms among Chinese thinkers that went far beyond technical debates over the location of oil or natural gas pipelines.
One Chinese Russia specialist wrote that the purpose of the Shanghai Five must be to construct a high-tech Silk Road. This new Silk Road would have to be both spiritual and material; visible and invisible; underground, above ground, and in the air; and capable of weakening all frictions caused by differences in ethnicity, religion, and language. China’s mission, as the leader of the new Silk Road commonwealth, would be to “congeal” or “coagulate” Central Asian economic life by transmitting Chinese reform experiences to Central Asians. China would even have to “fill in the historical blank spaces” of countries like Kazakhstan and Kyrgizstan, whose national identities were weak.
This vision – of a Christopher Columbus-like Chinese political centre heroically constituting a new multicivilizational world on China’s borders – transcended economics. And, in so doing, it failed to capture the sheer technical difficulties of coordinating energy, land, tax, and currency policies among the five countries, let alone the difficulty of coordinating even the different prices in China’s own natural gas market. But, as in the old days, a “double truth” was at work here, with its teleological and functional concerns far from perfectly aligned. And the transposition of Mao Zedong’s old “blankness” metaphor, from the Chinese people themselves to the countries of the Central Asian borderlands, was suggestive on a number of counts: in both instances the metaphor justified the prescriptive activity of a strong central leadership …
… Two Fudan University economists … warned that China must use Northeast Asia cooperation – among China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea – to construct a “tripolar” world order instead of a Euro-American bipolar one. Otherwise the “natural laws” of the strong-eat-the-weak global economy might “eliminate” China as a serious competitor …
… Northeast Asia is special. In no other Chinese borderlands does the long shadow of modern history so complicate the Chinese centre’s sense of its own capacity to cooperate with other powers. In much of the northeast, serious state boundary creation, at least of the European post-Westphalian type, did not begin before 1858. This was late and, more important, it was virtually on the eve of Japan’s prodigious self-modernization. From this point on, Japanese scholars dominated the study of Northeast Asian societies and their histories; a specialized Chinese understanding of the region remained comparatively shallow …
… For China now, the Japanese economy remains that of a rival whose power must be overcome rather than that of a neighbour, like Kazakhstan, whose economic activities must be “coagulated” by Beijing. As one Chinese strategist wrote in 1999, China must use Northeast Asia cooperation schemes to smash Japan’s hierarchical “flying geese” model of economic progress for Asia. This could only be done by using European investment capital to upgrade China’s industrial technology faster than the Japanese lead goose might like, Europeans having fewer “misgivings” than the Japanese about investing in the improvement of Chinese technology. As a Chinese environmentalist complained in 2002, the main reason for the failure to create a borderlands environmental community in Northeast Asia was China’s view of itself – in its relations with Japan and South Korea – as a victimized developing country. Influenced by this view, China’s only interest was how much financial aid the Chinese government could extract from Japan, its richer counterpart; the Chinese government showed far too little interest in its own managerial and technical contributions to Sino-Japanese environmental cooperation.
As in the past, therefore, different borderlands created mutable “dispositions” at the political centre, even if the centre’s teleological “essence” remained constant. The Chinese political centre today is embodied in a much more complex array of formal institutions than it was two hundred years ago: the CCP Central Committee, the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Consultative Conference, and the Central Military Commission. This centre also rules over the most extensively militarized state in Chinese history; its resources and ceremonies include the People’s Liberation Army, the armed police, the people’s militia, eleven military industrial groups, a state border defence commission (charged with everything from improving roads to television broadcasting in border areas), the roughly 60 percent of Chinese college students who receive some form of military training, and (since 2002) an annual September National Defence Education Day. But China remains, as in the past, a huge country with one political centre and multiple types of borderlands. The sheer breadth of the political engineering required to reconcile the two ensures that, in the minds of the Chinese elite, the imagining of borderlands space (and the logic of visualization applied to the process of such imagining) will continue to be affected by efforts to resolve perceived problems of power and knowledge – problems that exist quite independently of the real borderlands. Or, to put it another way, elite pictures of the borderlands are, as often as not, displaced forms of more general concerns in political theory …
Of course, to some extent, this is also true in the Western world … The difference is that the Chinese teleological sense of life as having a developing purpose uses China’s borderlands but remains tied to faith in a commanding political centre. And if the catastrophic view of the borderlands has gone, the centre’s borderlands hypochondria has nonetheless enlarged its rhetorical character. As changes in missile development and information technology have increased the spaces the centre must guard (land, sea, air, space, cyberspace), the perceived threats to those spaces have also increased. Now border threats are defined as including “terrorisms, separatisms, and extremisms” (in the words of the State Council’s December 2002 paper on national defence). Here is a potential border defence overstretch problem such as the Ming dynasty critics of imperial overstretch could scarcely have imagined.
The Source:
Alexander Woodside, ‘The Centre and the Borderlands in Chinese Political Theory’, in The Chinese State at the Borders, edited by Diana Lary, University of British Columbia 2007 [pp. 11-28]
From today’s newspaper, which for US readers is your tomorrow i.e. June 6th:
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.