The Chinese State at the Borders.

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

Although China historically placed utmost faith in its role as commanding political centre, its huge and varied borderlands provoked both fear and fascination among its political thinkers. How the Chinese elite considered their frontiers is ably discussed in this collection of 13 essays that cover China’s complex interactions with the peoples and issues scattered along its 20,000 kilometres of continental borders.

As recently as 2002, China’s State Council saw its land borders as hotbeds of “terrorisms, extremisms, and separatisms” that potentially threatened Beijing’s position as “centre.” Indeed, the presumption here, that of “imperial overreach,” is startlingly similar to the fiscal and logistic demands border defence and security placed on the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). While Louis XIV could at best afford a French standing army of 400,000 in the late 1600s, Ming emperors struggled to fund a huge combined force of nearly four million. Although border defence and reckless spending bankrupted the Ming, the Qing (1644–1911) ran what historians would recognize as a “successful” empire capable of transferring wealth and resources from the periphery to the centre. This was greatly aided by the enormous 18th-century expansion of China’s population and economy that led to officially sanctioned colonization of hinterlands and the displacement of Aboriginal societies. At the popular level, China’s frontiers were regarded variously as threatening, exotic, uninhabitable, or simply desolate and barren, with populations that were suspicious and potentially dangerous. Unlike the Western experience, particularly Frederick Jackson Turner’s optimistic interpretation of the American frontier’s effect on political participation and national character, the Chinese relationship with its periphery produced deep-seated defensiveness.

China’s current frontier issues are reminiscent of the historical problems covered in this timely and useful volume. Indeed, rebellious Muslims minorities on China’s Inner Asian borders and, importantly, the ongoing dilemma of Tibetan demands for sovereignty are best understood against the historical and philosophical background the contributors to this significant collection analyze with insight and enthusiasm.