Person:

Elliott, Mark

Mark C. Elliott examines the Qing geographical imagination as it related to the frontier region of Manchuria. He identifies the different approaches adopted by the Qing court toward this area and shows how each of these perspectives generated a separate geographical and political identity for the region.

The last few years have seen a vigorous public policy debate emerge over a “second generation” ethnic policy (di’erdai minzu zhengce) which, if implemented, would constitute a major revision of ethnic politics in China. Despite the fact that nationalities policy is a notoriously sensitive subject within China, the debate is happening openly in newspapers, academic journals and on the Internet. The prominence accorded to anthropological theory and international comparison is a notable feature of the debate. This article first explores the main positions in the ongoing policy discussion, then goes on to argue that, rather than comparing China’s non-Han peoples to minority immigrant populations in the industrialized democracies, a better comparison is to indigenous peoples. It then considers why this perspective is completely missing from the present debate.

Since at least the 1960s, the importance of the tremendous territorial expansion under Qing rule to the modern history of China has been generally acknowledged. Indeed, one can say that the frontier story is one of the things that makes the Qing “Qing.” However, only in the last twenty years has the study of what is now termed the “borderlands” come into its own as a sub-field. This essay begins by describing some key concepts and terms in the study of the Qing frontier, including the Manchu word jecen. It then raises the problem of narrative frameworks, asking how we might best contextualize the growth of the empire, before going on to explore the implications of the discursive shift represented by the “New Qing History” and the extensive research on Qing borderlands associated therewith. A poem by the Mongol poet Na-xun Lan-bao provides the focus for a concluding discussion of a distinctive Qing frontier sensibility.

The Eight Banners (Chinese baqi 八旗/Manchu jakūn gūsa) is well known as the omnibus military, social, political, and economic institution that played a crucial role in enabling the Manchu conquest of China in the middle seventeenth century and the establishment of the Qing state (1644-1912), the last of China’s dynastic regimes. Along with their Mongol and Han allies in the banners, the Manchus were vastly outnumbered by Han Chinese supporters of the Ming state (1368-1644), not to mention various rebel armies, and formed a tiny group next to the general Chinese population. Yet, despite being so greatly outnumbered, they nonetheless seized and retained power for 267 years.