James Scott and the anarchist history of Zomia

Like James Scott's other books, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009) is interesting and has a simple message that sticks in the reader's memory. It will certainly stick in mine for a long time. Many hills and mountainous regions in South-East Asia were first populated by refugees. These mountains functioned as a no-man's-land, as a refuge for people fleeing the state. The so-called "tribes" inhabiting these hills and mountains have often been portrayed - especially by the agricultural "paddy kingdoms" from which they escaped - as barbarians or backward populations stuck at a primitive stage of social development. But as Scott points out, the hill peoples were not backward or primitive at all. They knew only too well what civilization amounted too: taxes, forced labor and conscription. They knew civilization and had freely chosen to escape it.

Since the book is well summarized by Scott’s own abstract for a conference paper, I’ll start by quoting that:

The hill peoples of mainland Southeast Asia have been viewed, until recently, by scholars and valley peoples, a ‘backward population’ that has failed to make the transition to settled, wet-rice cultivation and incorporation into state structures. This paper, instead, treats the hill-dwellers as essentially a maroon, runaway, state-fleeing population which has, over the past two millennia, peopled the hills. Moving away, especially from Han expansion, into this ‘zone of refuge’, hill people are best conceived of as a “state-effect”. Their social structure, agricultural practices, and cultural values make most sense in this light. The concept of “escape agriculture” is introduced to explain how swiddening and foraging are practiced, in large part, because they are resistant to appropriation, unlike irrigated, wet-rice cultivation which is tailor-made for appropriation. The concept of “escape social structure” is introduced to account for practices of dispersion, fission, and acephaly designed to evade capture by slave-raiding and incorporation into state structures. The history of conscription, warfare, epidemics, crop-failure, taxes and corvée in the valley states is examined to show how they may account for patterns of demographic flight from lowland state cores. Much of the distinctiveness of the “hills” as an agro-ecological and cultural zone, I argue, stems from the fact that the hills have been populated by those who have voluntarily fled or have been driven out of the alluvial valleys. (Abstract to the paper “Zomia as a ‘State-Repelling Space’”, to the conference ”’Zomia’ as a Framework for Conceiving Scholarship on Upland Mainland Southeast Asia”).

The word "Zomia" used by Scott refers to the mountainous regions of the Himalayas and lower ranges that run from the Central Highlands of Vietnam through most of Laos, southwest China, northern Thailand, northern Burma, and into Northeastern India. It was originally coined by van Schendel and is derived from “zo” which means “hill” in some dialects along the Burma-India/Bangladesh border (Scott 2009:14).

Scott's portrayal of hills and mountains is that it can be linked to ideas I've been interested in myself, such as those of no-man's-land or the common. The people depicted in his book flee to spaces that are still free to use - leftover spaces that offer refuge and access to subsistence resources. Scott calls them “non-state spaces” – “locations where, owing largely to geographical obstacles, the state has particular difficulty in establishing and maintaining its authority” (Scott 2009:13). Such spaces were always the subject of derison from people adopting the point of view of the "civilizations" of the plain. In Vietnam, people without a fixed abode or ancestral place were stigmatized as “people of the four corners of the world”, while the Chinese described the Lahu of Yunnan as “people of the mountains, forests and streams” (ibid. 102f). The colonial and early postcolonial regimes, like the classical states, considered these areas terra nullius or inutile, in the sense that they did not even repay the costs of administration in terms of grain or revenue (ibid. 340 n16). Not surprisingly, civilizational discourses of all kinds - such as the Chinese distinction of "raw" and "cooked", or the Western idea of civilizational progress - come in for grinding attacks by Scott. Such views, Scott emphasizes, disregard that statelessness can be a deliberate choice.

For this choice to be possible, however, open and equal access to subsistence resources was crucial. “Common-property land tenure and an open frontier are… the material conditions that underwrite egalitarianism" (ibid. 279). Such access made possible the foraging and swiddening which Scott calls "two major state-repelling subsistence routines". The rice paddy, by contrast, is ideal for the ruler: not only is rice the crop that feeds the greatest population per area unit, but it also ties the peasantry to the place, it imposes a regular, collective rhythm on life, and it can easily be confiscated or burned or destroyed as retaliation. By contrast, in the hills sweet potatoes or cassava could be grown individually, without need of cooperation, according to the needs of the family, almost anytime during the year. It could be grown by swiddening farmers in the hills, out of reach of the eyes of officials, and being below ground, it could not be easily harmed (ibid. 207). The Irish, Scott remarks, chose to cultivate the potato not only because it provided many calories but also because it could not be confiscated or burned (ibid. 196).

Among the conditions that facilitated escape were also "a large open frontier" with access to open stateless spaces, mobility, peripheral location, a flexible social structure that could change size and institutions, availability of crops that could be used in the mountains, and knowledge of foraging, hunting, swiddening or pastoral nomadism.
 
Being surrounded by plentiful "stateless space" and lacking the capability to check people's freedom of movement, it is no wonder that ancient states were desperate for means to keep or increase their populations. This certainly puts the famous Chinese philosophical texts in perspective. I'm thinking of when Mencius says that if rulers are benevolent and virtuous, people will flock to them out of their own accord, from all directions, as water flows downwards.

There is a way to win the people; win their hearts and you will win the people. There is a way to win their hearts; amass what they want for them; do not impose what they dislike on them. That is all. The people turn to the benevolent as water flows downwards or as animals head for the wilds. Thus the otter drives fish to the deep; thus the hawk drives birds to the bushes... (Mencius, tr. D. C. Lau, Penguin, 2004:81)

Even while reading Mencius, I remember I was vaguely reflecting on the social background of such statements. Clearly, this must have been a period when the population in general was much more "nomadic" and less settled than it would later become, much more ready to move if it didn't please it to stay. Their freedom to move gave them leverage. What Mencius was saying was basically that rulers had to be benevolent because otherwise their subjects would escape, to the mountains or elsewhere.

States didn't just rely on virtue, however, to prevent population loss. They also systematically tried to block escape routes. Echoing an old suggestion made by Owen Lattimore (which is today supported by scholars such as Christopher Beckwith), Scott argues that the Great Wall was as much for keeping the population inside as to keep barbarians out (ibid. 110). The state also tried to prohibit subsistence activities in the mountains and wetlands or - as in the case of the Legalists - to systematically starve the population into grain or paddy rice farming by separating them from the open commons (ibid 72). As the wars of the Burmese and Siamese kings show, states went to war to capture populations and force them to relocate in the paddy deltas.

Gradually the agricultural kingdoms and empires grew in size and power, pushing back the frontiers of the "stateless" areas. Scott's book contains much historical material illustrating this process. Chinas' southward expansion, for instance, was accompanied by brutal military campaigns of expulsion and extermination that created wave after wave of refugees of various origin, often lumpted together under the name "Miao". Scott points out that this term was applied indiscriminately to almost any acephalous people on the frontier and that "miao" hence lacked any specific ethnic identity over time (ibid. 140). Generally, Scott adopts a radical constructivist view of ethnicity in his work, pointing out that ethnicity and tribes are state-effects rather than natural givens. “Ethnicity and ‘tribe’ begin exactly where taxes and sovereignty end” (ibid. 114f).

Rather than being primitive and unaquainted with civilization, many of the hill peoples that populate today's Zomia are people who actively fled civilization. Many are descendants from refugees escaping civil wars and strife in China such as the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) or the Panthay Rebellion in Guizhou and Yunnan (1854-73). For instance, many Chinese entering northern Siam in the late nineteenth century were remnants of the Taiping forces. Even as late as in the 20th century, defeated Kuomintang troops ettled in what is today known as the Golden Triangle, where they came to control much of the opium trade together with their hill allies. In 1958, under pressure from Chinese party cadres and soldiers, fully one third of the Wa population crossed the border from the People’s Republic into Burma seeking refuge (ibid. 154).

What is the situation for non-state spaces today? Private property and the modern national state have eradicated them. Sovereignty now reaches all the way to the border of the next state, the hills are increasingly incorporated into the state-space for the extraction of various resources and cultural assimilation is encouraged. Demographic factors are making valley people migrate into the hills, engulfing them and bringing with them their state (ibid. 11f).

Certainly, one might fantasize about new zones where state control is weak. Criminal networks, black economies, moments of chaos, situations when the apparatus of control is overburdened and breaks down, as during the recent urban unrest in Britain. We might even try to imagine ways to increase our subsistence knowhow in order to become less dependent on the regular labor market or our employers. I cannot help recalling here a book I read a year ago, Boku wa ryôshi ni natta (I became a hunter, 2008). It's written by Senmatsu Shin'ya, a former student activist in Kyoto who kept fowl and pigs on the university campus and who is now a hunter, using traditional methods to catch deer and wildboar in the mountains. Although he claims to have dropped out of political activism, in the light of Scott's book his life-style is political indeed!

If I should voice one objection to Scott's book, it would be that it is not entirely clear what the "state", "government" or "sovereignty" is that the hill people escape. States are not only integrated by taxes and forced labour, but also symbolically. If I look at Japanese history, for instance, there are many "hill peoples" that have been regarded as primitives or outcasts and who also in other respects appear comparable to the ones described by Scott. But as Amino Yoshihiko and others have pointed out, many of these peoples have played important roles in symbolically underpinning imperial power through their association with the religious or sacred power of the hills - for instance through being employed as religious specialists on ritual occasions or through special offerings to the court in exchange for which they would be offered imperial protection. This mechanism is connected to a fact which Scott does discuss at length - namely the fact that the hills were also the abode of holy men and women, prophets and hermits. What I want to suggest is that the exchanges between the hills and the imperial centre often made the hill populations part of the symbolic edifice of the state, and this, it seems, was also a role that many of these people relished. While I realize that it is unfair to use Japan as a case to criticize a work on South-east Asia, a question I would like to pose to Scott is whether he sees any similar symbolic mechanisms of incorporation in the societies he studies. If he does, does the "art of not being governed" also extend to how such mechanisms can be evaded?

Scott's book is rare in trying to look at history from a non-state perspective, taking the side of the "primitives"", "mountain peoples" or "nomads" who have always been looked down on by the "civilized", settled peoples of the plain, the empires and the paddy-kingdoms. In seeing through the self-conceit of civilization, it belongs with other refreshing books, such as Marshall Sahlin's Stone-age Economics, Pierre Clastres' Society against the State, the books of Amino Yoshihiko or the essays of Bruce Chatwin.

Nomads and empires

During the last year I have been doing some reading about China and its steppe neighbors (Xiongnu, Mongols, Uyghur...). My hope is that these brief jottings about what I thought while reading these books will help me put the various perspectives offered on the subject of empires and nomads into some kind of order.

The common association of steppe nomads with mobility and military power - think for instance of Deleuze and Guattari's "nomadic war machine" - seems partly rooted in the actual conduct of warfare. The inability of successive Chinese dynasties to ever defeat the nomads decisively before the Qing Dynasty stemmed from the fact that the nomads could almost withdraw into the interior of the steppe, retreating to a point where the bulky imperial armies could be ambushed or where their supply lines would be stretched too far. The empires' means of controlling the nomads were therefore limited, the best results usually being gained by playing out nomad clans against each other, domesticating part of them by selective rewards such as trade or political support in inter-clan struggles. When nothing else worked, the empire would have to buy peace by tribute, as the Han Dynasty did from the Xiongnu or the Tang Dynasty from the Uyghur, or attempt to wall itself in, as the Ming Dynasty did when it abandoned the steppe and erected the Great Wall.


Thomas Barfield

One influential theory about the relations between China and the steppe nomads is Thomas Barfield's. His 1989 book The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (the main argument of which is recapitulated in a 2001 essay, "The Shadow Empires") argues that the nomadic empires of the Xiongnu, Mongols and Uyghurs were "shadow empires" or secondary formations, rising and falling in tandem with the primary empire, China. Unable to tax their own too mobile and pasturing population, they lived on extracting wealth from China. This idea that nomad societies were "non-autharcic" and hence dependent on trading with or raiding neighboring agricultural peoples is derived from A. M. Khazanov, who made this the central thesis of his 1984 book Nomads and the Outside World. Barfield develops this idea by arguing that the nomads' primary aim was almost never conquest (the Mongol empire was a rare exception). Instead, they simply sought to gain access to the resources which they lacked themselves - if not by trade, then by raiding. Regular wars would only break out as the Chinese tried to shut out or drive away the nomads, closing border markets or abrogating treaties. Barfield points out that the nomads' dependence on the "primary empire", China, explains why they often intervened to support tottering the Chinese dynasties against domestic turmoil, as the Xiongnu did during the Han and the Uyghurs during the Tang.

Barfield mainly discusses the steppe polities of Mongolia, people familiar with trade and caravans. The fact that they knew how to enrich themselves on the goods they got from the Chinese was one reason why they thrived on a strong China. The Manchu or the Jurchen further east belonged to another tradition, less concerned with trade and more prepared to prey on China in times of weakness and making several attempts to conquer it, the most succesful one being the Manchu conquest of the 17th century.

An interesting part of Barfield's argument concerns the uselessness and futility of the grand Chinese war campaigns against the nomads, who basically desired trade rather than war and posed no fundamental threat to the empire. The wasteful wars of the martial emperor Wu-di against the Xiongnu were a failure. What finally pacified the latter were not the wars, but allowing them to occupy a position along the border where they could trade.

Emerging from Barfield's book is the image of rather harmless nomads, far from the image of warlike barbarians Chinese historians like to conjure up. This image, true or not, is enough to put the simple opposition of nomads and empires in question. In Barfield's vision, there is hardly any essential conflict between the two. On the contrary, the steppe nomads usually tended to establish symbiotic relationships with the empire, whose real enemy was another kind of formation, another logic, associated with the Manchu and Jurchen further east.


Nicola Di Cosmo

Barfield's account is challenged by Nicola Di Cosmo, whose 2002 work Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History represents a completely different take on the steppe empires. Di Cosmo's ambition is to use archaeology as well as textual sources to escape the "claustrophobic narrowness of the Chinese classical tradition” (Di Cosmo 2002:3). He is also critical of the view that the steppe empires were dependent on or secondary to the Chinese empire or that they could only subsist by trading or raiding the Chinese.

Against the view that nomads raided or attacked because of desire for trade and need of cereals, he points out that nomads to a certain extent grew their own cereals, that they didn’t need much and that they also had access to other sources of wealth through their Central Asian trade network. He rejects the notion that the nomadic economy was dependent on Chinese production and that the nomads were therefore forced to trade or raid. Rather, it was the Chinese who needed economic exchange with the steppe - to obtain horses and exotic goods - and this, along with the desire to establish contact with allies in Central Asia, explains the Chinese aggressiveness and expansionism in regard to Central Asia (ibid. 155-8, 168-171, 248).

Di Cosmo also argues that until the Ming Dynasty, the Chinese border walls were not so much a defense against increasing nomad aggression, but rather part of Chinese aggression and expansion, serving as a base for exercising hegemony over tribes living along the frontier (ibid. 139, 155f). He also notes the curious fact that the walls - for instance during the Ch'in Dynasty - were not located between the Chinese and nomad populations, but far out in relatively homogenous non-Chinese country, running through "an alien land inhabited by alien groups" (ibid. 152), "right in the middle of large stretches of grassland used for pastoral production" (ibid. 157) - something which he believes may have been linked to the Chinese need to acquire horses for its nascent cavalry.

All in all, this adds up to a firm rejection of the idea that state-formation among the nomads was subordinate to or dependent up the influence of the previously established Chinese empire. We can note, however, that just as little as Barfield does he portray the steppe nomads as inherent aggressors intent on conquering China. The big military campaigns were usually started by the Chinese.


Christopher Beckwith

Di Cosmo's arguments are supported by Christopher Beckwith, who in his 2009 Empires of the Silk Road - a polemical work that sometimes lends itself to what I suspect may be rather too broad generalizations - reiterates the criticism of Barfield's "needy nomad theory". Far from being poor, Beckwith argues, ”rank-and-file nomads were much better off in every way than their counterparts in the peripheral agricultural regions, who were slaves or treated little better than slaves” (Beckwith 2009:xxiii). They were also generally "bigger and healthier than the peripheral agricultural peoples” (ibid. 325). ”Moreover, if life on the steppe was so hard, and the people there were so poor, why should peasants from peripheral states want to defect to them? The reason is that most nomads might have been poor, but most peasants were much poorer” (ibid. 332).

What Beckwith is saying here may sound reminiscent of Marshall Sahlins' well-known argument about "stone age affluence": so-called primitive peoples generally lived a life of relative ease and abundance, while systematic impoverishment makes its appearance with so-called civilized, settled or agricultural life. However, Beckwith clearly parts way with Sahlins in his insistence that nomad empires were far from primitive. They were in fact highly advanced and complex, bringing together not only pastoral nomads, but also agricultural and urban peoples. ”The nomadic peoples and the settled urban peoples were mutually inseparable components of any successful Central Eurasian empire” (ibid. 258). The economic entity into which these peoples were brought together was the so-called "Silk Road", the highly intricate Inner Asian economy itself, which - contrary to popular prejudice - was no mere pipeline connecting east and west. The nomadic states were crucial to this economy, not only because they instituted a pax which provided security for travel, but also because of their demand for products such as silk, metals, and gems: ”what drove the economic engine of the Silk Road was first of all internal Central Eurasian trade, based on internal demand not only for the products of their own peoples but for those of neighboring Central Eurasian states and the peripheral states” (ibid. 321).

Like Barfield and Di Cosmo, Beckwith also attacks the stereotype of nomads as inherently warlike. The Great Wall was not built to protect the Chinese from the barbarians, he argues, but for offensive purposes, to hold territory conquered  from neighboring states and prevent loss of population to them (ibid. 27, 330, 333f). In an argument echoing James Scott's in The Art of not Being Governed, he argues that the life of peasants in the "civilized" agricultural empires was in fact such a burden that the rulers were always desperate to prevent the flight of population to the much freer "primitive" societies of the mountains, forests or steppes. ”The only was to avoid losing population, power, and wealth to Central Eurasia was to build walls, limit trading at frontier cities, and attack the steppe peoples as often as necessary” (ibid. 333f).


Arthur Waldron

Another illuminating work that goes even further in dispelling misperceptions about the Great Wall and which is probably bound to serve as an eye-opener to most readers is Arthur Waldron's 1990 The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth. The introductory chapters are an amusing and eye-opening read about how mistaken the view is of a single “Great Wall” existing ever since Shi Huangdi. For most of China’s history, no wall existed. Before the Ming Dynasty, all walls eroded quickly since they were made of earth. Furthermore, they were constructed in various places according to the needs of the various dynasties. The invading Mongols don’t seem to have encountered any wall. The often discussed riddle why Marco Polo never mentions passing through any "Great Wall" is solved: there probably wasn’t any wall.

Waldron furthermore criticizes the stereotypical view of an ahistorical Chinese cultural essence somehow expressed in wall-building (as in the idea that the wall was a direct expression of the Chinese worldview, serving as a symbolic boundary between civilized, agricultural China and barbarian peoples of Central Asia). Wall-building was only one strategy among many others used in the course of the various dynasties towards the steppe, including trade, peaceful coexistence and outright conquest. Only the Ming Dynasty - and only from its middle period - seems to have relied primarily on wall building. The middle chapters deal with the question why this was so - the reason was military weakness and the inability to hold the Ordos region - and do a good job in illuminating the various debates that took place at the Ming court.

The final chapters deals with the construction of various myths concerning the Great Wall (as being continuously in existence in the same place since Shi Huangdi, serving as a boundary between civilization and barbary, being visible from the moon etc) and their role in modern nation-building, a subject which Waldron also treats in an amusing essay from 1993, “Representing China: The Great Wall and Cultural Nationalism in the Twentieth Century”. While conceding that components of the myths originated in China, Waldron argues that ”the myth itself first grew to maturity in the Europe of the Enlightenment and was reimported into China in the twentieth century, at a time when that country faced an acute identity crisis” (Waldron 1993:40).

Speaking of the wall, it is hard not to recall Owen Lattimore's argument in "Origins of the Great Wall of China" (originally written in 1937). Although it operates much with the probably untenable idea of the wall serving as a boundary between civilization and barbary, it must have been one of the earliest attempts to debunk som of the common myths of the wall. Pointing out that the various Chinese walls existed not only along the northern frontier but also between several of the Chinese states of the "Warring States" period, he argues that they functioned not only to keep people out but also to keep them in, preventing the home population from dispersing or reverting to a nomad state (Lattimore 1962:7-118).Lattimore's old argument is still suggestive, since it points out that much state-building has involved not only providing protection against nomads, but also a suppression of nomadic lifestyles at home. Even in Lattimore's account, then, it turns out that the boundary between the civilized and the barbarian is fluid.


Peter Perdue

The fact that the nomads too engaged in state-building is a theme that is central to Peter Perdue's 2005 book China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Perdue criticizes Barfield for not allowing the nomads any agency of their own and adopts a perspective closer to Di Cosmo's. The book looks at three empires – the Manchu Qing, the Muscovite-Russian and the Mongolian Zunghar – as engaged in "competitive state-building" during the 17th and 18th centuries, a process which ends with the erasure of the Zunghar empire and the major part of its population in the latter half of the 18th century. Before being obliterated, however, the Zunghar had managed to travel quite a bit on the road of state building, creating their own capital, mapping the empire, adopting artillery, and so on.

There is much of interest in Perdue's thick book. It is packed with detail. Among the most horrifying pages are about the genocidal character of the final Qing campaigns against the Zunghars. This genocide - which appears to have been quite deliberate, judging from the prevalence of directives urging "massacre" emanating from emperor Qianlong - led to the disappearance of the Zunghars as a people and left much of present-day Xinjiang empty and ready to be populated by Han Chinese, other Mongols and Turkic peoples moving in from the southern oasis towns (Perdue 2005: 283-286).

Perdue argues that the crucial factor that enabled the Qing, unlike previous dynasties, to conclusively defeat and eliminate the Mongols as a threat was the closure of the steppe through the simultaneous advance of the Russian and Qing empires. This advance, along with the Sino-Russian treaties of Nerchinsk and Kiakhta in the early 18th century, deprived the Mongols of “breathing space” to consolidate their state.

All Qing efforts would have been in vain if the Zunghars had had unlimited space in which to retreat… Thus the Nerchinsk and Kiakhta treaties… made possible the closure of the steppe. The presence of the Russian empire in Siberia rendered Qing-steppe relations radically different from those in any earlier period. (ibid. 523).

Perdue believes that the "closing of this great frontier was more significant in world history than the renowned closing of the North American frontier” (ibid. 10).

He rejects two well-known old hypotheses about the decline of the steppe empires. Firstly, the idea that the nomads were vanquished by the diffusion of gunpowder is rejected, since the Mongols also adopted gunpowder (ibid. 11). Secondly, he also rejects the idea that the region was turned into an economic backwater as the Europeans penetrated the Indian Ocean and trans-Asian trade along the old "Silk road" dwindled. 

Even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the old Silk Route trade declined, the Russo-Chinese tea and fur trade remained important. Religious diversity, linguistic pluralism, and cosmopolitanism characterized the oasis cities. More than anything else, it was the conquest of the region by the ‘modern’ empires of China and Russia that relegated it to backwardness in the nineteenth century. (ibid. 10)

An idea that runs through Perdue's book is that of a basic similarity between European and Chinese processes of state-building, economic dynamism and expansionism up until the end of the eighteenth century. Thus he stresses the similarities between the settlement of Xinjiang and European colonization (ibid 335-339, 342ff) and points out that American, Russian and Chinese expansion represented a worldwide and almost simultaneous advance of settler-frontier and the obliteration of nomads (ibid 16).


James Millward

James Millward's 1999 Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864 does not deal with nomads. I mention it here anyway since it does deal with the territory once inhabited by the Zunghars - modern Xinjiang - and how it fared after the Qing conquest.

A major aim of the book is to study the transformation of the Qing empire into the entity known today as ”China”. Being a product of Qing conquests, this entity is of course far bigger than what might be referred to as China proper or the entity that, for instance, a Ming official would have recognized as "China". Today, however, the idea of China possessing natural borders that are coextensive with those of the Qing empire has become firmly rooted. This is reflected in the changed significance of the Jiayuguan, the old border outpost in Gansu which once, to literary Chinese, had signified the end of civilization in the West but which in the late 19th century could be described by journalists as a toll gate absurdly located in the midst of China.

Jiayuguan as reconstructed today

Millward traces this transformation back to the shift in Qing policy that started with the Kokandi invasion of 1830 and the mid-19th century rebellions in Xinjiang. Previous to these events, Qing rulers had conceived of their empire as consisting of discrete parts, united only in the celestial person of the emperor himself. In this conception, China was simply one of the parts, next to the Manchu, the Mongols, and other peoples. Based on this pluralist conception, the Qing government ”rarely placed Han Chinese... in positions of authority of Inner Asians”, instead checking their movements with a road-pass system and prohibiting them from settling permanently in the Muslim south. This, of course, was nothing like the Sinocentric world order posited by John K. Fairbank and other researchers as dominating the Qing conception of the world (Millward 1999:234).

Shaken by the invasion in 1830, however, the dynasty shifted stance and started to accommodate the Han Chinese. While local Chinese in Xinjiang fought off invaders, massacred native Muslims and clamoured for permission to make permanent settlements there, elite scholars like Wei Yuan and Gong Zizhen started to advocate a policy of assimilation, hoping to displace Xinjiang people with massive Han immigration and thus to create a Chinese empire in the Western regions (ibid. 244-250). The result, as Chinese-style administration was implemented the immigration of Han Chinese promoted, was a "Hanization" of the Qing empire:

It is a well-known aspect of China’s modern history that Han Chinese officials, commanding new provincial armies, successfully repressed the Taiping and other rebellions in China proper and thereafter exercised increasing influence on Qing domestic and foreign affairs. There was a less well known but parallel process underway on the peripheries of the Qing empire, however. Han colonization and implementation of Chinese-style administration of frontier regions, from Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Manchuria to Taiwan, became standard dynastic policy as foreign pressures mounted int he latter half of the latter century. (ibid. 250)

The transformation of the Qing empire into "China" was completed after the fall of the Qing dynasty. While the Han activists who had opposed the Qing were inspired by the legacy of the geographically far smaller Ming empire, they were not willing to let go of the Qing conquests. Leaders of the Republic as well as of the People’s Republic thus tried to ”retain – and justify retention of – the Manchu empire while renouncing the Manchus” (ibid 13). The empire was recast as a Chinese nation-state. ”Like any modern nation-state, China has assumed its current sense and shape only after a process of invention, a process Benedict Anderson has memorably called ’stretching the short, tight, skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire’” (ibid. 18).

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What emerges from the discussions of nomad state building in Barfield, Di Cosmo, Beckwith and Perdue is a multifaceted picture of the steppe nomads that does not lend itself very easily into classifications in terms of deterritorialization versus reterritorialization, or "the nomadic war-machine" versus "the apparatus of capture". Despite this, each of the books - along with Millward's - in its own fashion opens up for the possibility of critical scrutiny of Chinese empire building

References

Barfield, Thomas J. (1989) The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Barfield, Thomas J. (2001) “The Shadow Empires: Imperial State Formations along the Chinese-Nomad Frontier”, pp 10-41, in Susan E. Alcock et al (eds) Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Beckwith, Christopher I. (2009) Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Di Cosmo, Nicola (2002) Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Khazanov, A. M. (1984) Nomads and the Outside World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lattimore (1962) Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers 1928-1958, Paris and La Haye: Mouton & Co.

Millward, James A. (1998) Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Perdue, Peter (2005) China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Harvard University Press.

Waldron, Arthur (1990) The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Waldron, Arthur (1993) “Representing China: The Great Wall and Cultural Nationalism in the Twentieth Century”, pp 36-60, in Harumi Befu (ed) Cultural Nationalism in East Asia: Representation and Identity, Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California.

Update on Kashgar

Henryk Szadziewski has a good update on the demolition of Kashgar here.

My original thoughts on this are here. Today I can only think of Benjamin: that things go on like this is the catastrophe.

"Modern society" and "unity" in Urumqi

We’ve all read the depressing news coming from Xinjiang – the dead, wounded and arrested, the violence spreading from Urumqi to Kashgar. The regime is blaming foreigners for instigating the riots. As if there were any need for such explanations. Isn’t the pent up frustration and repression in the region is explanation enough? The story that everything escalated from an Internet posting about a gang rape in Guangzhou may be true, but hardly provided more than the igniting spark in an already explosive situation.

An especially depressing, and worrying, piece of news is the appearance on Tuesday of revenge mobs of thousands of Han Chinese armed with clubs, shovels, lead pipes and machetes, who marched through central Urumqi, smashing shops and knocking over food stalls run by Uighurs. Some of the Han Chinese appear to have been waving the national flag. Perhaps I know too little to judge the situation correctly, but this smells fascism, or at least a very unpleasant form of ethnic bullying.

I was intrigued to find that, according to the journalist William Foreman in this article, the crowd chanted slogans such as ”Modern society” and ”[National] Unity”. These slogans are used by the CCP to legitimize its rule in Xinjiang, but apparently they are also endorsed by the local Han Chinese. The slogans portray the CCP as a benevolent bringer of “modernization” and other blessings. “Unity” is not to be understood as imperialist or colonial domination, but as harmonious cooperation between culturally distinct groups who are united by their gratitude to the CCP and by their enthusiasm for their brilliant common future.

I remember a conversation I had with a young man in Urumqi in 2004. I remember him vividly because of his earnestness, which shone through in his thoughtful and hesitating way of speaking. He and his friends had chosen to study English at a business school ”because it is international” and because they disliked the Chinese language. He dreamed about studying psychology at university, but he couldn’t since there was no literature in Uighur and he didn’t want to study in Chinese. He went on to describe how the situation for the Uighurs was deteriorating from year to year. In school, they can’t study their own language or their classics until in the later years, often in mixed clases where Chinese predominates. Many young people can’t even speak their own language properly, much less read and write. Perhaps it’s fate, he says suddenly. I asked him what he meant. ”Allah’s punishment”, he said, ”because many Uighur have behaved badly”. He started to tell me about Islam. ”The schools teach propaganda, such as Islam being against modernization. And they teach bullshit like Darwinism – have you heard about it? It teaches that man has evolved from some kind of monkey. And they tell that to children, who don’t know better! Islam is not against modernization, but unfortunately many today have forgotten about religion”. “Well, wine and the beer seem to be popular everywhere in Urumqi”, I remarked. “Exactly”, he said, “that’s what I meant when I told you that many Uighur behave badly”.

Yes, there is oppression in Xinjiang, who can deny it? And yes, there is a need for modernization, but what kind of modernization? And modernization to what price? I can’t help recalling Japan’s attempt at setting up its own multi-ethnic empire in East Asia, which ended in 1945. How did it legitimize its rule? By referring to modernization – Japan as a bringer of civilization, of economic and industrial development and of widespread education. Japan as a heroic nation that would liberate Asia from colonialism and even unite all the oppressed peoples of the world in a crusade against the white peril. Japan, whose ”Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” was unlike Western imperialism or colonialism since it was infinately hospitable to difference, allowing each member nation to retain its ”independence” (albeit ”not in the term’s Western sense”) while at the same time remaining a harmonious whole in which each part would gratefully participate and cooperate under Japan’s benevolent leadership.

What is the least that I (and hopefully everyone who reads this) should ask of China right now? Openness, transparency, that the Internet and mobile phones be allowed to function normally everywhere and that journalists should have easy access to the area. That Uighurs should be allowed to make their voices heard, to organize and demonstrate, and be provided with channels to influence the rule of their own province. That they should be able to study psychology if they want to, preferably in their own language, or, if that is impossible, that exchange studies should be facilitated. Finally, I would like the Chinese majority population to reflect on a few questions. Aren't you repeating what you so rightly loathe in the imperialism of other countries? What makes the Han Chinese in Xinjiang different from the Japanese settlers of Manchuria or the European colonizers of most of the rest of the world? Is the contribution to “modernization” and “development” really a valid way of justifying the rule of the territories of other nations and ethnic groups?

Demolition of Kashgar

One of the best memories of my trip to China in 2004 was a two-week stay in Kashgar, a city well known for its location along the Silk Road. Chinese authorities are now planning to demolish the old Uighur part of the town (See this New York Times article or this post on Frog in the Well ).

Authorities claim that the demolition is a safety measure against earthquakes and that the town will be rebuilt in a local "Islamic" style. They also state that since the old parts of town are too densely populated, the reconstruction will involve the transfer of many inhabitants to new dwellings elsewhere.

The concern for earthquakes is understandable in wiew of the Sichuan disaster, but I fear that the demolition also has political motives. Isn't it intented as a blow against Uighur culture and the milieus in which this culture has thrived? Hasn't Kashgar been singled out because of its role as a center of that culture and of Uighur separatism? The top-down process of the reconstruction will ensure that the old part of Kashgar will from now on be Sinicized, if not in appearance, then through the process of its construction. A resurrected town in "Islamic" style would not be the creation of local historical circumstances, but a gift from benevolent authorities - a symbol not of autonomy but of heteronomy.

I am happy to have been able to travel in China. To have seen the hutongs in Beijing before the Olympics wiped them away, to travel along the Sanxia (three gorges) before they were inundated by the largest hydroelectric power plant in the world. Just as glad as to have been able, during my lifetime, to have seen and walked through these dusty but hospitable alleys in Kashgar, so full of surprises, playing kids and tea-houses with beautiful wooden balconies.

How much say did the people affected by all these changes have in any of the decisions? Is progress that silences the voices of dissidents really progress?