From alien land to inalienable parts of China: how Qing imperial possessions became the Chinese Frontiers
| Author | Andy Hanlun Li |
| DOI | 10.1177/13540661221086486 |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221086486
European Journal of
International Relations
2022, Vol. 28(2) 237 –262
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661221086486
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E
JR
I
From alien land to inalienable
parts of China: how Qing
imperial possessions became
the Chinese Frontiers
Andy Hanlun Li
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Abstract
Scholarship on the origins of modern territoriality and the modernist conception of
territory has largely been confined to Europe and its colonial histories. Few attempts have
been made to understand modern territoriality from an alternative epistemic starting
point. This article moves beyond critiques of Eurocentrism by examining the territorial
metamorphosis of the Qing Empire to modern China. Like the United States and Russia,
China has retained its early modern continental colonial possessions. In order to explain
the territorialisation of the multi-ethnic Qing empire, this article engages empirically
with cartographic and textual representations of China from Confucian literati scholars,
European Jesuit cartographers and the Manchu imperial court from the 17th to the
early 19th centuries. The empirical study shows that by the early 19th century, a new
territorialised conception of ‘China’ closely resembling that of modern territoriality had
emerged. This ‘modern’ and Sinocentric form of territoriality encompassed areas that
were hitherto seen as foreign and non-Chinese. In opposition to the extant Eurocentric
historiography, this article traces the emergence of modern territoriality in imperial China
to a nexus of European cartographic techniques, Qing imperial conquests and the literati
synthesis of Manchu imperial and Sinocentric forms of territoriality. By showing the deep
historical processes and global entanglements behind the emergence of modern China as a
territorial state, the article makes a case for a polycentric account of modern territoriality
Keywords
China, International Relations, eurocentrism, territoriality, international history,
territorial state
Corresponding author:
Andy Hanlun Li, London School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: H.Li44@lse.ac.uk
1086486EJT0010.1177/13540661221086486European Journal of International RelationsLi
research-article2022
Article
238 European Journal of International Relations 28(2)
The territorialisation of China was a remarkable historical development in the history of
International Relations (IR). Despite the plight brought upon by foreign imperial powers
in its ‘century of humiliation’, contemporary China remains one of the very few early
modern colonial powers that has retained their territorial possessions till this day. Other
large multi-ethnic empires such as the French, Habsburg and the Ottoman empires have
disintegrated and gave rise to smaller territorial states. In contrast, and like the United
States and Russia, contemporary China continues to preside over a vast continental
empire that originated from violent expansions in the early modern period. As other
colonial empires collapsed in the wake of the Second World War, Chinese settler-coloni-
alism in both Inner Asia and the southwestern hinterland accelerated and transformed the
social and environmental landscapes of the country’s vast ethnic frontiers. In recent
years, violent border clashes between China and India, the prosecutions of ethnic and
religious minorities, and the pursuit of Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan has laid bare the
degree of state violence justified in the name of territorial sovereignty.
Like other modern states, China as the coalescence of a people, a territory and a state
remains a heavily contested notion both internally and externally. The historical process
through which the three are entangled warrants further investigations. This article focuses
on the conceptual emergence of China as a territory. Today, Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan
are often proclaimed to be inalienable parts of the ‘sacred territory of China’ by state
media outlets of the People’s Republic of China. However, as recent as the late 19th
century, two centuries after their inclusion into the Qing Empire, these places were still
viewed by some Han Chinese nationalists to be outside of China (Esherick, 2006). The
rejections were rooted in the ethnocultural conception of China centred around Han
Chinese. In contrast to the geographic conception of China encompassing the entirety of
the Qing Empire, the ethnocultural conception defines the geographic boundaries of
China through the limits of Han Chinese dominated provinces. Nevertheless, despite
widespread prejudice and even exclusionist views towards non-Han peoples, the geo-
graphic conception of China is flexible enough to be stretched to encompass their land
and render their inhabitants Chinese. The territorialised understanding of China, in turn,
enabled the Han-centric multiculturalist notion of the Chinese nation in light of dissent-
ing voices and underlying ethnocultural tensions.
In recent years, scholars in Historical IR have begun to examine the plurality of poli-
ties and international systems that predate our present international system made up of
sovereign territorial states (Kadercan, 2015, 2017; Neumann and Wigen, 2018; Phillips
and Sharman, 2015, 2020; Schulz, 2019; Sharman, 2019; Spruyt, 2020). Collectively,
these works have shown that the territorialisation of world politics is by no means a sim-
ple case of convergence through European colonial expansion and imposition. Instead,
the emergence of modern territorial states around the world was driven by polycentric
and connected historical processes across geographical and cultural contexts. In contrast,
the literature on the conceptual and cartographic origins of territorial sovereignty
(Branch, 2014; Elden, 2013b) has focused primarily on European ideas, technologies
and European colonial experiences. Therefore, a corrective audit of the European colo-
nial provenance of the modern sovereign territorial state is needed to enable scholars to
both apprehend and evaluate coeval processes of territorialisation to European
colonisations.
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