Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Resources, Competition, and the Layers of the State
Passing through the Jade Gate and setting foot in the Qing empire's westernmost province of Xinjiang in 1911, the imperial official Yuan Dahua carefully noted the rocky desert (gebi), harsh unrelenting climate, and lack of vegetation. Summing up the landscape of this region located a long and dusty 1,500 miles from Beijing in a memorial to the imperial court, he wrote, "The scattered, bleached bones of men and horses lie strewn in this place." In that same document, however, Yuan, who served as the last Qing governor of Xinjiang, also noted that those capable of braving the brutal landscape and willing to sweep aside the bones, move the rocks, and sift the arid soil, could catch a glimpse of a different vision of this region — one that glittered.
Qing armies conquered Xinjiang, which means "New Frontier" in Chinese, in 1759, and for more than a century afterward, travelers, prisoners, soldiers, and officials from the "inner lands" (neidi, or what I will also refer to in this book as China-proper) tended to depict the region as a vast unredeemable "wasteland" (huang). The distance, the terrain, and the difficult climate were significant obstacles to the integration of this border region into the empire. In spite of this, a whole host of highly sought-after lucrative local products, including Kazakh horses, black otter pelts, white jade, and bolts of gold-threaded satin, attracted the interest and attention of Qing officials throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the twentieth, the allure of gold, petroleum, wool, various animal parts, and rare minerals caught the attention of officials from the Qing dynasty, as well as the Republic of China and the People's Republic, all of whom were eager to try to stake their own claims to these products.
The dynamic pull of its local products and the push of its natural environment have shaped Xinjiang's relationship to the modern Chinese nation-state. Today, Xinjiang, now known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, is a major producer of petroleum and various lucrative industrial minerals critical for fueling China's economic rise. This position, however, is merely the end point of more than a century of struggle, as China-based officials struggled to bridge Xinjiang's distance from infrastructural networks, institutions, and markets in China-proper, and grappled with the severe difficulties of operating in the often harsh and unforgiving landscape. The natural obstacles forced successive generations of Qing and later Chinese officials from the late nineteenth century well into the second half of the twentieth, to undertake complex and often surprising alliances with the agents of foreign powers and largely autonomous local and regional leaders in order to stake some semblance of a claim to the region's rich local products.
In this book, these local products and natural resources sit at the center of a broader narrative that seeks to understand the development of the institutions of Chinese state power in this border region. By focusing on the resources themselves, along with the surveying, extraction and processing facilities, transportation infrastructure, and institutions of state control that were established to oversee their production, I reveal a new narrative of Chinese state building in Xinjiang. Far from a process of inexorable state-centered integration over the course of the twentieth century, which is the narrative that has been aggressively endorsed by the Chinese Communist Party today, this work finds that in fact the process was nonlinear, transnational, and highly contingent. Well into the 1950s, faced with high price tags and competing priorities, Chinese officials left much of the work of infrastructural development and institution building in Xinjiang to a shifting alliance of imperial agents, local officials, and Chinese technocrats. The result is not a unified, centralized program of state building, but rather the accumulation of a disjointed mish-mash of infrastructure and institutions that ran counter to Chinese state interests as often as they supported them.
This work makes three major contributions. First, it reveals the deep seated but often overlooked connection that exists between resources, resource extraction regimes, and long-term patterns of economic development and state institutionalization. Secondly, over the ensuing seven chapters, I offer a new "layered" model of state formation that binds the efforts not only of state planners, but also largely autonomous local officials and the representatives of foreign powers into one singular, transnational narrative. What this model reveals is that in peripheral regions like Xinjiang, surveys, capital investments, and institutions begun by one regime to facilitate the extraction of natural resources often served as a blueprint for future regimes to follow. Eager to facilitate production quickly and cheaply, subsequent regimes layered their own surveys, investments, and infrastructure atop these earlier layers, thereby shaping long-term patterns of state investment, infrastructural development, and ultimately political institutionalization in ways that continue to resonate. Finally, this work also offers a unique perspective on the origins of a simmering discontent among indigenous groups in Xinjiang. Connected to patterns of state investment and institutionalization that were shaped by resource extraction campaigns developed over the course of the twentieth century, this discontent has increasingly manifested itself in a growing ethnonationalism, religious fundamentalism, and antistate violence.
China and Xinjiang
Xinjiang was first conquered by the armies of the Qing dynasty in order to exert greater control over their western frontier. Well into the nineteenth century, however, rather than undertaking an aggressive integrationist policy in this region, the court retained it as a frontier "dependency" (fanshu) overseen by Qing military officials working with a network of indigenous local headmen. As the proponents of what has come to be called "New Qing History" have forcefully argued, this border policy was a product of the court's pluralistic vision of empire. But in addition, practical concerns about the cost and difficulty of undertaking a large-scale program of settlement and administrative expansion paired with a fear of destabilizing the delicate ethnocultural balance in this region made up primarily of various groups of Turkic Muslims ensured that Qing officials into the 1860s were content to retain their policy of keeping Xinjiang as a dependency, rather than transforming it into a fully integrated province of the empire.
Maintaining even a light grip on Xinjiang, however, cost the court substantial amounts of treasure. The need to station large numbers of troops in this arid region with a small population and meager and widely dispersed plots of arable land meant that Qing officials in the region had to rely on annual shipments of silver bullion from the imperial treasury to keep their fiscal heads above water. Desperate to lighten the heavy financial burden of empire, these shipments, referred to as "interprovincial assistance" (xiexiang), were a major source of frustration for Qing officials in the years following the conquest. Compounding this situation, a series of uprisings among Turkic Muslim ethnocultural groups in southern Xinjiang in the first half of the nineteenth century increased the burden of empire in the region and inspired a new generation of thinkers to experiment with new approaches to the administration of empire.
In the early to mid-nineteenth century, a new group of Han thinkers, influenced by "statecraft" (jingshi) approaches, called on the court to abandon pluralism in the empire's border regions and adopt an assimilationist approach. In an 1820 essay, the influential statecraft thinker Gong Zizhen, urged the imperial court to adopt a new border policy that centered around aggressively investing in agricultural reclamation, importing large numbers of immigrant settlers from Chinaproper, and eliminating the administrative differences between Xinjiang and the lands "inside the pass" by establishing the region as an official province and also implementing the prefecture-county (junxian) system of local administration. By creating a stable population of taxpaying immigrants who would be overseen by a proven system of governance, Gong and other statecraft advocates argued that the court could resolve the fiscal and ethnic problems simultaneously. The Qing military commander Zuo Zongtang, himself a committed adherent to statecraft approaches, was particularly influenced by Gong's essay on Xinjiang. Zuo was tapped to head the Qing military campaign to reconquer the region after a decade-long rebellion in the 1860s. After the successful reconquest of Xinjiang in 1878, he was in a position to advocate for much of Gong's program. Pushed by Zuo's advocacy, the Qing court established Xinjiang as an official province in 1884.
By the late nineteenth century, the integrationist impulse was not confined simply to statecraft thinkers. New ideas about the state and empire, many of which were imported from the West, prompted many reformist Qing officials to begin calling for even greater integration of border regions like Xinjiang. All across the empire they sought to transform imperial frontiers into national borderlands through political reforms and the development of transportation infrastructure, as well as education and cultural campaigns. This impulse continued in the years following the overthrow of the Qing in 1911, and the establishment of the Republic of China the next year, as early Republican modernizers like Sun Yatsen sought to fundamentally transform these former imperial frontiers into integrated corners of the newly established Chinese Republic. There was no shortage of integrationist plans for Xinjiang from leaders in the late Qing and early Republican periods, including the development of large-scale rail networks, the construction of agricultural settler communities, and aggressive surveys of Xinjiang's resource wealth. But despite these plans, and the vocal commitment to carrying them out, both late Qing officials and their Republican counterparts lacked the political and economic capital to implement them. From the late Qing period well into the Republic, central government officials tended to prioritize efforts in the Han Chinese heartland of eastern and central China, and the bulk of the plans drawn up for Xinjiang never existed outside of the paper they were written on.
The inability and often unwillingness of officials in the new Republic to tangibly support this effort in the far west meant that Chinese officials retained a light grip on Xinjiang. Indeed, the priorities of the Republican government on developing areas of China-proper over investing in border regions, the cutting off of interprovincial assistance in 1912, and the long distances that stood between Xinjiang and the rest of China helped ensure that a succession of Han Chinese provincial leaders, who governed the region from the time of the revolution into the mid-1940s, operated with almost complete autonomy. In addition, this hands-off border policy by officials in the Chinese Republic also allowed for the emergence of new competitors for power in Xinjiang. In the early twentieth century, British, Russian and later Soviet, and even American agents jousted over access to the region's resource wealth. By the late 1920s, armed with an advantageous topography and a willingness to invest in transportation infrastructure in neighboring Central Asia, Soviet planners had large eclipsed their imperial rivals. Well into the 1950s, Soviet officials were actively involved in the task of accessing Xinjiang's lucrative resource wealth. Eager to control its natural resources without shouldering the costly burden of annexing it, Soviet officials effectively transformed Xinjiang into a nearly textbook example of "informal empire." For their part, the largely autonomous provincial officials who were desperate for aid, support, and infusions of cash and commodities to prop up their isolated economy were more than willing to work closely with their Soviet counterparts even as they continued to proclaim their allegiance to the Chinese Republic. This dynamic continued well into the post-1949 People's Republic period, as Chinese officials enthusiastically offered up access to Xinjiang's resources in exchange for material support and aid in the region.
Despite the autonomy of local officials and the growing boldness of foreign powers, officials in the central government of the Republic of China repeatedly asserted their sovereign claims to Xinjiang. These claims were backed up with little more than aggressive rhetoric, however. In his work on Republican-era Tibet, Lin Hsiao-ting argues that Chinese officials simply asserted an "imagined sovereignty" that was "based on a sort of political imagination that was engineered to maintain its Nationalist façade and political legitimacy." A similar imagination was at play in Xinjiang, as rhetorical claims by Republican officials and to a lesser extent their counterparts in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rarely matched realities on the ground. This inability or often unwillingness of the state to exert a totalizing control over state integration is not uncommon in distant border regions. As Richard White notes in his work on empire in North America, power weakens at the periphery: "At the center are hands on the levers of power, but the cables have, in a sense, been badly frayed or even cut." As in North America, in Xinjiang this opened the door to a wide assortment of state and nonstate actors all competing for resources and influence. As White writes, along these peripheries, "minor agents, allies, and even subjects at the periphery often guide the course of empire."
Moving from the world of rhetoric and discourse to the political and economic realities on the ground in Xinjiang, my work reveals the weakness of Chinese border policy in the twentieth century. When it comes to the embattled Republic of China, weakness is a common trope of historical scholarship. Whether or not one points to Chiang Kaishek's administrative inadequacies, the corruption at the heart of Chinese political elites, the impact of Japanese aggression throughout the 1930s, or some other factor, weakness is frequently seen to sit at the center of the Republican project. As far as its policy in border regions was concerned, this assessment is undeniably true. The period from 1911 to 1949 was witness to the secession of Outer Mongolia, the seizure of Manchuria by Japan, and the autonomy if not de facto independence of both Tibet and Xinjiang. While Qing officials exerted control over border regions and the early People's Republic was able to stake clearer sovereign claims to various borderlands in ways that their Republican counterparts could not, my work reveals that in a practical sense, weakness remained a central element of border policy from the late nineteenth century well into the 1960s.
Unlike much of the previous scholarship on Republican weakness, which is driven by a desire to ascertain the roots of the CCP's 1949 victory over Chiang Kaishek's Guomindang Party (GMD), this work does not focus on the factors that led to Qing and later Chinese weakness in Xinjiang. Instead, I am more interested in the consequences of this weakness. What impact does the inability or unwillingness of Qing and Republican leaders to invest in the integration of Xinjiang have in shaping this border region's relationship to China-based regimes in the twentieth century? This simple question lies at the heart of this book. In pursuing it, I reveal the complex concessions, alliances, and negotiations between provincial officials, local elites, the agents of imperial powers, Chinese officials, and representatives of international markets in the late nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. This perspective places Xinjiang into a broader transnational context and highlights a contingency that lay at the heart of China's twentieth-century state building project in the far west that has lasting implications for this border region.
Resources and the State
This moment of Chinese weakness coincided with the development of a global, integrated resource market. As a consequence, beginning in the late nineteenth century but continuing throughout the twentieth, Xinjiang's rich natural resources were a siren song attracting the attentions of foreign powers, Chinese planners, and provincial officials. Whether it was gold and petroleum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; wool, hides, and furs with high value on international markets in the 1910s and 1920s; industrial minerals with military application including beryllium and tungsten in the 1930s and 1940s; or the pursuit of petroleum and rare nonferrous metals in more recent years, the potential profit that these local products were capable of generating drew in large numbers of interested parties. The efforts to gain access to Xinjiang's local products served as a critical but largely overlooked factor in shaping the region's connections to China, regional neighbors, and indeed the world.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Natural Resources and the New Frontier"
by .
Copyright © 2018 The University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
