Peter C. Perdue

Native place, city, and nation : regional networks and identities in Shanghai, 1853-1937

This book explores the role of native place associations in the development of modern Chinese urban society and the role of native-place identity in the development of urban nationalism. From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, sojourners from other provinces dominated the population of Shanghai and other expanding commercial Chinese cities. These immigrants formed native place associations beginning in the imperial period and persisting into the mid-twentieth century. Goodman examines the modernization of these associations and argues that under weak urban government, native place sentiment and organization flourished and had a profound effect on city life, social order and urban and national identity.

Water Control in the Dongting Lake Region during the Ming and Qing Periods

espite impressive commercial growth and urbanization in the Qing period, agriculture remained the basis of the Chinese economy. Millions of Chinese peasants provided the food for the cities and the taxes that supported the imperial armies and the bureaucracy. The court and its officials were well aware that an essential task of good administration was the preservation of a stable agricultural society. Confucian paternalism, as an expression of the self-interest of the state, encouraged the emperor and his officials to develop a repertory of measures designed to restore agricultural production after periods of disruption. These measures included both short-term and long-term policies. In the short term, officials could sell grain from public granaries to level off drastic price fluctuations, encourage merchants to sell grain to famine-stricken areas, or provide direct relief to refugees and famine victims. In the long term, the government stressed improving irrigation, opening new land to increase production, and stocking granaries to prepare for future disasters. Historians are aware of the ineffectiveness of many of these policies in the modern period. In the nineteenth century, the Qing rulers were incapable of relieving rural distress or preventing social conflict. The panoply of prophylactic measures against social upheaval proved ineffective in the face of foreign invasion, peasant revolts, and widespread hunger. Why was this so? The sources of nineteenth-century decline can be illuminated by examining an earlier period when similar policies were relatively successful. By focusing on the development of a single province, Hunan, during the Qing period, it is possible to study the efforts of the Chinese state to promote agricultural recovery while maintaining stability in the countryside. In general, Qing officials were successful in encouraging the recovery of agricultural production from the devastation of the Ming-Qing transition, but the unprecedented population growth of the eighteenth century caused open conflict to break out by the end of the century. All over China, water control played an important role in safeguarding the local food supply. In North China, dikes along major rivers controlled flooding, while reservoirs stored the sparse annual rainfall. In South China, with its abundance of lakes and rivers, dikes were needed to protect peasants against unpredictable floods

Boundaries, Maps, and Movement: Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian Empires in Early Modern Central Eurasia

Comparative responses to global processes that affected China and the other early modern empires. Central Eurasia during the seventeent and eighteenth centuries offers one important site because three agrarian states contended for power: the Muscovite/Russian empire, expanding eastwards across Siberia; the Manchu Qing expanding first south-east, then northwest into the Central Asian steppes, deserts, and oases; and the Mongolian empire of the Zunghars, who created an autonomous state in western Mongolia, Turkestan, and Tibet. Although, between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, the Zunghars rivalled Russian and Chinese power, by 1760 the Qing had crushed the state and exterminated the Zunghar people. The Qing then established permanent control, which lasted until the fall of the empire in 1911, over all of present-day Mongolia (Inner and Outer), Xinjiang, and Tibet. The elimination of a powerful, independent Mongol-nomadic state in the steppe was a world-historical event. The closure of the steppe frontier meant the end of an age of fluidity, ecumenical exchange, fighting, and shifting of boundaries, and the division, dispersal, and extermination of the Mongols, who are now scattered from the Volga river to North China, one of the widest involuntary diasporas to occur on the continent. The outcome was the bipolar division of Central Asia between two empires, marked by a border delimited in treaty negotiations between the Chinese and the Russians. The bipolar division effectively lasted from 1760 until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Outer Mongolia, despite proclaiming its independence in 1911, became a Soviet satellite under Red Army occupation in 1921.1 The division persists conceptually in the terminology generally used to describe the broad, physiographically unbounded region lying between

Military Mobilization in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century China, Russia, and Mongolia

From the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries three agrarian states—Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian—struggled for power over the heartland of the Eurasian continent. Each had dynamic central leaders mobilizing agrarian surpluses based on drastically different ecologies, institutions, and military structures. When the dust cleared, by 1760, only two survived.

Comparing Empires: Manchu Colonialism

T HE QING EMPIRE of China was a colonial empire that ruled over a diverse collection of peoples with separate identities and deserves comparison with other empires. This claim is more problematic than it seems. The reigning tradition of nationalist historiography, practised in both the Peoples Republic of China and Taiwan, rejects the comparison in principle. Nationalist scholars argue that China is not like other imperialist powers, because all of its peoples were hnified ( t o n ~ i ) , not conquered, under the aegis of an inclusive culture-state. The modern Chinese nation-state, which inherits nearly a11 of the territory and ~eop le s of the Qlng, thus defines itself as a Lmultinationality state that represents the culmination of millennia of Chinese imperial history. Traditionalist historians, who take the line taken by the @g empire itself, also reject the validity of the comparison, to the extent that they argue that Chinese imperial domination of non-Han peoples was based not on coercion, but on cultural assimilation From this perspective, frontier peoples willingly accepted the norms of the orthodox Confucian culture because they recognized its superiority. The Chinese empire was a universalist civilization, not an ordinary state, because it claimed legitimacy on the basis of humanist cultural foundations, not on the contingencies of military conquest or material interest. Only rebels and bandits, whose sole interest lay in creating disorder, could reject the claims to domination of the imperial state, and they deserved ruthless suppression. Despite obvious deficiencies, these views remain influential in studies of China. Nationalist historians take the essentialist view that all the basic features of the contemporary nation-state are found in the distant past without fundamental alteration. They turn a articular moment of imperial expansion the maximal borders attained by the Q n g empire in the mideighteenth century into ideal boundaries defining a timeless national culture. They ignore the contradictions between imperial pretensions and the peoples under subjection, and they do not take serious account of heterodox, autonomous rivals to official ideology. Likewise, traditionalists,

Empire and nation in comparative perspective: frontier administration in eighteenth-century China

R. Bin Wong espouses the principle of symmetry in comparative analysis. 35 If we are to view China through European eyes, we should equally view Europe through Chinese eyes. This leads him to develop new perspectives on both regions. What is a major focus of attention in one society may only be a minor key in another. Even though the repertory of human perceptions, administrative structures, or economic modes of production is finite, different forms take prominence in different places. What happens if we apply, even crudely, the principle of symmetry to the Qing-Ottoman comparison? An Ottoman administrator looking at the Qing would find much that was strangely familiar. The Mongolian jasak confirmed lands by the Qing look very much like yurts, summer and winter pasturelands the limits of which were determined and were entered in the imperial registers. 36 The feudatories of the early Qing [sanfan] were large-scale timars. Both were grants of large territories to provincial military rulers in return for service to the state. And coerced population movements [surgun] were prominent features of the Ottoman and Qing states. 37 Both of these states, during times of expansion and conquest, chose analogous methods of controlling the newly incorporated populations. For administering conquered nomads, it was convenient to

Nature and Nurture on Imperial China's Frontiers

Ecologies of production and state classifications shaped Chinese imperial frontier policies. In Chinese classical debates about the effect of environment on human character, the dominant view held that all peoples could become civilised, but a dissenting view held that barbarians could never change their ways. Nomadic pastoralists likewise debated whether to adopt certain Han cultural practices or reject them. Chinese dynasties often accepted diversity, but at certain times tried to eliminate difference by persuasion or by force. Three cases illustrate these processes during the Qing period: the relationship between Manchus and Mongols, Qing policies towards aboriginal peoples and the settlement of Taiwan, and Qing policies towards southwestern mountain peoples. In each case, policies came out of the interaction of ethnic categorization, views on cultural transformation and frontier environments. When Qing rulers lost the ability to recognise such cultural distinctions, they lost a key to the endurance of the empire.

Insiders and Outsiders: The Xiangtan Riot of 1819 and Collective Action in Hunan

-Qingshilu (365.6b, 1819) ... the Hunanese being well known to be exceedingly clannish, brought their influence to bear on the politics of the country, and became known as the political factor called the &dquo;Hunan Party.&dquo; The Hunanese, in their own country, are noted for their independence and haughty exclusiveness, not only towards Foreigners, but even to Natives from other provinces; and owing to this attitude, and their successful endeavours to prevent Foreigners entering the province, Hunan earned the name of &dquo;The Closed Province.&dquo;

Review Article : Lakes of Empire: Man and Water in Chinese History R. Keith Schoppa, Xiang Lake: Nine Centuries of Chinese Life. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989.

The scene: a small lake in eastern Zhejiang, just across the Qiantang river from Hangzhou. Known as Xianghu, it watered more than 20,000 acres of paddy fields for 900 years, from its creation as a reservoir in the Song dynasty until its final destruction in the twentieth century. Keith Schoppa’s extraordinary work, examining irrigation conflicts in this region over the longue durée, does more than enlighten us about issues of water conservancy and agricultural production in the last millenium of China’s history. The author ingeniously turns the struggle over the lake into a metaphor for the preservation of Chinese civilization. Precisely because water has been so central to the survival of the Chinese people, controversies over the use of the lake lead him inexorably into all the cultural, economic, and social bases of China: local elite authority, the power of lineages, the role of temples, martyrdom, and personal relations (guanxi), among others. He shows how human contests with nature express social and political relationships, with the environment as the backdrop. The lake began its life during the Song dynasty, when four heroic officials promoted the clearance and preservation of a reservoir for the irrigation needs of the surrounding community. Water dominated the

Joseph Needham's Problematic Legacy

This is the concluding chapter of an epic that began almost seventy years ago. In 1937, when Japan invaded north China, beginning the full-blown Pacific War, three Chinese students came to Cambridge to study with a worldfamous biochemist, Joseph Needham. Greatly impressed by their intelligence, Needham wondered what kind of science ancient China had produced. Thus began an intellectual journey that revealed a vast treasure of scholarly work by Chinese investigators of nature. With his collaborators— one of whom, Lu Gwei-Djen, he later married—Needham planned to demonstrate the wealth of Chinese writing on all the basic modern science and engineering disciplines. Volume 1 of Science and Civilisation in China (SCC) appeared in 1954; by 1995, when he died, Needham had written ten volumes, and other contributors will continue to add more, for a total of twenty-nine. The astonishing breadth of Needham’s learning and his dedication to a few clear guiding principles gave the entire project both impressive analytical power and immense empirical detail. In The Guardian, Laurence Picken called it “perhaps the greatest single act of historical synthesis and intercultural communication ever attempted by one man.” Unlike so many one-man world-historical visionaries (Arnold Toynbee, for example), Needham always went back to the primary sources. He decoded extremely difficult technical texts, providing valuable translations and commentaries of every major work in Chinese science. He proved conclusively that Chinese scholars from earliest times had led the world in inventive genius and analytical creativity in the investigation of nature. (One could go through the science and engineering disciplines at MIT today, for example, in numerical order by course, and find Chinese precursors for all of them— 1: Civil Engineering, 2: Mechanical Engineering, 3: Materials Science, 4: