Ethnicizing the frontier: Imperial transformation and ethnic confrontations in China-Inner Mongolia,1890s-1930s.
详细信息
文摘
My dissertation examines the emergence of three types of Mongol-Han confrontation in Inner Mongolia in the period of Chinese imperial transition (1890s-1930s). Three local exigencies,namely,private land cultivation,jurisdictional vacuum and Russian territorial expansion,which vividly embodied the general imperial crisis in the Mongolian frontier,prompted the late Qing government to readjust its frontier tactics and consequently induced restructuring of local governing relationships in three ecological zones. The multifarious Mongol-Han confrontations largely came out of these local processes of political restructuring. I use a wide range of sources,including the archives of the Department of Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs,the archives of Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region,the imperial officials' memorials,local gazetteers,printed legal archives,foreigners' travelogues and so on,to development my arguments. While the current sociology of empire offers many insights into the distinction between empire and nation-state,particularly by assessing the merits and demerits of the two,my study questions such a distinction. It affirms that the Mongol-Han confrontations occurred at the critical conjuncture when the Qing empire gave way to a nascent Chinese republic. Yet,the weak and inchoate Republic of China continuously relied on the remnant imperial elites to run frontier politics,and,due to its internal fragmentation,was not able to propagate any strong national ideology. Henceforth,the institutional incentives for state elites to systematically homogenize their subjects,as is frequently seen in other post-imperial states (like Turkey and Russia),are rather limited in the China case. My study therefore questions the macro institutional explanations provided by the center-periphery model to the causes and timing of minority ethnic mobilizations in empires. Moreover,because the specific exigencies that catalyzed the political reshuffling varied in these three contexts,also did the local governing relationships,the actual meanings of Mongol-Han confrontation were different in these three zones. My study thus dissolves the imagined uniformity of the Mongols,and emphasizes that not all of the Mongol-Han interactions were fraught with the longstanding antagonism derived from the "natural hostility" between nomads and sedentary people.