The Chinese government has, in modern times, had an exceptionally complicated relationship with its frontiers. Tim Oakes, in “Building a Southern Dynamo: Guizhou and State Power;” Max Woodworth, in “Frontier Boomtown Urbanism in Ordos;” and Scott Relyea, in “Conceiving the ’West‘: Early Twentieth-Century Visions of Kham,” all examine these frontiers in their various economic forms. But all three analyses lead to one main argument: The central Chinese government never had any interest in subsuming its frontiers into the national center or otherwise improving the condition of those frontiers. When the state “Sinicized” or otherwise developed these frontiers, it was only to fulfill the state’s one and only desire to shift all resources east and strengthen the coastal core of the country.
Because this is a large claim to make, given the limited scope of the readings and the limited scale of this paper, let me first clarify the definition of a frontier, using Woodworth’s article on Mongolia as a helpful framing device. Woodworth begins his discussion by quoting Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” speech, in which the latter says the frontier is a “meeting point between civilization and savagery.” (Woodworth, 4) Woodworth continues by saying, “later scholars have tried to retain the idea of the frontier as a space of civilizational encounter while dropping the intimations of manifest destiny in Turner’s thesis.” (Woodworth, 4) Like the Chinese cases which we will see later, the American government also had a nebulous relationship with the frontier. The “Great American West” that came to be a key agricultural and livestock-production node for the country had long been seen as a desert, an uncolonizable and unmarketable land. But Woodworth’s application of Turner’s Thesis does not only apply to 21st century Mongolia. Relyea, in his article on Kham in late Qing, describes one Chen Qichang, who wrote in a contemporary newspaper, “The lands of Sichuan and Tibet are like lips and teeth. Teeth without lips will shiver; Sichuan without Tibet will tremble.” (Relyea, 183) Relyea, like Woodworth, describes Kham as a place at the proverbial edge of the world for China: Chinese in ownership, yet not Chinese in “spirit.” To the extent that there was a Chinese “nation” in the last decades of the Qing, Kham was not part of it. So the frontier, at its most basic level, is a halfway point, a grey-zone in which the Chinese state manifests itself in intentional and limited ways, but which the state also sees as fundamentally necessary to the continued existence of China. As Turner argued in his speech, there could be no America without the Frontier, yet America’s relationship to the frontier is nebulous and often misunderstood; the Chinese argued the same.
Let us begin, then, our analysis of this nebulous nature by looking at Guizhou, a frontier province that is nevertheless reasonably safely tucked in to China, away from the threat of the Russians and other large powers. In describing a controversial advertisement for a state-run electric power company which purports to bring clean energy from the west (from places such as Guizhou) into the east, Tim Oakes asks a question key to our argument: “Was this, then, the image’s underlying message – that Guangdong’s healthy environment was being purchased by the state at the expense of the clean air that impoverished Guizhou has always enjoyed? Is it possible – as some in Guizhou have suggested – that the east stands to benefit more from the west’s development than the west itself?” (Oakes, 468) Oakes says the answer to this question is hard to answer. It certainly is not just “yes” or “no,” but it is clear that, at this time, the vast wealth of power that eastern China receives from Guizhou has not translated into vast wealth being disseminated in Guizhou. According to Oakes, “in terms of GDP per capita, Guizhou remains China’s poorest province.” (Oakes, 470) Furthermore, while it purports to bring civilizational benefits to the whole province, the campaign to “Open Up the West” (the state’s push toward development of resources in western provinces like Guizhou) in fact has only succeeded in pushing for “big developments.” As we have seen in Qing frontier development practices centuries earlier, these developments concentrate wealth in pocketed areas and fail to benefit the rest of the province. (Oakes, 473) What this says, then, is that the state has developed Guizhou as a proverbial gold mine. — It could benefit the “nation” (which generally seems to be portrayed specifically as the east), but in the end it has left the province of Guizhou itself a rather hollow shell, not much better off than it was before the state moved in with the Open Up the West campaign. Guizhou, as a frontier province, is nothing but a tool with which to develop the east; it is in essence an internal colony, the story of which sounds strikingly familiar to colonial narratives in European colonies in West Africa. (Oakes, 469) Let us continue to examine the historical and contemporary frontier narrative in China.
Our next case, Ordos, is a place with a comparable history of poverty but which, to an even greater extent than Guizhou, has recently had an economic boom resulting from a massive supply of energy resources. Woodworth says that “until its recent explosion of wealth [in the early 2000s], Ordos was a rough-and-tumble place with a tradition of lawlessness. Given this history, and having observed from the sidelines the economic growth of the Chinese littoral during the first two decades of reform, locals exhibit an intense solidarity rooted in the shared experience of exclusion and deep poverty.” (Woodworth, 5) It is a well-established fact that Ordos, and Inner Mongolia generally, was an overwhelmingly poor region before the coal boom. Thus, we can already establish a connection to the Guizhou case: both were poor and outside the reasonably powerful economic and infrastructural core of Chinese development, and neither received notable benefits from technological or social advancement until the state realized the immense need for energy resources, the likes of which both provinces have in great surplus. But the Ordos case stands apart from Guizhou in one key aspect: the state is not a main actor in the economic development that Ordos has experienced since the boom. While the state did confer municipality status to Ordos in 2001 (Woodworth, 8), it has taken very few direct measures to improve Ordos economic infrastructure, instead leaving the task to the local communities. Woodworth says, “in contrast to the concentration of major global financial players that converges on places like Shenzhen and Dubai, reports indicate that the lion’s share of financing for industrial activity and property development in Ordos is organized through local kinship- and place-based finance networks, fly-by-night microlending institutions, shell investment companies, and pawnshops.” (Qin 2011). “A small share—around 10 percent—of financing is obtained through commercial and state-run banks.” (Woodworth, 8) In Guizhou, we saw that the state took a passive stance on all development except that which was necessary to successfully extract the wealth of resources in the province for eastern use. In Inner Mongolia, the state has even taken a passive stance toward that development. The more widespread economic success that Ordos has experienced, which Guizhou lacks, is almost purely a homegrown affair, yet in the end, much of the coal and cash appears to flow into China proper anyway.
Ordos is 90% Han, which would suggest it is not a “frontier.” (Woodworth, 4) But it is a frontier, in the sense that its own local economic situation, like Guizhou, exists completely independently of the state’s affairs. Were we to argue that Inner Mongolia is as much a core province as Hebei or Shandong, we would have to ignore the fact that the province exists almost entirely outside the Chinese state’s own economic infrastructure. There is proof (albeit speculative, given the scale and scope of this paper) that the state’s economic relationship with the frontier is at most extraction-based (Guizhou), and even completely detached in places like Inner Mongolia; yet in both cases, the state reaps massive benefits.
But a valuable question to ask, given this idea, is: Is the state’s disengaged relationship with its frontier a fundamentally modern concept, or is there historical basis for it? We turn now to Kham, a region long regarded by the Qing as a “fence” between China and everything east of it. (Relyea, 183) Relyea says, “neither the territory nor the people [of Kham] were of immediate concern to the imperial government… As long as their rulers had submitted to the emperor by accepting investiture of a tusi title, refrained from aggression, periodically sent tribute, and defended their territory against external threats as commanded, then the officials and gentry of Sichuan perceived their western fence to be secure.” (Relyea, 183-184) Like Inner Mongolia and Guizhou, Kham had a history of minimal state intervention, which resulted in poverty but nonetheless a reasonable amount of autonomy. It was, for all intents and purposes, hardly a part of China and certainly not a part of “core” China, since financial returns were minimal at best, and Sinification was generally greeted with resistance. But this changed in the last two decades of Qing rule; British power in India and Russian power in the northwest had simply risen too much for China to trust semi-autonomous Kham with the whole country’s protection (as a fence)., Additionally, “the loss of influence on the Korean peninsula and heightened concern for expanding Russian and Japanese intrigue in Manchuria” forced the Qing to turn their attention, for the first time, “to sovereignty as a diplomatic tool, appeal to which could preserve the empire’s territorial integrity.” (Relyea, 185) To return to the metaphor quoted at the beginning of this paper, the precious and interior “teeth” of Sichuan needed the “lips” of Kham to protect them, but in order for this to be a success, Kham had to be as fully integrated into China as Sichuan.
This model espoused by the Qing in the 1900s was, on the outside, perhaps the most directly integrative of all models in this essay (admittedly, the competition is weak). But in the end, Kham received no more benefit from this integration than Inner Mongolia or Guizhou. Although it received a good deal of administrative attention from Sichuan particularly, according to Relyea, this attention only came in the form of increased military presence and economic extraction. (Relyea, 189) In the early 1900s, a number of European/American research parties surveyed Kham and informed the Qing of the vast and untapped mining potential of silver, copper, and particularly gold, as well as a number of other metals. (Relyea, 188) By the end of Qing rule in 1912, Sichuan official Zhao Erfeng had nearly created a monopoly on mining enterprise in Kham, all of the capital from which was being sent east (this narrative should seem similar to that of Guizhou). Kham, like Guizhou and Inner Mongolia, had long been a poor and desolate region unsupported by the government which purported to rule it; and like Guizhou and Inner Mongolia, when Kham finally came to give value to the government, it received little value in return.
The frontier is a complicated place; not quite Chinese, it is nonetheless a part of China; not quite civilized, it is nevertheless a part of a civilization. But, as we have speculated in this paper, to the extent that the frontier is a part of civilizational China, its relationship to China is rather unequal. Ordos in Inner Mongolia stands alone as a frontier that, despite lack of wholesale integration, has gained similar prosperity to that which it funnels into eastern China through exploitation of its coal supply. When the state has intervened recently in places like Guizhou, and historically in places like Kham, it was not for the sake of conveying civilizational benefits onto those places, but simply for the sake of extracting all possible economic benefits from those provinces and sending them east. To tell a story of China imposing itself on its frontiers with the intention of helping those frontiers is like telling a story of a farmer milking her cow with the intention of feeding the milk to that cow: it just seems improbable.
Aidan Lilienfeld, for “Frontiers and Expansion in Modern China” at the University of Chicago, June 2016
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