Transforming Inner Mongolia: Commerce, Migration, and Colonization on the Qing Frontier

Abstract

Transforming Inner Mongolia, by Yi Wang, examines the long-term process of Chinese expansion into Inner Mongolia during the Qing period, which Wang describes as internal colonialization or, in Owen Lattimore's words, secondary imperialism (209, 249). Wang successfully contextualizes the Chinese colonization of Inner Mongolia on local, regional, national, and global levels by utilizing a wide range of Chinese and European sources. The book begins with a summary of the geography, environment, and history of the Mongolian steppe and then discusses various changes that the Qing's territorial expansion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries introduced or reinforced in the steppe region. Although the Qing officially prohibited the Chinese from entering the Mongolian steppe, its need to maintain various imperial apparatuses, as well as increasing population pressure and ecological crises in North China, drove Chinese farmers to travel outside the Great Wall. The growing presence of Chinese on the steppe—especially in today's Inner Mongolia—compelled the Qing to expand the Chinese-style administrative system north of the Great Wall, giving rise to what Wang calls “dual administrative system” (41–46). As a result, Inner Mongolia witnessed the coexistence of, as well as conflict between, the decentralized Mongol aristocracy and the centralized Chinese bureaucracy.In the second chapter, Wang examines the penetration and expansion of Chinese commerce into the Mongolian steppe. The Qing not only gave Chinese merchants direct access to Mongolia, but it also established a series of politico-military mechanisms—the postal relay system, frontier guard post system, and the institution of annual rotation of Mongol princes and high lamas—to sustain imperial control over the region. Given the cash-poor Mongolian economy, however, it was unviable for the Mongols to meet these official obligations. In this situation, Chinese merchants—most prominently those from Shanxi Province—drew partnership contracts with local Mongol authorities and took on the role of financial intermediary to facilitate the fulfillment of these duties. These developments made the Mongols economically dependent on Chinese merchants while increasingly incorporating Mongolia into the silver-based market system of China proper.The third chapter discusses the processes and ramifications of Chinese migration, settlement, and cultivation in Inner Mongolia. Chinese cultivation would have devastating impacts on the fragile environment of the steppe, causing land degradation and desertification. The ever-expanding Chinese presence also threatened the livelihood of ordinary herders and challenged the authority of local Mongol rulers, eventually leading to ethnic conflicts between Mongols and Chinese. The surge in the Chinese population also necessitated the transplantation of Chinese-style centralized administrative units to the steppe to oversee fiscal and judicial affairs related to Chinese migrants, which in turn encroached upon the autonomy of Mongol banners. Last, Chinese agricultural expansion shifted practical land ownership from Mongols to Chinese migrants, thereby fostering the commodification and privatization of Mongol lands.Chapter 4 explores the rise of a highly commercialized, capital-intensive, and market-oriented rural economy, which resembled agrarian capitalism, in the Hetao region on the northern bend of the Yellow River. From the early 1800s, a group of Chinese entrepreneurs known as “land merchants” (dishang) advanced into Hetao, where they acquired lands from the Mongols, developed elaborate irrigation systems, and established large-scale managerial farms using wage labor. In doing so, the land merchants mobilized large amounts of capital, technical expertise, land, and labor through a sophisticated shareholding system. They also participated in long-distance trade and handicraft industries. These activities increasingly integrated Hetao into the larger regional and global economic system. Wang points out that the existence of such domestically financed and organized developments—however short-lived—counters the conventional view that China, incapable of initiating transformative changes on its own, kept repeating the long-term pattern of smallholder farming and “involutionary” growth.The fifth chapter investigates the expansion of the Catholic Church in Inner Mongolia by focusing on the proselytizing activities of missionaries from the Belgian Catholic order named the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Since the 1860s, a series of rebellions, natural disasters, and famines in North China offered the missionaries favorable conditions to penetrate Inner Mongolia. To attract new converts, most of whom were land-poor and famine-stricken Chinese farmers, the missionaries adopted an evangelical strategy of acquiring Mongol pasturelands and converting them into farmland. The missionaries were also often entangled in land disputes with Mongols, Manchu and Chinese local officials, and Chinese land merchants. During the Boxer Rebellion, these disputes often erupted into violence, for which Mongols came to owe tremendous indemnities. To pay off the huge reparations, many Mongol banners had to resort to land cession, which enabled an unprecedented expansion of the church in Inner Mongolia and stimulated the increasingly Sinicized and centralizing Qing state to penetrate the steppe region.The sixth chapter examines the land reclamation campaign conducted in Inner Mongolia by the centralizing and modernizing late Qing state. From the 1860s, two major challenges brought on by foreign imperialism—the worsening financial crisis and imminent security predicament in Mongolia—gave rise to a significant cognitive shift among high Qing officials concerning the Mongolian steppe, which was now conceptualized as an untapped source of revenue and a locus of strategic defense. In the wake of the launch of the New Policies reforms, the Qing court appointed Yigu, a high-ranking Manchu official, as imperial commissioner to oversee land reclamation in Inner Mongolia, which was considered a way to finance the reform programs and to counter foreign influences on the northern frontiers. By imposing a standardized procedure of land survey, registration, and taxation, Yigu also aimed to retrieve Mongol lands for official taxation, abrogate the Mongols’ hereditary land rights, and transfer the ownership of Mongol lands to the Qing state. As a result, Chinese-style centralized bureaucratic units proliferated in Inner Mongolia. After the fall of the Qing, these developments would facilitate Inner Mongolia's integration into the centralized administrative system of the homogenizing Chinese nation-state.In the end, Wang argues that the historical process of Chinese migration and colonization in Inner Mongolia played a critical role in China's modern transition from a multiethnic empire to a centralizing and homogenizing nation-state. The author also eloquently proves that the development of Chinese colonization on the steppe originated from a set of endogenous socioeconomic transformations well before the impacts from the West forced the Qing to pursue modernization and national integration. Nonetheless, several misconceptions about the history of the steppe are intermittently spotted. For example, the author writes as if the Mongols had not been organized into territorial units before the Qing conquest (27, 37). Recent scholarship, however, points out that territoriality has been ever-present on the steppe.1 Wang also continues to use the term “tribe” to describe traditional Mongol society (26–27, 30–31, 63). Yet a group of scholars has recently challenged the terminology and concept of “tribe,” at least in the context of Mongol history.2 Moreover, the transcription system used for Mongolian words is sometimes inconsistent. Last, this research would have been more nuanced if the author had refrained from characterizing Han Chinese as the “core” and various non-Han peoples as the “periphery.” From the perspective of Qing imperial history, at least during the first half of the empire, the Mongols were not peripheral people. These minor issues, however, do not reduce the overall value of this excellent research. Given that “the PRC government has continued the policy of large-scale Chinese migration and state-sponsored development schemes in Inner Mongolia since the late Qing period and carried these initiatives forward with a forcefulness and efficiency as never seen before” (263), particularly in this time of China's hard-line state policies toward its Inner Asian minorities, Wang's book deserves to be read widely.