From Subjects to Citizens: Frontier Recolonization and Civilizing Mission of Late Qing China

Although the new historiography of Qing China has profoundly changed our conception of the Qing Empire, including the significance of its colonial enterprises in the early modern period, historians have not yet fully reexamined the frontier policies of the later Qing period, especially in light of the new scholarship on colonialism and imperialism developed elsewhere. Instead of following the fatalist narrative of the Qing's inevitable decline due to the presumed conservatism of Confucian ideology and the backwardness of the Manchu court, this paper insists not only that we need to take the drastic institutional and political reforms of the late Qing seriously, but also to approach these reforms as nation-building as well as empire-building projects. Late Qing China, in other words, was far from being a passive victim of colonialism and capitalism even in its final moments. The Qing's renewed colonial ambitions were often revealed in the desires of many Qing officials and cultural elites to establish a colonial state to rival Russia, Japan, and other colonial powers. Yet, without the financial resources to mount the kind of colonial expansion pursued by its rivals, Qing leaders temporarily settled on a project of frontier recolonization, namely to reconceptualize and incorporate the frontier region using modern technologies of governance. Ultimately, this paper will examine how the Qing's project of “civilizing mission”--itself part of the larger frontier recolonization project--effectively converted some of the frontier populations who once enjoyed special privileges in the hierarchal empire into citizens of the new nation-based empire. In so doing, this paper highlights that Qing China's frontier substantiation and incorporation was simultaneously a nationalist and colonial project.