The Ping-Sui Railway and the Northwest: Travel and Nation-Building in Republican China

In the summer of 1934, a group of Beijing scholars and writers participated in a tour along the Ping-Sui railway.  A major artery connecting Beijing with Inner Mongolia, the Ping-Sui line was the first railway in China designed, built, and managed by the Chinese. Since its completion in 1923, this important trunk line played a crucial role in the economic development of the region, however, because of the volatile political climate and the underdeveloped tourist infrastructures, tourists from China’s eastern seaboard had not taken advantage of it to travel to China’s Northwest in the 1920s.  The situation changed dramatically in the early 1930s. When the Japanese occupation of Manchuria deepened the “frontier crisis” in China, Chinese intellectuals began to call on their fellow countrymen to “go to the Northwest.” As the only modern thoroughfare to region, the Ping-Sui line suddenly attracted many travelers—especially the Han Chinese intellectuals from major universities in Beijing—to explore and investigate the northwestern provinces and its diverse groups of non-Han ethnic groups.

Following this 1934 tour, this paper delineates the connections between railway, travel, and nation-building projects during the Nanjing decade (1928-1937).  Traveling at the moment of crisis, four of the tour members, including writers and social scientists, published books based on their travel experiences or fieldworks conducted during their journey. Juxtaposing travel accounts with academic studies, this paper explores multiple ways of representing the Northwest—its landscape, history, and peoples and highlights how the old imperial spatial imaginations and new conceptualizations of race, ethnicity, and nationality grinded against one another in these travel narratives. I argue that the growing attention to the Northwest in the 1930s demonstrated how the empire-to-nation-state transition in modern China was the result of the overlapping trajectories of imperial and anti-imperial aspirations.