A Comparative Study of Nativization of Han Chinese Settlers on Qing Inner Asian and Maritime Frontiers

Since the early seventeenth century, the Qing empire gradually expanded its territories toward Inner Asia and maritime frontiers. The expansion of Qing dominions and grave population pressure of China proper created a favorable condition for Han Chinese immigrations into frontier regions. In this process, settler nativization appeared on different frontiers. The term “nativization” coined in this paper means a phenomenon that a settler who acquires the identity of the native people, in the ethno-cultural, institutional, and legal sense. For the Qing court, settler nativization had created a challenge to maintain its closing-off policy in the borderlands and its segregation policy toward its multi-ethnic subjects. Drawing on Mongolian and Chinese archival sources, this paper explores nativization of Han Chinese settlers on Qing Inner Asian and maritime frontiers, mainly Mongolia and Taiwan. It discusses the differences of modes of nativization of Han Chinese settlers and the Qing reactions to this problem. This paper argues that the Han Chinese settlers had similar strategies of adaption despite of facing different environments, cultures, peoples on Inner Asian and maritime frontiers. The closing-off policy of frontiers played a significant role in settler nativization. The differences of the channels and degrees of nativization depended on two factors: 1) the level of Qing reverence for native cultures and institutions; 2) the level of autonomy of local elites.