Reluctant Pioneers: China's Expansion Northward, 1644–1937 (review)

This ambitious and elegant book covers a subject of vast scope, the opening up and settlement of Manchuria, and its incorporation into China, before it was alienated from China by Japan. This movement was the largest and the most successful of Chinese territorial expansions of the Qing dynasty; it was much more complete and effective, and much more peaceable, than China's expansion westwards. It involved the gradual but wholesale adaptation of a region to Chinese social and economic practices, achieved not by military conquest, as were Xinjiang and Tibet, but by the gradual settlement of millions of people, who brought with them their own lifestyle.

The lands of Manchuria were the homeland of the Manchus and groups of Tartars, most of whom led nomadic and subsistence lives. After the Manchus moved south, to take over China and found the Qing Dynasty, Manchuria was retained as a closed area for the Manchus alone. But the growth in China's population, and the knowledge that there was rich virgin land just north of the Bohai, led increasing numbers of people to move there, at first illegally and later as part of programs encouraged by the Chinese government.

Reardon-Anderson's study of Manchuria focuses on the land, the people, and the economy, an approach that works well for the early periods, given that much of the story for the Qing was of the settlement of "empty" land by peasants from China proper. The author gives a strong, detailed account of the gradual movement of settlers into the Manchu homeland, and of the evolution of the land-holding systems that allowed rural settlement. He shows the recreation of a Chinese world in a harsh environment where the space and the soil fertility made the physical endurance Manchuria demanded endurable. He makes a persuasive case for seeing the migration into Manchuria in terms of sojourner migration, parallel to the contemporary movements from south China to the Nanyang and North America.

As a region, Manchuria is comparable to Siberia, the American midwest, and the Canadian Prairies, the great regions of rural settlement of the late nineteenth century. Manchuria's vast plains are crossed by grand, sluggish rivers that become roads in winter, its mountains are rich in timber and fur-bearing animals. It is a land dominated by a brutal winter, one that forced climatic adaptations for settlers-but not major changes in culture. Manchuria became part of China because the settlers took the Chinese world with them, as much as it did by political incorporation through the Qing. Reardon-Anderson's descriptions of the long process of settlement contradict theories developed especially in the Japanese imperialist enterprise that Manchuria was never really a part of China-and thus could be easily detached.

The author's focus on the land, the people, and the economy works well for the early and mid-Qing, less well for the late Qing and the Republic, as Manchuria became the prize fought over by the Russians and the Japanese, and because Japanese investment and development turned Manchuria into one of the great industrial heartlands, with major urban centers connected by an extensive railway network. These projects required huge numbers of workers, and the first two decades of the Republic were the period when the greatest influx of migrants took place. Unless (and this is an unmentioned possibility), migration and settlement continued in spite of political and economic changes, the absence of a discussion in the book of political and international affairs is rather critical. Some of the key events in modern Asian history took place in Manchuria-the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), Jiuyiba/the Mukden Incident (1931), and the creation of the Japanese client state of Manzhouguo (1932). The degree to which imperialist activity influenced migration is a difficult one for nationalist historians to handle, and so it is often ignored, but there can be no doubt that without...