China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (review)

The Manchu rulers of China's Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) conquered and permanently annexed the sparsely populated arid lands of Mongolia, Qinghai, Xinjiang, and Tibet. No Chinese-ruled dynasty was able to do all of that, and the Mongol-ruled Yuan Dynasty did so only temporarily. The Qing transformed the economies and societies in these lands, which mostly (Outer Mongolia excepted) remained under Chinese rule even after the Manchus fell. The Qing conquest of Central Eurasia thus has much contemporary relevance, as it seems to underpin the claim of the present Chinese government that these lands (along with Taiwan) have "always" been part of an entity called "China."

My own introduction to this subject was individual entries in Arthur W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (Washington, 1943), an excellent work that, like most earlier treatments of Qing history, relied almost exclusively on Chinese language sources. Peter C. Perdue's China Marches West will probably be the definitive work on the topic for decades to come. In addition to the voluminous and difficult Chinese sources, the author has mastered Manchu and Mongolian, and gives numerous examples of the different perspective that comes from using sources in those languages, even when they seem to be mere components of Qing documents issued in the standard trilingual format. Russian sources round out the picture, the author noting how Russian expansion both complicated and facilitated the Qing absorption of their Central Eurasian territories.

After an introductory Part One dealing with the expansion of the Qing and Russian empires into Central Eurasia and the emergence of the Zunghar state, Perdue deals with the military history of the conquest in Part Two ("Contending for Power"). Galdan (r. 1671–97) and his successors as rulers of the Zunghar Mongols were never quite the threat that the Qing emperors imagined, the author argues, and he demonstrates that despite the semi-nomadic background of the Manchus, logistical factors remained the major constraint on projecting power into Mongolia and Xinjiang. The 1696 battle of Jao Modo, won by Qing armies that had nearly exhausted their rations, was much more of a "damned near run thing" than the clever trap that it became in later histories.

Part Three ("The Economic Basis of Empire") and Part Four ("Fixing Frontiers") chronicle the steps needed to bind the new territories to the empire (elimination of enemies, settlement of military colonists, subsidization of commerce to ensure grain supplies) and the way that the mapmaking and historiography attending this process changed perceptions. In the concluding Part Five ("Legacies and Implications") the author analyzes the political use of this history by post-Qing Chinese regimes, and its theoretical implications. He finds Eurocentric formulations unpersuasive, and argues for greater emphasis on military considerations and state policy in explaining historical change. Many readers of the Journal of Military History may be well disposed to these arguments.

The author presents his complex arguments in clear prose that is uninfected by current academic jargon, and the pleasure of reading his book is enhanced by its beautiful production values, which include good maps and carefully chosen full color illustrations.