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

The ecology of human movements has shown that one way or another people will acquire the necessities of life and, if necessary, seek greener pastures to find them. For centuries the Middle Kingdom was plagued by marauding nomadic Mongols, who survived and flourished by periodically plundering settled agrarian societies. In one dynasty after another, China tried to end this perennial threat to its security and stability, but without success. The Ming (1368-1644) built its own Great Wall, with watchtowers situated at strategic locations to keep the barbarian raiders out, but this ultimately failed. It was during the Qing (1644-1911), under the foreign rule of the Manchus-themselves a "conquest regime" of strong martial heritage—that the Chinese became more skillful in dealing with the Mongol threat.¹ Theirs was a well worked out strategy of co-optation and domestication through trade, diplomacy, and even bribery, or else the annihilation of those who refused to submit to their rule.

The Qing conquest of the different Mongol tribes under their respective leaders (khans) was effected through a program of pacification through trade, providing the Mongols with products from settled agrarian communities such as cloth, tea, and other goods that nomadic people needed but could not produce themselves. Qing goods were traded primarily for horses, which Mongols were adept in raising, especially those suitable for the purposes of the cavalry, which was ever in need of replenishing animals that died in battle, from harsh weather conditions, or from exhaustion, starvation, or disease. For such a "conquest regime" military force was always an option when trade and the offer of incorporation into the Qing realm failed. Mongols who surrendered and complied with Qing demands were brought into the Qing multinational banner militia and given prestigious titles, replacing those of the former khans. The bannermen included not only their own Manchus, but Han Chinese, Mongolians, Tibetans, Turkic Muslims, and all others who submitted to Qing rule. Mongols who resisted would be hunted down in protracted military campaigns until they were ultimately vanquished, as happened to the Zunghars, who were exterminated in 1761.

Peter C. Perdue, professor of History and of Asian civilizations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has done extensive research on this much-neglected subject. His book China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Asia is about a part of history that, he claims, has often been bypassed or not dealt with in sufficient depth; it is "a dramatic story almost unknown to English-language readers" (p. 1). As pointed out by the author at the outset, the "China" that marched west refers to the Manchu expansion into much of Central Eurasia during the Qing period. Ironically, Perdue notes, the Chinese nation-state of today claims this Qing history as its very own. Revisionist history begins here.

Using primarily archival materials—the author's research took him to Beijing, Taibei, and Moscow—and constrained by the limitations of his other scholarly resources, Perdue is intentionally comprehensive, and he is serious about his inclusive and multicultural approach. He makes a sincere effort to avoid bias toward any civilization or condescension toward "barbaric" peoples by giving equal time to all the actors contending for power and place in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century "Central Eurasia"—a term he prefers in an attempt to blur the distinction between "Europe" and "Asia," especially with reference to Russia, which embraces both. The three major players he focuses on in this contestation are the Manchu Qing (1644-1911), the Muscovite Russians (1613-1917), and the Mongolian Zunghars (1671-1761). Admittedly, Perdue found objectivity and neutrality difficult in this project, where the primary and secondary sources in several languages with which he was working were largely written in and by Chinese during the Qing period, from the perspective of a people who saw themselves as victors who ruled by the mandate of Heaven.

Since he is...