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  • The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands
  • Evelyn S. Rawski
The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands. By Leo K. Shin (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006) 246 pp. $80.00

Using a wide variety of contemporary sources—ranging from travel accounts, local gazetteers, collected literati writings, and military handbooks—Shin analyzes the process of identity formation in the southwest Chinese province of Guangxi during the Ming (1368–1644) period. He draws on a large and growing secondary literature in anthropology and history to determine how officials and literati constructed a "Chinese" identity by classifying, in ever-finer detail, the "non-Chinese" groups who inhabited this frontier region.

The primary factor in identity formation was an expansionist Chinese state. In the second half of the fourteenth century, Ming rulers and elites, experiencing policy setbacks on their northern borders, turned their attention instead to the control of south China and the re-affirmation of "the distinctions between 'Chinese' and 'non-Chinese'" (160). The sixteenth-century economic expansion stimulated literati to travel throughout the empire, creating a growing urban audience for their memoirs. Although an older literature fantasizing the exotic persisted, the travelers displayed a new interest in empirical knowledge. The systematic search for accurate information, which is also evident in gazetteers and administrative handbooks, may have pushed the beginnings of ethnography, identified by Hostetler as part of the Qing colonial enterprise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, forward by a century.1

In Guangxi, efforts to establish administrative units directly under central government control were stymied by high costs and the resistance of local residents. The Ming compromised. Their decision to rule indirectly through native chieftains (tu guan, later tusi) created a system empowering local elites that would persist in some localities until the 1950s. Similarly, Shin argues, the marking of groups outside the category of proper subjects (min, literally "people") during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the forerunner of the designation of fifty-five minority nationalities in the People's Republic of China.

This monograph joins several others focusing on ethnic identity [End Page 492] formation and state–society interactions in China's southwest and west, but extends the historical range to an earlier period.2 Unlike Hostetler, Shin does not cast the state as a colonizing power, nor does he address the extent to which the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Chinese state should be placed within an early modern historical frame. However, his study's ability to provoke such questions comprises part of its contribution to the field.

Evelyn S. Rawski
University of Pittsburgh

Footnotes

1. Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago, 2000).

2. David G. Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856–1873 (Stanford, 2005); Ho-dong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1874–1877 (Stanford, 2004); Pamela K. Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton (eds.), Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley, 2006).

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