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  • Editor's Note:Transnational Chinese Passages and the Global Making of Frontiers and Borderlands
  • Gary Chi-Hung Luk

In 2014, Paul Readman, Cynthia Radding, and Chad Bryant concluded in the introduction to their edited volume on the global history of borderlands: "In the historiography now spanning nearly a century, the meaning of borderlands has shifted from the notion of Europeans 'taming' a wild and dangerous frontier to a zone of cultural commingling, and—more recently—to contested spaces marked by violent encounters among multiple European, Afro-descendant, and indigenous groups."1 After Frederick J. Turner, the notions of frontiers and borderlands have been widely employed to study North America and, in the past few decades, to study regions in other continents, including China and its bordering Asian territories.2 Since the 1990s there has been rapidly expanding scholarship that examines state expansion (and its limits) and interactions among different state agents, native groups, and migrants on late imperial China's (1368–1912) internal frontiers (such as South China's West River frontier) and in its internal borderlands (such as the Han River Highlands), on its maritime frontier, and in the inland regions between China proper and Northeast, Central, South, or Southeast Asian states such as the Sino-Korean borderland, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Yunnan.3 [End Page 277]

Frontiers and borderlands, it must be noted, are not necessarily geopolitical in nature. As Pamela K. Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton argue, "frontiers are sometimes at the political borders of empires, but very often they are located at social, economic, or cultural fissures internal to a political order."4 Emerging in the early 1990s, Richard White's idea of "middle ground" in his study of the Great Lakes region in early modern times and Mary Louise Pratt's concept of "contact zone" as "social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other" in literary texts have been appropriated in various disciplines and area studies—including Chinese studies. These ideas have been used not only to illuminate the intermingling of peoples and ideas and the flow of goods and disease in borderland regions, but also to describe cross-cultural exchanges and cultural mixtures in intangible realms often identified as borderlands.5

Readman, Radding, and Bryant have interpreted borderlands as "transnational spaces."6 Yet, "borderlands" and also "frontiers" have only been occasionally employed as analytical tools to explain the flows of Chinese people and their goods, capital, and ideas that transcend national boundaries,7 even though migration and diaspora studies respecting China [End Page 278] and Chinese people have already been established fields. Huge scholarly emphasis has rested on Chinatowns, which have been more often characterized as "ethnic enclaves" that highlight the Chinese as a distinct ethnicity and their challenges in assimilating into the mainstream society of the "receiving country" and much less often identified as "frontier enclaves" (Philip A. Kuhn's term) that exemplify the extension of Chinese activities overseas from China.8 The virtual disjunction between the history of frontiers and borderlands where Chinese people or culture was present and the history of transnational Chinese passages (in terms of people, remittance, idea, etc) is in contrast to the fact that many of their major themes overlap. These themes include transregional Chinese networks (formed by native-place associations, for example), the ways in which Chinese migrants took advantage of economic and social niches, and their interactions with various authorities and peoples, Chinese and non-Chinese alike.9

This theme issue aims to link the formation and evolution of frontiers and borderlands within China and beyond and the history of Chinese people, their political and social networks, and the goods and ideas transmitted by them across oceans in different continents. The three articles in the issue show how the activities of Chinese people with different backgrounds in China and its overseas regions contributed to the making of frontiers (of empires, Chinese settlements, and Chinese cultural productions) and borderlands (where cross-cultural exchange took place). Each of the three articles deals with one aspect of transnational Chinese activities. They are, respectively, the East Asian maritime trade involving Western, Japanese, and Chinese merchants, the global Chinese National Salvation [End Page 279] Movement...

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