The View from the Border Crossing

The China travelogue boasts an illustrious history. From Marco Polo to Peter Hessler, Western writers have long used the genre as a point of entry for broader assessments of the nation and its relationship to the outside world. Still and moving images, from early newsreels to the contemporary photo-book, have played a similar role. In China at Its Limits, Matthias Messmer and Hsin-Mei Chuang bring these two forms together. Combining “solid academic research” (414) with five years of travel around and across China’s borders, they have written a book that they emphasize is neither “purely academic . . . nor a comprehensive travel documentary” (12). Instead it weaves together historical narrative, images, and reportage in an attempt to capture for the general reader what China’s global reemergence looks like from the country’s margins.

Messmer and Chuang focus on borderlands for several reasons. China’s borders have been shaped by both late nineteenth-century imperial aggression and the Cold War. While the contemporary People’s Republic of China (PRC) has solved most, though not all, of its border disputes, the country’s relationships with many of its immediate neighbors remain overshadowed by this history. As these relationships are challenged by the PRC’s growing economic and political power, the Chinese periphery has become an excellent location from which to observe the past’s continued influence on the present. But the view from the margins also decenters the national narrative promulgated by both state and party. The Chinese borderlands are home to the overwhelming majority of the country’s fifty-five ethnic minority groups, many of whom are part of cross-border communities, so the China that emerges from the everyday history of these spaces is more liminal and less Han-centric than is assumed in Beijing. Attention to these people and places thus allows us “glimpses into some neglected and often unfamiliar lifeworlds far from the center of China proper” (14), a phrase that suggests the authors’ desire to capture a history from below, rather than above.

Structurally, the book is composed of an introduction, laying out the volume’s rationale, and eight chapters. Each chapter focuses on one example, or one group, of China’s borders with its neighbors, arranged counter-clockwise from east to west. Thus we start at the border with North Korea; move on to Russia; then Mongolia; then the “stans” (Kazakh-stan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, which all border China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region); the Himalayas (India, Nepal, Bhutan, which all border Tibet); Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam; and, finally, the South China Sea, China’s primary maritime border. Each chapter has a similar internal structure, starting with a section on the history of the border region, moving on to one entitled “Places for the Curious,” and concluding with “A Lingering Question.” Photographs taken by the authors are interspersed throughout, although within the text they are only numbered; their captions are gathered together as endnotes at the conclusion of each chapter. Finally, the book has a chapter-specific general bibliography and a reading list at the end.

This arrangement allows Messmer and Chuang to provide background context for the individual stories that are their preferred focus. The historical introductions synthesize academic work on the relevant border into an accessible overview, with the angle taken reflecting the history in question. Thus the chapter on Russia outlines the history and consequences of Russian adventurism in China’s northeast; the chapter on Laos and Vietnam, meanwhile, explores how both countries have experienced the presence of an imperial power on their doorstep. Long-standing issues arising from these entangled histories — for example, the implications of China’s de facto control over Southeast Asia’s primary water supply, the Mekong River — often return in “A Lingering Question.” In contrast, “Places for the Curious” is a product of the authors’ travels. Here they concentrate on particular locations and people that bring these histories into focus...