Managing Frontiers in Qing China: The Lifanyuan and Libu Revisited ed. by Dittmar Schorkowitz and Chia Ning (review)

The history of the Qing has become increasingly popular among western scholars since the end of the twentieth century, particularly with regard to the problem of frontiers and institutions. The edited volume under review combines the two perspectives by exploring Qing institutions in the frontier regions through a range of interdisciplinary approaches. The book is coedited by Dittmar Schorkowitz, a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, and Chia Ning, a professor of history at Central College in Pella, Iowa. As often happens, the volume originated at a conference. In April 2011, the conference “Administrative and Colonial Practices in Qing Ruled China: Lifanyuan and Libu Revisited” was held at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. It focused on two Qing agencies that administered non-Han groups: the Lifanyuan and the Libu.

With the expansion of the Qing, imperial policies toward minority groups changed, as did the Qing’s integrative strategies. The Lifanyuan and the Libu were the two primary institutions responsible for frontier administration and population integration in the Qing Empire. The Lifanyuan was established with the growth of Qing geopolitical influence in Inner Asia. The agency’s responsibilities in Mongolia, Qinghai, Tibet, Xingjiang, and other regions with non-Han populations covered a broad range of political, economic, military, and cultural affairs. They were in charge of administering penalties and supervising pilgrimages, maintaining posting stations and dealing with Buddhists.¹ The Libu was a traditional institution inherited from the Ming that dated back to much earlier periods. Sometimes translated as the Board of Rites, it was in charge of moral order, proper conduct, education, and examinations throughout the empire.

Transcending traditional institutional analysis, the edited volume focuses on the interaction of the Lifanyuan and the Libu with local ethnic groups, which resulted in changing the Qing’s sociocultural organization, legal system, and adinistrative regime in newly incorporated territories. The book consists of an introduction and thirteen chapters, which can be thematically grouped into three parts.

In the first tentatively identified part, chapters by Micheal Weiers, Chia Ning, Pamela Crossley, and Yongjiang Zhang discuss the inner structure and organization of the Lifanyuan and Libu and how their modes of operation changed over time. Michael Weiers’s chapter complements this section by drawing a parallel between the Lifanyuan and the traditional and highly reputed Libu and presenting unpublished Manchurian and Mongolian primary sources on these institutions. In the first of her two chapters, Chia Ning compares the role of these agencies during the early stages of Qing empire building; in her second chapter she explicates the way the Lifanyuan and the Libu were integrated into the Qing general tribute system. This comprehensive multilayered system was central to the Qing government and its worldview, regulating administrative hierarchy, social rituals, and trade relations. Pamela Crossley argues that the Lifanyuan played an essential role in sustaining political stability during the turbulent period of Qing territorial expansion. The political transformations of the early nineteenth century disrupted the complex system of the Qing’s distributed sovereignty, which had the effect of narrowing the scope of the Lifanyuan’s authority. Yongjiang Zhang focuses on the Libu during the pre-Qing era and the political significance of the Qing’s efforts to use it to arrange multiple ethnic groups in an orderly way and to integrate them culturally through pan-imperial rituals. The Libu was instrumental in ranking diverse communities within the Qing political system in political, cultural, and affective terms. Rather than diminishing or concealing diversity, the Libu operationalized it, and the complex hierarchy it maintained was not structured on the basis of the core–periphery principle. To the contrary, borderland populations played a leading role in the Qing world.

The second thematic cluster encompasses the chapters penned by Lan Mei-hua, Uradyn E. Bulag, Dittmar Schorkowitz, Laura Hostetler, and Dorothea Heuschert...