Transforming Inner Mongolia: Commerce, Migration, and Colonization on the Qing Frontier by Yi Wang

The word "colonization" in the subtitle of Yi Wang's book has deceptively radical implications. It puts the Qing in a class of imperial formations that includes the Western and Japanese empires of the nineteenth century. This comparison has flourished among Western scholars of modern China in recent years. Previously, China was described as a "semi-colonial" formation, a partial victim, not a perpetrator of imperialism. Indeed, the unequal treaties and large indemnities heavily compromised its sovereignty. Owen Lattimore, however, observed over fifty years ago that the Qing concurrently practiced "secondary imperialism" on its own Central Asian frontiers, expanding Han settlement at the cost of Mongols, Turkic Muslims, and others. Now, a wave of new studies has come full circle back to Lattimore, swinging away from simple victim narratives to a new recognition of the vast commercial and political power embedded in the Han majority. Yi Wang's study of Inner Mongolia, the primary victim of Qing expansion, is a welcome addition to the literature. Thoroughly documented with sources from Mongolian and Chinese archives, it provides a powerful analysis of Qing colonialism as an active participant in the formation of global capitalism.¹

Prof. Wang's story highlights three aspects of integration of Inner Mongolia into this system: the flow of silver and commodities since the sixteenth century, Qing expansion, and European imperialism. Han migrants as settler colonists engaged with all three trends. The migrants brought capital to clear land and create exports, they supported Qing influence, and they introduced and responded to European imperial demands. During most of the eighteenth century the Qing tried to limit migration, but by 1800 one million Han migrants had already penetrated the region; by 1912, there were over 1.5 million compared to 900,000 Mongols. Today only seventeen percent of Inner Mongolia is Mongolian; the indigenous Mongols have been swamped by the Han.

Each of Wang's core chapters centers on one aspect of this integrative process. She describes, first, commercial penetration by Shanxi merchants, followed by agricultural clearance, investment in irrigation, the role of the Catholic Church, and the major policy changes of the Qing state after 1900. Her discussion includes attention to ecological impact, cultural change, legal conflicts, and personal experiences of migrants. We do not hear much about the dispossessed Mongols themselves; their voices are much scarcer in the archives than those of the Chinese. But we learn much indirectly about what they gained and lost.

Chapter 1 stresses the "multilayered boundaries" characterizing interactions between steppe pastoralists and settled farmers, as opposed to a simple dichotomy. Pastoralists historically practiced agriculture as a supplementary livelihood, and settlers often entered into personal and commercial relations with nomads. The Manchu conquerors included Mongol allies and Chinese agriculturalists in their banner system, so from the beginning the Qing elite was a multicultural coalition. Several Qing policies, however, substantially weakened Mongol power. Qing divide-and-rule policy fragmented the Mongols among separate banners, and Qing promotion of monasteries in the steppe drained much of the Mongols' wealth, while also creating a literate class of Buddhist monks who legitimized Qing rule. Although the Qing at first tried to maintain the purity of Mongol culture by forbidding immigration, beginning in 1724 it relaxed many of its restrictions. Migrants from China rented land from Mongol nobles, and many of them married Mongol women. Mongol elites welcomed the rental income, but the Mongols had very different views of land than the Chinese. Mongols worshipped an earth that was "boundless" and "expansive" while Chinese saw virgin soil as simply unproductive wasteland (pp. 46-47). The Mongols kept some areas for extensive cultivation as a backup to pastoralism, but avoided intensive agriculture that would interfere with the needs of their animals. The Qing rulers regarded this extensive agriculture as wasteful and the Mongols as indolent "reckless cultivators" (p. 49). The stage was set already for a confrontation over land use.

Chapter 2 tracks the gradual penetration of Chinese merchants and their networks into Inner Mongolia from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. In the Ming dynasty, at the fortress passages in the Great Wall, licensed merchants already traded salt and grain for horses to supply the Ming military. After 1691, the Kangxi emperor declared that the Great Wall was no longer necessary: his Mongol alliances would give the empire greater security. The capital city of Hohhot became the gateway to the steppe. Shanxi merchant houses established large-scale trading networks, selling brick tea, raw tobacco, cotton cloth, and silk to the nomadic nobility, and also financing their trips to Beijing with high-interest loans. Trading fairs at Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and Russian trade at the border town of Kiakhta injected silver currency into the pastoral economy. This vast network of cities, monasteries, caravanserais, and inns connected Mongolia to the treaty port of Tianjin by the late nineteenth century. The Shanxi merchants were "agents of imperial order as well as cultural brokers" (p. 138). They served the Qing administration's need for control while also profiting hugely. Meanwhile, the indigenous Mongol population suffered heavy tax levies, high indebtedness, and caught syphilis from their Chinese contacts. Many of the Mongols were dispossessed, as Han settlers moved into the Tumed region north of the Yellow river and the Chahar territories farther north. The Hetao region, within the bend of the Yellow River, became a central focus of settlement during the nineteenth century.

In chapter 3, Wang gives us a moving personal view of the Chinese migrants who flooded the region. Most of them were single men from northwestern provinces who went out beyond the wall as seasonal sojourners. They did not intend to stay in Mongolia; they hoped to gain enough in a year's temporary agricultural labor to prosper and return to their home villages. Folk songs from Shanxi expressed vividly the sufferings of the isolated, poverty-stricken migrants. Their wives at home also expressed their loneliness, their fear of starvation, and of abandonment by their men.

The Han migrants, at first welcomed by some of the Mongol nobility, soon became a source of fear and hostility. Local Mongols clashed with the settlers over land rights and debts, and appealed to the banner leaders to expel them, but many Chinese resisted violently. A major incident in 1891 in Rehe led to a large massacre of Mongols by Han sectarians.

Throughout this period, the Qing did not pursue an unambiguous policy of settler colonization. Fearing conflict, it governed the region indirectly through Mongol chieftains. Yet the pressures of overpopulation, drought, and yearning for land by the northwestern farmers overcame Qing hesitancy, and large parts of Inner Mongolia were swamped by the Han settler tide.

Chapter 4 examines in detail the key actors in the promotion of settlement in Mongolia: the land merchants (dishang) from Shanxi. Wang's brilliant analysis uses this case to address larger issues of constraints on China's economic development in reaction to foreign imperialism. In Hetao, the alluvial plain of the northern course of the Yellow river, the merchant-built irrigation works helped produce high grain yields on the fertile soil. Han settlers bought land and water rights from indebted Mongol elites, employing refugees from rebellions in north China as laborers. Just when traditional tea and cloth exports declined in the face of international competition, flourishing exports of grain created an economic boom. A new system of shareholding agreements allowed multiple investors to inject capital into development, while new land tenure arrangements divvied up property rights among many shareholders. This private property regime radically undermined the heritable tenure system of the Mongol nobility. The land merchants in effect created independent estates, in which they controlled land, water, labor, local authority, and even created their own private militia. These firms linked Hetao to Baotou downstream and farther on to Tianjin, where wool exports entered international markets, and medicinal herbs filled the domestic market. During this process, merchants led the way, unimpeded, at times even supported, by the Qing state. In this way the peripheral region of Hetao entered national and international markets on the basis of large landed estates under capitalist merchant control: precisely the kind of large-scale agrarian development, reminiscent of Argentina or Russia, that many scholars of Chinese economic history have declared was impossible. The stereotype of China as dominated by a "smallholder" mode of production that was unable to raise large amounts of capital from the land literally runs into the ground here.

Chapter 5 introduces a surprising new actor to the story: the Catholic Church. Even in the early nineteenth century, scattered Christian communities had survived beyond the Great Wall, but after the Second Opium War's treaties of 1860 forced open China to missionary activity, the Belgian Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary acquired land from Chahar Mongols with the backing of the Zongli Yamen. Despite local resistance and violent conflicts, the order expanded further into the Ordos, even converting a few Mongols. Its main support, however, came from the Chinese migrants, to whom it offered famine relief, land, agricultural tools, and protection from state taxes. The order used Chinese land brokers to buy from Mongols, further exacerbating resentment. As in China proper, the Catholics called on foreign pressure when they became entangled in land disputes, threatening the authority of local gentry. The Qing response was indecisive: Qing officials wanted higher land revenues for modernization projects, and they, like the missionaries, saw Mongols as primitive and backward, but the Qing lost sovereignty over the region as Catholic communities expanded. This tinderbox blew up in the Boxer revolts of 1900, when xenophobic warriors, egged on by threatened elites, massacred thousands of Christian converts and dispossessed the rest. The ultimate results of the Boxer rebellion were even worse: the heavy indemnities imposed on Mongol elites forced them to give up even more land, and reclamation by both the Chinese state and the Church accelerated.

This detailed local account demonstrates brilliantly how one frontier region's experience tied into international economic and diplomatic relations. This frontier contained a "multiplicity of overlapping and intersecting identities," not a simple clash of ethnic groups or civilizations (p. 207). Qing officials and French missionaries alike went after Mongol lands, while Mongols and local Chinese gentry attacked native Chinese Christians. Ultimately, the missionaries, even though they undermined Qing authority, also assisted its "secondary imperialism" inflicted on the Mongolian territories (p. 209).

In 1902, Qing authorities threw open Mongolia to Han settlement. Desperate for resources, they actively promoted land and mining development as part of their new policies to build economic and military power. As in Xinjiang and Manchuria, they openly proclaimed land clearance as a civilizing process, regarding the weak and impoverished Mongols as threats to national security. Cadastral surveys and a Land Reclamation commission brought in a surge of profits for the Qing state until 1908, when the projects were abandoned. But the Mongolian elites never recovered. To defend itself against foreign imperialism, the Qing had transformed itself into a colonizing power. The reclaimers looked to the United States and Australia as models, invoking the same Social-Darwinist ideology of racial survival. This "massive expropriation" delivered full authority over land into the hands of the modernizing state (p. 235). What had been a "heterogeneous periphery" was now on its way to becoming fully part of a unified nation-state (p. 218).

Returning to the discussion of colonization in the beginning of this review: can we apply terms like "settler-colonialism," "internal colonialism," or "secondary imperialism" usefully to the Qing experience? Yes, we can, if the concepts are grounded in detailed local experience and defined in a nuanced way. The Han Chinese settler-colonists, who dispossessed the indigenous Mongols and extracted resources from their territory, backed by concentrated forces of capital and international markets, surely evoke similar images of Western colonists in Africa, Australia, or the United States. Mongol pastoralists, once the rulers of gigantic empires, hardly fit our notion of indigenous peoples. But we might recall that the Comanche empire, for example, also dominated the southwestern United States until it was destroyed in the nineteenth century. Settler-colonialism also highlights the ambiguous position of the Qing state, which suffered both the intrusions of Western imperial capitalism while itself imposing many of the same expansive policies on the peoples of its frontiers. The term "civilizing mission" applied to land use also fits well with both Qing modernizing reformers and Western imperialists. Both regarded Mongols as wasteful users of land, doomed to be replaced by intensive agriculture. Yi Wang does not discuss more intimate effects of colonization, but Eric Schluessel has shown how a civilizing imperative based on neo-Confucian family values confronted the radically different ideas of moral order held by Musulmans in Xinjiang. On both the material and cultural levels, these concepts expand the implications of studies of Chinese frontiers to address major theoretical issues of modern capitalism. Wang Yi's book adds much to the distinguished lineage of frontier studies from Lattimore to the present.