China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (review)

China Marches West is a massive and important book. It is richly researched, profoundly intelligent, sharply focused, and rich in its historiographical implications. It is also beautifully produced; both the maps and the illustrations are gorgeous.

At its core is what will surely prove a definitive contemporary account of a fundamental yet neglected topic: the closing of the ancient Eurasian frontier between steppe and sown lands as a result of the Qing conquest of modern Xinjiang. Perdue argues that the closing of the Eurasian frontier was as momentous an event in Eurasian history as the closing of the American frontier was according to the Turner thesis. What makes this book so valuable for those who are not China specialists (such as the author of this review) is that Perdue uses the distinctive perspective of his central theme to illuminate many fundamental issues in modern historiography and world history. These include the nature and origins of modernity, how we conceptualize states and empires of the modern world, how states and empires conceptualized and represented themselves, how "the frontier" played out in Eurasian history, and, perhaps most interestingly of all for those interested in world history, how to place modern China within modern world history. Perdue himself highlights three themes or "theoretical perspectives": "frontier environments, state-building, and the construction of national and ethnic identities through historical representation" (15).

Perdue gained his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from Harvard University, and he is currently the T. T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations in the History Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850 AD and numerous articles on Chinese history.1 Though I have no doubt of this book's fundamental importance for China specialists, this review will focus mainly on its value for those interested in world history and comparative history.

China Marches West is not a book to be read quickly: it is too full of information and ideas for that. It deserves a slow, careful reading and an openness to the many different questions it explores. Perhaps the most useful thing a reviewer can do is to summarize some of the book's contents and describe some of the many lines of inquiry it sets in motion.

At its simplest, the book is about the Qing conquest of what is today Xinjiang province, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. This is a vast and important topic that has been largely neglected in modern historiography. Until Perdue's book, the main European language accounts dated, respectively, from 1912 (Courant) and 1964 (Zlatkin). While Courant's 1912 volume relies mainly on a single Chinese source, Zlatkin's Soviet-era publication uses Manchu and Russian sources but none in Chinese.² There is considerable Japanese and Chinese scholarship on the issue but, as Perdue notes, these accounts are constructed firmly within the nationalist historiographical paradigms that he is keen to transcend.

From the start, Perdue takes issue with an official historiography that sees the conquest of Xinjiang as a natural process of "unification." In this view, the ultimate outcome of Qing conflict with the western Mongols was never in doubt. The conquest was the inevitable result of geography and of Chinese cultural, economic, and technological primacy in eastern Eurasia. It was also the culmination of a process that had begun 2,000 years earlier with the initial Han conquest of the "western regions." In the official view, the conquest brought pre-existing ethnic communities into new relationships under the civilizing umbrella of the Chinese empire. The logic of this historiographical perspective explains why the People's Republic of China (PRC) has managed to persuade the United Nations to classify the Eastern Turkestan independence movement as a terrorist organization (xiii).

Perdue describes a much more complex and less predictable process involving a competition among three empires for the heartlands of Eurasia. The three...