From the Himalayan stand-off with India and island disputes with the Philippines in the South China Sea to sporadic ethnic tensions in China’s far-western regions, borderland security is a paramount national imperative for Beijing.
Now, Chinese academics are being mobilised to rapidly build up indigenous expertise in borderland governance as Beijing calls for deeper research on related theoretical and practical issues.
As its rivalry with the United States escalates, China sees greater urgency than ever to ensure local stability, secure relations with its neighbours, grow the economy, forge a strong Chinese consciousness in ethnic communities and gain a strong footing in the narrative.
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Xing Guangcheng, director of the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, said accelerated efforts were a “necessity” because the borderlands held an “extremely significant strategic” position.
“[This is] to meet the country’s major needs, provide theoretical support for borderland governance and deconstruct the Western theoretical discourse on China’s borderlands from an academic and theoretical perspective,” he said at a symposium in January.
China has more than 22,000km (13,700 miles) of land borders shared with 14 countries and inhabited by dozens of ethnic groups. Nine provinces and autonomous regions along China’s land frontier occupy around 62 per cent of the country’s land area. It also has 18,000km of coastline.
“Multidisciplinary research on borderland history and governance should be furthered ... More influential and convincing research outcomes should be produced and the research findings should be effectively applied to tell [the] good story of China’s borderland governance in the new era,” President Xi Jinping said at a Politburo study session in December.
And with advances in information technologies, the definition of border regions and national sovereignty are likely to be expanded, from traditional areas of land and maritime power to airspace sovereignty and digital frontiers.
“Borderland issues are increasingly moving beyond land sovereignty, becoming key to forging new international relations and reforming the global governance system,” said Wang Xiongjun, vice-president of the Minzu University of China, in an article published in state-run Guangming Daily last month.
Chinese researchers have argued for breaking away from the Western academic perspective, advocating instead for “using Chinese theories to address China’s own frontier matters”.
State media, government officials and academics have often accused Western countries of using border issues to “contain China”, saying the West has leveraged issues related to Xinjiang, Tibet, the South China Sea, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Concerned about the influence of foreign theory on China’s frontier studies, Xing proposed setting up a national association on border studies and rallying more academic efforts to counter challenges from foreign research, which he said aimed to “de-Sinicise” it.
One example is the “New Qing History” narrative that emerged in Western academia during the 1980s and 1990s. Qing was China’s last imperial dynasty, founded in 1644 by the Manchus and ending after the last emperor’s abdication in 1912. China’s borders today are largely inherited from the Qing dynasty.
The “New Qing History” became an “extremely provocative and contentious issue” in China because scholars behind the research had challenged equating China with the Qing empire and the notion of China as a stable concept, according to Aaron Glasserman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary China in Philadelphia who researches China’s ethnic policy.
Andres Rodriguez, a senior lecturer in modern Chinese history at the University of Sydney, said these researchers had questioned the degree of Sinicisation of Manchu rulers and highlighted “a very diverse sense of ethnic identities which is not looked upon favourably under the current government” whose priority was national unity.
Foreign schools of thought “attempt to blur China’s border sovereignty, fragment the unity of the integrity and diversity of China’s historical development and diminish the consciousness of the Chinese national community”, Xing told the Taiwan-based United Daily News.
In March, amid Beijing’s latest efforts to strengthen its narrative, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences set up a research centre on the history of the Qing dynasty to gather the nation’s top Qing historians and consolidate the narrative.
Beijing had been concerned that foreign countries could challenge its control of the distant peripheries as the borderlands became more strategically important, both economically and to its security, Glasserman said.
“China’s leaders ... find themselves in a situation where they’re looking for a new set of terms and strategy for dealing with this very old problem that they believe has become more acute in recent years,” he said.
Feng Jianyong, a professor of history at Zhejiang Normal University, said some Western academics had used the nation-state model to argue that China was a state of Han nationality, and had interpreted its governance of frontier regions such Xinjiang and Tibet through a colonial framework.
Feng, who worked at the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies from 2008 to 2017, said these interpretations of China’s borderland governance were viewed through the lens of Western historical experience and context, which did not fit China’s multi-ethnic historical reality and its unique national unity concept.
They had been exploited by anti-China forces and had become a theoretical foundation for inciting separatism, he wrote in an article first published by the Chinese Academy of History in September.
During the December Politburo study session, Xi also said the researchers of borderland governance should be steeped in a firm political stance and a good command of theories.
Rodriguez said that in the 1920s and 30s, Chinese researchers had begun advocating for the “nationalisation” of frontier studies, arguing that foreign knowledge of contested regions could undermine Chinese sovereignty.
Rejecting colonial discourses in frontier studies was part of a wider sense of anti-colonial identity – part of the early modern Chinese identity – rooted in China’s “century of humiliation”, he said.
Rodriguez added that human rights did not seem to be a priority in the US during President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, and some scholars had noted that the recent cuts to USAID had indeed hampered efforts to support Uygurs both inside and outside China.
“Maritime borders – South China Sea and the so-called Indo Pacific – and [the issue of] Taiwan are arguably much more important in the eyes of China hawks who dominate the Trump administration,” Rodriguez said.
China’s approach to the ethnic issue was previously to recognise the particular ethnic identities of its peoples, promising ethnic equality and protections for their culture and language, and granting them what it called autonomy within their homelands, analysts said.
However, ethnic unrest and violent protests that hit Tibet and Xinjiang in 2008 and 2009 fundamentally shifted China’s ethnic policy after Xi took power. Since 2014, Xi has put forward the concept of “a sense of community of the Chinese nation” and placed it at the centre of ethnic policies.
According to Benno Weiner, an associate professor in the department of history at Carnegie Mellon University, unfulfilled promises of equality and autonomy contributed to the 2008-09 unrest and the classic approach was eventually seen by Beijing as ineffective, and even counterproductive.
Instead of 56 theoretically equal but separate nationalities, the emphasis turned on the idea of a single unified Han-centric Chinese identity, he said.
Analysts said Beijing had concluded there were flaws in its initial formula of “unity through difference” and had drawn lessons from the fall of the Soviet Union to improve governance.
The rise of ethnic nationalism in the 1980s aided the Communist bloc’s dissolution, which exacerbated Beijing’s concerns regarding any kind of separatism or independent ethnic consciousness of minority groups, Glasserman said.
Foreign governments and researchers have criticised China’s moves to educate minorities about their national identity which Rodriguez said were carried out “at the cost of local customs, religion and language”. Beijing has rebuffed the accusations and insists it is promoting “ethnic integration”.
“The emulation of the USA’s ‘war on terror’ is another obvious element that sought to repress any manifestation of these elements seen as non-Chinese,” Rodriguez said.
In Xi’s speech in the December Politburo study session, there was a wider call for what Rodriguez described as “unhinged modernisation” without mention of “minorities” or any particular ethnic group.
“The sole emphasis on [bianqu or borderlands] does speak once again to these areas as peripheral and as part of a wider teleology of national progress development and the unstoppable tide of Chinese culture,” Rodriguez said.
China has been pushing for the development of “a unified national market”, aiming to integrate the border regions into the national development map with the goal of improving economic connectivity.
However, Weiner at Carnegie Mellon said it had remained an “unresolved question” for several generations of Chinese political leaders who he said had faced the challenge of: “How do we make non-Han people who formerly were subjects of the Manchu Qing identify as Chinese, how to convince them that they have a stake being minorities within a Han-dominated state and nation?”
A key pillar of China’s borderlands studies is to look back into history, to ancient times and how the emperors governed. Xi and researchers have repeatedly hailed China’s “great unity” as a historical foundation for national cohesion.
Xi has stated that “we are better positioned than any other era to resolve the debate between ancient and modern, East and West”.
The iconoclastic Communist Party – which once focused on rejecting the feudal past and promoting Marxism and Leninism – has deviated from its earlier model of recognising and institutionalising distinct ethnic identities, to a more aggressive push for ethnic fusion, according to Glasserman.
It encouraged scholars to move beyond Marxism and Leninism, allowing a focus on concepts such as Chinese civilisation and “great unity” as a more flexible and useful framework, he said.
Glasserman noted an “ironic imbalance” in perceptions of Beijing’s control over its borderlands: while other countries saw China as firmly in charge, Beijing itself held a “paranoid and extremely ambitious” benchmark for what constituted full control, showing less confidence.
Eric Schluessel, an associate professor in the department of history at Columbian College of Arts and Sciences in Washington, said academic exchanges with foreign counterparts had been in drastic decline in recent years because of political pressure and the Covid-19 pandemic, with “almost no room” for open discussion.
“The opportunities to have honest conversations about history were very limited in terms of topics, and the borderland history is not a feasible topic to have a dialogue on right now,” he said.
He said from what he heard from Chinese researchers, it appeared that the Chinese government now considered issues in Tibet and Xinjiang to be settled, no longer viewing them as political problems, and that Beijing was not concerned about unrest.
This allowed more space for academics to engage in academic discussion, he said, while adding that the reality on the ground remained uncertain.
Meanwhile, Xing called for strengthening public education and raising public awareness about the strategic role of the border regions.
“They are geographically distant from the central regions, but by no means ... peripheral or insignificant. They are critical in the country’s stability and security, and should not be underestimated,” he said.
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