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Introduction Introduction The Editor Most of the recent research on the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, in history, anthropology, and related fields has focused on the dynamics of state in- corporation and on the marginalization of the local population. Following the Manchu intervention in Tibet in the 1720s, there was a sustained effort to incorporate Kham into Sichuan province both administratively and economically. These moves were countered by attempts from the government of Central Tibet, the Ganden Phodrang, to expand its own religious and politico-economic presence. Colonial frontiers are not necessarily of the ‘tidal-wave’ type where a centre moves into an uncontrolled area, where the civilized gradually subsumes the wild. Many authors have used the metaphor of the sea to describe borderland interactions, whereby the relentless waves rolling in from the civilizational centre would progressively, but ineluctably, wear away the land. Borderland interactions do not leave the centre untouched; it too is altered in the process. The logic underlying the ‘frontier of control’ has generally been to ensure the continued presence of indigenous com- munities and their political system. In the words of Ann Stoler and Carole McGranahan (2007, 8), ‘imperial formations thrive on deferred autonomy, meted out to particular populations incrementally, promised to those in whose lives they intervene’. A key element of imperial formation is the balance between direct and indirect rule exemplified in Qing Empire’s periphery by the native office (tusi) system: Qing expansion into Kham depended on the cooperation of local elites, and in this case the device to lure them toward Beijing was the tusi office. Imperial governance was by necessity a series of compromises, and this was especially true at the empire’s edge where the Qing state offered tusi titles and offices, as well as vital military and financial support in return for a declared submission to the Qing throne. (Herman 2014, 79) This system of indirect rule allowed for the maintenance of indigenous leaders and their political system with a great degree of independence, and sympathetic local leaders were bestowed tusi titles, which became a step 144 FRONTIER TIBET towards their integration. Full incorporation, however, did not take place until a transition to direct administration had been forcefully achieved, replacing indigenous leaders with state-appointed officials – a process alluded to in several of the chapters in this volume. The experience of imperialism significantly differed across Tibetan areas and between Central Tibet and Kham or Amdo. The kind of state presence in Kham itself also varied in time and from place to place. For a long time the colonial agenda in Kham focused on controlling trade routes: vital pathways that connected the lowlands of the Sichuan basin to the highlands of the Tibetan plateau. Military colonists were deployed in strategic locales, especially along the southern ‘official’s road’, and merchants from Sichuan and Yunnan took advantage of the military presence to resume trade. There was also, at times, interest in the exploitation of certain natural resources on the territories concerned, which were turned into ‘frontiers of extraction’. This came with an increase in the number of settlers, as Relyea and Frank both demonstrate here. For the most part, though these people were not permanent residents, settler colonialism nevertheless became part of evolv- ing policies and ideologies about the frontier, especially in republican times. Late Qing and later republican era efforts in Kham and the Sichuan frontier resulted in important steps towards the integration of the highlands within the realm of centralized administrations and the nascent nation- state. The chapters in this section delve further into the complexities of the historical context and of the conditions of the time already alluded to in the introductory chapter. The region was repeatedly destabilized by internal strife and by events elsewhere: the development of Western imperialism, the Sino-Japanese war, the rise of provincial warlords, territorial dismember- ment, and the growth of nationalism as a new political ideology. As Jack Patrick Hayes (2014) demonstrated in his groundbreaking environmental history study about the northern Sichuan region, the struggle to control people, resources, and land led local residents and elites, other than business- men, warlords, and government agents, to create environmental and social changes through a series of ‘changing market regimes’. In this context, the frontier became both a space for opportunities and a place in need of intervention. The rise of this developmentalist approach and its legacy has survived to this day, and the chapters in this section contribute to show how interventionist policies in Kham, since late imperial and republican times, have contributed to a process of territorialization that transformed the land and the people (see Yeh 2013). We continue to engage with these issues here, well aware of the need to pursue the exploration of forms of colonialism or expansion in Asian contexts I NTRODUCTION 145 (Wade 2014) and the ‘civilising missions’ that inform them (see Harrell 1995). This section is organized around contrasting approaches to large-scale and externally driven transformations and modes of expansion that led to the progressive integration of Kham. The chapters focus on the historical period that saw rising nationalism, forced integration and reactions to it, and later integration into the newly founded People’s Republic of China. Part III, in a complementary fashion, assembles chapters that focus on local instances and individual trajectories that detail the limitations and opportunities provided by these transformations. One of the underlying questions that tie the chapters together is: how is state control achieved and, more importantly, maintained? External powers might be able to establish control over a brief period, but they could not generally afford to maintain it until the 1950s. This section offers a detailed exploration of the means mobilized to maintain state control as well as of the ideology that inspired it. What is also discussed here is the kind of cultural and ecological determinism that informed much of the colonial thinking in China, just like anywhere else. Addressing the many faces of the ‘civilising mission’ in Kham, this section starts with John Bray’s depiction of French missionaries’ entanglement in economic and political affairs as they settled in the highly contested region of Kham in the second half of the nineteenth century. The story of the attempts by the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris to settle on Tibetan land and reach Lhasa, the ‘Rome of Tibet’, is highly revealing of on-the-ground conflicts over territorial control. This chapter discusses the missionaries’ involvement in trade as a means of shedding light on wider historical developments in the region and as a lens through which to make plain the status of these borderlands. In trying to advocate for their presence, and in their dealings with various agents of the late Qing Empire and the young Republic, missionaries contributed to increasing political tension. One can hardly think of a more ‘external’ presence than French missionaries’ in Kham but, for the historian, their continuous presence over several decades made them key witnesses of their time (as much as they were key informants for Foreign Affairs services) and their archives can help shed a different light on events as they unfolded locally. As Mark Frank points out in his chapter (to which I return below), the Tibetologist Ren Naiqiang felt that French missionaries had succeeded where Imperial or Republican interventions had failed: ‘Such a vast stretch of fertile earth Han people have not been able to cultivate in over two hundred years of management, he remarked, but the French Catholic church has cultivated it in our place – how disgraceful ought this to be?’ (see Frank, this volume). 146 FRONTIER TIBET During the republican period, concerns about controlling and developing the hinterland and the difficulty in achieving transformation towards ‘progress’ were often evaluated with regard to the success of some of the Christian settlements in the borderlands. Historian Wang Xiuyu (2011, 3) describes Qing expansion into the Tibetan Kham areas of Sichuan in the late nineteenth century as ‘episodic escalations of state violence propelled by regional interests, which were distinct from central-level priorities but connected to them in dynamic ways’. The missionaries’ presence epitomizes the political fault line that ran through Kham, and which elicited state interventions that can be briefly captured through three main historical figures. The first is Lu Chuanlin (1836-1910), the Sichuan governor-general who prescribed a forward policy and a more interventionist stance as the imperial government struggled to limit the loss of its control over the frontier, espe- cially after the Tibetan military intervention in Nyarong (see the Chronology and Gros, this volume). He proposed the implementation of direct rule through the process of gaitu guiliu (bureaucratization), an imperial policy by which indigenous rulers who had been granted tusi titles were removed, sometimes forcibly, and replaced with civil officials appointed by Beijing. The implementation of a comprehensive set of policies in Kham influenced by the Westphalian sovereignty model became the strategic mission of the second
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