Documenting China’s Borderlands Podcast – Episode 1: From Empire to Nation

Borderlands

Documenting China’s Borderlands Podcast – Episode 1: From Empire to Nation

Nicola Di Cosmo and Maria Adele Carrai

August 25, 2025

The People’s Republic of China’s national territory today is roughly equivalent to that of the Qing empire—with the notable exceptions of outer Mongolia, Taiwan, and portions of Siberia. Two hundred years ago, the Qing’s borderlands included the Manchu, Tibetan, Hmong, Mongol, and Hui (Turkic-speaking Muslim populations of the western regions). Today, twenty neighbors share a land or a maritime border with China.

This first episode of the Borderlands Podcast Miniseries travels back in time to better understand how the imperial borderlands have been integrated within China’s national territory at the turn of the 20th century. With contributions from Professor Nicola Di Cosmo (Institute for Advanced Study) and Maria Adele Carrai (NYU Shanghai).

Materials cited in the recording

Joseph W. Esherick, “How the Qing Became China,” in Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World, ed Joseph W. Esherick (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006)

Maria Adele Carrai, Sovereignty in China: A Genealogy of a Concept since 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Transcript

Introduction

(Nadège Rolland)

The first two decades of the 21st century have been marked by the rapid rise of China, accompanied by its expanding global footprint. Today, China’s economic, military, and political presence is visible on 7 continents and 5 oceans. The PLA Navy has a base in Djibouti, Chinese telecom companies built a fiber optic submarine cable system connecting Latin America to Africa, the PRC government mediated a détente in the Middle East between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the Central Party School of China’s Communist Party has opened a branch in Tanzania to provide training to African bureaucrats. Beijing has also been actively polishing its credentials as a global power through its three Global Initiatives (on Development, Security, and Civilization).

Many questions arise about the implications of such changes for the rest of the world. But, as any great power with global horizons, China first needs to make sure its position in its own neighborhood is secure. After all, where, other than in its immediate periphery, can China begin experimenting what it’s like to be a great power and a leader on the global stage? It’s in this region that China’s Belt and Road corridors have begun to be deployed in late 2013. Closer to home, Beijing can make use of asymmetries in wealth and power to lay the building blocks of a new order that better serves its political, economic, and security interests. How is China investing in, engaging with, and deepening its presence within its neighbors, and how are these actions reshaping its proximate environment?

I’m Nadège Rolland, distinguished fellow for China studies at the National Bureau of Asia Research, and in this audio documentaries series, I invite you to find answers to these questions from the best experts and scholars in the world. Follow me along China’s land and maritime borders, at the hinges that link up China to the outside world—China’s Borderlands.

Echoes of the Past

Let’s start with a map. When you look at the People’s Republic of China’s map today, you look roughly at the map of the Qing empire—with the notable exceptions of outer Mongolia, Taiwan, and portions of Siberia. Two hundred years ago, the Qing’s borderlands included the Manchu, Hui, Tibetan, Hmong, and Mongol. These frontiers have been integrated at the turn of the 20th century within China’s national territory. What used to be the exterior, became the interior. Today, China’s borderlands extend from Japan, Korea, Russia, Mongolia, Central Asia, the Himalayas and Southeast Asia, to the East and South China Seas. Twenty countries share a land or a maritime border with China, making it the country with the greatest number of neighbors in the world. The extent of its frontiers and the diversity of the groups that sit over the edges of its territory create a uniquely complex regional environment for China.

Since 2013, the government of the PRC has stopped calling this liminal space China’s “neighborhood”, preferring instead to refer to it as its “periphery.” This term implicitly adopts a sino-centric perspective that is reminiscent of historical periods when China thought of itself as the center of the world. And in 2021, China’s government has included this proximate perimeter in its national security strategy under the label “sanbian,” a contraction for “bianjiang,” “bianjing,” and “zhoubian,” meaning borderlands, borders, and periphery, effectively blurring the lines between the areas located within the outer rim of China’s national territory and those surrounding it.

So, whether we look at a map of China’s national territory and see the phantom shape of the Qing empire, or whether we pay attention to how the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party talks about its borderlands, we keep finding echoes of the past.

In this first episode, we travel back in time to better understand how crucial the borderlands have been throughout China’s history. To help us navigate the timeline, here’s a quick reminder about the period we’ll survey today: The Ming ruled China from 1368 to 1644; Ming emperors were ethnic Han-Chinese. They were replaced by Manchu rulers who founded and led the Qing dynasty that reigned from 1644 to 1911. The Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911. The Republic of China began on January 1st, 1912, and the last Qing emperor abdicated in February 1912. We start our journey at the turn of the 20th century, at the critical time when China mutated from empire to nation, and when its former imperial frontiers were incorporated within its national territory. China’s territory has basically kept intact its old imperial borders as the Qing empire collapsed and was replaced by the Republic of China in 1911, followed by the People’s Republic in 1949.

Half of the territory of present-day China was conquered by Manchu emperors during the 18th century; before the Qing, who ruled China from 1644 to 1911, the borders of China shifted substantially over the centuries. But even when there was no united empire, there always existed a China core with a distinct cultural and political identity, as opposed to outside peripheries.

Professor Nicola Di Cosmo, a world-leading authority on the history of the Mongol and Manchu empires, working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, draws the map of the China core, or China “proper.”

(Nicola Di Cosmo)

I think China proper really means the traditional provinces that have always been ruled by a Han majority and respond to certain characteristics of Chinese rule and Chinese language, Chinese-style administration, which has never been changed even by the Manchus. There is a continuity in Chinese imperial history that must be recognized. The core provinces of China, from the Han Dynasty onwards, have not really been transformed dramatically. So by China proper, I, at least, understand the central provinces of China from the Warring States period, you know, all the way to today maybe, between the Wei River, the Han River and the Yellow River, and then the Yangzi River and then down to the Delta. Although the South is a little bit different, of course, because the South was also subject to waves of expansion of different, and so it’s less stable. But administratively speaking, there is a China proper that has not really changed much.

(Nadège Rolland)

Throughout China’s history, places that were once considered as exterior to this core may have become part of the interior through a process of conquest, colonization, and economic, cultural, as well as administrative integration. Successive dynasties may have considered borderlands as dangerous areas they needed to protect against, buffer zones they needed to manage, or far-flung territories populated by non-Chinese, or rather, non-Han ethnic groups they needed to take control of. Defining China’s borderlands really means defining the contours of China itself.

During the Qing period, Manchu rulers significantly expanded the imperial realm, mostly as a result of what Professor Di Cosmo calls defensive imperialism.

(Nicola Di Cosmo)

For instance, what is today Inner Mongolia, right, so the southern Mongol people were incorporated from the beginning in the Manchu state, but what is today Outer Mongolia was a much later process that we might call almost “defensive imperialism,” because the Mongols were enemies, these other Mongols. I mean, there was a threat to the Manchus that came from this Dzungar Mongol Khanate. So, it was a military response to a perceived threat. Tibet is pretty much the same. The Mongols were very close to the Tibetan sects and exercised a certain control over Tibet, that the Manchu, in particular of course, Kangxi, but also Yongzheng and Qianlong, perceived as a threat—this union between Tibetan lamas and Mongol chieftains, let’s say Mongol rulers. And the same for Xinjiang. So, it’s a gradual expansion in response to perceived threats. So, we could conceive of it as a kind of defensive imperialism. But these areas remained pretty much separate from the rest of China, what we might call China proper: administratively separate, culturally separate, and in any possible way, actually, until the late, I would say, the late 19th century, when these regions were open to Han immigration. So, until then they were ruled by what we might call a system of indirect rule through local aristocracies and local elites.

(Nadège Rolland)

The Qing’s frontier policy was completely different from that of their predecessors, the Ming dynasty.

(Nicola Di Cosmo)

Completely different—as exemplified by the Great Wall, for instance, as a symbol of (a symbol and also a reality) of a way of dealing with borders and with frontiers: you know, massive military presence in defense of a fixed border, right? And then beyond the border, of course, tributary people. So, during the Ming Dynasty, the tributary system expanded considerably. I think the Ming posture in foreign relations was completely different from the Qing, completely, and they relied so much more on this notion of lord-vassal relationship, in a sense: the tributary people would come to court, pay allegiance to the Chinese emperor, and in exchange would get some benefits of some sort. This is the general way in which it is portrayed, which, you know, sometimes was helpful, sometimes wasn’t. It’s not as if the Ming Dynasty managed to secure its borders completely, as it is obviously proven by the fact that they were conquered again by the Manchus, right?! Even the Mongols were able to cross the Great Wall several times. But it is true that their idea of China was a walled-in territory, closed, walled. And also on the southern maritime frontier, you don’t have a lot of desire to open-up to foreigners and to foreign contacts. So, even in Southeast Asia of course there are tributary states. So, the notion of territorial acquisition, territorial expansion, is really quite alien to the Ming. The Ming expand a little bit in the south, and there is a form settler colonialism: it is a settling process and a demographic expansion in southern China, that’s for sure, that already started during the Mongol period, actually, as people moved from the north because of the Mongol conquest, more to the south.

The Qing, on the other hand, they did expand, they brought their rule to the outside of what was China proper, but also, the China that they had conquered. So, that was the empire as they knew it. And then Tibet, Mongolia and so on, gradually the empire expanded as a result, I think, mostly of a desire to control these borderlands because they were perceived as being potentially threatening.

(Nadège Rolland)

Once the Qing conquered these frontiers, they implemented a system of administration that recognized their cultural identity and allowed them a certain degree of political autonomy. The Qing governance of the borderlands was also based on a very effective system of cooptation of local elites that ended up turning local chieftains into loyal servants of the emperor. The support they received from the Qing administrators enabled them to gain certain privileges, prestige, and power within their own community. From the Qing rulers, local lords gained fiscal privileges; they were sometimes chosen as husbands for Manchu princesses; their religion was respected; they were also invited to court regularly.

(Nicola Di Cosmo)

There is that side, of course, but there is also another side, and that is a certain ability to incorporate these people in a system in which they recognized themselves as being part of the empire.

(Nadège Rolland)

As the borderlands gradually got integrated into the empire’s fold, each with their distinct religious, ethnic, cultural, and political characteristics, Qing rulers designed specific institutions to govern them.

(Nicola Di Cosmo)

The central one, if I may add just one detail, is the Li Fan Yuan. The Li Fan Yuan is the ministry for the governance of peripheral regions which were inhabited by Tibetans, Mongols, Uyghurs, or rather—Uyghur is a modern ethnonym—let’s say Turkic people: these are the main regions that then became today largely “autonomous regions.” And, of course, there was also Manchuria in the northeast that was the homeland of the Manchus that conquered China. These were all territorial additions, but we should not see them just as borderlands, but rather as conspicuous cultural and religious and political separate units which are represented within the Qing Empire in many different ways, including symbolically. So we have very distinctive cultural/political/administrative system for each of these borderlands, with the Qing presence really limited to often a handful of military troops, stationary troops, but not a very large number. After the conquest, the Qing military presence in these regions was not a very heavy one or a heavy-handed…

(Nadège Rolland)

…except of course in places that were considered more problematic including in the north of current-day Xinjiang, the Ili region, populated mostly by nomadic Kazakh people which the Qing considered threatening and dangerous. Some Mongol and Manchu communities were also moved to the borderlands as border guards in garrisons.

(Nicola Di Cosmo)

So, for instance, the Xibei people who speak Manchu, today is a recognized national minority, they survived because, as a national minority, as a group, because they were moved to the Ili region as border guards around 1758, I think, or so. So, it’s part of the formation of an empire and the expansion of the empire that also creates these special communities that then in turn are now, today, so-called “national minorities.”

(Nadège Rolland)

The borderlands evolved significantly over the course of the Qing empire; but the early 20th century brought many more changes and transformations.

Following the 1911 revolution and the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the newly founded Republic aspired to build China as a unified, sovereign nation. But who exactly was to be included in this brand new Chinese nation? The revolution had broken out in the name of Han national self-determination and was fiercely anti-Manchu. Should the new China be comprised of only Han people, and define itself geographically simply along the borders of China proper? Or should the national territory include non-Han people and borderland regions, meaning that the Republic would effectively uphold the map of the former Qing empire? The frontiers entered a long period of transformation from imperial borderlands into territorial units that became part of a modern Chinese state. Maria-Adele Carrai, a professor at NYU Shanghai and the author of the book Sovereignty in China: A Genealogy of a Concept Since 1840, explains:

(Adele Maria Carrai)

I think to understand what happened in the Republican period, one still has to go back a bit in the Qing period—late Qing, collapse of empire—and also the introduction of new concepts like sovereignty, international law: these are essential for the new claims that Chinese leaders and political figures, or even intellectuals, start to rethink China as a sovereign country within the international system. So it’s only because of this new vocabulary that has been translated and fully appropriated by the Republican period that there starts to be a discourse of China as a nation, unified nation.

(Nadège Rolland)

In his inaugural speech, Sun Yat-sen, the provisional president of the Republic of China, ended up resolving the question of who would be considered as part of the Chinese nation by proclaiming the new Republic as a union of five nationalities. Here’s what he said in January 1912:

(Narrator)

“The people are the foundation of the State. Unifying the Han territories, Manchuria, Mongolia, the Muslim lands, and Tibet means uniting the Han, Manchu, Mongol, Hui, and Tibetan ethnicities as one people. This is called the unity of the nation.”

(Adele Maria Carrai)

And so it’s very important in the sense how Sun Yat-sen recognizes this multi-ethnic empire of China that has to be brought together in unity. And so, he comes up with these “five races under one union.” And it continued: even today, we see like all these different ethnicities of China. Of course, Han is the main ethnicity, but there’s an attempt to bring them together, to create, again, a narrative that unifies these races. And now, these ethnicities, of course, there is an attempt to make them uniform. So the difference is just in the names: there is Hui, Mongol, Manchu, etc., but then as a matter of fact, there is much more uniformization than maybe how it used to be in the late Qing, Republican period as well.

(Nadège Rolland)

Examining ‘How the Qing Became China,’ historian of modern China Joseph Esherick writes that during the Republican period, nobody really tried to demonstrate why these various people made up one nation; and that the arguments that dominated the public debate were mostly pragmatic:

(Narrator)

“The loss of the frontiers would expose China proper to partition; and the Mongols and Tibetans were too weak and backward to protect themselves from foreign control, so they should be assimilated and modernized under Chinese leadership”.

(Nadège Rolland)

Esherick continues:

(Narrator)

“The notion of the frontier areas as border screen was a common theme and derived from a comparable Qing usage. In a sense, these areas were treated as a buffer zone to protect China proper from foreign threats. The discourse reflected the fundamentally subordinate and instrumental role that frontier peoples were given in the new republic: their job was to protect the Chinese heartland.”

Even though the new nationalist government clearly aspired to create a secure, sovereign, unified China, it still lacked the actual power to assert its control over its territory, as Adele Carrai highlights.

(Maria Adele Carrai)

China in the Republican period, after the collapse of the empire, was very weak. There were warlords, the territory was fragmented, there was a lack of control of China proper, if you want, not to mention the territories that were in the borders of China.

(Nadège Rolland)

Up until the late 1920s, China proper was fragmented into areas ruled by powerful military leaders vying for control. At the same time, the territories in the borderlands were coveted by various foreign imperialist powers: Japan in Manchuria and Mongolia, the Soviet Union in Mongolia and Xinjiang, Britain in Xinjiang, Tibet and Yunnan, and France also in Yunnan. So, in addition to the internal fragmentation, external pressure was also mounting on the periphery. If this situation on the ground was not precarious enough, the traditional Chinese conception of world order that had prevailed so far – that of China being at the center of the world and the emperor ruling everything under heaven (or tianxia)—also shattered as the world was entering a period of tremendous power reconfiguration. Chinese intellectuals, diplomats, and political leaders of the Republican period, now had to familiarize themselves with foreign concepts introduced by Westerners, such as nationalism and international law, and they had to grapple with the rules of a nascent international system based on sovereignty, territorial integrity, and sovereign equality.

(Maria Adele Carrai)

And it was really a shock, because before you had this reference system of tianxia, this benevolent emperor that is the ruler over the entire world (a d you can see this also in the maps of China. Seeing maps of China, despite they knew that that was not accurate, they weren’t really interested in accuracy, but you have the world, it is China; China is the center of the world; China is the world), to representations of China as one among many. And so, cartographers also contributed to this transformation, translators of international law, diplomats, and it was a kind of a process, Chinese that went to study to Japan, to the UK, to France, to the US. And also, the way this new idea of sovereignty was implemented and articulated was also through diplomatic interactions. I think it was a process: there were many moving parts—there were intellectual parts, translations, conceptual parts, and then the diplomatic practice of all these great Chinese diplomats, that were really good in keeping this claim very high: You kind of keep saying it, and it becomes true.

(Nadège Rolland)

Among all the moving parts that Adele Carrai mentions, we should also talk about an additional vision for the borderlands and their people which starts to emerge in the early 1920s within the ranks of the rising Communist Party of China. We will discuss it in more detail in our next episode: we’ll examine how the CCP’s approach to China’s borderlands has evolved over roughly a hundred years and how the borderlands fit both into the party’s still ongoing nation-building efforts and into its current grand strategy.

In the meantime, I wanted to leave you with Adele Carrai’s observation that I think sums up some of the questions NBR’s research project on borderlands attempts to address.

(Maria Adele Carrai)

I think the way to think about the borderland is: what will happen to China if you cut away the borderland? What China would be without this borderland today? Why, even back then, China was so like all these intellectuals, not all of them, but many of them, or diplomats, understood the value of this borderland? What will be of China? Why do they need so much this extension in this borderland? What does it really bring to the center? And I think there’s more to that that we don’t fully grasp about this border, why it matters so much, historically, from a national point of view, from a resource point of view…but again, without that, probably the center would not be there, it would not be China, in a sense.

(Narrator)

We will continue our exploration of China’s borderlands in our next episode. In the meantime, you can visit our research project’s website, at https://strategicspace.nbr.org If you found today’s episode valuable, please consider leaving a quick like or rating; this really helps other people discover NBR’s podcast products too. Thank you for your support and until next time!