We hear a lot today about China’s border conflicts, from high-altitude skirmishes with Indian forces in the Himalayas to legal tussles over maritime sovereignty in the South China Sea. But the People’s Republic of China (PRC) does not just have a border problem. It also has a borderlands problem, or what in official Chinese rhetoric is known as the “frontier question” (bianjiang wenti): the disparity—in terms of development, culture, security, and, ultimately, political control—between the country’s core regions and its vast periphery, delineated by 14,000 miles of land borders shared with 14 countries across nearly 200 county-level jurisdictions and inhabited by dozens of distinct ethnic groups.

The frontier question is not new. Retaining control over the enormous territory of the former Qing dynasty, which collapsed in 1912, has arguably been the defining challenge of the modern Chinese state. It is also closely related to another political problem, the “national question” (minzu wenti). The PRC is formally a multiethnic state comprising 56 officially recognized “nationalities,” consisting of the Han majority and 55 minorities, each of which possesses its own developmental trajectory yet is also (or must be) an inalienable part of the overarching “Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu). In order to defuse separatist aspirations and preserve its unified rule, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established a system of regional ethnic autonomy—including the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the Tibet Autonomous Region, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and over a hundred other units across the provincial, prefectural, and county levels—in which relatively large and territorially concentrated minorities ostensibly enjoy special cultural and political rights.

One might think that in this respect the CCP’s strategy of governing the frontier as a composite of ethnically distinct places and peoples has been quite successful. With the exception of Mongolia and Taiwan, the overwhelming majority of what was the Qing domain is governed by Beijing. Yet Chinese officials today speak of the country’s outer regions in terms that suggest they are insecure about their control over the borderlands. “Stabilize and secure the frontier” (wen bian gu bian) and similar slogans have become widespread under Xi Jinping, whose tenure has been marked by draconian measures to dominate minority populations in Xinjiang and Tibet as well as increasingly assimilationist ethnic policy aimed at suppressing and destroying minority cultures.

At the same time, a contingent of Chinese scholars has been advocating a reconceptualization of the frontier itself. They claim that effective governance for China in the 21st century requires defining the frontier as an essentially spatial phenomenon rather than an ethnonational one and subordinating ethnic policy to what they consider to be the higher-order goal of eliminating differences between peripheral and core regions. Carried out in the pages of academic journals and blogs, these arguments about the distinction between borderland and ethnic affairs can be highly abstract and theoretical. Nevertheless, they shed light on the concerns behind some of the signature policies of the Xi era, including hard-line assimilationism and interregional economic integration. More broadly, this discourse merits attention for what it reveals about Chinese elites’ lack of confidence in their country’s control over land within its internationally recognized borders. Well over half a century since the founding of the PRC, Beijing believes that it still has not solved its “frontier problem” and made its borderlands fully Chinese.

The CCP and the National Question

Ethnic policy and its relationship to frontier governance are politically sensitive issues in the PRC. This is not just because they bear on questions of territorial integrity and national unity, but also because these issues have been central to the CCP’s historic self-definition and claims to legitimacy over its former rival and predecessor, the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT).

The conventional conjunction—now in question—between frontier and ethnic policy can be traced back to an earlier period in Chinese politics, before the establishment of the PRC in 1949, when the CCP was still an insurgent force, and the ruling KMT was struggling to maintain control over the country’s border regions. By the mid-1930s, the situation had become dire: a Japanese puppet state in Manchuria, Soviet control over the Mongolian People’s Republic and meddling in Xinjiang, and British machinations in Tibet instilled in the leaders of both parties a sense that Chinese sovereignty was disintegrating. In response, the KMT began to assert more aggressively that Manchus, Mongols, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other peoples in China all belonged to the same ethnic lineage as the Han. The CCP in turn weaponized this rhetoric to portray the KMT as “Han chauvinists” who denied the independent national identities of borderland peoples. Over the course of World War II and the Chinese Civil War, in an effort to peel support away from the KMT and build alliances with local elites in the borderlands, the CCP increasingly stressed its recognition of those groups as ethnically distinct “minority nationalities” (shaoshu minzu) with the right of self-determination. Under Communist leadership, the party promised, minority nationalities would finally “be masters of their own domain” (dang jia zuo zhu).

After the retreat of the KMT to Taiwan in 1949, the CCP continued to politicize ethnicity. On the one hand, the Communist leadership shifted its position to monopolize control over the PRC. In September 1949, Mao Zedong and his lieutenants determined that the PRC would be a unitary rather than a federated state, despite repeated suggestions in the past that minority nationalities would be entitled to form their own republics and join the PRC as a federation, as in the Soviet Union.¹ Within a week of the establishment of the PRC, the central government ordered cadres to stop emphasizing “self-determination” in their dealings with minorities.² On the other hand, over the subsequent decade, the CCP cemented ethnicity as a fundamental political category. Based on political considerations as well as ethnographic surveys, the CCP formally recognized dozens of minority nationalities.³ In regions where minority nationalities were relatively numerous, especially in the northern, western, and southern borderlands, the government established “national autonomous areas” (minzu zizhi difang) at various administrative levels. Titular nationalities ostensibly enjoyed special cultural and political group rights, including the right to use and develop their own languages and guaranteed representation in local government.

Thus, for most of PRC history, the frontier question has been inextricably linked to, and to a certain extent derivative of, the national question. Moreover, explicit recognition of this connection has been part of the CCP’s claim to unique political legitimacy in comparison with its predecessors. For example, in a March 1957 speech on ethnic policy, Premier Zhou Enlai reminded his audience that the KMT “did not recognize minority nationalities and spoke only of the ‘frontier question,’ politically, economically, and culturally oppressing minority nationalities and thereby deepening national estrangement [between them].”⁴ By the same token, the failure to recognize the fundamental ethnic dimension of the frontier was one reason why the Nationalists were illegitimate.

Rethinking Frontier Governance

Recognizing the national question is not the same as resolving it, and the persistence of ethnic tensions and separatist movements fueled concerns that the PRC’s ethnic policy needed reform. In the wake of unprecedented protests (including self-immolation by Buddhist monks) in Tibet around the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2009 Urumqi riots, the core features of CCP ethnic policy became the subject of a public debate among Chinese academics and officials. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, proponents of a “second-generation ethnic policy” argued that regional autonomy and ethnicity-based affirmative action had backfired: rather than easing tensions between groups, these policies had exacerbated them, strengthening minorities’ distinctive identities at the expense of interethnic unity and identification with the overarching “Chinese nation.” Reformists claimed that minority nationalism facilitated the collapse of the Soviet Union, while “melting pot” assimilation was a source of dynamism and strength for the United States.⁵

At first glance, these reformists appear to have lost the debate. The system of regional autonomy remains in place, and in his landmark 2021 “Resolution on History”—just the third document of its kind since the founding of the CCP—Xi Jinping affirmed the need for the party to “uphold and improve” it.⁶ However, the ethnoterritorial logic of frontier policy has also been challenged on other grounds. Scholars of borderland history and politics have critiqued the state’s approach to the borderlands, arguing that national integration depends on distinguishing between what they view as the previously conflated national and frontier questions.

One of the prominent voices in this discussion is Zhou Ping, a political scientist at the Research Institute of Ethnic Politics at Yunnan University and an established scholar in the study of ethnic politics and borderlands in China. In a series of works published since 2008, he has argued that the traditional paradigm for China’s frontier governance has been “interethnicism” (i.e., managing relations between ethnic groups in a region fundamentally defined by its multiethnic character).⁷ According to Zhou, this paradigm is rooted in ancient Chinese history; he claims that since the Qin unification in the third century BCE, the Chinese state developed a complex form of governance comprising one system for the core regions and one for the peripheral areas. This differentiation was a response to two pressures. First, because imperial borders were not fixed or necessarily respected, defense of core regions occupied by the dominant group required domination of other peoples in outer regions to form a buffer. Second, constraints on bureaucratic capacity along with existing cultural differences between the core and peripheral areas prevented the state from extending its reach to the same degree in the two zones. The resulting division in imperial administration exacerbated the disparities between the core and peripheral areas, producing the frontier as a special region. In short, large states like China “tend to differentiate core and peripheral areas, separately adopting distinct policies to implement governance, thereby constructing the frontier. The frontier is a constructed product.”⁸

Zhou affirms the suitability of this “interethnic” model for much of Chinese history but argues that the emergence of the modern international order based on sovereign nation-states has fundamentally transformed the logic and requirements of governance. Because borders and state sovereignty are at least in principle guaranteed, there is no longer a defense imperative to form a buffer around the core regions. In addition, as the state modernizes, the constraints on even and equal administration over the entire territory are reduced, gradually enabling full integration. The interethnic paradigm has thus lost its purpose and is simply a holdover from a bygone era.

At the same time, the model’s negative consequences are increasingly apparent. Zhou claims that the nationality-based privileges and special administrative arrangements that define ethnic policy in the PRC have hardened and strained relations between nationalities, spurred development of particularistic group interests, exacerbated disparities between groups, and kept the state from devoting sufficient attention to the construction and development of the frontier. This analysis is similar to the aforementioned arguments made by proponents of ethnic policy reform, but it also broadens their critique. For Zhou, it is insufficient to simply reform ethnic policy; rather, Chinese policymakers need a new conception of the frontier that subordinates ethnic policy to the higher-order goal of national integration.

To this end, Zhou proposes “regionalism” as a new paradigm for frontier governance that is commensurate with the conditions of the modern international order and requirements of the modern Chinese state. Whereas interethnicism framed frontier governance primarily as a matter of ethnic relations, regionalism entails policies that address the disparities between the core and periphery. As he explains:

There is a fundamental difference between “interethnicism” and “regionalism” in land frontier governance: the “interethnicist” orientation defines the land frontier as a “frontier ethnic region” and views interethnic relations and conflicts as the core of the frontier question, and therefore takes the coordination of interethnic relations as the primary content of frontier governance. By contrast, the “regionalist” orientation defines the land frontier as the peripheral region of the state’s domain and takes the resolution of this conspicuously distinctive region’s various problems as the primary content of frontier governance, focusing efforts on resolving its regional problems.⁹

For Zhou, the frontier is a product of pre-modern administration, and the purpose of frontier governance in the modern era is to resolve and eliminate the problems that distinguish the frontier from the core region, such as social and economic underdevelopment, weak state capacity, and insufficient cultural and political identification with the national polity.

These paradigms speak to different ways of imagining the process of China’s integration. Under interethnicism, ethnic groups are the basic building blocks of the political community; a sturdy China depends on the strength and quality of each group, as well as the balance among them. Under regionalism and its variants, by contrast, integration entails intensifying connections between different areas and gradually eroding the differences—economic and administrative but also social and cultural—between them.

Zhou and his proposed reorientation of frontier governance have not gone uncriticized. In a 2022 article, He Xiuliang, a professor at the Minzu University School of Management in Beijing, elaborates Zhou’s regionalism into “inter-regionalism,” which, he argues, avoids construing the frontier as a fixed and uniform zone (an implicit critique of Zhou’s regionalism) and better captures its complexity and dynamism.¹⁰ Meanwhile, Yang Minghong, a professor at Yunnan University’s College of Ethnology and Sociology, has repudiated what he calls Zhou’s “constructivist” perspective on the frontier, criticizing the notion that the state “constructs” the frontier through its special administrative arrangements for the country’s outer regions. Yang advocates instead for a “realist” view, arguing that the frontier is an objective phenomenon defined by its distance from the state’s political center, with its own “laws” that must be studied and taken into account in order to resolve the contradictions of the frontier question and achieve national integration.¹¹

These arguments are interesting for what they reveal about the continued relevance of Marxist theory—the reasoning in terms of “contradictions,” “problems,” and “laws”—in certain Chinese policy debates. But the broader significance of these arguments lies in what they have in common. Even if these scholars differ in terms of how they theorize the frontier, they agree that the paradigm of “interethnicism” is no longer working and, by implication, that China’s full national integration is yet to be achieved.

China’s Continuing Quest for National Integration

Setting aside the question of whether one agrees with these scholars on theoretical or normative grounds, their arguments offer a useful heuristic for making sense of contemporary Chinese policies toward the country’s borderland regions. In certain respects, regionalism already appears to be the paradigm of frontier governance. While one can still hear contrary voices insisting that the defining attribute of the frontier is its ethnic dimension,¹² developments under Xi Jinping suggest that the critics of “interethnicism” are ascendant. This can be seen in two policy trends that have accelerated under his rule.

The first is the economic integration of the frontier and core regions. To some extent this has been a goal of the regime since the 1950s, when workers from central and eastern China were dispatched north, south, and westward to “support the frontier” (zhi bian) and help develop local agriculture and infrastructure.¹³ In the early 2000s the regime initiated a new “great western development” campaign, aimed at exploiting the raw materials and energy resources of the western frontier and transforming the region into a thoroughfare for international trade and a destination for migrants from more densely populated parts of the country.¹⁴ But no Chinese leader has done more on this front than Xi. His signature Belt and Road Initiative is commonly identified as a means of extending China’s economic and political power abroad, but it is also a mechanism for reducing domestic economic disparities by boosting trade and industry in the frontier.¹⁵. Xi’s “dual circulation” policy—which aims to boost China’s high-value exports and consumption, in part by exploiting natural resources and relatively cheap labor in frontier provinces—likewise addresses the development imbalance between regions. More recent initiatives such as Private Enterprise Advances to the Frontier (Minying qiye jin bianjiang) also aim to promote economic integration by supporting cross-regional economic partnerships and investment.¹⁶

The second trend is the hard swing toward assimilationist ethnic policy. Although the eventual fusion of discrete ethnic identities has long been a tenet of the CCP’s theoretical understanding of the “national question,” the party’s concrete policies have variously emphasized regulating or repressing expression of those identities in different periods. Under Xi, however, ethnic policy has become unprecedentedly repressive.¹⁷ Part of this is a matter of means: new surveillance technology and administrative capacity have enabled the regime to constrain religious practice and ethnic customs in ways that were previously impossible, as witnessed in the securitization of daily life in Xinjiang and Tibet and the mass internment of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples.¹⁸ But part of this is also a matter of explicit policy goals. Xi has trumpeted the cause of “forging a sense of community of the Chinese nation”—deemed the “main line” (zhu xian) of the CCP’s “nationalities work” since 2021—and accelerating the “contact, exchange, and blending” (jiaowang jiaoliu jiaorong) among all ethnic groups.¹⁹ The elevation of this rhetoric and related claims of the five-thousand-year history of a unified Chinese nation has inspired a host of relatively anodyne cultural programs.²⁰ These include the recently announced “ethnic youth exchange project,” aimed at supporting interethnic professional, educational, and touristic activities, as well as the countrywide mobilization of scholars to compile materials on the “history of contact, exchange, and blending of the Chinese nation.”²¹ The new “main line” also lends ideological legitimacy to the coercive transfer of workers from Xinjiang to factories in central and eastern China ²² Meanwhile, the ongoing push to “China-ify” or “Sinicize” (Zhongguohua) religions—especially Islam and Tibetan Buddhism—and restrict the symbolic and pedagogical use of languages other than Mandarin likewise reflects the regime’s ambition of erasing ethnocultural differences within the population.²³

Viewed in isolation, these policies might seem like straightforward expressions of the expansionist and ethnonationalist aims of a rising China ruled by a Han-dominated regime that is hostile to foreign culture and religion. By taking contemporary discussions of the frontier into account, however, we can more easily see how assimilationism, along with the promotion of interregional economic integration, is part of a larger and longer project of unifying post-Qing China under the CCP’s control. Although they may disagree on finer points of theory, a contingent of prominent scholars apparently agree that a paradigm shift in frontier governance is in order. Indeed, the shift from an ethnoterritorial to a spatial conception of the frontier may already be underway. Amid rising concerns about Chinese aggression in military and foreign policy, we should not lose sight of the fact that in the 21st century China’s leaders continue to feel the need to have a frontier policy. Perhaps more than many foreign observers, they still see their own borderlands as an unresolved problem and still see themselves as engaged in a struggle to become “masters of their domain.”

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Aaron Glasserman is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania and a China Fellow at the Wilson Center.  

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IMAGE CREDITS

Banner illustration by Nate Christenson ©The National Bureau of Asian Research.

 

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