Securitising History: Reimagining and Reshaping the ‘Imagined Community’ in China’s New Era
In the summer of 2023, the British Museum hosted a major exhibition titled ‘China’s Hidden Century’ (British Museum 2023). This ambitious display aimed to present the political, economic, and social transformations of China under the late Qing Dynasty in the nineteenth century. On a microlevel, it aspired to show the creativity, diversity, and resilience of Chinese individuals during an era of rapid change and uncertainty through the careful curation of portraits, artisanship, and household items. On a macrolevel, it sought to capture the changes and adaptations in the social structures of this multiethnic empire amid domestic turmoil and Western aggression.
Unexpectedly, ‘China’s Hidden Century’ drew a wave of harsh, combative criticism from Chinese academics. Most notably, Xia Chuntao and Cui Zhihai (2024), two prominent historians from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), published a strongly worded critique in Modern Chinese History Studies (近代史研究), one of China’s leading history journals. They wrote that the primary issue with the exhibition was its ‘wrong’ historiography and distorted interpretation of Chinese history. They argued that, instead of portraying the Qing as a Chinese dynasty defined by unambiguously Chinese characters, the display presented it as a multinational polity under Manchu rule that conquered and colonised diverse territories, including both Han-inhabited China proper and non-Han areas such as Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. The exhibition’s biggest historiographic mistake, according to Xia and Cui, was framing China as part of the multinational Qing Empire, rather than viewing the Qing as a transient historical period of China. They alleged that this distorted view could have serious political implications—undermining China’s territorial unity, separating ethnic minority territories from the rest of China, and legitimising efforts by anti-China forces to divide the country.
In their polemic, Xia and Cui attributed the origin of the exhibition’s ‘mistaken’ view to New Qing History (NQH), a school of thought led by Western scholars proposing an alternative interpretation of the Qing Empire. In recent years, NQH has become the target (sometimes the strawman) of concentrated criticism by Chinese authorities and official historians. According to Yale historian Zhang Taisu, the Chinese Government allegedly vetoed a draft of authoritative Qing history compiled by a team of government-appointed historians, partly because it was ‘overly influenced by NQH’ (Ji 2023). In April 2024, the China Social Science Daily (中国社会科学报), an official CASS newspaper, published a series of harsh critiques of NQH by Chinese historians under the title ‘Critiquing Historical Nihilism’ (批判历史虚无主义). One article accused NQH of ‘complete obliteration and distortion of Qing history’ (Guo 2024), while another outlined three ‘irremediable flaws’ of NQH: a ‘misreading of five thousand years of Chinese history’, a ‘departure from the spirit of seeking truth’, and ‘the abuse of the practical functions of historical studies’ (Li 2024). These articles asserted that the critique of NQH is not merely an ‘optional’ scholarly debate, but also a political imperative for China’s territorial integrity, given that ‘the extent of their harm has become self-evident’ (Li 2024).
In this essay, I aim to explore a series of related questions: What is so important about the Qing and, from Beijing’s perspective, why is a ‘correct’ understanding of Qing history so crucial to justify its legitimacy and territorial claims over its vast non-Han ethnic frontier? How is the effort to shape modern Chinese history related to President Xi Jinping’s agenda to mould a ‘Chinese national community’? Without understanding these questions, one may find it puzzling why Chinese authorities and official historians are so anxious to control the interpretation of Qing history.
New Qing History: Revisionism, Innovation, or Threat?
The Qing Empire (1644–1912) has a complex relationship with modern China. On one hand, it largely defines the territorial reach and demographic characteristics of contemporary China. Unlike other multinational empires that disintegrated in the twentieth century—such as Tsarist Russia, Ottoman Turkey, and Austria–Hungary—the successor Chinese state to the Qing Empire retained most of its original land and population (except for Mongolia). In the words of Sinologist William Kirby (2005), the Qing shaped what we now recognise as modern China, marking the period ‘when China becomes China’. On the other hand, paradoxically, the Qing is larger than ‘China’ and more than ‘Chinese’ in the traditional sense. China proper—lands predominantly inhabited by Han Chinese and consistently ruled by previous Chinese dynasties—was only one part of the Qing Empire. The empire also governed Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet—non–Han-majority territories over which prior Chinese dynasties had only intermittent control at best. Defining the nature of the Qing Dynasty from the perspective of modern Chinese rulers is essential to their territorial claims and control over the vast non-Han frontier borderlands in Inner Asia. The question is thus not merely a scholarly one but also a political one: how is modern China entitled to inherit the entire territory of the Qing if the Qing was not even considered China?
The NQH school, particularly in the eyes of its critics, is perceived as challenging the presumed Chinese-ness of the Qing Empire. This loose group of historians—Mark Elliot, Evelyn Rawski, Pamela Crossley, and James Milward, among many others—rose to scholarly prominence starting in the 1980s and 1990s. Rather than a unified school of thought with similar views, NQH is characterised more by the shared research approach and substantive interests of these scholars. In contrast to earlier generations of Sinologists, these academics are proficient in both Chinese and a non-Han language used within the empire such as Manchu, Tibetan, Mongolian, or Uyghur. Taking advantage of their multilingual skills, they extensively utilise non-Chinese documents and materials in their research, going beyond relying solely on Chinese historical sources. Furthermore, NQH scholars are interested in the frontier and borderlands of the empire. They explore how the non-Han borderlands were governed, their relationships and interactions with both China proper and broader Inner Asia. Relatedly, they examine how the Manchu rulers—themselves a non-Han group originating from the borderlands—identified and positioned themselves in governing the empire (for a more comprehensive summary of NQH, see Wu 2016).
Before the emergence of NQH, historians of modern China rarely challenged the notion that the Qing Empire was Chinese, or at least Sinicised. Canonical works tended to highlight the fact that, although the Manchus were a non-Han ethnic group, they largely assimilated into Chinese culture after conquering China proper, adopting Chinese political and administrative norms, identifying themselves as rulers of the Middle Kingdom, and using Confucian ideological concepts to justify their legitimacy to rule China (for examples of this traditional view, see Peterson 1978; Corradini 2002). Therefore, the Qing political order was often viewed more as a smooth continuation of, rather than a break from, preceding Han-Chinese dynasties, and the 300-year Manchu rule was treated as just another episode in China’s cycle of dynastic succession (for a canonical work reflecting this point of view, see Wakeman, jr, 1985). In traditional Qing scholarship, relatively less attention was given to areas beyond the Han-inhabited hinterland.
The NQH marked a break from this traditional, Sinocentric historiography. In the words of Evelyn Rawski (1996), historians in this group are committed to a bold ‘re-envisioning’ of the Qing: what kind of empire it was, how it governed its diverse territories, and to what extent it was ‘Chinese’. While this essay cannot provide an exhaustive review of this diverse group of historians, most NQH scholars share a common scepticism that ‘Chinese’ was the sole defining feature of the Qing (Ho 1998). The Manchu ruling class was not as ‘Chinese’ or Sinicised as previously thought, but retained distinctly Inner Asian, nomadic features that shaped their pattern of governance. The Manchus did not administer the empire solely in a Chinese manner, especially its non-Han frontiers. Many NQH works argue that, contrary to the conventional notion that the Qing was a centralised state with a one-size-fits-all bureaucracy, Manchu rulers governed different ethnic homelands in Inner Asia—Manchuria, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet—with distinctive sets of institutions markedly different from those in China proper (for a representative book proposing this view, see Milward et al. 2004). Some NQH scholars point out that the Manchu rulers did not use the uniform title of ‘Chinese Emperor’ when asserting their rule over non-Han areas. Instead, they variably claimed titles such as ‘Khagan’, ‘Boda Khan’, or ‘Emperor Manjushri’, reflecting their efforts to establish legitimacy based on the political traditions of each ethnic group (Milward et al. 2004). Overall, NQH historians frame the Qing as a multicentric, multinational colonial empire governed by a Manchu elite with distinctly non-Chinese characteristics, and Han-inhabited China proper was just one part of this vast imperial polity.
There is little doubt that the NQH school’s questioning of the Qing’s Chinese identity is perceived as politically threatening by official historians in China. The modern Chinese State often justifies its territorial claims by invoking historical rights. According to this official narrative, China has the legitimacy to rule non-Han borderlands because those territories have been part of China since ancient times (for an in-depth analysis of China’s use of history to justify contemporary claims, see Wang 2008: 788; 2014). The expansive Qing Empire, as a formative period that united China proper with non-Han borderlands into one political entity, is used as key evidence to support this claim. The notion that the Qing was different from China undermines modern China’s legitimacy to inherit the historical lands under Manchu rule. Consequently, it is no surprise that Professor Li Zhiting, a member of the official National Qing History Compilation Committee, denounced NQH as a ‘neo-imperialist project’ and a ‘malicious attack on a sovereign country’ because its views imply that ‘separatism is legal’ (Li 2016).
China’s Evolving Battle with its Qing Legacy
In fact, the struggle for a ‘righteous’ interpretation of Qing history is nothing new. For subsequent Chinese rulers, the legacy of the Qing was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, the Qing left behind a much larger territory for their successors in the twentieth century, expanding the border of the future Chinese State far beyond the traditional Han homeland. On the other hand, the larger territory also brought a more complex and heterogeneous ethnic landscape for their successors to manage. Throughout the twentieth century, Chinese elites and intellectuals grappled with the imperial legacy of the Qing in their projects of building a modern Chinese state.
Ironically, revolutionaries against the Qing in the early 1900s understood the empire in a way somewhat similar to NQH scholars. In pamphlets and publications, they claimed that China was an oppressed nation subjugated by the Qing and the goal of the revolution should be to ‘rid the Manchus and revive the Han’ (排满兴汉) (Leibold 2014). Zhang Taiyan, the renowned literati and revolutionary, held a seminar in Tokyo in 1902 to commemorate the ‘242nd anniversary of the fall of China’, at which anti-Qing activists in exile lamented that the real China, represented by the Ming Dynasty, had long died under the yoke of the Manchus (for a more nuanced study of Zhang Taiyan’s political thought, see Schneider 2017). In the vision of many early revolutionaries, the future China should be a Han nation-state covering the 18 Han-Chinese provinces in China proper that were lost to the Manchus. This ideal was reflected in the ‘18-star flag’ adopted during the Xinhai Revolution, where each star represented a province to be liberated.
After the Xinhai Revolution and the abdication of the Qing monarch in 1912, political leaders of the fledgling Republic of China (ROC) faced the urgent question of how to handle the non-Han ethnic territories previously under Qing control. Many republican-era political elites envisioned a Greater China extending beyond the borders of the 18 Han provinces, claiming that the ROC, as the Qing’s successor, had the mandate to inherit all former Qing territories. The republican motto ‘Five Races Under One Union’ (五族共和)—referring to Han, Manchus, Mongols, Turkic Muslims, and Tibetans—reflected the political agenda to mould the former multiethnic empire into a modern nation-state. Early political thinkers of the republic, such as Liang Qichao, Yang Du, and Sun Yat-sen, proposed the idea of Zhonghua Minzu (中华民族, ‘Chinese Nation’) as an inclusive national identity that transcended ethnic differences (Leibold 2016). According to this narrative, all Han and non-Han citizens in China, regardless of their ethnic and cultural backgrounds, constituted one Chinese nation (for a nuanced discussion of the early nation-building of modern China, see Dikötter 1996). In the early republican period, the concept of Zhonghua Minzu was proposed as a form of liberal political nationhood—under which members of the Chinese nation should be united by their political allegiance to the republic and its ideals, rather than shared cultural or ethnic traits (for a more focused discussion on how early republican state-builders defined minzu, see Murata 2001).
The Kuomintang party-state, which dominated the ROC between 1927 and 1949, advocated an assimilationist policy to address the Qing’s legacy of ethnic fragmentation. Sun Yat-sen, the founding father who initially vowed to respect the rights of non-Han peoples, reversed his position in the 1920s and called for their acculturation into Han-Chinese culture (for a more nuanced discussion of the construction of the idea of Zhonghua Minzu in the Republican period, see Zheng 2014; for a non-technical commentary, see Li 2020). According to Sun, allowing distinctive ethnic groups to exist was harmful and contributed to China’s division and weakness. Therefore, the goal was to eliminate interethnic differences and integrate non-Han peoples into the Han majority to form a culturally homogeneous Chinese nation. Sun’s successor, Chiang Kai-shek, further insisted that there was only one Zhonghua Minzu and refused to recognise the existence of diverse ethnic identities in China. From Chiang’s perspective, demographic categories like Han, Mongol, and Tibetan were merely subordinate lineage groups (宗族) within the Chinese nation, rather than distinct ethnic groups (Zheng 2014; DeShaw Rae and Wang 2016). This rejection of interethnic differences was reflected in the 1947 election for the first National Assembly: the Hui people, a Muslim ethnoreligious group in central and western China, were referred to merely as ‘citizens with unique living habits’ (内地生活习惯特殊之国民), rather than being recognised as a group distinct from the Han (for a focused discussion of the Hui’s national identity, see Phelan 2020). However, throughout its 22-year rule, the Kuomintang never had the chance to truly implement its assimilationist policy in the ethnic frontier; Mongolia and Tibet were de facto independent, and Xinjiang was ruled by warlords outside central control.
The complete victory by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the Chinese Civil War marked the first time that most of the former Qing territory was under the control of a centralised Chinese regime. Unsurprisingly, the approach of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the Qing’s legacy was heavily impacted by Leninist ideology (Wu 2019). The regime downplayed the multiethnic nature of the Qing Empire and instead viewed it through the lens of Marxist class struggle (Horesh 2021). According to official historians like Bai Shouyi, both the Han in China proper and non-Han peoples in the frontier were fellow victims suffering under the yoke of a Manchu feudal ruling class. Thus, the proletariat from all ethnic backgrounds were united by a shared class consciousness in their struggle for emancipation. In this way, the CCP presented itself as the liberator of oppressed ethnic minorities. The political narrative on Tibet exemplified this approach: by emphasising the immense suffering and enslavement of Tibetan peasants in the past, the Party justified its rule in Tibet by asserting that it had liberated Tibetans from feudal oppression and granted them the rights of free and equal PRC citizens under socialism (for a dissertation focusing on the PRC’s ethnic narrative about Tibet, see Coleman 1998).
During the Mao Zedong era, the CCP’s principle for governing non-Han ethnic borderlands was also shaped by Leninist ethnic views. Non-Han ethnic groups were granted the status of nationalities (民族) and promised self-rule to a limited degree in their homelands (for a focused discussion of the Maoist notion of ethnic self-determination, see Kryukov 1996). Under the official policy of ‘Regional Ethnic Autonomy’, ethnic minorities were entitled to certain rights related to their language and culture, provided they pledged political allegiance to the CCP’s leadership. Accusing the preceding regimes of being ‘Han chauvinists’ (Mao 1953), the Mao-era Party leadership did not force ethnic minorities to assimilate culturally, but primarily demanded their political conformity with the CCP’s socialist agenda and ideological campaigns (Weiner 2023). In other words, the Party sought to use a shared communist vision and political objectives as the unifying force to bind Han and non-Han peoples into one polity, thereby justifying its rule over non-Han borderlands (Csete 2001).
Securitising the Chinese Identity in the New Era
Under President Xi Jinping, ethnic policy in the PRC has undergone a significant shift from previous norms and practices. Existing PRC ethnic policy generally tolerated ethnic diversity and allowed cultural and linguistic expression by ethnic minorities to a certain degree—if they did not explicitly challenge the Party’s political authority. In comparison, the ethnic policy of Xi’s administration revolves around an assertive agenda to ‘strengthen the consciousness of the Chinese national community’ (Klimeš 2018). The authorities now view overt ethnic or religious expression as a challenge to national unity and non-Han citizens are demanded to acquire a Chinese cultural identity in their hearts and minds. Metaphorically, while the PRC’s longstanding ethnic policy was ‘anyone who is not against me is with me’, the new era policy is ‘anyone who is not with me is against me’.
The Chinese Government’s shift in ethnic policy since the 2000s is driven by deep-seated insecurity over its ethnic borderlands. Waves of ethnic protests and rising separatist movements in places like Xinjiang and Tibet deeply concerned Beijing (Bovingdon 2002). The government diagnosed the problem as stemming from a lack of Chinese national identity among minority populations (Wei and Chen 2009). The existing ethnic policy, from Beijing’s perspective, prioritised ethnic autonomy over fostering a unified national identity. As minorities did not feel sufficiently connected to a Chinese identity, they would be more prone to anti-government agitation. The fall of the Soviet Union provided further support for this view. An analysis published by the CCP Party History and Literature Research Institute argues that the Leninist nationality policy created artificial divisions among the Soviet population and laid the foundation for its disintegration (Han 2014). Once the central power was weakened, there existed no cultural affinity that could continue to bind different ethnic groups together. Hence, identity is not merely a personal choice, but also an issue of national security crucial to regime survival (Zhou 2019).
Many ethnic policies in the Xi era reflect the view of ethnic identity through a national security lens. One example is the ‘bilingual education’ policy implemented in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia (Gupta and Ramachandran 2016; Baranovitch 2022; Atwood 2020). This policy mandated Mandarin as the primary language of instruction in schools, while gradually downplaying the role of ethnic languages in classroom instruction and exam schedules. Another significant campaign aimed at ‘shaping a Chinese national community’ was the Sinicisation of mosques. In this nationwide refurbishment project, all mosques with Arabic architectural features were modified to conform to traditional Chinese architectural styles (see Yuspov in this issue). These policies illustrate the regime’s broader strategy to ensure national unity and security by imposing a uniform Chinese identity across diverse ethnic groups.
Revisiting the Qing Legacy
From this analysis, it is possible to understand why the Chinese authorities and official historians take such a combative posture in controlling the interpretation of Qing history. The Qing Dynasty’s legacy plays a pivotal role in legitimising China’s territorial claims and national identity, particularly over its vast non-Han ethnic frontier. An orthodox, Sinocentric view of Qing history is crucial for national security—it allows Beijing to reinforce its narrative of historical continuity and unity, maintain internal cohesion, and counter challenges to China’s territorial claims.
Moreover, the struggle over interpreting Qing history reflects a broader ideological agenda within China, including President Xi’s priority to forge a cohesive ‘Chinese national community’ under a unified identity. Hence, the debate over NQH is not just a scholarly disagreement, but also a battleground for defining the PRC’s demographic and territorial landscape.
Featured Image: The Chinese army defeats the Khoja brothers (Burhān al-Dīn and Khwāja-i Jahān) in Yesil-Kol-Nor (present-day Yashil Kul, Tajikistan), 1759. Wikimedia Commons (CC).
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