Whatever happened to the Manchus? Simplistically, this is the question that Shao Dan's important monograph seeks to answer: how is it that a people could conquer the world's most populous society and then, within three centuries, seemingly disappear?
In the past two decades, the “New Qing” scholarship, led by Mark Elliot, Pamela Kyle Crossley, Edward Rhoads and Evelyn Rawski, has advanced our knowledge of the Manchus’ origins and development. Although not agreeing with one another on all points, these scholars and others have effectively undermined the “Sinicization thesis”: that Han Chinese culture subsumed Manchu well before the dynasty's fall in 1911. Instead, we have a still-evolving picture of Manchu culture and politics that played a vital role during the Qing dynasty.
Shao Dan's monograph advances this scholarship by exploring what became of the Manchus in the 20th century. Provocatively, she tries to discover the effect on the Manchus of what she describes as three failures. The Manchus, she writes, “failed to maintain control over their homeland of Manchuria … failed to make Manchukuo a free state … and, finally, failed to establish Manchuria as an ethnic autonomous region or prefecture within China” (p. 1). I will return later to these three perceived failures.
There is much to praise in this book. Shao deftly handles Chinese, Japanese and Manchu sources, as well as the extensive English-language historiography. The book moves methodically and chronologically in its first two parts. After an introductory chapter that surveys the Manchus' origins and policies toward Manchuria in the Qing dynasty, the book proceeds through the fall of the Qing to the Republic of China, the controversies and conflicts surrounding Manchukuo – the supposed Manchu homeland sponsored by the Japanese – to the fate of the Manchus as an ethnic group in the People Republic of China.
Shao suggests that a key problem for the Manchus was their homeland's sparse population and location on the periphery of the empire. Strategically important, difficult to defend, and resource-rich, Manchuria attracted both Han Chinese settlers and Russian and Japanese imperial interest. Until the late 19th century, Chinese immigrants and Manchu natives had been kept (with varying degrees of success and enthusiasm) formally separate. As Japan and Russia encroached on the region, Han and Manchu became part of a Qing “us” arrayed against outside incursions. No longer was Manchuria a dominion of Manchus within the Qing empire, but it was a key part of the empire that needed defending against outsiders. Because Han Chinese population was the most effective bulwark against these invaders, bringing Chinese settlers in – and further diluting the Manchu population – became a central part of late-Qing policy toward Manchuria.
Chinese nationalism exacerbated this weakening of Manchu identity as Han nationalists targeted the Manchus as enemies of a nascent Chinese nation. When the Qing dynasty fell, Manchus lost their empire and were without a homeland to which they could retreat.
When that homeland was reconstituted, it happened as a tool of Japanese imperial policy justified in terms of “national self-determination.” Shao documents the intellectual justifications for Manchukuo presented at the time, and makes the welcome point that the alternative to Japanese imperialism in Manchuria was not, in the eyes of the world, independence for the Manchus, but Han Chinese imperialism that wished to incorporate Manchukuo into the Republic of China, which had largely been founded on the basis of anti-Manchu nationalism.
This last shift, whereby Manchuria became part of the Han Chinese national project rather than an alien (and formerly hostile) nation, was crucial to the disappearance of the Manchus. As the Republic of China sought to replicate the boundaries of the Qing empire, the Manchus and Manchuria became, rhetorically, a central part of that project. Thus, even though they were cultural, economically and politically marginal, the Manchus were in many ways treated as part of the dominant, ruling Han. The Manchus under the Republic lacking both the (nominal) autonomy of minority groups like the Tibetans or Uyghurs, and the political and cultural influence of the Han majority.
Under the PRC, Manchu identity was complicated by ideology and nation-building. The ethnic autonomy of the Manchus was rehabilitated by the PRC's official policy of granting autonomy to ethnic groups within the state. However, the Manchus' complex historical relationship to the Chinese state (seen in the overthrow of the Qing empire and the founding of Manchukuo) made it difficult to integrate the Manchus into the (often propagandistic) narrative of various ethnic groups coming together to form one nation.
Shao's contributions to studies on border regions, the Manchus, and imperialism are welcome and of very high quality. My main concern with Shao's analysis is exemplified by the three “failures” she attributes to the Manchus. Each of them seems to presume the entity “Manchuria” that she is trying to analyse, thus begging the question. Shao cites Prasenjit Duara's work extensively, and certainly his observation that the nation-state has a privileged place within historiography is essential to understanding its treatment of the Manchus. One of Duara's most important emphases, however, is the constructed and contingent nature of the nation-state, a fact often ignored or denied by nationalists. I would suggest that ethnic groups and “homelands” are no less constructed, and Shao's analysis seems to suggest that Manchuria is a natural entity in much the same way that Han nationalists did for China.
Shao's last two chapters are creative and artful considerations of the lived experience of the Manchus, looking at the Manchu Princess Aisin Gioro Xianyu and then at collections of writing by Manchus during the 20th century. While I appreciate the author's desire to personalize the events about which she has theorized, I felt that these chapters would better stand alone as articles, or perhaps at the core of a separate book. The colourful portraits invoked here deserve more attention than they might get as illustrations of the theories developed in the greater part of the book. Overall, this is a welcome addition to the study of the Manchus, and helps to fill gaps in both the 20th-century history of the Manchus as well as China's northeastern border regions.
