How did the Chinese state become what it was before 1949? How did China maintain continuities in its territorial, demographic, and administrative patterns throughout the Qing, Republican, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) eras? Addressing all these questions, Huaiyin Li's The Making of the Modern Chinese State: 1600–1950 offers a systematic account of the making of the modern Chinese state from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Drawing on studies of late imperial and modern China, as well as archival records, memoirs, and officials’ works, Li traces the mechanics of the Chinese state's geopolitical setting, fiscal constitution, and identity building. He argues that the distinctive formation of the Qing state was essential to the continuity of China's territoriality and ethnic composition.
Challenging the perception that China's transformation from the Qing to the Republican era was a disruptive transition from an empire to a nation-state, Li contends that this painstaking process should be viewed as a transformation from a territorial state into a sovereign state (pp. xi, 48–50). The Qing, to Li, was not an “empire” because it was “neither a typical expansionist empire nor an emerging fiscal-military state resembling its counterparts in early modern Europe and beyond.” Instead, it was an “early-modern territorial state,” as it “had stable frontiers and effectively controlled its territory that had fixed borders clearly demarcated with the neighboring states” (p. 11). While the Qing departed from the preceding Chinese dynasties by creating a large state encompassing both the Han population and the frontiers of the Inner Asian nomads, its military expeditions beginning in the late seventeenth century were primarily defensive, and its geopolitical goal was to safeguard its strategic security instead of demanding taxes or tributes from the frontiers (p. 9–10).
Chapter 2 analyzes the dynamics and limits of the Qing's territorial expansion. As Li demonstrates, it was driven primarily by the imperial rulers’ pursuit of geopolitical security (pp. 23–29). The Qing rulers considered the ideological, social, and geopolitical contexts of both the frontier and interior regions and developed different policies and strategies to govern the diverse populations (pp. 31–44). Chapter 3 further reveals how the Qing's “low-level equilibrium”—a static and rigid structure of regular revenues and routine expenditures—helped fulfill the state's geopolitical goals and maintain its military operation. Yet, as Li argues, when this equilibrium lost balance and became increasingly unfavorable to the state in the late eighteenth century, it also determined the limits of the Qing's war efforts and caused a decrease in the government's capacity of handling interior and frontier crisis (pp. 53–69, 77–79).
Chapter 4 examines how the Qing managed to survive the devastating wars and even doubled its officially reported revenues in the three decades following the Taiping Rebellion. The underlying cause, to Li, was the Qing's new fiscal constitution: “high-level disequilibrium” and “regionalized centralism”—a system in which provincial authorities developed various decentralized ways of fundraising (pp. 86–108).
Chapter 5 explores how the new fiscal framework helped the Qing quell revolts and modernize its defense during the Tong-Guang Restoration. Yet the expansion of Western powers and Japan urged the Qing to undertake a series of fundamental shifts in statecraft, rebuilding its foreign relations by giving up its claim of suzerainty and accepting all other states as its equals (pp. 128–30). Chapter 6 demonstrates how the Qing initiated a series of transformations of its infrastructural institutions, recentralizing fiscal structure and military power and keeping its vast territory largely intact before its demise in 1911 (pp. 133–45).
Chapter 7 examines the dynamics of warlordism in Republican China, demonstrating how powerful warlord cliques succeeded through their efforts to strengthen the fiscal constitution and centralize institutions and the military apparatus (pp. 163–86). Chapter 8 examines how the frontiers were transformed during the Republican period, as well as how foreign powers played a significant role in China's frontier rebuilding and crisis (pp. 194–210). Chapter 9 explores how the Nationalist regime established a national government in China, survived Japan's full-scale invasion, and fully recovered China's sovereignty. Yet the Nationalist’ regime's “semi-centralism” structure after its unification of China also constituted a challenge to its state rebuilding, leading to its worsening disequilibrium in fiscal constitution and failure to build an efficient and centralized bureaucracy (pp. 225–37). Chapter 10 reveals that the CCP's unified leadership, centralized fiscal-military constitution, and occupation of strategically important Manchuria helped it defeat the Nationalists during the Chinese Civil War (pp. 251–73).
Using a fiscal-military perspective and macrohistorical approach, Li offers an alternative and fresh account of the making of the modern Chinese state. His vivid account not only demonstrates the significant role of geopolitical setting, fiscal constitution, and identity building in the transformation of modern China but also resonates with a “China-centered” approach that tends to understand the Chinese historical trajectory on its own terms. However, while Li exhaustively researches the dynamic evolution of modern Chinese state and convincingly places it in the broad world-historical context, some points raised by his analysis also deserve further exploration.
First, Li vigorously demonstrates varied modes of the Chinese state and echoes the scholarship that perceived the state-making process as essential to China's modern transformations. Yet he does not provide sufficient discussion of an equally important concept that closely interacts with the state and often influences the latter: society. If Li's macrohistorical approach, as he persuasively presents, tends to “inquire into the causes of change and paths of development characteristic of the society or process under investigation” (p. 6), how did the modern Chinese state transform its fiscal constitution, geopolitical setting, and identity building throughout its dynamic interactions with society? How did the bottom-up path construct China's state rebuilding? Moreover, how did the complex interactions between the Chinese state and society make the transformation of modern China different from that of other countries?
Second, while Li convincingly demonstrates the major transformations of the Chinese state, his explorations tend to center on the structure and mechanics of political regimes. Such a “regime-centered” or “state-centered” approach certainly matches the major objective of this monograph, namely, the process of “state making.” Yet it can hardly explicate how the Chinese state evolved and operated at the “margins” and how the dynamic process of state making took place under varied circumstances. What kind of “state making” can be observed if one takes a “decentering” approach to investigate the complex power games and confrontations between the state, its agents, and various actors? Moreover, how did all these complex interactions offer different understandings about the striking phenomenon, as Li describes, that China maintained its territorial and demographic basis and eventually became so “big” and “strong” (pp. 277–81)?
All in all, Li effectively argues that a proper understanding of the formation of the modern Chinese state requires a macro- and world-historical perspective to investigate China's distinctive trajectory. His exploration also overcomes various political and ideological implications given to the history of modern China.
