Jodi Weinstein's Empire and Identity in Guizhou: Local Resistance to Qing Expansion fits into a growing literature on the Qing frontier. The monograph offers a series of case studies of local conflicts in the contiguous prefectures of Guiyang, Nanlong, and Anshun that illustrate forms of local resistance in Guizhou during the eighteenth century. These tensions would eventually culminate in the 1797 Nanlong uprising that involved the entire southwestern portion of the province. Weinstein's is the first major study in English of the 1797 Nanlong uprising. In addition to relying on a close reading of Qing archival documents for the historical framework and chronicling of events, Weinstein also recounts two folk narratives in order to capture “the way Zhongjia chose to perceive and remember the rebellion” (p. 84).
For theoretical grounding, Weinstein draws on the work of James C. Scott and Jean Michaud. These perspectives from political science and anthropology allow her to explore state and local power dynamics and the livelihood choices of the Guizhou indigenes in a way that transcends simple ethnic divisions, while nonetheless taking ethnicity into account. The resisters to Qing imperial power that she writes about were primarily from the Zhongjia ethnic group, currently classified in the People's Republic of China as Buyi. Instead of describing local conflicts as simply a contest between imperial authority as represented by Han Chinese interests and ethnic Zhongjia resisters, Weinstein rather understands illegal activity and resistance to state authority as stemming from a limited number of viable livelihood strategies available to indigenous peoples, as set against the state's desire to make the area “legible” in terms of its own strategies of governance.
Methodologically, Weinstein uses evidence in a way reminiscent of Philip A. Kuhn's Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). She draws the readers in with a good story, well told, that also educates them about Qing imperial policy, procedures for frontier governance, and tensions between the center and the periphery. Weinstein shows how strategies for amassing ill-gotten profit played on local people's trust in the spirit world. Itinerants with some literacy would typically work in conjunction with local Zhongjia to learn about and then capitalize on local beliefs by selling charms and talismans purported to bring prosperity or provide protection to their owners. Charms that included written characters seemed to hold the most power. As the implications of the written characters were frequently subversive, such schemes would often draw their targets unwittingly into conflict with central authorities.
In order to include Zhongjia perspectives into her work, Weinstein introduces to her readers two folk narratives about the rebellion recorded in the late 1950s, and now available in Chinese translation. The first, a narrative poem entitled “Immortal Maiden Wang,” focuses on a female spiritual leader of the rebellion. The second, “Song of the Nanlong Resistance,” showcases Buyi resistance and cleverness, particularly in repartee with Qing officials. Weinstein retells these colorful and entertaining tales, but rather than setting them within the context of other folk narratives of either powerful female spirituality or Chinese folk literature with its tradition of oral bravado and repartee, she saves most of her analysis for a discussion of ways in which the narratives may have been influenced by “[t]he Chinese Communist Party's political agenda” (p. 85) in their later retelling and translation, on which she has to rely.
Weinstein is justifiably concerned with the potential pitfalls of relying on translations, yet the lack of an “original” against which to compare the version to which she has access significantly complicates her task of screening for possible ideological influence. While her goal is to explore Zhongjia perspectives on the rebellion, in the end the reader is left with a stronger impression of how the accounts themselves might have been adjusted to fit a narrative that privileges the triumph of science over superstition. Yet, such a narrative is not particular to PRC ideology; it could also be seen as part of a larger modernist state narrative of the kind described by James C. Scott.
Empire and Identity in Guizhou makes an important contribution to the literature on Qing frontier policy and ethnicity. The author's close attention to the documentary record contributes both to our understanding of imperial and local dynamics and to the specific circumstances of Guizhou Province. At the same time, the framework she crafts by drawing from the work of Scott and Michaud helps make the work accessible and relevant to those interested in state formation and frontier policy in other times and places. However, the livelihood model she employs to understand instances of Zhongjia resistance to Qing imperial control, while a useful one, cannot be assumed to be free of its own ideological assumptions.
