Studies in Qing statecraft in frontier contexts have in recent years produced revealing perspectives on the late imperial and nationalist histories of the Chinese state, with respect to both its construction and its place in world history. Viewed through the lens of borderland developments, even well-established ideas about Qing history can be problematized, or at least more fully elucidated. This book provides a fresh explanation of Sichuan's place in the Qing system based on the empire's strategic endeavor in the Tibetan and Mongolian regions of Inner Asia. Known as a wealthy “granary of heaven” yet also a tax haven, a cultural center yet also a bastion of unruliness, Sichuan's unique identity turns out to be, in Yingcong Dai's analysis, as much a legacy of Qing imperial strategy as a product of its citizens' industriousness peppered by abundant resources.
The central argument of the book is that Sichuan's strategic importance grew so much in the early eighteenth century that, for nearly the next two centuries, the Qing state deliberately maintained high military spending and low taxation in the province in order to be ready for military action in Tibet, whose connections with Zunghar Mongols constituted a significant threat that was difficult to ignore during the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong reigns. Subsequent growth in Sichuan's migrant population and grain commercialization led to the concentration of political power in two groups: the banner elite, who were permitted to become attached to local commerce and real estate, and the gentry stratum, whose wealth exceeded their Confucian dynastic loyalty. Dai shows that these developments came about primarily through metropolitan planning and secondarily through gubernatorial turf building. Dai's reliance on the Veritable Records, memorials, and imperial rescripts, which form the majority of the author's sources, perhaps lends itself to such an explanatory scheme, which is effectively supported and even skillfully executed at places, particularly where the author detects imperial rewritings of history and provincial power struggles tinged with ethnic tensions. Readers who are interested in the local aspects of these developments or who desire more on the grain and military labor markets than what is offered in the book may refer to Dai's journal articles in the bibliography.
Beyond these documented findings, the author makes some suggestions that warrant further consideration. One of these gets close to a conceptually underdeveloped area of the book. The strategic significance of central Tibet and Sichuan's western Kham borderland, which the author suggests was the driving force behind Sichuan's rise in profile, receives rather episodic treatment vis-à-vis the Chengdu part of the equation, which are the structural and personnel reshufflings through which that profile came to be defined. More attention needs to be given to why, and how, developments within the leadership circles in Lhasa and Kham were translated into court decisions that made Sichuan's frontier features more relevant than its other features.
This point is related to another suggestion by the author that, although the Qing expansion had largely ceased by the end of the eighteenth century, the state failed to raise Sichuan's tax until almost a century later, when its abrupt increase in extraction prompted an abandonment of the dynastic cause by the Sichuanese, whose already insufficient loyalty was further weakened by economic alienation. Although this broader conclusion extends beyond the scope of the book, it has important implications not only for the author's security-oriented thesis, but also for the study of the late Qing reforms and dynastic collapse. Importantly, although the threat of a Tibetan–Mongol alliance was withdrawn between the fall of the Zunghar empire in the 1790s and the rise of the Anglo-Russian rivalry in Tibetan fringes in the 1890s, the Qing empire remained in this period entangled by security problems in Tibet's eastern Kham region and western Nepali frontier. The continuity of Qing policy in Sichuan, if seen solely through official correspondences between Beijing and Chengdu, might seem to be a reflection of policy rigidity, but its strategic necessity should be more apparent with a closer look at these borderlands during this period.
By linking Qing imperial strategy to Tibetan history at the level of provincial administration, Dai's book underscores the significance of Tibetan frontiers for the structural development of Qing China's political underpinnings. Dai's insight into the endurance and the importance of this linkage advances our understanding of Qing borderland history. This is also a large analytical agenda that requires much further research.
