Among the more provocative questions scholars of late imperial China have grappled with in recent years is: How did Qing-era institutions contribute to the creation of modern China? This question is at the heart of this impressive volume by historian R. Kent Guy. Guy's main goal is to understand the processes through which the Manchus turned the country from a “China of regions” to a “China of provinces.” Put differently, he asks “how regional diversity [could] be contained within a single, centralized administrative structure” (p. 71). His hypothesis is that the institution of the province, and the formation of a corps of capable provincial governors (xunfu) loyal to the emperor, enabled the Qing to invent a new “territorial order” that was “qualitatively different from that of any previous dynasty” (p. 9). Perhaps the book's greatest contribution is to demonstrate how the late Ming office of xunfu (mostly temporary regional military commanders) was transformed into a permanently ranked, territorially based, “middleman” position by the mid eighteenth century. The story told here of the Qing restructuring of national administration puts another major dent in the battered body of the “Qing = Ming redux” jalopy.

But this is much more than an institutional study. Through meticulous research, most of it in published primary sources and secondary scholarship in Chinese (no archival sources appear to have been consulted), Guy grapples also with the major tensions that criss-crossed the early Qing state: between capital and province, between executive and bureaucratic power, between Han and bannerman, and between lettered and unlettered, as these figured in the political, military, and economic consolidations of the Shunzhi, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong reigns. There is enough insight in these pages to satisfy even the most demanding Qing politics junkie.

The book is divided into two equal halves, each about 180 pages in length, which makes for a very substantial tome. The first half is mainly about the careers of provincial governors and traces shifts in appointments to this post over time, which Guy sees as a kind of “mental map of the empire” (p. 9). Among his general findings is that fewer than half of provincial governors held the jinshi degree (p. 15), a fact that suggests that practical ability outweighed academic talent, and reinforces the arguments others (such as Jonathan Spence and William Rowe) have made about the preferences of Qing rulers for men of competence who could serve as troubleshooters on the ground. The second half moves region by region, outlining the emergence of new provinces (such as Hunan, formally created only in 1723). The individual character of each province seems to have been reflected in the kinds of men chosen to serve therein. How well these two halves support the overall narrative structure of the book is perhaps debatable. One is really about people and politics; the other, about people and space. Many readers may find they can read the one independently of the other.

This is a book for specialists, full of statistics and tables, facts and figures. The reading is dense in places, especially in Part II, where the province-by-province account can be somewhat repetitive. Interested in data on the intra-province promotions of governors? You'll find your answer on p. 69. Curious about the rate at which the Qing emperors made special appointments at the gubernatorial rank? It's all there on p. 113. Perhaps trusting that the likely reader would have a decent knowledge of Qing geography, the publisher decided not to include even a single map. This was a mistake, for the absence of maps often makes it difficult to follow the author's argument. Fortunately, the book is fluently written, and the Chinese character glossary is mostly error-free. Less happy is the index, which is little more than a list of proper nouns. A pity, too, that Manchu names are rendered capriciously throughout the text (e.g., “Korjishan” for Karjišan, “Manpei” for Mampi, etc.).

Let me here raise two further questions.

One has to do with the specifically “Manchu” nature of Qing rule and its relevance to the institution of the governorship that Guy describes. At the beginning of chapter 2, Guy asks, “How were the Manchus able to build such an institution?” He goes on to say, “The answer lies not in any specific Manchu vision of territorial administration but in the details of their postconquest confrontation with the realities of rule in China” (p. 47). Later in the chapter (and elsewhere in the book), however, a rather different argument is made. For instance, Guy says that “There appears to have been a specifically Manchu component to the policy of eliminating governorships,” referring to the complexities of court politics in the Shunzhi reign and the back-and-forth between nativist and assimilationist factions (p. 52). A couple of pages on, referring to the administration of the northern border, he writes, “The disappearance of these posts pointed to one of the fundamental characteristics of early Qing rule, that the Manchus, in effect a nation-at-arms, were simply better prepared to maintain the preponderance of military force through their own organizational resources” (p. 54). Guy's emphasis on the importance of the Chinese bannermen in early Qing administration (p. 64) and his statement that “Qing bureaucratic forms may have originated, at least in part, from the need of a conquest dynasty to sort out and enforce the obligations and provisions of its various strata of servitors” (p. 110) would seem to offer further evidence that, in fact, a “specific Manchu vision” of region-level administration had everything to do with the new territorial order that emerged in the eighteenth century. After all, as Guy acknowledges later on, “in many respects, Manchus were different from their Chinese counterparts” (p. 160), and special procedures and considerations—what he calls a “Manchu imperative” (p. 163)—could hardly have been avoided.

The second question has to do with Guy's argument as to the emergence of provinces in place of regions. The argument is put most clearly on p. 289:

In other words, it was the distinctive shaping of the post of provincial governor by Qing rulers that led to the development of the province. What is left unexplained here, it seems, is the connection between the men who occupied this official post (often for just a few years) and the people of the region he governed. Guy's account gives us an excellent sense of how, administratively, we get to Fujian and Hubei from Jiangnan and Huguang, and who the men were who helped to create this new spatial regime. However, it does not tell us very much about how we get to Fujian ren and Hubei ren, and what role local residents played in making the provinces what they would become. One suspects that this is at least as important a part of the story.