China's Last Imperial Frontier

Relations between the Qing empire and its Tibetan borderlands in western Sichuan underwent major changes during the decades between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. In eastern Tibet or Kham, a region straddling western Sichuan and central Tibet that traditionally had been under the rule of hereditary chieftains, the Qing state mounted a vigorous campaign of conquest and expansion. Large-scale military actions targeted indigenous institutions of government, which were then replaced by Qing bureaucracies in a series of reforms designed to alter frontier society. Imperial officials justified their military, political and socioeconomic incursions in terms of two distinct policies: first, as gaitu guiliu or administrative regularization of local chieftains, which invoked an old frontier statecraft tradition; and second, as xinzheng or “new policies,” which identified with the contemporaneous modernization reforms that were sweeping through China proper. Departing from its previous practice, the state abandoned frontier indirect rule and shifted from a policy of supporting local Buddhist monasteries to a policy that undermined them. For the first time in the region’s history, the Qing state sought to systematically integrate local government, society and culture with China proper. This campaign, occurring decades after frontiers like Xinjiang and Taiwan were made into provinces and interrupted only by the fall of the Qing in 1912, was the last major frontier expansion by imperial China in an important borderland. Kham’s subsequent incorporation into the Chinese republics, nominally in the 1930s and more forcefully since the 1950s, had extended the contested legacies of the Qing campaign down through the twentieth century.