Constructing Qinghai Province: Chinese state-making in a Tibetan-Mongol frontier region 1907-1957

Abstract

ABSTRACT Dilemmas of territoriality beset the modern Chinese state at the rupture with empire in 1912, critically in the northwestern borderlands where Mongol and Tibetan declarations of independence threatened disaggregation of the imperial territory. In response the new Republican government took up the late Qing’s practice of “consolidating the borders” (shibian) by establishing provinces in the empire’s Inner Asian dependencies (fanshu) to integrate them by direct administration into the Chinese state. This paper examines one such project of Chinese state-making at the frontiers: the construction of Qinghai Province in the region of the Qing dependency situated between Gansu Province and Central Tibet. It adopts a historical-geographic approach to the state’s instrumentalization of administrative categorization and construction in Qinghai’s Tibetan and Mongol territories, a protracted undertaking carried out with heavy reliance on military coercion. Making the province evolved through interplay of national state and regional sub-state interests, driven by the Sino-Muslim Ma regime who acted as key agents on the ground, but located within the Republican political-administrative structure. In 1949, the CCP eliminated the Republic and the Ma regime but retained the province, dynamically restructuring its interior administration under regional nationality autonomy in recognition of the region’s Tibetan, Mongol and other non-Han populations. Qinghai’s significance for Chinese states in the first half of the 20th century lay in centrist calculations of national security and territoriality. As the first Chinese province on the Tibetan Plateau, its construction was, in essence, concerned with sovereignty, providing a political-administrative means to alter wider regional geopolitics in the interests of the Chinese state. Ongoing re-categorization of territorial administrative units inside the province suggests an unfinished project of state territorialization, as anxieties over instability in the northwestern regions of the PRC intensify.