Han Expansion to the South

Abstract

On the surface, a discussion of China’s expansion south might appear as just another academic endeavor with little relevance to contemporary events. Anyone who has taken a university course on Chinese civilization knows the story: Chinese civilization began in the second millennium bce as various Neolithic settlements situated along the lower reaches of the Yellow River, an area known as the Central Plain, coalesced to form the first Chinese dynasty, the Shang. For the next three thousand years, the culture that emerged from this Central Plain heartland spread uniformly over the geopolitical expanse of what is contemporary China, bringing civilization to the previously untamed “barbarians” of the periphery. This linear narrative presumes that the geopolitical entity that is China today has unsullied ancient roots, and that China today has always been China. The arguments offered in support of China’s universal culture, Prasenjit Duara tells us, are rhetorical subterfuge aimed at securing for the “contested and contingent nation the false unity of a self-same” (p. 4), the Han. Thus, to question this teleological paradigm of Chinese history is to challenge the very essence of China, Chinese civilization, and Han identity. Yet this is precisely what students of China’s expansion south are doing today. They are decentering China’s history by asking a deceptively simple question: What would Chinese history look like if we examine it from the perspective of the peoples living along China’s southern periphery?