China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia.(Book review)

China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. By Peter C. Perdue. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. 725 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

Historical knowledge about Central Eurasia in the English-speaking world has many gaps. Scholars cannot even agree on the historical boundaries of this vast region. Peter Perdue, in his monumental study of the Qing westward expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, recognizes that Central Eurasian history is shaped by military conquest, trade, and cultural diversity. He defines its territory as extending from the Ukranian steppes to the Pacific Ocean and from southern Siberia to the Tibetan Plateau. Echoing Owen Lattimore, Joseph Fletcher, and Andre Gunter Frank, Perdue considers this region a crossroads of the Eurasian continent, affecting historical processes in Asia and Europe.

China Marches West is a comparative study of three empires-in-the-making: the Manchu Qing, Muscovite Russia, and Mongolian Zungharia. Perdue discusses the Qing conquest of the Mongolian nomads in great detail. In part 1, "The Formation of the Central Eurasian States," Perdue emphasizes the region's four ecological zones--tundra, forest, steppe, and desert--that separated agricultural settled regimes and nomadic societies. Even culturally similar Mongol tribes were divided by the endless Gobi Desert. At the same time, no fixed borders existed between the peoples of this vast terrain. Caravan trade, migration, and nomadic mobility allowed for shifting cultural identifies in the frontier zones, creating "sinicized nomads, semi-barbarized Chinese, Tibetans, Muslims and other non-Han peoples--mixtures of merchants, nomads, oasis settlers and peasants" (p. 42). In the early stages of their development, the Manchu, Russian, and Mongol empires were linked by the Central Eurasian steppe. According to Perdue, steppe traditions left long-lasting legacies in all three empires through cultural borrowing and intermarriage of the Manchu-Mongolian elites; for example, Mongol traditions influenced Russian and Qing state institutions, diplomacy, horsemanship, and script.

Part 2, "Contending for Power," tells a dramatic story of protracted struggle between the Qing and Zunghar states, which started with Kangxi's campaigns against Galdan in 1690 and ended in 1759 when the Qianlong emperor announced the elimination of the Zunghars. The author calls this power struggle the "Great Game of the 18th century," from which the Qing emerged the winner. Before confronting the Zunghars, the Qing negotiated peace with the Russians in Nerchinsk (1689) and won over several frontier Mongol tribes that had previously paid tribute to the Russians. Thus, the Qing neutralized the Russian threat to their borders and took advantage of tribal divisions between the Mongols. However, Perdue argues that the strength of the Qing state alone cannot explain its success in a decades-long struggle to eliminate the Zunghar threat. He notes that chronic disputes between the Zunghar and Khalka Mongols, and among the Zunghars themselves, prevented their unified action against the Qing.

What explains the determination of three Manchu emperors to exterminate the Zunghar state and people? Perdue argues that the Zunghars, unlike eastern Mongol tribes, insisted on preserving their autonomy from the Qing state. Chinese emperors saw them as barbarians threatening the security of the empire's western frontiers. The imperial project of bringing the Central Asian steppe into the empire could not be successfully achieved without eliminating this threat. Manchu-Zunghar rivalry was a political struggle of an expanding multiethnic empire against an independent nomadic formation. Qianlong's military campaigns went beyond destroying the Zunghar state. They eliminated Zunghar influence in ...