Book Review

Asia

This book is an expansion and summation of Pamela Kyle Crossley's now sizeable body of work on the Manchus, the questions they raise regarding identity and ideology in the Qing empire, and the key role of the eighteenth-century Qianlong emperorship in shaping our understanding of Qing history. It contributes to a revision of "Chinese" late imperial history that Crossley herself helped set in motion, one that stresses the previously neglected Inner Asian facets of the Qing empire. The book also addresses, through comparisons to Romanov, Ottoman, French, and Habsburg imperial systems, the larger issue of imperial rulerships across early modern Eurasia, and especially their role in the formulation of ethnic and national identities. This study is thus aimed at an audience beyond China specialists.	1
Crossley principally argues that developments in the expanding Qing polity in the late sixteenth through the late nineteenth centuries necessitated changes in how it defined its subjects. These changes were codified ideologically in official productions: literary, artistic, architectural, linguistic, and, of greatest interest to Crossley, historical. This flood of material, Crossley argues, particularly that of the long Qianlong reign in the eighteenth century, to a large degree constructed the very categories of "Manchu," "Mongol," and "Chinese" that modern historians have conventionally taken as natural ethnic units with meanings predating the Qing.	2
This process had several stages. Initially, the relationship of the khans Nurhaci and Hong Taiji with their followers in demographically mixed and fluid Northeast Asia was articulated as master-slave; the followers' languages and places of origin (Korean, Chinese, Tungusic, Mongol) were less important than such moral criteria as how early each joined the rising Latter Jin state. Next, after Hong Taiji declared the Qing dynasty in 1636, his need to institutionalize and centralize power led him to rely increasingly upon the sociomilitary units known as the Eight Banners, which, while coming in Manchu, Mongol, and Hanjun (Chinese martial) flavors, remained fuzzy categories with porous borders and were not genealogically determined.	3
After decades of ruling China, during which time the Qing faced Chinese rebellion, incorporated many Chinese within the military and bureaucracy, and bemoaned the creeping assimilation of Manchus, the state sought to consolidate power by further clarifying who was who. It thus finally turned to bloodlines to define the categories of Qing subjects. Nevertheless, the period from ca. 1688 to the early eighteenth century was still characterized by a flexible "'transformationalist' ideology of identity," epitomized by the Yongzheng emperor's assertion that non-Chinese peoples could be transformed through cultural influences. After 1736, however, the Qianlong emperor disputed both the possibility and the need for such transformation, directly contradicting his father. The Qianlong court promoted ascriptive genealogical criteria in a range of ideological productions to enshrine as discrete political categories the primary "constituencies" of his rule: Manchus, Mongols, Chinese, Tibetan, and (Uyghur) Muslims. After taxonomizing these constituencies, Qianlong presented a different ideological face to each and transcended them all as a universal emperor (the "simultaneous emperorship"). In the process, the "Chinese martial" were folded into a newly constructed monolithic "Chinese" (Han) category and stripped of special status; "Mongol" became a catch-all grouping including even such peoples as the Oyirads, who had not been "Mongol" in the time of Chinggis Khan; and "Manchu" itself was tortuously historicized, with adherence to "Manchu ways" required of many Manchus to whom such ways were quite unfamiliar. (Qing efforts to reify and historicize the categories of Uyghur and Tibetan were qualitatively different and far less extensive—a difference noted but not fully explained here.)	. . .