Arbiters of the Borderlands: Warlords, Municipalities, and State-Making in Sino-Tibet, 1905-1955
Research Poster Arts & Humanities 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Zachary Clark
Exhibition Number 63
Abstract
Historians of the Republic of China (1911-1949) have adopted an eastern-China-centric view of the era, casting areas outside of its political umbrella as deviant, divided, and under the chaotic governance of warlords (military men with local authority and own armies) who hinder modernization efforts. My project challenges this traditional telling of Chinese history by inverting our lens to the far western regions that sit between China and Tibet. I look at three urban centers in western China: Kunming, Yunnan Province; Kangding, Xikang Province; Xining, Qinghai Province. Within these urban centers, my project analyzes the ways warlords interacted with local institutions: Indigenous Headmen (Chieftains), Tibetan Buddhist Monasteries, Regional Banks, and Transregional Merchants, so that they could put forward unique policies and vision for a “modern” Chinese state. My poster presents some of my project’s interventions that argue 1) China’s western regional governments were not “peripheral” but directly a part of making a “modern” China. 2) The local ethnic minority (non-Han Chinese) communities of western China leveraged their religious, cultural, and political power to limit and shape the reach of the Chinese state. Through my research, I have visited archives in China, Taiwan, Japan, India, and the United States to use Chinese, English, and Tibetan language newspapers, government correspondence, diaries, local chronicles, missionary photo collections. My research concludes that local Indigenous communities of western China were essential to the modernization changes in global trade, multilingual education reform, military modernization, infrastructure, and renewable energy that occurs in western China in the twentieth century.
Importance
My research project is a critical intervention in our understanding of how the modern People’s Republic of China (1949 - ) came to be a modern nation-state. By showing the key role western China played in the transition from and empire to nation-state, my project includes the often overlooked and erased voices of Indigenous communities in China’s borderlands into the modern state-making project. Only by understanding the role’s borderlands peoples played in making China what it was a century ago, can we hope to understand the relationship between China and these borderland’s communities in Tibet, Xinjing, Inner Mongolia today.