By shaping contemporary academic and popular understanding of China's historical relations with northeast Asia, the national histories of the twentieth century continue to affect China's relations with Korea and Japan. This chapter begins with a survey of the introduction into Asia of a European model of “scientific history,” its subordination to the demands of nation-building, and the interstate quarrels that the new national history provoked. Throughout the twentieth century, national history remained the dominant framework within which history was written and taught. The new history served the political need to legitimate and explain “the nation-state in its present expanding form.” In Asia as in Europe, historians served the nation not only in inculcating nationalism– developing loyalty to the state as the citizens' preeminent obligation and primary identity – but in fulfilling the government's need for specialized language and regional knowledge in articulating and legitimating the foreign policy agenda. Inverting the sequence that prevailed in the pre-modern era, new knowledge appeared first in Japan, then several decades later in China, and finally after 1945 in Korea.

The new national histories and Japan's imperial expansion raised issues of historical “ownership” of northeast Asia. As Japanese scholars created a history that extended beyond contemporary boundaries, Korean and Chinese historians responded with their own counter narratives. Despite the changing geopolitics of the post-1945 period, the nationalist-inspired controversies have persisted and continue to create political tensions.

The fall-out in 2004 from conflicting claims for international recognition of the northeast Asian kingdom of Gaogouli/Koguryŏ illustrates the ways in which national history caused international wrangles with neighboring states. The Chinese–Korean struggle over historical ownership of Gaogouli/Koguryŏ, a northeast Asian state that existed in ancient times (first century BCE – 668 CE) serves as a good example of the repercussions surrounding the PRC leadership's moves to shore up its control over territories that were acquired by the Qing empire, but it also introduces us to the broader ongoing debate among scholars on how concepts of the nation could be applied to antiquity, an issue of particular relevance to China's multi-ethnic citizenry and germane to a fundamental issue, the role of China's minority nationalities in the writing of national history.

The last chapter examined how northeast conquest regimes and nearby states shaped a ritual vocabulary imported from the Central Plain to meet their specific situations. By exploring issues surrounding the legitimacy of royal succession that arose when newly emergent states in Korea and Japan adopted Chinese-style legal codes, this chapter aims to provide a fresh perspective on the idiosyncrasies of Chinese Confucian practices. The native legacy of rulership and succession which constrained the exportability of Confucian practices helps explain how, despite commonalities in their initial kinship systems, Japanese and Korean regimes ended up with strikingly different resolutions in their attempts to implement Chinese-style political structures.

The fundamental problem was the Chinese legal code that was introduced into the emerging states of the Korean peninsula and thence into the Japanese archipelago during the state-building era. The normative ideas of political legitimacy embedded in the codes were generally regarded as Confucian, referring to a set of principles which were incorporated into the education of elites and rulers. Assumed to be universally applicable, these norms were in actuality predicated on the Chinese patrilineal kinship system rather than the very different indigenous kinship and succession systems practiced in early Korea and Japan. Ancient Japanese and Korean kingship was based on bilateral kinship, which emphasized the blood lines of mothers as well as fathers. Rulership was dominated by a royal lineage, which practiced brother–sister marriage. Chinese legal principles denied inheritance rights to daughters and wives and dictated that only sons could ascend the throne. They proved difficult to implement, especially because they threatened the legitimacy of native rulers. Although Japan and Korea eventually adopted patrilineal principles, the end results deviated from the Chinese system and from each other in significant respects.

This chapter begins with a brief survey of the Chinese patrilineal kinship system, which marked status differences by gender, generation, and birth order within the descent group or lineage.

The second half of the sixteenth century found the Portuguese cruising in waters off the coasts of Asia, the Spanish colonizing the Philippines, and Jesuit and Dominican missionaries evangelizing in Japan and China. How did these newcomers affect the maritime and coastal frontiers discussed in the last chapter? More specifically, was the European advent linked to regime change in Japan and China? In contrast to earlier accounts, which place the Tokugawa shogunate and the Qing conquest within separate national histories, this chapter demonstrates the importance of regional interaction in shaping these seemingly independent events. Additionally, it shows how introduction of a world history context that the national histories ignore advances our understanding of the dynastic transition in China, the reunification of Japan, and Korea's traumatic experience of three invasions.

We begin with the 1592 invasion of Korea by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the culminating event of his successful military career, and the Ming military intervention that stymied Hideyoshi's initiative. Several decades later, another tripartite confrontation of forces involved the Ming, Chosŏn, and a new northeast regional power who would go on to conquer and rule China as the Qing empire. The chapter surveys the Jurchen origins of the Qing ruling house, traces its expanding influence, and chronicles its shifting relations with the Ming and the Chosŏn state. Initially regarded by the Ming and Koreans as mobile marauders on the northeast Asian frontier, the Jianzhou Jurchen successfully created a military force that eventually bested both regimes. Their story presents many elements familiar from the history of earlier conquest dynasties, but with a twist – the new opportunities for wealth accumulation provided by the expanding maritime frontier.

Activities on the maritime frontier and the land frontier in Siberia stimulated political, cultural, and economic transformations in China, Japan and Korea that make the 1550–1650 period “early modern.” The European impact extended far beyond the introduction of improved firearms.

This book explores what we might gain by looking at Chinese history from the periphery rather than from the core. The project of “de-centering China” is intended to counter the tradition of conceiving of Chinese history in terms of an unbroken sequence of dynasties, an organizational structure that emphasizes long-term historical continuity at the expense of downplaying the significance of ruling houses and dynastic policies. This book questions the dominant theme in modern historiography, which treats Chinese history as a linear narrative centered on the culture of the Central Plain and its original inhabitants, the Han Chinese. I argue that while what others have described as the “history of the nation” serves the interests of the modern nation-state that is the People's Republic of China (hereafter PRC), its emphasis on China as the history of the Han Chinese creates new problems for the state as it tries to create a tighter bond with its ethnic minorities.

De-centering China

The primary task in de-centering Chinese history is to examine it from the perspective of the periphery, and not the core. There is no lack of evidence from ancient times onward of intensive interactions between frontier and indigenous peoples (presently identified as the “Han Chinese”) in the Central Plain (zhongyuan), which is widely considered to be the “cradle” or core region of Chinese civilization. Migrants from its northern and western frontiers moved into the Central Plain, and their descendants eventually established states that ruled north China from the third to the seventh century. Later, conquest regimes from the northeast occupied first parts then all of north China and, in the thirteenth century, the Mongols successfully conquered the south and incorporated it into their empire. Yet we know relatively little about the peoples who headed the “sixteen barbarian states” who ruled north China in the third to fifth centuries, or the Khitan Liao, Jurchen Jin, and even the Mongol Yuan, because they left few written records, leaving most ordinary people to believe that the militarily superior frontier peoples eventually succumbed to the culturally superior Han Chinese; that is, that Central Plain culture triumphed over the culture of the frontier.

What would Chinese history look like if it were written from the perspective of the periphery and not the core? De-centering China entails focusing on interaction between the borderlands and the Central Plain as the dynamic engine behind the long-term development of China's imperial formation, and considering the long periods when China was divided or ruled by non-Han peoples, generally from its northern or northeastern frontiers, rather than concentrating attention on periods of unified rule. De-centering China also requires us to study texts produced by borderland peoples, and to contemplate events in which the Chinese heartland was encompassed in historical movements of regional or global dimensions.

Why de-center China? Orthodox historians neglect the story of how peoples from the borderlands interacted, formed states, and challenged Central Plain regimes. To justify this oversight, they rely on the traditional generalization that the horse-riding nomads had to dismount in order to rule, i.e. that they had to learn Chinese ways in order to govern the Central Plain. Despite scholarship that shows northeast regimes rather quickly developed bureaucratic modes of governance and political rhetoric through long contact with Chinese states, the notion that frontiersmen might conquer China, but would then find themselves enveloped by Chinese culture, persists. The traditional framework of dynastic cycles, along with officially commissioned dynastic histories that perpetuate this idealized and distorted vision of a unified China that exaggerates continuity, downplays the distinctiveness of each ruling house, and thus its special historical contribution.

The gap between image and reality is especially significant with regard to the many centuries when non-Han rulers – including the Tang, Yuan, and Qing – governed the Chinese heartland. For example, although the Tang era has been described as a “golden age” of Chinese history, its frontier origins played virtually no role in analyses of its historical contributions outside the military sphere.

The three chapters in Part II examine what Lieberman calls “politicized ethnicity,” the cultural practices created by elites that simultaneously affirmed their shared civilizational roots and their uniqueness. This chapter looks at state rituals. A large body of secondary literature attests that rituals, “symbolic behavior that is socially standardized and repetitive,” shape our perception of reality and the world. State rituals are an important instrument by which rulers and ritual specialists fuse potent cultural symbols into emotion-stirring choreographed sequences of gesture, music, and voiced utterance in an attempt to legitimate political systems and create symbolic communities. Rituals are multi-media vehicles for the expression of collective sentiments about one's own community and the community's view of itself. Rather than being fixed and stable, they are evolving and fluid. They provide a rich source for insights about the self-images of East Asian states at different points in their long entangled history.

Surveying its ritual repertoire, we argue that calling China's state rituals “Confucian” ignores the diversity of religious practice and the persistence of indigenous “religious orientations” such as ancestor worship, an “omnipresent” orientation that, Benjamin Schwartz noted, was “central to the entire development of Chinese civilization.” Ancestor worship, dating from long before the life of Confucius (541–479 BCE), and the ancillary idea that human beings could become gods, featured in Chinese state rites to 1911. By the Ming and Qing period, the state supported Daoist, Buddhist, and shamanic rites; it sacrificed at altars to nature deities originating in pre-Confucian times, and to others that marked the Manchu identity of the Qing regime.

Before the second half of the seventh century, when Japan imported elements of proto-Daoist and other religious and ritual practices from the continent, shamanism was the dominant religious orientation. Striving to advance political centralization and consolidate the power of the imperial line, rulers seized upon the continental imports to position Amaterasu as the focal ancestress of the imperial family.

Frontiers, or borderlands, can connote a boundary line which separates two states from one another, but refers here to a broader, more diffuse zone or place where different cultures mingle and meet. Like virtually all states before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, China's borders were not fixed in the modern sense, but much more fluid sites where different peoples commingled. Claims to sovereignty did not match actual administrative control, which peaked in the political center and weakened as one moved toward the peripheries. In this chapter, we view frontiers/borderlands as “permeable … and interpenetrable” spaces, zones of transition which also engendered societal transformation.

This chapter has several aims. First, it situates the northeast with respect to China's core region, the Central Plain, as a borderland which gave birth to states that borrowed from yet were not subsumed by the precocious polities of the Central Plain. In addition, it situates states in the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago within the geopolitical boundary of China's northeast Asian frontier. Korean and Japanese states were created through intense interaction with other entities on the steppe and the Central Plain. The periodic crises that swept across the steppe initiated political reverberations through the northeast and the Central Plain. When these political forces collided, they sparked military clashes among China, Korea, and Japan. A brief survey demonstrates that China's historical interactions with Japan and Korea replicated every dimension of its interaction with northeast Asia. The chapter ends with the arrival of Europeans in maritime Asia, an event which disrupted and eventually shifted the power balance among these states and lifted Chinese restrictions on the movement of goods and people.

The Central Plain

The earliest historical records locate Chinese states emerging in the Yellow River drainage as it flows south and turns eastward on the borders of present-day Shaanxi, the area that historians denote as the Central Plain (zhongyuan). According to a popular contemporary encyclopedia, the capitals of these early states were clustered in the present-day province of Henan.