The wars launched in Kham (the eastern part of the Tibetan world) in 1905 by Qing officials determined to replace local Khampa leadership with Chinese bureaucracy are of great importance in Chinese and Tibetan history. They fundamentally altered relations between China and Tibet, and Samuel Adshead mused that without the ruinously expensive wars in Kham, Sichuan might have avoided its 1911 crisis and the “empire might have escaped revolution” (Province and Politics in Late Imperial China, Curzon, 1984). Xiuyu Wang's book on the origins of the campaigns, their prosecution by Zhao Erfeng, and the subsequent attempts to reshape Kham's government, economy and culture joins a relatively significant body of work on the subject (for example, the books by Louis Sigel and Adshead; and articles by Elliot Sperling and Dahpon David Ho). But there are enough reinterpretations and new details in Wang's book to make it interesting to scholars who work on Sino-Tibetan relations, and significant for those who study Qing and Chinese rule over other non-Han territory more generally.
A minor problem that one feels bound to mention before moving onto the more important things: the map on p. 2 is too small, and many of its labels illegible. One wonders why the publishers allowed this in a book about places whose names are generally known only to locals and scholars of the Tibetan lands.
Wang's interpretative inclination is to locate historical agency at a more local level more than previous scholarly accounts have (though his stress on regional rather than central government echoes the view aired by British diplomat Eric Teichman in the 1920s). In this interpretation, the Qing court was cautious and unwilling to undertake action that might drive the Dalai Lama into the arms of foreign powers. Officials based in Sichuan, by contrast, were the gung-ho expansionists. Here, Wang differentiates his work from Robert Shepherd's interpretation of Qing policy for Taiwan, which, Wang points out, suggests a “unitary Qing state,” in which the interests of the centre are not differentiated from those of provincial officials (p. 169).
As a consequence of highlighting regional agency, Wang gives events in Kham (like the killing in Batang of Fengquan, newly appointed assistant amban) more weight than the 1903–04 British invasion of central Tibet in the development of an expansionist programme (pp. 8–9, 89). In a somewhat different way, Wang also localizes the sources of influence on the Zhao. Previous scholars have stressed the references that he made to Western imperialism, and cast him as a modern colonial governor in the mould of his European and Japanese contemporaries. Wang tempers this image by showing how Zhao “did not merely imitate the other colonizers nor rehearse a derivative colonial discourse […] [He] also drew upon an older Chinese repertoire of frontier statecraft” (p. 233). On this point in particular, Wang's intervention is important: references to foreign colonialism in Zhao's memorials were in fact very few and very brief, though this is not the impression given in some previous accounts.
Wang also paints a somewhat different portrait of Xiliang (the Mongol banner official and governor-general of Sichuan from 1904–07) from that offered by Roger Des Forges (Hsi-liang and the Chinese National Revolution, Yale University Press, 1973) and Adshead (1984). Des Forges's and Adshead's books had a more cautious Xiliang whose approach the authors contrasted with Zhao's aggressive expansionism. Adshead called Xiliang a conservative, who “rejected, stalled or modified proposals on the most contentious issues” including the Tibetan border. Des Forges even supposed that Xiliang's reluctance to initiate a more assertive policy was the main reason for his removal from the Sichuan governor-generalship. Wang, by contrast puts Xiliang more at the heart of a Sichuanese clique of colonizers. The divergence here between Wang and the earlier scholars is intriguing, but Wang pulls his historiographical punch rather than foregrounding his work's innovation more directly.
Wang's arguments are persuasive, and grounded in a very comprehensive reading of Qing documents. He has also used a number of unpublished manuscripts in the possession of Khampa individuals – though he does not cite them particularly widely, and one suspects that their major value will be for the light they shed on other topics. These manuscripts and a couple of other non-Tibetan language works by Tibetans give glimpses of the Khampa perspectives. But, for all the emphasis on local factors in Wang's analysis, this book is still primarily an analysis of Qing policy making, rather than Khampa communities.
In many instances, Wang's book casts Sichuan, rather than the Qing state, as the principle actor. Future scholarship will have to flesh this out significantly. About half of the money and many of the soldiers came from Sichuan, but the Zhao brothers and Xiliang did not, and the motivations of these key leaders remain slightly opaque. Were they such strong exponents of expansion because of particularly Sichuanese interests? If so, why did they see control over Kham as such a priority for the province, given that its population was not much more than one per cent of the Sichuan basin population? Some quotes indicate they may have been careerists who believed that conquests in Tibet would give them personal prestige and power, rather than Sichuan-ists who wanted to build, or to safeguard the province. But if so, why did the conquest of Tibetan lands become one of the premier achievements for a provincial official's résumé, especially given that the central government was apparently lukewarm about expansion? It is not really a failing of Wang's book that he has not answered these questions; on the contrary, part of the strength of the book is that has raised them.
