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The nomadic other: Ontological security and the Inner Asian steppe in historical East Asian international politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2015

Abstract

A growing literature in IR addresses the historical international politics of East Asia prior to Western influence. However, this literature has taken little note of the role of Eurasian steppe societies and empires in these dynamics. This article offers a corrective, showing that relations between China and the steppe played an important role in regional politics. I argue that Chinese elite conceptions of the steppe as other played an important role in maintaining China’s ontological security. Imperial Chinese elites pursued a deliberate strategy of ‘othering’ steppe societies, presenting them as China’s political-cultural opposite. Doing so both provided a source of stable identity to China and justified their exclusion from the Chinese ‘world order’. Empirically, I proceed in three sections. First, I consider Chinese identity building, framed in terms of ontological security, both under the founding Qin and Han dynasties, and under the later Ming dynasty. Second, I address recent historiography of the steppe, showing Chinese conceptions of it were inaccurate. Third, I address the long history of hybridity between the two regions.

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Articles
Copyright
© 2015 British International Studies Association 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Simon Pratt, Christopher David LaRoche, Lincoln Rathnam, three extremely helpful reviewers, and the editors of the RIS for help in preparing this article.

References

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8 Rumelili, Bahar, Constructing Regional Community and Order in Europe and Southeast Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nor, as Abizadeh has recently argued, does identity building require an other. Abizadeh, Arash, ‘Does collective identity presuppose an other? On the alleged incoherence of global solidarity’, American Political Science Review, 99:1 (2005), pp. 4560CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 East Asia Before the West, p. 140.

15 Ibid., p. 10.

16 Kelly, ‘A “Confucian long peace” in pre-Western East Asia?’ The peace was nonetheless puzzling. In contrast, the same period in Europe (roughly the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries) included all the Reformationary wars, including the Thirty Years War, as well as the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. It was an extraordinarily bloody period. Alternately, the East Asian peace was more than ten times as long as, and considerably less violent than, the original ‘long peace’ – the Cold War.

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25 See, for example, Rumelili, Constructing Regional Community and Order in Europe and Southeast Asia.

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44 A Song dynasty historian took an analogous view of steppe peoples: ‘Let us not seek victory over them … They are like unto all manner of insects, reptiles, snakes, and lizards. How could we “receive them with courtesy and deference”?’ quoted in Wright, David C., ‘The northern frontier’, in David Andrew Graff and Robin D. S. Higham (eds), A Military History of China (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), p. 57Google Scholar.

45 This view was not limited to the steppe – it applied to multiple peripheral peoples. See Scott’s account of imperial relations with Southeast Asian hill tribes. Scott, James C., The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed. Tellingly, Scott references Barfield’s ‘shadow empires’ in framing his account. Barfield, Thomas J., ‘The shadow empires: Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier’, in Susan E. Alcock et al. (eds), Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. Only the steppe both received this rhetorical treatment and presented a military threat. Exceptionally, Ming and Qing authorities had difficulty dealing with pirate polities on the Chinese coast. Being relatively short-lived, institutionally adaptable, and opposed to Chinese rule, they had striking parallels with the steppe. MacKay, Joseph, ‘Pirate nations: Maritime pirates as escape societies in late Imperial China’, Social Science History, 37:4 (2013), pp. 551573Google Scholar.

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47 By this time, the states were states, in the sense of being centralised and bureaucratised. For example, civil service exams dated from the Han dynasty, and were formalised during the Tang dynasty (618–907). Woodside, Alexander, Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 12Google Scholar. East Asian state consolidation thus predates equivalent processes in Europe. It occurred in China, Korea, and Vietnam, and to a lesser extent in Japan, where a feudal warrior aristocracy persisted. Kang, , East Asia Before the West, pp. 2553Google Scholar.

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58 Chiefly Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian of China.

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79 Ibid., p. 306.

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84 Skrynnikova, Tatyana D., ‘Relations of domination and submission: Political practice in the Mongol Empire of Chinggis Khan’, in David Sneath (ed.), Imperial Statecraft: Political Forms and Techniques of Governance in Inner Asia, Sixth-Twentieth Centuries (Bellingham, WA: East Asian Studies Press, 2006), p. 86Google Scholar.

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