In Defense of Sinicization:

A Rebuttal of Evelyn Rawski's

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"Reenvisioning the Qing"
PING-TI HO

I N HER RECENT PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, "Reenvisioning the Qing," Professor Evelyn

Sakakida Rawski attacks the "sinicization" theme originally presented as one of the
five major aspects of my 1967 article, "The Significance of the Ch'ing Period in
Chinese History" (Ho 1967). In her essay—frankly admitted to have been based
exclusively on "recent secondary literature"—she states that "a notable outcome of
the new scholarship is the rejection of the sinicization thesis and its Han-centered
orientation in favor of an empire-building model that emphasizes the importance of
the Chinese empire's cultural links with the non-Han peoples of Inner Asia" (Rawski
1996, 827). It ought to be pointed out at the outset that my 1967 paper was not
delivered, as she mistakenly presumed, from the podium of the president of the
Association for Asian Studies; for I did not receive this honor until 1975—76, when,
after having shifted my research interest so far away from the Ming-Ch'ing period, I
addressed the Association with a paper entitled "The Chinese Civilization: A Search
for the Roots of its Longevity." The 1967 paper was an AAS panel presentation, not
a presidential address.1

My Original Multidimensional Thesis

In order to provide readers with the minimum background necessary for judging
my reply, I will list briefly the five salient aspects of the Ch'ing heritage presented in
that paper, which were largely based on my original research and perspective.
1. The Manchu rulers between 1600 and 1800 made a unique contribution to the
creation of the largest consolidated and administratively viable multiethnic empire
in China's long history.
2. The unprecedented population growth during that empire-building period was
itself the outcome of more than one century of peace, prosperity, and a series of

Ping-ti Ho is James Westfall Thompson Professor of History, Emeritus, the University

of Chicago.
'This panel of four papers on Ch'ing history was organized and chaired by the late Mary
Wright, who allowed my paper the "maximum" time of only thirty minutes, which accounts
for the brevity of the original article.
The Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (February 1998): 123-155.
© 1998 by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc.

123
124 PING-TI HO

fiscal reforms benefiting the poor, including the permanent abolition of

compulsory labor services, thus bringing an end to "two thousand years of
government oppression."2
3. The Manchu court carried out a policy of systematic sinicization, with the

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implementation of the Ch'eng-Chu Neo-Confucian orthodoxy as its core, which
not only facilitated the metamorphosis of the Manchu tribal-banner state into a
unitary centralized empire but also won the allegiance and dedication of the
Confucian elite who saved the "alien" dynasty by eventually wiping out the ethnic
Chinese Taiping rebels in fourteen years (1851-64) of life-and-death struggle.
4. The Ch'ing period was one in which traditional political, economic, and social
institutions attained greater maturity and in which the economy and society
achieved a greater degree of interregional integration.
5. In the fields of material culture, fine arts, printing, and library resources, the Ch'ing
period was one of leisurely fulfillment and enrichment.
Even the most basic factors accounting for the decline and fall of the Ch'ing were
somewhat different from those that brought down the earlier dynasties. Internally,
the unforeseen population explosion created a new set of social and economic problems
with which the existing fund of technological knowledge failed to cope. Externally,
Ch'ing China was being drawn into a maelstrom of modern world politics by the
West, whose culture was in many ways equal to hers and in some crucial ways superior
to hers. It was the convergence and interplay of these unprecedented crises that finally
brought about the downfall of an otherwise rather remarkable dynasty.
In spite of the constraints under which this paper was prepared, I decided to make
it broad-gauged, multidimensional, and sweeping, but intellectually responsible down
to even many a necessarily tacit comparison between the Ch'ing and earlier dynasties.
For only by planning my paper in this way could I hope to make it fulfill the Oxford
English Dictionary's definition of my key title word "significance," in the sense of "full
of meaning or import." And only by planning my paper in this way could I clearly
suggest what I meant by the accompanying diachronic phrase "in Chinese history."
Professor Rawski's "Reenvisioning the Qing: The Significance of the Qing in
Chinese History" is basically a monothematic bibliographical survey, which is
generically quite different from my macrohistorical perspective. I might have ignored
it but for the following reasons. Since a complex macrohistorical perspective can be
legitimately challenged only by a comparable perspective, what is one to make of a
critique that proceeds reductively from a monothematic bibliographical survey? What
is one to make of a bibliographical survey that does not always truthfully represent
the more balanced views of the authors it relies on? And what is one to make of major
distortions of my argument?

A False Dichotomy: Rawski's Distortion

of My Thesis

Professor Rawski tells us that she has chosen as her point of departure my
assessment of the Ch'ing period in Chinese history. As a matter of fact, she considers
only the third of my five basic points, manages to badly obscure its meaning, and—

2
This remark was originally by Yii Cheng-hsieh (1775-1840) and is cited in Ho 1959,
211.
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 125

most egregiously—fails to acknowledge the clear recognition presented in the first of

my five points: the early Manchu emperors in fact contributed profoundly to the
growth of China as a consolidated, multiethnic empire. Although the term
"multiethnic" was hardly in wide use thirty years ago, my article plainly referred to

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the achievement of the Manchus in the creation of an empire consisting of Manchus,
Chinese, Mongols, Zunghars, Tibetans, and various aboriginal groups in the
mountainous southwestern provinces.
Governing China meant first and foremost developing the capacities to rule
China's many hundreds of million of people, whose numbers increased dramatically
between 1650 and 1800. Manchu success at this most challenging task was achieved
in large measure by drawing upon a Chinese tradition of policies and institutions.
Their relations with other non-Han peoples may not fit post-T'ang conventional
notions of Chinese rule, but this hardly means that the core of their strategy of rule
was not predicated on Chinese political principles. Recent research on Inner Asian
dimensions of Ch'ing rule complements what we already have learned about Ch'ing
rule within China's more densely settled and outlying territories. Rawski constructs
a false dichotomy between sinicization and Manchu relations with non-Han peoples
of Inner Asia. There is no logical reason to assume that what we have recently learned
about Manchu activities means that what we already knew about their rule within
China proper and Inner Asia is therefore mistaken.
To reduce the potential for misunderstanding, I should state explicitly that
Chinese civilization certainly changes over time, in part because of internal
developments and in part because contacts with the very peoples who become sinicized
also expand the content of what it can mean to be Chinese. While there are certain
elements of Chinese thinking and behavior that have an extremely long historical
pedigree, Chinese culture takes on distinctive characteristics in different historical
periods as the culture is itself transformed. I must also make clear that the growth of
Manchu identification with Chinese norms of behavior and patterns of thought need
not exclude other forms of identity. To pose such binary choices, as I think Rawski
has done, distorts what individuals experience. Once again, Rawski's argument posits
a false dichotomy between being Manchu and becoming Chinese.
Rawski rejects sinicization without putting in its place an explanation for what
the Manchus did and said they were doing in ruling most of China. This failure
severely limits her ability to explain how the Manchus were able to cope effectively
with the largest population, most persistent political tradition, and most enduring
civilization in world history. More fundamentally, her dismissal of the sinicization
thesis makes it difficult, if not impossible, to locate the Ch'ing dynasty within the
far longer span of Chinese history. Sinicization is a long, complex, and unending
process. We cannot appreciate its force without going back to early Chinese history
and prehistory.

"Rejection of the Sinicization Thesis": Rawski

vs. International Scholarship

Prior to assessing the bibliographical survey contained in Rawski's address, I

should do justice to its one useful aspect for beginners of Ch'ing history, namely, its
listing of some Ch'ing palace archives and Manchu-language sources that have become
available during the past twenty-five years. Of these, the most important is the chiin-
126 PING-TI HO

chi-ch'u (Grand Council) archive, which enabled Beatrice S. Bartlett to produce

Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council of Mid- Ch'ing China, 1723-1820 (Bartlett
1991), the best contribution to Ch'ing institutional history in any language. Although
Bartlett in an earlier article talked about the quantity and "importance" of the Grand

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Council archive in Manchu, I judge from the archival category-names listed in her
article that they are wide-ranging but probably of rather minor importance as
compared to the entire series in Chinese (Bartlett 1985). Similarly, other types of
increasingly available Manchu-language sources are not quite of the nature and quality
that Rawski would have us believe (Rawski 1996, 835; Crossley and Rawski 1993).
The judgment of the late Joseph Fletcher, who formed a Manchu class of seven
students at Harvard in the fall of 1981, merits our attention:

Despite a certain amount of Manchu literary production in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, including enormous translation projects and some belles-lettres,
efforts to create a Manchu literary culture of stature had ended in failure. Manchu
continued to be used in government documents in an increasingly formalistic and
lifeless way until the twentieth century, but a Manchu education was of limited use.
(Fletcher 1978, 44)

After acknowledging the useful portion of Rawski's bibliographical survey,

we must now turn to its main theme: the multiethnic orientation of the Ch'ing
empire, which she has traced back to the Khitan Liao (916—1125) dynasty of conquest.
She generalizes thus:

Although the Liao, Jin, Xixia, and Yuan regimes employed Han Chinese in
government service, each resisted sinicization. All four governments created their
own scripts.
(Rawski 1996, 837)

Like the bulk of her essay, this passage is so nebulous and evasive as to call for
careful scrutiny. If I understand it correctly, its "logic" runs like this: (1) she hopes
that a mere mention of employing Han Chinese in government service would be a
sufficient concession to offset the weighty opinion of international scholarship that all
these four conquest regimes eventually became fairly highly or very highly sinicized;
(2) hence, the noncommittal (in terms of outcome) statement "each resisted
sinicization" could hopefully lead the unwary into believing that such nativist
resistance was a success; (3) the "proof of their success in resisting sinicization was
their effort to create their own national scripts from scratch. When a passage of
scholarly prose invites so many discrepant meanings, it becomes at best vague or
confusing and perhaps at worst meaningless. Moreover, Rawaski ignores the fact that
after a brief period of native resistance, the newly created scripts inevitably accelerated
the absorption of Chinese culture, literature, and institutions, leading to the ultimate
obsolescence of the scripts and any related claims for the development of indigenous
culture.
The reasons for the failure of Jurchen script to create an adequate Jurchen literary
culture are aptly analyzed by a specialist:

The primary impediment to the formal development of Jurchen ethnic literature was
the literature of the Jurchen's nearest neighbor, the Han Chinese. Even before the
arrival of the Jurchen, the mature, formal, and eloquent structure of Chinese literature
had infatuated the Po-hai, Khitan, and other ethnic groups. These peoples abandoned
their own languages and literary forms and adopted the Chinese language to articulate
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 127

their own passions and thoughts. . . . The Jurchen were certainly no exception in this
respect. By 1150 Han Chinese literary forms had already spread widely through the
ranks of the Jurchen ruling house and nobility, relegating ethnic forms of literature
to the narrow realm of the older generation and the lower classes. But just as ethnic
Jurchen literature was edging toward extinction in the 1160s, it gained new life

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under Chin Shih-tsung's (r. 1161—89) revitalization of Jurchen culture. During this
native revival, free lyric compositions, original in structure and form, began to spread.
But even advocacy of literature in native Jurchen form could not extirpate the Han
Chinese literature that had already taken root among the Jurchen nobility. True
Jurchen literature could only run a temporary parallel course with Han Chinese
writing until, in the end, it was again engulfed by it.
(Jin 1995, 217; for Khitan script and education, Ch'en Shu 1987, 140-58;
for Hsi-Hsia [Tanguts], Chin 1958, 108-26)

There is no need to cite extensively from the sizable multilingual literature

on earlier dynasties of conquest to show the invalidity of Rawski's basic view. Suffice
it here just to examine Rawski's most specific bibliographical statement: "The
revisions of Qing history described above are consonant with the recent scholarship
on earlier conquest states (Franke and Twitchett 1994)" (Rawski 1996, 836). Let us
read and reflect on what Herbert Franke, with his incomparable fund of knowledge
on China's dynasties of conquest, has to say about the significance of the Jurchen Chin
dynasty in Chinese history:

There existed no "China" as a whole in the twelfth and thirteen centuries; rather,
there was Chinese civilization that took on very different shapes in the north and in
the south. . . . Traditionalism certainly contributed much to the emergence of a
feeling of a separate northern identity. Once the Jurchen had given up trying to
conquer the south, a sense of growing stability must have pervaded the intellectual
elite, and it is strange that there were no widespread defections to the south, to the
national Chinese state of Sung. It seems that the Chin state and its ruling elite
developed a strong sense of their own legitimacy. They considered themselves to be
the guardians of the "real" Chinese traditions of the T'ang and Northern Sung. The
surprising endurance of the Chin against overwhelming odds after 1206, the survival
of a state sandwiched between the revanchist Sung and the invincible Mongols, can
perhaps be partly explained by the increased feeling of legitimacy that must have
underlain the loyalty of officials and soldiers, many of whom preferred death to
surrender.
The Chin confirmed their own inclusion in the legitimate succession of Chinese
dynasties in 1203 when the government proclaimed that henceforth the element earth
would be assigned to the Chin dynasty, succeeding Sung whose element had been
fire. This might appear to the modern mind as a senseless speculation, but to every
Chinese in the Middle Ages it meant much more: At the latest in 1203 the Jurchen
State of Chin had, in its own eyes, become fully Chinese and a legitimate link in the
chain of successive dynasties on the highest, if rarefied, level of cosmological
speculation. This had taken less than a century to accomplish. But in that century
the Chin had traveled the whole way from a rustic tribal society to a state that in
many respects could be considered a fully legitimate element in the Chinese world
order. Modern historians, too, might well consider Chin as more than just a barbarian
interlude in Chinese history. There can be little doubt that the achievement of Chin,
and the conviction of Chin intellectuals that they represented the true Chinese values,
contributed much to the cultural vitality that enabled them to perpetuate Chinese
ways of life under the crushing onslaught of the Mongols.
(Franke 1994, 319-20)
128 PING-TI HO

Instead of being "consonant with the recent scholarship on earlier conquest states"
best exemplified by Herbert Franke, Rawski's generalization is actually diametrically
opposed to Franke's. In fact, the sinicization of all earlier alien conquest states has
been so generally taken for granted by the scholarly world that Jacques Gernet in his

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A History of Chinese Civilization, the most comprehensive single-volume treatise on
Chinese history widely accepted in the Western world, discusses the Liao, Hsi-Hsia,
and the Jurchen Chin under the chapter title of "the Sinicized Empires" (Gernet
1982). To contradict international scholarship without being able to offer one's own
superior erudition is astounding enough. But it is beyond belief that Rawski should
have failed completely to anticipate that one needs only to make a simple
bibliographical check to unveil her intellectual disingenuousness.

Sinicization: Phases, Facets, and Perennial

Significance

The proto-Sinids made their debut in the Loess Highlands of North China about
9000 years ago. A millennium later neolithic Yang-shao villages began to appear in
large numbers on loess terraces along numerous tributaries and small streams both
north and south of the Wei River. The loess is porous, textually homogeneous, rich
in minerals, and "self-fertilizing" (Pumpelley 1908, I: 7). It thus enabled Yang-shao
farmers to practice sedentary millet farming right from the very beginning, in contrast
to the slash-and-burn type of shifting agriculture that characterized the rest of the
neolithic world. Consequently, from thousands of Yang-shao cultural sites discovered
since 1949, it would appear that the density of Yang-shao settlements might be many
times higher than those of any other region in the entire neolithic period, at least up
to the beginnings of irrigation in lower Mesopotamia. It would also appear that from
Yang-shao times onwards the impact of the early Sinids upon the surrounding peoples
was already partially one of extent and numbers.
The typical Yang-shao settlements consisted of a centrally located large assembly
hall, residential quarters, pottery kilns, and a cemetery noted for its neatly planned
graves. The constant "communion" between the living and the dead gave rise to an
ancestral cult which by the second millennium B.C. had become the most highly
developed in the annals of men. This in turn stimulated a parallel institutional
development, which finally resulted in the establishment of an extensive network of
the tsung-fa (major-lineage-dominated) patrilineal kinship system shortly after the
Chou conquest of the Shang in 1027 B.C.
The one focal value revealed in Chou literature and bronze inscriptions is the
overriding concern of the Chou people for biological and social perpetuation. This is
indeed to be expected of a people whose religious core was a most sophisticated
ancestor worship. What is not so easily explained is that Chou literature also reveals
a more ancient inclination of the Sinitic people to extend such strong concern for
perpetuation from "self to "others." Yii, the founder of the so-called Hsia dynasty
who lived a full millennium before the inception of the Chou, searched out and
ennobled the descendants of various ancient ruling houses, including one of the non-
Sinitic Eastern I (barbarian), in order to perpetuate their lines of descent and to ensure
the continuance of their ancestral sacrificial rites.
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 129

As to the origin of this magnanimous spirit that was to guide the ancient Sinitic
people in their intra- and interethnic relationships, we can at best only speculate
because archaeological data are here mute. It is my guess that, since the loessic soil
made it possible for large numbers of Yang-shao farmers to live closely together along

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numerous small streams, they had learned instinctively and empirically that the only
way to avoid unnecessary violence and bloodshed was to respect each other's
territoriality (as do primates and large carnivorous animals) and rights to survival.
Psychically, therefore, the circle demarcating "us" and "them" was constantly being
enlarged in favor of the former, once the benefits of peaceful coexistence were better
understood (Ho 1996). Over time, notions and norms that guided dealings among
various feudal states and ethnic groups crystallized into what may be regarded as a
unique Sinitic ethical precept, best expressed in Confucius' Analects: "Restore states
that have been annexed and revive lines that have become extinct (hsing-mieh-kuo, chi-
chueb-shih)" (Lau 1992, 201).
While this ethical precept could at best only mitigate the unceasing processes of
annexing small and weak states by the large and powerful, it does help to explain
how and why the ancient Sinitic world had kept on expanding. Mencius explains it
best:

Shun [the legendary sage king before Yu] was originally an Eastern barbarian; King
Wen [of Chou] was originally a Western barbarian. . . . their native places were a
thousand // apart, and there were a thousand years between them. Buc when they got
their wish, and carried their principles into practice throughout the Middle
Kingdom, it was like uniting the two halves of a seal.
(Legge I and II: 316—17, with minor alteration in phrasing)

What Mencius really meant to say is that the original "Sinitic" group was
relatively small and that any subsequent leaders of non-Sinitic tribes or states who
adopted the original Sinitic way of life and contributed to its enrichment were
retrospectively to be regarded as sage-kings of the progressively enlarging Sinitic
world. This saying of Mencius suggests that long before the rise of Chou the
fundamental criterion for defining membership in the Sinitic world was the awareness
of a common cultural heritage rather than rigid racial or ethnic identity (Ho 1975,
344). It is also prophetic because throughout the following millennia this deeply
ingrained culture-orientation in interethnic relationships has largely accounted for the
fact that China has become a state with fifty-six officially defined "nationalities."
From the standpoint of sinicization, China's long imperial age (221 B.C.-A.D.
1911) may be conveniently demarcated by the end of the Turk-dominated Five
Dynasties and the inception of the Sung in 959-960. Prior to this watershed, the
polyethnic empires of Han (206 B.C-A.D. 220) and T'ang (618-907) were the outcome
of Chinese expansion and conquest. After 960 it was the aliens who succeeded in
partial or total conquest of China. Although the alien dynasties of conquest—the
Khitan Liao, Jurchen Chin, Mongol Yuan, and Manchu Ch'ing—have attracted most
attention of Western students of Chinese history, the various pre-960 non-Chinese
groups may have played a far more important role in the growth of China as a
multiethnic state.
This may be partially shown statistically. The great steppe empire of the Huns
(Hsiung-nu), which reached the height of its power around 200 B.C., boasted of
between 300,000 and 400,000 horse-riding archers, not including a fairly large Wu-
huan population enslaved by them for farm and sundry work. (Wu-huan was one of
the Tung-hu, literally the "Eastern Barbarian," groups who belonged to the proto-
130 PING-TI HO

Mongolic linguistic family.) This would mean a total Hun population of between 1.5
and 2 million. This figure takes on extra meaning when we realize that the then
population of Han China probably did not amount to one-third of the peak former
Han population of nearly 60 million in A.D. 2. In other words, the ratio of Hsiung-

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nu to Chinese population is likely to have been 1:10. We find a similar situation in
the early seventh century: a total population of 2 million for the Turkish empire as
compared to a total of less than 3 million registered households during the reign of
T'ang T'ai-tsung (627^49); and the Turks were but one of a score or so of non-Chinese
ethnic groups within and without T'ang China.
What intrigues me the most is the situation in the fourth century, certainly the
most chaotic in Chinese history. The incessant wars among various ethnic groups,
devastation of large tracts of farm land, forced mass migrations, and recurrent famines
and epidemics all exacted the heaviest toll on Chinese lives. On the other hand, all
the major non-Chinese ethnic groups were of considerable size. There were well over
100,000 sinicized Huns who had been allowed to live along and within the Great
Wall and who were the first to revolt against the Chin Dynasty and to establish a
regional regime. The western part of the Chin empire, from Kansu, Kokonor,
southwards to Szechwan and Yunnan, was teeming with Ti farmers and Ch'iang
herdsmen, both of Tibetan stock. The one non-Chinese ethnic group destined to unify
North China was the Hsien-pei, a major Tung-hu group. After groups of Northern
Huns fled westwards to the Urals and beyond in A.D. 91, the Hsien-pei conglomerate
had the numerical and military strength to incorporate some 500,000 or 600,000
Huns stranded on the steppe and also to absorb large numbers of their ethnic kin,
the Wu-huan people previously subjugated by the Huns (Lin 1983, 152—53; Ma
1962a, 27). In A.D. 258, when the To-pa Hsien-pei subnation began to become
powerful, it boasted of "more than two hundred thousand horse-riding archers." In
308 the whole Hsien-pei conglomerate had more than 400,000 archers, which means
an aggregate population of 2 million [Wei Shu, chap. I, passim]. It is my conjecture
that during this century of serious decimation of the Chinese population and of intense
intermingling of peoples in North China, the ratio of major non-Chinese ethnic groups
to the Northern Chinese might have been as high as one to five.
After the To-pa Hsien-pei founded the Northern Wei dynasty in 386 and
reunified all North China thirty years later, peace in general prevailed. The various
non-Chinese ethnic groups, which had been uprooted from tribal living within and
without the Chin empire since the beginning of the fourth century, were now scattered
far and wide and mingled daily with the Chinese population. The continual
deportation cumulatively involving a million Chinese peasants and craftsmen to the
Northern Wei metropolitan area of Northern Shansi took place simultaneously with
efforts to relocate large numbers of Hsien-pei soldiers for settled village farming.
Forces of acculturation went on apace throughout the empire, while the cream of the
Hsien-pei tribal army was stationed in the six northern headquarters, keeping constant
vigilance against the fierce marauding Jou-jan nomads.
Contrary to the necessarily gradual process of acculturation at the bottom of the
social scale, the ethnic aristocracy was susceptible to Chinese cultural influence rather
early. A classic example is Chin Mi-ti (d. 86 B.C.), a captured heir-apparent to a
Hsiung-nu Shan-yii (great khan), whose political and personal conduct was so
profoundly influenced by Confucian moral precepts that he won contemporary
recognition as a paragon of virtue; his descendants chose to die as Han loyalists rather
than to serve the usurper Wang Mang [Han-shu, ch. 68]. Since such non-Chinese
ethnic groups as the Huns, the Ti, and Ch'iang had been permitted to continue their
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 131

tribal mode of living inside China since the first century B.C., it is to be expected that
in the course of time their great and lesser chiefs knew the Han Chinese language.
But I am surprised to learn that practically all of the leaders of various major non-
Chinese ethnic groups of the early fourth-century were not only well-versed in Chinese

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classics and history, but also took Chin Mi-ti as their role model. In spite of their
inevitable involvement in the scramble for power which led to the rise and fall of a
number of non-Chinese dominated regional states, their full acceptance of Confucian
morals, norms, and of the Chinese imperial system as the only political orthodoxy
indicates a considerably higher degree of sinicization than is usually expected of the
"barbarians" [Chin-shu, ch. 101—5, passim].
Although the dynasty-founding To-pa group was less sinicized than the two other
Hsien-pei subnations, they also had to follow the logic of the time: to shift a largely
nomadic economy to the Chinese type of sedentary agriculture and to adopt by
increasing measure the Chinese imperial system and bureaucracy for better
management of the majority Chinese subjects. Besides, culturally and institutionally
sinicization would serve as a common denominator with which to homogenize the
polyethnic subject population. For all these reasons, the Hsiao-wen emperor from 494
onwards embarked upon a policy of systematic sinicization, which consisted of such
measures as the moving of the capital from northern Shansi to Loyang, which was the
heart of the agricultural zone, the prohibition of Hsien-pei language, the use of
Chinese as the lingua franca, the change of polysyllabic Hsien-pei surnames into
monosyllabic Chinese ones, the abandonment of Hsien-pei costumes for Chinese-style
attires, and the full-scale adoption of Chinese rituals and legal code. By forcing the
Hsien-pei aristocracy to take up permanent residence in the new metropolitan Loyang
area and by encouraging their intermarriage with Chinese noble houses, he succeeded
in forging a close bond between the biethnic ruling class. All these were parts of long-
range planning for a military conquest of the southern Chinese dynasty—the only
way to gain legitimacy to supreme rulership of the entire China world.
Emperor Hsiao-wen did not live to see the realization of his ultimate goal. On
the contrary, full-scale sinicization in the Loyang area made the Northern Wei court,
aristocracy, and officialdom increasingly extravagant and effete. The subsequent
negligence and degradation of the Hsien-pei rank and file at the six northern garrison
headquarters precipitated a strong nativist revolt that lasted ten years and finally
brought down the Northern Wei dynasty in 534. North China was politically divided
into an eastern and a western state until the former was annexed by the latter in 577.
Initially, both the eastern and western states had to vie with each other in
attracting the broken-up units of the northern garrison forces. While the east remained
strongly nativist and prejudiced against the majority Chinese population, the west
carried out a policy of appeasing the nativist sentiments of the traditional Hsien-pei
elements, on the one hand, and of generating a sense of Hsien-pei-Chinese solidarity,
on the other. At the bottom, the "privilege" of military service was extended to
propertied Chinese farmers, the backbone of the newly created Chinese fu-ping army,
so as to broaden the social and ethnic base of armed forces. At the top, the policy of
power-sharing and intermarriage between the Hsien-pei and Chinese aristocracy was
so successful that it was precisely this so-called Kuan-Lung (Shensi-Kansu) bloc that
finally reunified all China and founded the Sui-T'ang multiethnic empires.
The greatest political and military genius produced by this northwestern biethnic
bloc was Li Shih-min (597-649), the second ruler but the real founder of the T'ang
dynasty. Since his grandmother and mother were Hsien-pei, he was genetically 75
percent Hsien-pei, though legitimately Chinese. It was from this multiethnic cultural
132 PING-TI HO

milieu that he acquired a profound understanding of the traits and customs of the
most powerful of the steppe peoples, the Turks under the Great Khan Hsieh-li. From
various historical sources it can now be ascertained that as early as 617-18 he had
already entered a sworn brotherhood with Tu-li, the second-ranking great khan and

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nephew and adopted son of Hsieh-li. I suspect he was able to speak Turkish because
in the fall of 624 when Hsieh-li and his troops reached the north bank of the Wei
River near the capital city of Ch'ang-an, he determinedly left his forces behind and
rode alone without any escort to confront Hsien-li from south of the river, reproaching
the latter for failure to observe the spirit of a previous oath. Then he dispatched
someone to remind Tu-li not to forget the bond of "sworn brotherhood {hsiang-huo-
meng)."* This and many later accounts show that T'ang T'ai-Tsung was truly unique
because the Turks and various steppe peoples genuinely believed that he was "one of
them."
The most eloquent testimonial to the polyglot and multiethnic character of the
T'ang empire was the assumption by T'ang T'ai-tsung of a second and entirely novel
imperial title of "Heavenly Khan," upon the requests of vanquished Turkish khans
and rulers of various other steppe tribal states and ethnic groups in the year 630,
shortly after he had crushed the Eastern Turkish empire. An event of no less
significance was the acceptance by T'ang T'ai-tsung in the early spring of 647, after
a great deal of feasting and merry-making, of a plea jointly made by all attending
tribal chieftains that a road be opened up between the northerly Uighurs and the
southerly Turks, and be named the "Road to facilitate [various vassal peoples of the
steppe] to make obeisance to their 'Heavenly Khan (Ts'an t'ien-k'o-han tao)'" [Tzu-
chih-t'ung-chien, T'ang Chi, 198, 114]. From abundant T'ang records, there can be
little doubt that this and many similar requests and gestures from the steppe peoples
were spontaneous and sincere.
We can catch glimpses of the grandeur of the T'ang multiethnic empire from the
top of the mausoleum of Emperor Kao-tsung (650-83) and Empress Wu (684-704):
halfway down the hill there stand at attention two symmetrically arranged groups of
stone statues, each representing the head or envoy of one of the sixty-four vassal states
that stretch 3,000 miles from Korea across the Eurasian steppe to the state of Tokhara,
southeast of the Aral Sea. The rare sense of mutual belonging between T'ang T'ai-
tsung and his multiethnic vassals and ministers can be detected from the ground plan
of his own mausoleum, which was made in 636, thirteen years before his death: the
mausoleum to be guarded in the north by statues representing fourteen of his loyal
Turkish and other ethnic vassals and appended in the south by a very large cemetery
consisting of tombs of some members of the imperial lineage, meritorious Chinese,
and non-Chinese officials and generals.
For a proper historical perspective, one should search deeper into the significance
of the system of "Heavenly Khan." Rawski, relying entirely on Pamela Crossley,
contends that the origin of the "Khan of Khans" must be sought in Chinggis Khan
and that "the 'Khan of Khans' was not a Chinese emperor" (Rawski 1996, 835). As
is shown above, the archetypal Khan of Khans was the T'ang emperor T'ai-tsung's
"Heavenly Khanate." E. G. Pulleyblank explains it best: "It established a separate
basis of legitimacy for his rule beyond the Great Wall, with its roots in nomad
conditions, and was not simply an extension of universalist claims by a Chinese Son

3
This is most clear in the narrative recorded in T'ung Tien, 197, 1069; Ch'en Yin- k'o
1952, suggests the year in which the sworn brotherhood formality took place in accordance
with Turkish customs.
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 133

of Heaven, Moreover, it had as its corollary the assumption, quite contrary to Chinese
traditional attitudes, of the equality of barbarian and Chinese as subjects. This was a
point of view consciously maintained and expressed by T'ai-tsung" (Pulleyblank 1976,
38). Needless to say, T'ang T'ai-tsung's legitimacy as the Chinese emperor was never

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questioned, while later "Khan of Khans" such as Khubilai or Ch'ien-lung, being
"resident alien" in China, had to devise various political, institutional, cultural, and
ideological means to legitimize their rulership in China. On the other hand, while
later Tibetan Lamaist Buddhism could make Khubilai or Ch'ien-lung "God" incarnate
(Franke 1978, esp. 77-79), T'ang T'ai-tsung's Heavenly Khanate was a secular
institution, though not devoid of cosmological meaning.
During the entire T'ang period there were altogether 369 "prime ministers" from
98 surname groups. Those of non-Chinese ethnic origins account for 9 percent of the
total but constitute 17.4 percent of the aggregate of surnames—a record unsurpassed
by any "Chinese" dynasty. No less unique in Chinese history is the fact that the
various steppe ethnic groups, such as the Turks, Sogdians, and other Central Asians;
the Khitans, Hsi, Koreans; and toward late T'ang the Sha-t'o Turks, consistently
dominated the T'ang polyethnic army.
Other statistics, facts, and facets relevant to the study of sinicization up to and
including T'ang times are either illuminating or self-explanatory..
The author of the phonetic dictionary Ch'ieh-yiin, Lu Fa-yen, who completed this
landmark work late in the sixth century, was a member of an aristocratic Hsien-pei
family. China's greatest romantic poet, Li Po (? 705-62), was brought to Szechwan
in his early boyhood by his Central Asian merchant father. More revealingly, the three
lifelong friends and leading poets of late T'ang were all of non-Chinese ethnic origins:
Po Chii-i (772-846), Yuan Chen (779-831), and Liu Yii-hsi (772-842) were
respectively of Central Asian, Hsien-pei, and Hun (Hsiung-nu) descent. During Sui
and early T'ang, the great architect Yii-wen K'ai was of mixed Hsiung-nu and Hsien-
pei descent. His contemporary, the architect Ho Ch'ou, who was commissioned to do
the initial planning for the metropolitan Ch'ang-an (Ta-hsing in Sui times) area, was
the grandson of a Sogdian merchant from Central Asia. Mi Fu (1051—1107), a great
calligrapher and father of the splash-ink school of landscape painting, is very likely
to have been of Sogdian descent too (Yao 1962, passim).
Not to be completely overshadowed by the north, the south that had remained
Chinese throughout the pre-Tang centuries also produced its own share of preeminent
persons. The aboriginal Hsi people of modern Kiangsi area could take pride in
producing China's foremost pastoral poet T'ao Ch'ien (365—427), better known by
the name T'ao Yiian-ming. The aboriginal people of modern northern Hunan had the
honor of producing Ou-yang Hsiin (557-645), one of the most famous T'ang
calligraphers. If a dozen or so of these southern ethnic groups were pushed increasingly
into the hills and mountains of inland Yangtze as the Chinese immigrants advanced,
significant numbers of these aborigines had their compensation by becoming the
backbone of the southern army, especially because the carpet-bagging Chinese ruling
class was too effete and self-indulgent to lead the ranks. One of the stout ethnic
generals who saved the nascent Eastern Chin dynasty from military collapse was T'ao
K'an (259—334), great-grandfather of T'ao Yuan-ming.
A different kind of acculturation took place in the heavily garrisoned northern
border areas. It is beyond the scope of this essay to outline the evolution of the T'ang
army system. Suffice it here to point out that, with the impending collapse of the
Chinese peasant army (fu-ping) system and its inevitable replacement by a professional
polyglot mercenary army, soon after 700 there was the need to merge several normal
134 PING-TI HO

provinces into one large military region for better coordination and efficiency. In order
to check the power of the newly instituted military governors, the T'ang court finally
decided to fill such posts only with non-Chinese ethnics of humble social origin on
the theory that such men did not have political ambition. Consequently, in 742 An

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Lu-shan (d. 757), a Sogdian fluent in six steppe languages and dialects who was also
a courtier, emerged as the most powerful of the northern military governors, with
much of modern Hopei and southern Manchuria under his command. Although the
great rebellion (755-62) he launched ended in failure, the T'ang court could never
regain effective control of the northeastern provinces, which remained in the hands
of virtually "hereditary" warlords, mostly of non-Chinese origins. The extent to which
people of this northeastern region had undergone the process of "barbarization" may
be reflected in the fact that henceforth they identified themselves more with the
memories of An Lu-shan and his warlord successors than with later T'ang emperors
(Ch'en [1942]; 1997,1:179—200). Defying the national trend that literary attainments
procured more and more social prestige, people in this northeastern region still valued
such qualities as physical prowess and personal valor that make up good soldiery.
There was also another kind of "barbarization" that may be more correctly
described as "Central-Asianization" or "Western-Asianization." Throughout the
period 600—900 there was the continual introduction of Central and Western Asian
music; dance; magic; acrobatics; polo; Turkish and other ethnic costumes; various
exotic foods including grape wines, refined granular cane sugar, many types of
pancakes and pastry; and certain nomad ways of cooking meats. In early T'ang it was
fashionable to learn to speak and to act Turkish. The best-known case was the ill-
starred first heir apparent of T'ai-tsung, prince Ch'eng-ch'ien.
In the realm of interracial, interethnic, and interfaith dealings, the open-
mindedness and large-heartedness of the early T'ang Chinese are nowhere better shown
than in the words of T'ang T'ai-tsung, who, after receiving the Nestorian monk O
Lo Pen in 635, expressed his opinion on religions in general, including Nestorian
Christianity:

The Way has more than one name. There is more than one Sage. Doctrines vary in
different lands, their benefits reach all mankind. O Lo Pen, a man of great virtue
from Ta Ts'in (the Roman Empire) has brought his images and books from afar to
present them in our capital. After examining his doctrines we find them profound
and pacific. After studying his principles we find that they stress what is good and
important. His teaching is not diffuse and his reasoning is sound. This religion does
good to all men. Let it be preached freely in Our Empire.
(Fitzgerald 1935, 336)

Although the specific circumstances of their introduction were not clearly

recorded, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism were equally welcomed into T'ang China.
It may indeed be said that the spirit of tolerance and of cosmopolitanism exhibited
by T'ang Chinese is almost the exact opposite to "Han chauvinism," arrogance, and
xenophobia, which some students of Chinese history believe to have characterized the
so-called "sinicization."
Broadly speaking, whether at the spiritual and philosophical level or at the
mundane everyday level, the T'ang court and society at large seem to have well
understood the futility of forced assimilation and the wisdom of "laissez-faire" in the
sense of letting all ethnic and religious groups play themselves out in the same melting
pot. The "final" outcome would be something that may be called "sinicization."
Biologically and culturally, the almost complete absence of reference to such ethnic
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 135

terms as Hsiung-nu, Wu-huan, and Hsien-pei, seems to indicate that they had long
become "sinicized" or absorbed into the enlarged Chinese nation. Religiously and
philosophically, a similar phenomenon is found in the case of Buddhism. Its pre-T'ang
phase is nowhere more aptly described than by the title of Eric Ziircher's standard

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treatise, The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early
Medieval China (1959). As a result of centuries of adaptation to the Chinese milieu,
Indian Buddhism finally became thoroughly "sinicized" in T'ang times, as may be
evidenced by the maturation of such typically "Chinese" schools of Buddhism as the
T'ien-t'ai, the Hua-yen, the Pure Land, and especially the Ch'an (Zen).
Before concluding the section on the T'ang, I would like to examine some
available figures. Between T'ang T'ai-tsung's accession in 617 and the outbreak of the
An Lu-shan rebellion in 755, a span of 138 years, the aggregate number of such steppe
people as the Turks and the nineteen Turkish T'ieh-le tribes, the Koreans, the T'u-
fan Tibetans, the Tang-hsiang Tibetans (the Tanguts), and Central and Western
Asians who were captured by the T'ang army or voluntarily submitted to the T'ang
and were hence settled within China amounted to at least 1.7 million (Fu 1992, 257).
This total does not, of course, include those alien ethnics who chose to reside in China
through normal channels, nor does it include those alien ethnics who took up
permanent residence in China in the late eighth and ninth centuries. Thousands of
Uighurs served in the T'ang army as mercenaries. After having helped the T'ang court
to crush the An Lu-shan rebellion, many Uighurs became merchants and usurers. The
number of Uighurs who eventually settled in Ch'ang-an and other cities of China is
impossible to estimate. There were Persians in Ch'ang-an and Yang-chou by the
thousands. A very large Arab population resided in Kuang-chou (Canton) in late
T'ang. C. P. Fitzgerald summarizes thus: "the Arab and other foreign communities
resident in the port were very large. . . . Abu Zaid, an Arab traveler who was in China
towards the end of the T'ang period, relates that when Canton was taken by storm
by the rebel Huang Tsao in A.D. 879, 120,000 foreigners, Arabs, Jews, Zoroastrians
and Christians, were massacred, as well as native population of the city" (Fitzgerald
1935, 334). The kind of true metropolitanism that characterized the life, outlook,
and attitude of the T'ang Chinese is almost unique in world history, paralleled perhaps
only by the Roman Empire from Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 117—80).
In regard to early T'ang's basic principle in handling interethnic affairs, certain
Western scholars hold views more critical than what has been presented in this section.
Let us analyze what is the actual meaning of the much-quoted Turkish inscription of
Kocho-Tsaidam, which H. J. Wechsler thinks "eloquently relates the fate suffered by
the conquered Turks."
The sons of the Turkish nobles became slaves to the Chinese people, and their
innocent daughters were reduced to serfdom. The nobles, discarding their Turkish
titles, accepted those of China, and made submission to the Chinese Qaghan, devoting
their labour and their strength for fifty years. For him, both toward the rising sun
and westward to the Iron Gates, they launched their expeditions. But to the Chinese
Qaghan they surrendered their empire and their institutions.
(Cited and commented on in Wechsler 1979, 223)

I have read six other Turkish inscriptions available in Chinese translation (Lin
1988, 241—86), but the passage quoted above should enable us to get at the truth.
When we realize that this inscription represents basically the nomad's nostalgia about
the "freedom" of his mode of life on the vast expanse of the Eurasian steppe with the
blessing of the lord of the boundless blue sky (Tengri), then such expressions as "slaves"
136 PING-TI HO

and "serfdom" are merely metaphorical. What the inscription says about "the nobles,
discarding their Turkish titles," accepting "those of China" is true because these
Turkish nobles did receive at least comparable ranks and ample material rewards from
the "Heavenly Khan."

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What is more important is the fact that T'ang T'ai-tsung's success in playing the
game of divide and rule was primarily due to great-khan Hsieh-li's cruelty and tyranny
to his own people and also accidentally to unusually severe snowstorms that hit the
steppe in the winter of 629-30. To do justice to T'ang T'ai-tsung, he prevailed over
conservative opinion and decided to resettle some one hundred thousand surrendered
Turks in the Ordos area without changing their tribal mode of living and
commissioned more than a hundred Turkish nobles as officers of higher and middle
ranks, several as generals. It was said that in the year 630 the total of Turkish officers
at the T'ang court almost matched that of similarly ranked Chinese civil officials.
Consequently, before long nearly ten thousand households of Turks came to reside in
the metropolitan Ch'ang-an area (Tzu-chih t'ung-chien, "T'ang-chi," ch. 193, p. 907).
In the spring of 630 when the great khan Hsieh-li was brought to T'ang T'ai—
tsung as a war captive, the emperor, after reprimanding him for his acts of atrocity,
not only spared his life but ordered that he be well taken care of by the director of
the bureau of imperial stud horses for the remainder of his life. In 658, the Turkish
general A-shih-na Ho-lu, having turned traitor in plotting the great Turkish rebellion,
was captured and offered to be executed at T'ang T'ai-tsung's mausoleum as a
redemption for his ingratitude; the emperor Kao-tsung was so moved that he spared
Ho-lu's life and later decided to bury him beside the grave of his original supreme
ruler, Hsieh-li great khan (Lin 1988, 115). These anecdotes and many others go far
to testify to the fact that early T'ang rulers treated alien subjects fairly, without
discrimination but with feeling. As pointed out above, such genuine feeling for alien
subjects found its expression even in the design of T'ang T'ai-tsung's mausoleum.
By way of summing up, the Han period initiated the policy of letting large non-
Chinese ethnic groups live along and within the northern and northwestern boundaries
of the empire, a policy which in the long run familiarized them with the Chinese
mode of sedentary rural life. It also brought about a surprisingly high degree of
sinicization, at least in terms of knowledge of Chinese classics and history and
acceptance of Confucian values and norms, of members of the ethnic aristocracy—a
factor which might have mitigated the cultural shock of the Chinese during the fourth
century A.D., when interethnic mingling and blending was intense and persistent
amidst severe decimation of Chinese population. This century and the following fifth
and sixth centuries A.D. seem to constitute a special chapter in which the blending
of various streams of ethnicity in the bodies of the "Chinese" of entire North China
may have reached an extent never equaled in subsequent Chinese history.
While the ratio of non-Chinese ethnics to the entire Chinese population at the
height of T'ang prosperity in the early eighth century may not be as high as that
during the fourth century, the acculturation between the various ethnic and religious
groups and the Chinese went on at an accelerated pace because of the peace in the
Eurasian steppe ensured by the system of Heavenly Khan and of the prevailing spirit
of cosmopolitanism in the nation at large. Instead of reasserting the superiority of the
Chinese political and cultural tradition as a force of forced assimilation of the aliens,
the T'ang Chinese watched with amusement the adoption of certain steppe ways and
customs by the playful aristocrats and commoners. They resigned themselves to the
fate of "barbarization" of the northeast after the An Lu-shan rebellion, but welcomed
with open arms the introduction of Central and Western Asian music, dance, food,
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 137

drinks, and games as well as ancient and rising religions. It is through T'ang China's
attitude toward religions we can best understand that it is the open-mindedness and
large-heartedness that account substantially for sinicization's innate strength.
If regarded as an orbit under direct and indirect Chinese cultural and institutional

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influence, the greater China world remained divided for more than half a millennium,
from the outbreak of the An Lu-shan rebellion in 755 to Khubilai Khan's conquest
of the Southern Sung in 1279 (Han 1986, II: Foreword). Viewed from the standpoint
of interethnic contest for power during the millennium since the inception of the
Northern Sung in 960, the Chinese were distinctly in a disadvantageous position:
witness the long-lasting Khitan Liao (916—1125) and the Jurchen Chin (1115—1234)
dynasties of conquest in the north, the enduring border state of the Tangut Hsia
(1038-1227) in the northwest, and especially the conquest of the whole of the China
world first by the Mongol Yuan (1260-1368) and then by the Manchu Ch'ing (1644-
1911).
As compared to the T'ang and pre-T'ang phase, the number of dominant ethnic
groups and of effective alien regimes and border states of the post-960 period seems
to have been reduced to a neater and simpler pattern more easily grasped by modern
students. But decades of specialized research by Chinese, Japanese, and Western
scholars have shown that the emergence of the above-mentioned border regimes and
vast empires actually represented the "crystalization" of long and complex processes,
including the break-up, absorption, regrouping, and merging of various ethnic groups
within their respective regions, groups whose roots go deep into Chinese history. For
example, among the peoples the Khitan Liao conquered and incorporated into its
conglomerate were the Hsi, the Shih-wei proto-Mongols, and especially the Po-hai
(Parhae), who formed a highly sinicized state in southeastern Manchuria (714-926).
The regime of Hsia, with its territorial base in Kansu, Ordos, and northern Shensi,
all within the boundaries of the T'ang and Sung empires, was a perfect outcome of
centuries of acculturation between the Tanguts, Chinese, Uighurs, and the T'u-fan
Tibetans; its rulers had been bestowed the T'ang imperial surname of Li and also the
Sung imperial surname of Chao. As to the Khitans themselves, they began to get
involved in the greater China wotld from the fourth century onwards; and, while
harassing the northeastern border of early T'ang, they also served loyally and ably in
the T'ang army. Indeed, the Khitan general Li Kuang-pi earned his imperially
bestowed surname because of his important contribution to the putting-down of the
An Lu-shan rebellion. It is clear, therefore, that none of these tegimes was founded
by "barbarians."
The post-960 period as a whole should be regarded as one of alien military
ascendancy, but also one of profound demographic changes in favor of the Chinese.
Recently, ruminating over a passage in an essay by the Northern Sung statesman and
historian Ou-yang Hsiu (1007—72), which was part of my preteen required reading,
I became more aware than ever of the probable causal relationship between the
unbroken domestic peace and the unprecedented population growth that characterized
the period from the inception of the Sung to Ou-yang Hsiu's lifetime.4 In fact, as to
4
The essay is "Feng-lo-t'ing chi," written by Ou-yang Hsiu in 1046 or 1047 when he
was prefect of Ch'u-chou in Anhwei. It is my comfort to learn that concerning the populations
of Sung, Liao, and Chin the views of the conttibutots to Vol. 6 of The Cambridge History of
China and mine almost entirely agree. My systematic studies of the effects of early-ripening
rice and of various American food plants on the long-range food production and land utilization
in China during the past millennium should help to deepen our understanding of one of the
most basic factors that made unptecedented population growth possible. See the bibliography
for detailed references to my articles.
138 PING-TI HO

the relative importance of economic and institutional factors bearing on the sustained
growth of a preindustrial population, a brief comparison between early Sung and early
Ch'ing is overdue. Actually, domestic peace under Northern Sung (960—1125) lasted
nearly half a century longer than that of early Ch'ing (1679-1796), in which the

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Ch'ing population more than doubled itself and reached the unprecedented magnitude
of 300 million. Offhand, I can only say that the one distinctively favorable factor the
early Ch'ing Chinese enjoyed, as compared to their Northern Sung counterpart, was
a series of fiscal reforms, all aimed at benefitting the poor segments of the population,
including the permanent abolition of the corvee and the merging of the adult ting
payment into the land tax. Recent reflections seem to reaffirm the conclusion I reached
a quarter of a century ago that the population near the end of Northern Sung must
have reached 100 million. The combined population of Southern Sung and Jurchen
Chin empire in the north before the Mongol onslaught must have considerably
exceeded 100 million. Although the factors relating to the Mongol wars of conquest
of north and south China and to the sustained lower level of registered population
under a century of Mongol rule are not fully understood, there can be little doubt
that in the interethnic contest for power during the last millennium the military
weakness of the Chinese seems to have been more than compensated for by their vast
numerical superiority.
During the post-960 period two major novel factors merit our attention. 1.
Although the T'u-fan Tibetans and the peoples of the Nan-chao state in modern
Yunnan participated in the interethnic contest for power in T'ang times, they did not
become parts of the greater China world until Khubilai's military conquest of the
extreme southwest in the early 1250s. 2. After Khubilai's accession to the great
khanate in 1260, he began to build a symbiotic relationship with Tibetan Lamaist
Buddhism. He acted as the patron-protector of Tibetan Buddhism; in return, Lamaism
contributed a new dimension to Khubilai's claim of legitmacy in his vast polyethnic
empire, namely, his being identified with Mafijusri, the Buddhisattva of Wisdom,
and with the Universal Emperor (Sanskrit: Cakravartiri) (Franke 1978, esp. 77—79;
Rossabi 1993, 460). In addition, Tibetan Buddhism began to play a vital role in the
long-range stabilization and governance of Tibet and also to appear among the
Mongols. The early Manchu rulers, both before and after the conquest of China in
1644, fully understood the importance of Tibetan Buddhism as an instrument with
which to build up and to help govern their vast multiethnic empire.
Before we examine the outcome of various subphases of sinicization during the
post-960 period, I shall mention in passing that the Chinese nation during the Sung,
especially during the southern Sung, seemed to have turned inward psychically.
Prolonged military menace and humiliation by the Khitans, Tanguts, and Jurchens
made the elite as well as the commoners increasingly sinocentric and somewhat
xenophobic. The lustful and joyous cosmopolitanism of the early T'ang was gone
forever.
In examining the outcome of sinicization during the subphase from 960 to the
Mongol conquest of all China in 1279, we are very fortunate in having Herbert
Franke's profound concluding remarks on the Jurchen Chin dynasty, which I have
cited earlier. Though confined to the Chin, his remarks actually apply to a lesser
extent to the Khitan Liao and the Tangut Hsia empires as well. From his conclusion
on the Chin we learn that for the first time in the history of the greater China world
the multiethnic intellectual elite of a defunct "alien" dynasty solemnly imposed upon
itself the moral obligation of serving as the standard-bearer of Chinese orthodoxy
under the most predatory of the dynasties of conquest, the Mongol Yuan. Nothing
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 139

indicates better the Jurchen elite's complete transformation into "Chinese" than this
deeply moving fact: its tragic fate under the hooves of Mongol horses gave the leading
Chinese literary figure, Yiian Hao-wen (1190—1257), the resolve to chronicle the
literary achievements of his fallen dynasty in his Chung-chou chi (An Anthology of the

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Central Plain) and other works that are vital sources for the reconstruction of late Chin
history. Be it specially noted here that Yiian, who dedicated so much of his productive
life to salvaging many of the Sino-Jurchen literary elite from oblivion, was himself
descended from the once "barbaric" To-pa Wei imperial lineage.
Information on the sinicization of Jurchen commoners is scanty, but there are
valuable clues. 1. From 1145 onward, an increasing number of Jurchen army units
{meng-an mo-k'o) began to carry out military colonization in the interior of north China
and to intermingle constantly with the Chinese population (Ho 1970, 36). 2. From
the inception of the Chin dynasty, rules and regulations relating to intermarriage
between the Jurchen and Chinese were nebulous. Although emperor Shih-tsung
(1161—89) is known for his nativist movement, including his half-hearted attempts
to segregate meng-an mo-k'o rank and file from Chinese villagers, there was no explicit
prohibition of Jurchen-Chinese intermarriage. On the contrary, in late spring 1191
the cabinet memorialized to the throne that "the Chinese tax-paying peasants and the
{Jurchen] military colonizers are sometimes not friendly toward each other; to
encourage them to intermarry would contribute much to the long-term stabilization
of our state" (cited in T'ao 1971, 85 n. 6). Consequently, emperor Chang-tsung
approved this proposal, thus removing any apprehension about interethnic marriage,
which must have taken place unobtrusively since rather early in the dynasty. 3. Since
even against overwhelming odds Jurchen forces refused to surrender, the Mongols
naturally took Jurchens as their primary target for slaughter. This Mongol cruelty
made it necessary for Jurchen soldiers and civilians to use every conceivable means to
appear in the guise of Chinese, including the change to Chinese names and attires.
In other words, by the time the whole Chin empire fell to the Mongols, "complete"
sinicization became the Jurchens' necessary means for survival (T'ao 1970, 84, 86 n.
14). 4. Perhaps the best general index of the complete or near-complete sinicization
of the Jurchens is the Mongol Yiian's broad socioethnic stratificational system, in
which the third category "Han jen" (Chinese) includes those Chinese north of the
Huai river originally within the orbit of the Chin empire, those inhabitants of
Szechwan and Yunnan conquered by Khubilai years before he conquered, among
others, the Southern Sung, Khitans, Jurchens, Koreans, and Po-hai (Han 1986,11:54).
The Mongols of Chinggis Khan and his descendants succeeded in creating the
largest empire in human history. With their nomadic and predatory mode of life,
shamanistic beliefs, and relatively primitive culture, the Mongols welcomed
practically every cultural import. In a sense, Mongol China's "cosmopolitanism" is
comparable to that of T'ang China except that it functioned largely as a one-way
street—merely as a conduit to receive and to adapt. It is well known that of all alien
conquering aristocracies the Mongol ruling elite was the least susceptible to the
Chinese way of life, except for the necessity of adopting the traditional Chinese
imperial ideology and bureaucracy to govern the Chinese who, at the time of Mongol
conquest, easily outnumbered their conquerors more than one hundred to one.
Fortunately for our purpose, a mine of information about elite sinicization in
Yiian times can be found in the modern classic by Ch'en Yiian (1880—1971), which
is available in English translation under the title Western and Central Asians in China
under the Mongols: Their Transformation into Chinese (1966; Chinese original, 1935).
Thanks to the quantity and variety of Yiian literary works extant and especially to
140 PING-TI HO

Table 1 Non-Natives of Chen-chiang, 1330-1332

Household Mouth Single Grand Total

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Total 3,845 10,555 2,948 13,503
Mongol 29 163 429 592
Uighur 14 93 107 200
Hui-hui (Moslims) 59 374 310 684
Yeh-li-k'o-wen 23 106 109 215
Ho-hsi 3 35 19 54
Khitan 21 116 75 691
Jurchen 25 261 224 485
Han Chinese 3,671 9,407 1,675 11,082
Source: Chih-shun Cheng-chiang chih cited in Lo 1966, 178-79; supplemented by Han 1986,
5.

Ch'en's rare erudition, we have reliable and sometimes vivid and detailed information
on as many as 132 Western and Central Asians of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries who excelled in literature and fine arts or otherwise contributed
meaningfully to discourses on Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist philosophies and
religions, and also on various ancient classics on rites. Not a few of these Muslims
and Nestorian Christians gave up their original faiths and adopted the Confucian way
of life, including the observance of the three-year mourning period. Sometimes their
womenfolk, too, received a good Confucian education, including a large dosage of the
Ch'eng-Chu Neo-Confucian precept for women: "Starvation to death is a trivial matter
but the loss of physical chastity is a matter of utmost seriousness." During the wars
and turmoil attending the fall of the Yuan dynasty some of these highly sinicized
women chose the Ch'eng-Chu style of martyrdom.
According to Yuan government regulations, all the Western and Central Asians
belonged to the se-mu group, that is, all those from the far western regions who were
not Mongols, Chinese, Jurchens, Khitans, or the like. As to the ethnic origins of the
132 se-mu individuals studied by Ch'en Yuan, 23 were lumped together as Hsi-yii
(western regions), and 8 were called Yeh-li-k'o-wen (Erke'un, Nestorian Christians)
without specification. With the exception of 8 Tanguts, 2 Naimans, and 2 Arabs (Ta-
shih), the rest all appear to be Turks, with at least 68 Uighurs under several
subdesignations. The cultural predominance of the Uighurs among the se-mu group
is quite congruent with the known fact that they played a very important role in the
Yuan government both at the central and the provincial levels.
It was not long before some se-mu elite generated a genuine admiration for Chinese
culture, but that is not likely to have been true of all of them, let alone the "many
thousands of Turks [and other se-mu] in various walks of life: soldiers, tradesmen,
couriers, clerks and scribes, interpreters, teachers, minor officials and scholars,
craftsmen, monks, and adventurers" who have left no records (de Rachewiltz 1983,
293). The unusual population register showing ethnic composition in the 1330-32
edition of the history of the Chen-chiang prefecture, about 75 kilometers east of
Nanking, may yield some clue (see table 1).
All categories of non-Chinese immigrants (ch'iao-yu) account for 17.93 percent of
the "transients," a percentage which certainly is not insignificant. But when we set
it against the total number of permanent resident households (100,065) of the entire
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 141

prefecture—which would indicate a total population in the neighborhood of half a

million—then the 2,411 non-Chinese transients, representing but one-half of 1
percent of the prefectural population, was truly a drop in the bucket. Although the
ratio of Mongol and se-mu might be considerably higher in the national and provincial

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capitals and military garrison headquarters, the vast rural hinterland was not likely
to see many aliens. It seems reasonable to generalize that the overwhelming numerical
superiority of the Chinese was a most elemental biological factor that ensured the
long-range sinicization of their alien conquerors, multiethnic ruling class, and people
of various walks of life.
We are, however, cautioned by the Mongologist Henry Serruys, who has patiently
explained that the sinicization of nonelite aliens and especially of the Mongols is likely
to have been a much slower process than is usually presumed. Although cases in which
Mongols in Yiian times adopted Chinese names and in which Mongol commoners
were sold as slaves at home and abroad are known (Meng 1938, 96), Serruys is certainly
right in saying that the real sinicization of the Mongols began only with the Ming
dynasty. "They were," he says, "far too few in number to resist indefinitely the
influence of the surrounding Chinese population" (Serruys 1959, 163). A factor which
may or may not have helped much to accelerate the sinicization of the Mongols and
se-mu in Ming times was the 1391 interethnic marriage law:

Every Mongol and se-mu is allowed to marry a Chinese [in small print: "provided
both are willing"]. They are not allowed to marry their own kind. Those violating
[this regulation] shall be punished with a bastinado of eighty blows and both male
and female shall become state slaves.
(Ming-lu chi-chieh fu-li, 1908 reprint, ch. 6, 36a-36b)

In theory, this law should have quickened the tempo of sinicization through
legally forced intermarriage between aliens and Chinese. But in practice we have found
cases of successful evasion and of changing alien names into Chinese so as to make
intraethnic marriage appear legal. We should mention in passing, too, certain early-
Ming revanchist measures—which are preserved only in private literary works and
genealogies—such as prohibiting the descendants of those alien traitors of Sung
during the Mongol conquest from taking civil-service examinations, but which often
could not be enforced effectively (Lo 1959, 52-53).
We have now arrived at the point of whether the Ch'ing as a dynasty of conquest
did or did not owe its success to a policy of systematic sinicization and whether, in
assessing the significance of the Ch'ing in Chinese history, the so-called new trend
that rejects the sinicization thesis is intellectually valid. Let me, therefore, resubmit
to rigorous scholarly examination the gist of what I said thirty years ago about Ch'ing
sinicization:

Systematic sinicization of the Manchu imperial clan, nobility, and officials may be
evidenced by the following facts: the adoption from the beginning of the dynasty of
the Ming government system in toto, which, with a few Manchu innovations, was
improved and rationalized; the ardent endorsement by the K'ang-hsi emperor and
his successors of the conservative and passive aspects of social and political
relationships in later Sung Neo-Confucianism as official orthodoxy; the
unprecedented homage that the Ch'ing emperors paid to Confucius (two kneelings
and six prostrations in Peking and three kneelings and nine prostrations in Confucius'
birthplace, Ch'ii-fu); the designing and maintaining of the strictest education for
imperial princes in Chinese history based largely on orthodox Confucianism; the
utilization of Confucian orthodoxy as a justification for abolishing the various layers
142 PING-TI HO

of feudal relationships within the indigenous Manchu Eight Banner system; the large-
scale printing and dissemination under imperial auspices of ancient classics and Neo-
Confucian writings of the Ch'eng-Chu school and literary reference tools and
anthologies which culminated in the compilation of the ssu-k-u ch'iian'shu; and the
increasing addiction to Chinese literature, calligraphy, painting, and entertainments.

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It is true that such unusually able rulers as K'ang-hsi, Yung-cheng, and Ch'ien-
lung did not fail to realize the importance of preserving certain Manchu traits and
customs. But so effective was the crucible of Chinese culture that by the latter half
of the eighteenth century the imperially exhorted Manchu nativism had boiled down
to little more than a legal obligation on the part of imperial princes and Manchu
examination candidates to practice horsemanship and archery and to study the
Manchu language, although Manchu Shamanism seems to have survived till the end
of the dynasty. There is definite evidence that even for imperial princes, Manchu had
become a dead language by the beginning of the nineteenth century at the latest. . . .
In fact, so sinicized were the Manchus that much of what we regard as the orthodox
Confucian state and society is exemplified not by earlier Chinese dynasties, but the
Ch'ing period. When the supreme test came in 1851 with the outbreak of the Taiping
rebellion, the majority of the Chinese nation, especially the key social class of scholars
and officials, fought loyally for their Manchu masters because the so-called alien
dynasty had been, in fact, more Confucian than previous Chinese dynasties.
(Ho 1967, 192-93)

While I am reasonably confident that these aspects of Ch'ing sinicization I

brought up a full generation ago have by and large stood the test of time, the required
brevity of my 1967 essay calls for some amplification. The first major point I would
like to amplify is what appears to me to have been the consistent if unwritten ancestral
injunction since the time of the dynastic founder Nurhaci (1559—1626) that it was
vital for imperial princes to work hard on Chinese literature and history so that at the
very least they duly understood the basic factors accounting for the rise and fall of
dynasties. Very unusual circumstances made the young Nurhaci conversant in three
languages—Manchu, Chinese, and Mongolian—and insightful into the weakness of
the corrupt Ming court.5 While he and his successor Huang-t'ai-chi (1592—1643)
realized the wisdom of preserving Manchu nativism, they understood better that
knowledge is power and the key to that power was Chinese. The creation of the
Manchu script was less an indication of nativism than a means to acquire new
knowledge and to raise the cultural level of all Manchus through more and more
translation of Chinese classics, history, literature, and works on technology.
K'ang-hsi (r. 1662-1722) was the first Manchu emperor to plunge deeply into
Chinese classics and history and, hence, the first to develop a genuine admiration for
Chinese culture. He laid down the rule, which was strictly observed to the end of the
dynasty, that all imperial princes undergo years of rigorously supervised instruction

'Still a preteen, Nurhaci already made his first contacts with Chinese and Mongols at
various Ming border trade posts. Living with his maternal grandfather, a powerful Manchu
chieftain who repeatedly harassed Ming border towns, Nurhaci was captured by the Ming
general Li Ch'eng-liang, who executed Nurhaci's maternal grandfather but treated Nurhaci
almost as an adopted son. Consequently, in a three-year period Nurhaci accompanied Li on his
various official tours, including visits to Beijing. Nurhaci must have known Chinese so well
that, as he later recalled, he learned the basics of military and political strategy from the famous
Chinese novels, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Chinese "Robin Hood" serials, Shui-
hu Chuan. The Manchus did not have their own script and these novels were not translated
into a newly created Manchu script until nearly half a century later. There can be little doubt
about Nurhaci's proficiency in Mongolian. See T'eng Shao-chen 1995, 31—37.
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 143

in Chinese. As the famous historian Chao I (1727—1814) recalled, while serving as

secretary of the Grand Council between 1756 and 1761, he was so moved by the
familiar sight of lantern-guided preteen princes walking to attend palace school at
daybreak that he was filled with boundless admiration and stated that none of the

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previous dynasties had ever offered a better and stricter schooling for imperial princes
than did the reigning Ch'ing dynasty. As Chao added, the young princes were allowed
very few holidays a year; in fact, not many commoners would institute as rigorous
and exacting a school-scheduling for their children as did the Manchu emperors. Small
wonder, then, that there were men of attainments among Ch'ing rulers. Emperor
Yung-cheng's (1723—35) calligraphy and lucid prose, shown partly in his famous and
voluminous "rescripts in vermilion ink," won the admiration of my late teacher, Ch'en
Yin-k'o (1890—1969), a leading sinologue of this century. Emperor Ch'ien-lung
(1736-95) may have established a world record as the most prolific "poet," composing
more than 42,000 poems in Chinese during his long life (T'ang and Lo 1996, 461).
The significance of emperor K'ang-hsi's exaltation of Confucius to unprecedented
heights cannot be overestimated. Although from Former Han onwards Confucius was
progressively deified and honored, the principle had always persisted that no living
emperor should make the same obeisance to Confucius as his subjects did to him. To
demonstrate his sincere admiration for and deep gratitude to Confucius, K'ang-hsi
broke all historical precedents by performing ritual kowtows to Confucius' tablet. If
this was not a ritualistic expression of the highest possible degree of "sinicization," I
do not know what was. As is generally known, in the Sung manual Hundred Surnames,
the imperial Sung surname of Chao heads the list. It is less generally known that there
was a Ming manual entitled Thousand Surnames, in which the highest honor was given
to the imperial Ming surname Chu. It is a recent revelation {Chinese Science News,
Overseas Edition [in Chinese], 25 April 1997) that The K'ang-hsi Imperially Compiled
Hundred Surnames designates Confucius' surname K'ung as the first and foremost. The
rationale for making the Ch'ing the most Confucian of all the dynasties in Chinese
history is nowhere more candidly and authoritatively explained than by emperor
Yung-cheng in 1723:

Ordinary people know only that Confucius' teaching aims at differentiating human
relationships, distinguishing the rights and obligations of the superior and the
inferior, rectifying human minds and thoughts, and amending social customs. Do
they also know that after human relationships have been differentiated, the rights
and obligations of the superior and the inferior distinguished, human minds and
thoughts rectified, and social customs amended the one who benefits the most [from
his teachings] is the ruler himself?
(Translated and cited in Ho 1968, 14-15)

I invite all students of Ch'ing history, especially Rawski, to make a point-by-

point repudiation of the above-mentioned events and rituals in the history of
sinicization and also the words and deeds of the main architects of the Ch'ing empire
in rationalizing the unprecedented exaltation of Confucius—the very quintessence of
Siniticism.
It must also be re-stressed that the kind of Confucianism that the Ch'ing state
wholeheartedly sponsored and tried to fully implement is the Ch'eng-Chu Neo-
Confucianism. The late Arthur F. Wright amplified very well the point I barely
touched on in my 1968 essay:
. . . The new Confucianism not only updated Confucian thought, it added new
imperatives unknown in the more permissive and amorphous Confucianism of earlier
144 PING-TI HO

centuries. It is the new Confucianism that insists on the segregation of sexes and the
complete subordination of women. It is the new Confucianism that gradually develops
the concept of loyalty from what it was—a relationship ultimately determined by
the conscience of the subject—into what it became—imperative to unquestioning
and total subordination to any ruler, however idiotic or amoral he might be. The

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new Confucianism was more totalitarian in intent than the old had been, in that it
gave the monarch authority to police all private as well as public morals and customs,
to extirpate heresy, etc. No wonder that later emperors found in it the justification
for gathering to themselves more and more of the power they formerly shared with
the literati.
(Wright 1968, 39)

Starting from the early years of the K'ang-hsi reign, the government used more
and more channels through which the popularized version of the Ch'eng-Chu political-
moral orthodoxy was endlessly exhorted to the nation. The late Professor Meng Shen
had probably the most profound understanding of the lives and emotions of the Ming
loyalists of early Ch'ing times. In his opinion, when emperor K'ang-hsi gave orders
that scholars of repute be recommended by provincial authorities and that a special
palace examination be held for them in the spring of 1679, the hearts of even the
most "determined" of the Ming loyalist candidates softened because they knew only
too well by now that none of the previous Chinese rulers could have been more
Confucian than this Manchu emperor (Meng Shen 1935).
It was the policy of systematic sinicization that enabled Manchu rulers to win the
loyal support of the overwhelming majority of their subjects—the Han Chinese—and
further to usher the whole nation into more than a full century of peace, prosperity,
and population growth, which in the last analysis provided the three generations of
outstanding Manchu monarchs—K'ang-hsi, Yung-cheng, and Ch'ien-lung—with all
the necessary resources to construct and sustain the largest consolidated empire in
Chinese history.
Realizing that consolidating the steppe was always a necessary requisite for the
conquest of China, Nurhaci and Huang-t'ai-chi took full advantage of Mongol internal
dissension by establishing Manchu overlordship over them years before launching a
full-scale war of invasion of China. As early as 1636 a special government organ was
established for supervising Mongolian affairs, which was renamed Li-Fan-Yuan,
commonly known as the Colonial Court, in 1638. The policy towards the Mongols,
which had begun in the 1630s and was continued and amplified throughout the post-
1644 years, consisted of perennial intermarriage between the imperial clan and
Mongol princedom, periodic conferring of noble ranks on various strata of the Mongol
ruling class, and the setting up of mutually "segregated" basic administrative units
known as khoshuns (banners), ruled by hereditary banner princes. The time-honored
aimaks, or tribal domains, remained in name only, for they were transformed by the
Manchu court into leagues (chighulghari), which met every three years but possessed
little real authority beyond regulating inter-banner disputes. Six leagues were in Inner
Mongolia and four leagues were in Outer Mongolia. Other adjacent and strategic areas
were under more direct control of Ch'ing government. Administratively, the Ch'ing
policy of "divide and rule" in Mongolia was a success (Ho 1967; Fletcher 1978, 5 1 -
52).
While East Mongolia—Inner and Outer Mongolia—were brought under Manchu
control as planned, the Western Mongols, mostly of mixed Mongolian and Turkish
blood and collectively known as the Oolods (Kalmuks), posed a real menace to the
Ch'ing court. Of all the Oolods tribes, the Zunghars during the latter half of the
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 145

seventeenth century were the most powerful. Under the leadership of Galdan (d.
1697), the Zunghars dominated the vast territories north and south of the T'ien-shan
range, Tsinghai (Kohonor), and Tibet. Relying in part on firearms and armorers
supplied by Russia, especially on the Zhunghars' own ability to manufacture

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technologically advanced cannons {Ch'un-ke-erh sbih-liieh 1985, 128-29), and posing
as a devout supporter of the yellow sect of Tibetan Buddhism, Galdan repeatedly
invaded Outer and Inner Mongolia. These invasions made it necessary for emperor
K'ang-hsi personally to lay down the main strategy, with meticulous logistical
planning, for a series of expeditions to the far northwest, which finally resulted in the
collapse of the Zungharian empire and the death of Galdan in 1697. In fact, early in
the war in 1691, when K'ang-hsi went to Dolonor in eastern Inner Mongolia to receive
the homage of all the high Mongol chiefs, he was not only esteemed as their overlord
but also regarded as their savior. This recognition established the unshaken prestige
of Manchu rulers over the Mongols for the remainder of the dynasty.
However, the continued intrigues and instability in Tibet and the ambitions of
other Oolod leaders after Galdan's death made it necessary for emperors Yung-cheng
and Ch'ien-lung to dispatch further expeditions, which resulted in the Ch'ing
conquest of the entire area of Chinese Turkestan and Tsinghai and the establishment
of the Manchu protectorate of Tibet. All these conquests were accomplished before
the end of the eighteenth century. The main events and the variegated administrative
systems devised for this extremely complicated ethnic area are told elsewhere;6 this
essay must limit its task to a brief assessment of the effects of this remarkable Ch'ing
empire-building on China as a whole.
Our task is greatly facilitated by the macrohistorical perspective of the late Joseph
Fletcher:
Before 1800 the focus of Ch'ing history was on Inner Asia—its conquest, its politics,
the swallowing and digesting of immense, culturally diverse areas by a single
increasingly Han Chinese empire. After 1800 the emphasis began to shift to the
interior of China proper and to the coast. In the nineteenth century Ch'ing Inner
Asia commenced being slowly absorbed into an expanding China and began to come
under the influence of Han Chinese culture.
(Fletcher 1978, 35)

The combined effects of Russia's eastward expansion from Turkestan to the Amur
region near the Pacific Ocean, the Anglo-Chinese war over opium, and a series of
internal disturbances and rebellions from 1796 onwards, which culminated in the
outbreak in 1851 of the Taiping rebellion, the most massive civil war in human
history, are too well known to need any elaboration. It is clear, therefore, that the
Manchu court needed not only the collective talent and dedication of the Chinese elite
but also the sheer resilience and numbers of the Chinese population, which reached
300 million by 1800 and 430 million by 1850, to come to its rescue.
We should not omit mentioning that even during the repeated Zungharian
expeditions of the K'ang-hsi era there were already signs of decreasing efficacy of the

6
Joseph Fletcher (1978) remains the best survey based on Chinese and Western sources.
The best concise analysis of the complex Ch'ing Inner Asian policies and administrative systems
is Wang 1993. The literature on Tibet is considerable and controversial, but Petech 1973 is
generally regarded as the most scholarly, objective, and fair. His conclusion that the organi-
zation of the Ch'ing protectorate of Tibet took its final form in 1751 and that this protectorate
was maintained until after the fall of the Ch'ing Dynasty in 1912, has been accepted by most
specialists of China's national minorities.
146 PING-TI HO

Eight-Banner army and the increasing usefulness of the Chinese Green Standard forces.
Soon after the pacification of entire Turkestan, the Ch'ing court launched a policy of
colonizing Zungharia, which had large tracts of territory suitable for farming. The
colonization took many forms: by sinicized Muslims of Eastern Turkestan, by the

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Chinese Green Standard soldiers and families, by the Eight-Banner units and
households, by Chinese convicts and exiles, and by Chinese civilian colonists from
China proper attracted by the government offer of 4 1/2 acres (30 mu) of land per
household. By 1800 the number of these Chinese civilian colonists in the area around
Urumchi alone is said to have increased many times from the 72,000 persons
registered in 1775 (Fletcher 1978, 65—66). Around the old and newly built walled
cities of Zungharia and in the oasis-cities around the fringe of the Tarim Basin south
of the T'ien-shan range, Chinese and Tungan (Chinese Muslims of Kansu and Shensi)
traders played an increasingly important role in the local and regional commerce
(Fletcher 1978, 106). But these measures were inadequate to stabilize this vast area
of unusual ethnic and religious complexity and to offset the omnipresent menace from
Russia.
It was in Mongolia that the Manchu policy and the tacit Manchu-Chinese
understanding procured results beyond their fondest dreams. It has been pointed out
earlier that the administrative apparatus K'ang-hsi and his successors set up for Inner
and Outer Mongolia worked very well. But it was the Ch'ing religious policy of
sponsoring the Yellow sect of the Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia that permanently
enervated the descendants of the most fearsome military conquerors in human history
(Wang 1990, 170-75). Fletcher further remarks:

In the nineteenth century, the dynasty had the Mongols under control, and the Ch'ing
government feared them no more. Even the population was evidently in decline,
among the main reasons being monasticism and syphilis. . . . Unceasingly, Ch'ing
interests in Mongolia became Han Chinese interests. . . . If anything, Han Chinese
economic penetration served the dynasty's interest, because it bound the Mongols
tightly to the rest of the empire.
(Fletcher 1978, 332-33)

Mongolia was to further suffer from the following economic chain reaction. The
heavy debt incurred by Mongol aristocracy and lamaseries compelled them to
mortgage illegally large tracts of pasture land to Chinese merchants. The Chinese
merchants brought in more and more Chinese peasants to convert the grazing land
into more productive farmland. Under the double pressure of increased fiscal burden
and ever-dwindling pastureland, the Mongol commoners were uprooted from their
traditional nomadic mode of life and became pauperized. Although Ch'ing statutes
prohibited the alienation of pastureland in Mongolia, the declining Ch'ing
government could not but recognize the accomplished fact—Mongolia, especially
Inner Mongolia, became increasingly "sinicized."
Emperor K'ang-hsi's only short-sighted policy was the one towards his ancestral
land of Manchuria. In 1688 he decided to close off Manchuria entirely and make it
exclusively a reservoir for the Manchus. In spite of frequent violations of this
prohibition by Chinese immigrants from northern provinces of Shantung, Chihli
(Hopei), and Honan, especially in years of famine, the aggregate Chinese immigration
into Manchuria up to the middle of the nineteenth century was limited and
northeastern Manchuria remained a power vacuum area. Not until after Czarist Russia
forced the Ch'ing court to cede some 350,000 square miles of territories north of the
Amur and east of the Ussuri in I860 did the Chinese colonization of Manchuria
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 147

become a matter of urgent national concern. All legal bans to Chinese colonization
had been removed before Manchuria was made into three provinces in 1907, when
its total population was around 17 million. Subsequent sustained Chinese
immigration doubled the population to 34 million in 1930, a year before Japan
launched her Manchurian conquest. In the heyday of imperialism, the only way for

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the late Ch'ing and early Republican China to save Manchuria was to resort to what
we may call the most elemental means of sinicization, i.e., to populate it with millions
of Chinese (Ho 1959, 158-63).
The outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion in 1851 not only fully revealed the
degeneration of the Eight-Banner army system but also forced the Ch'ing court to
depend on the collective talent and loyalty of Chinese officials and gentry for survival.
It was precisely at this critical juncture that the Manchu court, which had carried out
a policy of systematic sinicization for two centuries, reaped its greatest reward. To
answer the pseudo-Leveler-Christian creed of the Taiping rebels, which was
fundamentally subversive of traditional Chinese values, Tseng Kuo-fan (1811—72), a
Ch'eng-Chu devotee with inclinations towards the statecraft school of Ch'ing thinkers,
solemnly declared in 1852, virtually on behalf of the whole Chinese ruling elite, its
political, cultural, and ideological identity with the Manchu dynasty. The Hunan
army corps, which Tseng experimentally organized, trained, and led from 1852
onwards, proved to be the only potent military unit in fighting the Taiping rebels.
The main strength of the "Hunan Braves" lay in the strong personal bonds between
the commander, officers, and native-son soldiers. Inspired by the efficacy of Tseng's
corps, "brave battalions" were soon organized in other Yangtze provinces. As it turned
out, the brave battalions marked the beginning of a process in which the main army
system was "sinicized" in the sense of its being completely dominated by the Chinese
and of becoming gradually modernized.
Although Chinese statesmen and generals gave the Manchu dynasty a new lease
on life, the internal and external problems of the post-Taiping period were still legion.
For our purpose, no problem could be more serious than the great Hui (Chinese
Muslim) rebellion in the northwest between 1862 and 1877, which had international
implications. In sharp contrast to the Arab, Persian, and other Central Asian Muslim
elite who spontaneously chose to adopt the Chinese culture and value system during
a century of Mongol rule, Ch'ing Chinese Muslims of Shensi, Kansu, and Turkestan
lived in mosque-centered communities, observed their religious taboos, and
segregated themselves from the Chinese. And, although Sufi mysticism had trickled
into China since the fifteenth century, it began to produce great impact on Chinese
Islam only from mid-Ch'ing onwards, especially in the northwest. Moreover, in the
course of time those Chinese Muslim teachers (akunds) who established certain Sufi
orders virtually became founders of local or regional religious dynasties, enjoying
almost absolute authority on doctrinal and administrative matters, owning large
estates, and receiving "tithe" (not necessarily one-tenth) and other forms of
contribution from faithful followers. The office and privileges were hereditary within
the "saintly leader's" family. By the latter half of the eighteenth century such houses
came to be called by the Chinese as men-huan, literally, "houses of officials," which
actually meant "houses of Muslim magnates."7

7
Gladney 1996, 41-48. Articles on "men-huan," "i-ch'an," and a series of biographical
sketches in Zhongguo dabaikequanshu (The Chinese Encyclopedia). Volumes on Minzu (Nation-
alities) and Zongjiao (Religions) are helpful. "Men-huan" as a special term did not come into
being until the latter half of the eighteenth century. The term first appeared in Ch'ing doc-
148 PING-TI HO

The two most famous men-huan were both in the Kansu-Tsinghai border area.
The earlier one was founded by Ma Lai-ch'ih (1681-1766) and the later one was
founded by Ma Ming-hsin. Both Mas had completed years of study abroad, in Mecca
and other Islamic centers. The former could count on as many as over 200,000

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followers at the height of his power. The latter, an akund of fundamentalist and
reformist inclinations, soon after his return to China in 1741, founded a "new" school,
preaching simpler and purer worship including criticism of the hereditary vested
interests in general. From 1761 onwards his followers began to make rapid headway
into Ma Lai-ch'ih's sphere of influence. A series of clashes culminated in serious
bloodshed in 1781, which called for government armed intervention and the execution
of Ma Ming-shin and the main troublemakers among his disciples. This tragic episode
made Ma Ming-hsin a martyr-saint, whose posthumous influence spread far and wide,
such that the pivotal figure in the great Hui rebellion of the 1860s in Shensi and
Kansu was his fifth-generation descendant Ma Hua-lung (1810—71). The prolonged
Han-Muslim community feuds, the discriminating laws against the Muslims from
1762 onwards, the inherent Muslim resentment of the infidels and suppressed
secessionist urge, and the brief Taiping thrust into the heart of Shensi in 1862 all
contributed to the outbreak of the great Muslim rebellion in Shensi, Kansu, and
Sinkiang.
The task of salvaging the northwest, especially Sinkiang, the most vulnerable and
by now the most critical portion of the Ch'ing Inner Asian empire, once more fell to
Chinese statesmen, generals, and soldiers, specifically Tso Tsung-t'ang (1812—85) and
his Hunan brave battalions. The protracted nature of the war in Shensi and Kansu
mainly resulted from the need of the Ch'ing army to capture hundreds upon hundreds
of Muslim stockades and fortified villages. Not until late 1873 were these two
provinces cleared of Muslim rebels. But the situation in Sinkiang remained very grave.
Southern Sinkiang, the Muslim Uighur area, had been dominated by the intruder
Yakub Beg, a former general of the Khokand army who had extensive contacts with
Islamic states; Russia, fishing in troubled waters, had already militarily occupied the
Hi valley since 1871. Tso's campaign had to wait for more than a year because Japan's
brief invasion of Taiwan in the spring of 1874 evoked a great debate between advocates
of maritime defense and those who placed highest priority on the recovery of Sinkiang.
Tso finally prevailed and embarked on his expedition in early 1875. Thanks to his
indomitable will and meticulous planning, to the two huge foreign loans totaling 51
million taels, and to the procuring of a sufficient number of Krupp siege guns, his
army fulfilled its mission in less than two years—a feat most Western powers
including Russia had deemed impossible. Only Hi was to be settled diplomatically
in 1881 (Liu 1980; Hsu 1980). It may indeed be said that it was Tso's ethnic Chinese
army that saved the consolidated multiethnic empire so laboriously built up by the
successive Manchu emperors K'ang-hsi, Yung-cheng, and Ch'ien-lung.
Sinkiang, always an administrative labyrinth because of its exceptional
ethnoreligious complexity, was finally made a province in 1884—a measure that may
be regarded as administrative sinicization. It is true, that, in spite of the drastic
rationalization of the multifarious administrative apparatuses, the concentration of
control under the newly created office of the governor, and steadier and larger-scale

uments in the spring of 1897. "Men-huan" as a term has therefore been used by current writers
on Chinese Muslims retrogressively to much earlier periods. Perhaps out of courtesy, Western
writers on Chinese Muslims avoid mentioning that the men-huan were hereditary vested interest
groups of rather reactionary kind. "Men-huan" as a system seems to have been wiped out by
waves of social and economic reforms under the People's Republic.
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 149

Chinese immigration, this vast province was far from sinicized. Yet, the very fact that
Sinkiang was administratively "interiorized," i.e., organized along the line of the
provinces of China proper, was bound to have its psychological and international
jurisdictional effect. For similar but more urgent reasons, Manchuria was made into

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three provinces in 1907. The process of "interiorization" of other parts of the Ch'ing
Inner Asian empire was disrupted by the downfall of the dynasty in 1911—12. But as
soon as the era of warlordism was brought to an end, the Nationalist government in
1928 resumed the old process of administrative sinicization by making Kham, eastern
Tibet, the new province of Sikiang (Hsi-k'ang); by making Tsinghai a full-fledged
province; and by transforming Inner Mongolia into three provinces, namely, Jehol,
Chahar, and Suiyiian. Owing to internal weakness and external threats from Russia,
Britain, and Japan, Late Ch'ing and Republican China could not do much to save her
vital ethnic areas beyond carrying out schemes of administrative sinicization—largely
a calculated gesture that could not be backed up by political and military strength.
For a full century after the Opium War, China learned endless lessons from Western
imperialist powers and Japan that sovereignty over any part of her outlying areas
required proof of effective jurisdiction, which in the last analysis boiled down to ability
to defend it with military force. It seems a great irony that in the 1950s, when China
finally proved its ability to assert authority over its Inner Asian territories and thus
overturned foreign assessments of China's political impotence during the previous
century, some of these foreign countries began to criticize Chinese strength leading
to interference in the affairs of its national minorities. The making of Inner Mongolia,
Ninghsia, Sinkiang, Tibet, and Kuangsi into five autonomous regions in the 1950s,
which in theory reversed the process of administrative sinicization of major ethnic
areas during the previous six decades of national weakness and humiliation, signified
the ability and determination of the People's Republic of China to fully defend her
territorial integrity.
Discussion of the phases and facets of Manchu sinicization along with the growth
and decline of the Ch'ing Inner Asian empire makes it abundantly clear that
sinicization and empire-building were complementary rather than competitive forces.
Indeed it was unprecedented prosperity and population growth—largely the outcome
of early Ch'ing policy of systematic sinicization including the carrying out of a series
of equitable fiscal reforms—that provided three generations of able Manchu rulers
with the necessary resources to construct and sustain the largest consolidated
polyethnic empire in Chinese history. When the Ch'ing Inner Asian empire began to
decline after 1800 and the dynasty's collapse seemed impending in the 1850s, it took
the collective talent and dedication of the entire Han Chinese ruling elite and every
conceivable form of sinicization, including massive Chinese immigration into ethnic
areas, to save the polyethnic empire and the dynastic house from crumbling.
As national crises deepened in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the
Manchus and the Han Chinese shared more and more a larger sense of identity—
being all "Chinese" in the same boat struggling to navigate through the rough waters
of intensified imperialism. Not until the Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi-dominated
Manchu court had clearly and repeatedly demonstrated its utter inability to overcome
inertia and to "self-strengthen," especially after China's defeat by Japan in 1895 and
further humiliation consequent upon the Boxer uprising in 1900, did some Chinese
intellectuals begin to launch a revolution aimed at the overthrow of the Manchu
dynasty. Speaking of the Ch'ing period as a whole, there was never a polarity between
polyethnic-empire-building and systematic sinicization. The dichotomy set up by
Rawski is doubly false because of her ignorance or reluctance to search more deeply
150 PING-TI HO

into the close correlationship between these two mainstays of the whole policy
structure and because of her distortion of my multidimensional theme, which clearly
shows their complementarity.
Toward the end of her address, Rawski makes another generalization:

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"Sinicization"—the thesis that all of the non-Han peoples who have entered the
Chinese realm have eventually been assimilated into Chinese culture—is a twentieth-
century Han Nationalist interpretation of China's past.
(Rawski 1996, 842)

Historiographically, her statement needs serious qualification. According to the

Oxford English Dictionary, the words "sinicize" and "sinicization" first appeared in the
Athenaeum respectively on 18 September 1889 and 26 November 1895, both in
reference to Japanese language, religion and civilization. In fact, the view of the
inevitable sinicization of China's nomad conquerors seems to have been expounded
again and again by such sinological and philological luminaries as Sir Henry Yule
(1820-89), Edouard Chavannes (1860-1916), Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943), and
especially Paul Pelliot (1878-1945) (Wittfogel and Feng 1949, 4). I suspect that it
was under Pelliot's inspiration that Ch'en Yuan, president of the leading Catholic Fu-
jen University, who was in close touch with French sinology with the help of research
assistants, published his famous study of the sinicization of Western and Central
Asians during Mongol times in 1935.
Looking back, very few scholars and students of the 1930s even heard of Ch'en's
book, because practically all of us were constantly haunted by the presence of the
spearhead of the Japanese Kwantung Army merely 200 kilometers from Peiping. It
was not the time to find solace in the irresistible power of the traditional culture of
China to civilize her steppe conquerors. Ir was the time for hundreds of us on the
Tsing Hua campus to ponder over Professor Lei Hai-tsung's (1902—62) highly self-
critical macrohistorical perspective as to how and why the Chinese civilization during
the imperial age should be regarded as a "soldierless civilization," which accounted
for repeated partial and total conquests by peoples of the great Eurasian steppe.8
Sixty years later, it is with full understanding of the basic weakness of traditional
Chinese civilization that I attempt to make the following concluding remarks on
sinicization.
1. Although the way in which great European sinologists and philologists
generalized about the inevitability of the sinicization of China's alien conquerors may
appear a bit simplistic today, there can be no gainsaying their general assessment of
the basic strength of Chinese civilization, in terms of level of achievement and richness
of content, vis-a-vis others in the Eastern and Northeastern Asian world in historic
times. Cumulative international research on China during the past century seems to
have, by and large, affirmed rather than refuted their assessment. A fair and objective
reassessment is found in the general editors' preface to The Cambridge History of China
(1978):

8
A series of Lei Hai-tsung's macrohistorical essays were published in the 1930s in The
Tsing Hua Journal and Tsing Hua University's Social Sciences (both in Chinese). "A Soldierless
Civilization" is reprinted in Lei's Chung-kuo-wen-huayu chung-kuo tiping. It ought to be pointed
out that China always seems to have borne the main brunt of the onslaughts of the largest and
most ferocious nomad conglomerates of the Eurasian steppe. The barbarian groups that invaded
the Roman Empire during the fifth century A.D. were numerically far smaller, usually con-
sisting of some 20,000 or 25,000 fighting men. For a methodical discussion, see A. H. M.
Jones 1986, 194-99-
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 151

The history of Chinese civilization is more extensive and complex than that of any
single Western nation, and only slightly less ramified than the European civilization
as a whole.

The old sinologists' view sounds trite, but truths and near-truths often sound

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trite.
2. The innate strength of sinicization seems to have been ultimately derived from
the man-centered Sinitic religion with ancestor worship as its core. The ancient Sinitic
religion, with the extension of the concern for biological and social perpetuation from
"self to "others," is fundamentally different from ancient Western religions—
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—which are characterized by their exclusivity and
sectarianism. China was fortunate in not having any "holy war" in her long history
until the Muslim rebellion of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. In long-
range interethnic and interfaith contacts, the open-mindedness and large-heartedness
of the Chinese could not fail to create a favorable impression upon the thinking aliens.
The "largeness" in the traditional Chinese "psyche" may well have been the main
reason why sinicization normally was not forced but spontaneous.9 Otherwise, it is
difficult to imagine how the 1990 census would have shown only 3 percent of China's
population to be minorities living in strategic Inner Asian areas; Rawski's
preoccupation with such groups in the Ch'ing dynasty leads her thesis to a dead-end.10
3. Part of the power and persuasiveness of sinicization has rested in its open and
dynamic appropriation of religio-philosophical ideas and aspects of material culture

'The late Professor Lo Hsiang-lin of the University of Hong Kong has left us two excep-
tionally well-documented case-studies of long-range sinicization of two Arab families (clans).
The P'u family can be traced 900 years back to the 1050s in the northern Sung period. The
best known member was P'u Shou-keng of Ch'uan-chou (Zayton), Fukien. While serving as
director of maritime trade at the end of the Southern Sung period, he surrendered to the
Mongols along with the sailing ships under his command. Consequently, his clan greatly
flourished under the Mongols and produced some famous officials and poets. The P'u clan,
including its offshoots in Canton, managed to do well in Ming-Ch'ing times. Based on editions
of the P'u genealogy, epitaphs, ramified literary works, and even calls on living P'u descendants,
Lo's P'u Shou-heng yen-chiu has superseded all previous Japanese studies. Lo's book has a special
appendix devoted to the Sa clan of Foochow, which is traced back to the time of Khubilai
Khan in the thirteenth century. This clan of Arab origin has "perpetuated" its success so well
that it can boast of an admiral, Sa Chen-ping (1859—1951) and two professors at National
Tsing Hua University in the 1930s, namely, Sa Pen-t'ieh, professor of organic chemistry, and
his younger and better known brother, Sa Pen-tung, professor of physics and electrical engi-
neering, who later became president of Hsia-men (Amoy) University. These case studies testify
eloquently to the ability of Arabs to adopt Chinese culture and to adapt to the typically Chinese
milieu.
Different in nature but no less instructive is Henry Serruy's The Mongols in Kansu during
the Ming, which actually brings the subject to the early twentieth century. It shows that the
Ming government never resorted to forced assimilation of this sizable group of Mongols
stranded in the northwest and relied in the long run on natural forces to do the work of
sinicization.
lo
For population figures of China's national minorities shown by the Peoples Republic of
China's four censuses, see Mackerras 1994, 237-59, especially Table 9-1- It is generally known
that, with the exception of small enclaves in Sinkiang and Heilongjiang, most of the 9.8
million "Manchus" registered in 1990 have been completely integrated with the Han Chinese.
Only some 600,000 of the 8.6 million Hui (Muslims) in the 1990 census live in Sinkiang.
Moreover, there is good reason to believe that modernization will promote the integration of
minority "nationalities" with the Han Chinese (Mackerras 1994, 1995). Small wonder, then,
that Rawski has to be purposely vague in the temporal sense by saying that her ethnic-oriented
thesis is "concentrated on earlier moments of the [Ch'ing] period" (Rawski 1996, abstract).
152 PING-TI HO

from abroad. The single most outstanding case was the "Indianization" of early
medieval China by Buddhism and the eventual sinicization of Buddhism from T'ang
times onwards. Sinicized Buddhist metaphysics constituted an important part of the
Sung Neo-Confucian synthesis. Sinicization in its larger and legitimate sense far

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transcends the narrow confines of interethnic relations and embraces the evolution of
the whole Chinese civilization.
4. Sinicization is a continual and unending process and any diachronic study of
sinicization must end with a conjecture about its future. During the past 200 years
the sphere in which the forces of sinicization used to operate has been enlarged from
Eastern and Northeastern Asia to the whole globe; and globally Chinese civilization
has encountered the modern Western civilization, which is more powerful because of
its scientific and technological revolution. Consequently, in the intercivilizational
exchange China's role has been changed from that of a "giver" to that of a "receiver."
Despite a century of tardy and limited attempts at modernization, China's all-out
efforts and determination since 1978 have already produced so large an impact on the
world economy as to lead to some predictions that in the coming decades the Chinese
economy may become the world's largest. No one can accurately predict what China
will look like by the year 2025. What is certain is that China will have its own
distinct characteristics. Between now and then, Chinese tradition will have to be
adjusted to the changing times; and Western science-technology, economic, social,
political theories and ideologies, voluntarily and involuntarily introduced, will have
to undergo the process of sinicization in the sense of their being tested, sifted, digested,
and absorbed in such a way as to be reasonably well-adapted to China's changing
needs.
Sinicization has, therefore, its perennial significance.
It is well to remember that "Han-hua," the term in Chinese for sinicization, is
not entirely correct; the truly correct Chinese term should be "Hua-hua" because the
forces of sinicization had begun to operate millennia before the Han dynasty came
into being.
Rawski might more usefully have begun the work of tracing into the present
sinicization's evolutionary role in Chinese history—sinicization's new relevance to
Westernization and modernization now that contemporary China is engaged in
redefining its cultural relations with the West—instead of settling far too easily and
comfortably into the currently fashionable school of "cultural critics" who
mechanically substitute ideology for scholarship and historical vision.

Glossary
An-shih-na Ho-lu Liu Yu-hsi f?!] T'ao Ch'ien (Yuan-ming)
Lu Fa-yen | ^ j
Ch'eng-ch'ien Ma Hua-lung T'ao K'an WTO
chi-chueh-shih Ma Lai-ch'ih T'ieh-le W,®)
Ch'ieh-yun tf Ma Ming-hsin Ts'an-t'ien-k'e-han-tao
Chin Mi-ti ^ Men-huan P^I
Chung-chou chi 4 1 lH1 Meng-an-mo-k'e Tseng Kuo-fan
Ho Ch'ou J5J5I Mi Fu ^ ^ j Tso Tsung-t'ang
Hsi (of Manchuria) §5 Ou-yang Hsun tsung-fa g??£
Hsi (of inland Yangtze) PoChu-i 6PJ T'u-ii mm
Hsieh-li glflj rou-jan ffc$£ Wu-huan H f
hsing-mieh-kuo Sa Cheng-ping Yu Cheng-hsieh
i-ch'an fif Sa Pen-t'ieh Yuan Chen
Li Cheng-liang Sa Pen-tung B Yuan Hao-wen
Li Kuang-pi Se-mu Yu-wen K'ai
LiPo Sha-t'o
 IN DEFENSE OF SINICIZATION 153

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