There is a border in the North: Revisiting the eastern section of Sino-Russian border and the making of modern China

Abstract

This thesis revisits the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) between Qing China and Tsarist Russia in order to examine the making of the eastern section of Sino-Russian border. The border negotiated by this treaty defined the transition of China from a pre-modern empire towards a modern, territorial nation-state. In the centuries that followed, the Chinese territory has been bounded by international borders and has become seen as a static, pre-existing and homogeneous space, even though much literature discusses and analyses the gradual and iterative evolution of China's boundaries. Modern theories of borders and territory, following in the Westphalian tradition, have contributed to this view. This representation, however, raises a two-fold issue. On one hand, the application of modern Western European territorial understandings to Asia neglected existing understandings of borders and territoriality and the power relations that shaped them. On the other, the persistence of the 'Westphalian' system of territorial nation-states, though in many cases a response to the Western dominance, overlooks the heterogeneity of territory-forming processes that continued alongside the making of China's first modern border. Consequently, the richness of the geography and history of the non-West has been underestimated in accounts of modern state formation. In revisiting the Treaty of Nerchinsk and the eastern section of Sino-Russian border, this thesis considers the multiple actors that have constructed the border through heterogeneous practices at both the material and symbolic level. The thesis argues that China's first modern border was an outcome of various practices of negotiation, demarcation, patrol, survey, mapping, border-crossing and literary narration that belie a simplistic account of it as simply pre-existing or as primarily imposed by powerful external actors. Inspired by both relational accounts of border making and postcolonial debates concerning 'Asia as method' as a means to understand modernity, the thesis explores some of the multiple agents - objects, natural features, mapping techniques, grassroots officials, foreigners and marginalised literati - that influenced the making of the border and formation of China's modern nation-state. Accordingly, the thesis contributes to the literature on 'Asia as method' by foregrounding the value of the borderland as a site for grasping the formation of modern subjectivity: in this case the sense of a modern territorial nation-state. By doing so, the thesis hopes to demonstrate how by studying the diverse and heterogeneous paths pursued in the construction of the non-Western states, the impact and experience of the West itself can be relativised and a more heterogeneous theorisation of bordering and border-making practices appreciated across humanity.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Ed Pulford (Supervisor), Mark Usher (Supervisor) & Jamie Doucette (Supervisor)