Negotiating Sovereignty on the Sino-Vietnamese Frontier: Late-Qing Foreign Policy and the Mapping of the Chinese Nation

This dissertation analyzes the joint delimitation of the Sino-Vietnamese border by French and Qing border commissions over the course of 1885-1887, and its associated trade and border treaties. My research demonstrates that during the latter decades of the Qing dynasty, despite the state’s best efforts to direct foreign affairs from the capital, the foreign policy apparatus continued to be decentralized, fragmented, and piecemeal. While historians have thought of the creation of the Zongli Yamen, Qing China’s main institution charged with handling and overseeing foreign affairs, as representing a critical moment in the development of foreign policy and the centralization of state power, I show that this institution became another institution among many that could influence foreign policy outcomes—just another layer to the decentralized, and fragmented foreign policy apparatus. Influential officials such as Robert Hart and Li Hongzhang played import roles in influencing foreign policy outcomes, but so too did relatively lesser-known figures like Deng Chengxiu and others. However, I also maintain that decentralization allowed for flexibility and for local officials to make strategic decisions that took into account regional peculiarities and local conditions without uncritically carrying out the directives of high officials in the capital./nI also examine the reaction that the Qing state had to the ‘loss’ of its former tributary state, Vietnam. I demonstrate that the transformation of Vietnam from a tributary state within the Chinese dominated East Asian world order to a nation state within the French colonial system was much more than symbolic; it was a traumatic event that revealed how Qing statesmen viewed the function of tributaries, Qing China’s ‘extraterritorial’ rights and claims to the territories within those tributary states in the context of the asymmetric East Asian world order prior to the imposition of international law and Westphalian style sovereignty, and the nature of the Qing Empire’s borders in the last decades before the founding of the Republic of China. The task facing Qing statesmen was not simply to ‘confirm’ an existing border, but also required a seismic shift in the way space was conceptualized and governed. Hence, the project to delimit borders with former tributary states marked a significant stage in the transformation of interstate relations in East Asia, from a ‘premodern’ China-centered and hierarchical East Asian world order in which, at least according to traditional political theory, all land under heaven belonged to the emperor, to a system of bilateral boundary delimitation undertaken by sovereign states on equal footing as demonstrated in the new border treaties./nThis study also demonstrates that during the 1880s, a period in which the Qing state is typically portrayed as being largely ineffective at safeguarding the integrity of its national territory from predatory foreign powers, there is substantial evidence to suggest that this was not always the case, and that there were even some noteworthy attempts—in a few cases successful—at Qing territorial expansion, usually at the expense of the former tributary states on China’s periphery. Finally, this study shows that the late Qing state, despite its military weaknesses and technological limitations in the field of cartography played an equally important role in the competition for territorial control during the period of high imperialism. Not only did it prove to be adept at the negotiation and delimitation of what would more or less become the modern national Chinese geo-body during a time period typically associated with bureaucratic incompetence and inefficiency, but it was also an active participant in the creation of the epistemological ideals that legitimized the territorial imaginaries of the modern nation state in the late nineteenth century, initiating a revolution in Chinese mapmaking and cartography in the process.

Advisor: Yeh, Wen-hsin