Chinese historians generally describe the process of Chinese territorial expansion as one of ‘unification’ rather than ‘conquest’, with expansion being seen as a progressive evolution towards a preordained and inevitable unity. Territory, once taken, has been regarded as immutably Chinese. [721] There is a powerful underlying assumption that the numerous races and nationalities have always demonstrated undivided loyalty to the imperial regimes. [722] The truth, in fact, is rather different. Far from China’s expansion to its present borders being a harmonious and natural process, the realization of a nation always waiting to be born, it was in fact, as one would expect, a complicated process of war, rivalry, ethnic conflict, hegemony, assimilation, conquest and settlement. [723] The embryo of contemporary China was born out of the military victory of the Qin kingdom (221–206 BC), following the Warring State period during which over 100 states fought for supremacy in north and central China. The Qin dynasty — which, prior to its triumph, roughly coincided with the present north-west province of Shaanxi — eventually emerged victorious over six other kingdoms and succeeded in expanding its territory sixfold. [724] During the 2,000 years that followed the Qin victory, China expanded southwards to the South China Sea, northwards to incorporate much of the steppe lands, and westwards into Central Asia. Far from this enormous geographical expansion being characterized by a natural process of fusion, peace and harmony, it predictably entailed much conflict and many wars. [725]

The growth of China is the story of the outward expansion of the northern Chinese. The best-known area of conflict concerns the region to the north of Beijing, bordering on what we now know roughly as Mongolia and Manchuria. For thousands of years this region was contested between the northern horse-bound nomads of the steppes and the agrarian-based Chinese. The picture painted by official Chinese histories is of aggressive, rampaging nomads and peace-loving Chinese peasants. [726] While it is true that the Chinese were constantly preoccupied with the security of their northern borders — until the Qing dynasty, the steppe nomads showed themselves to be highly effective fighters — the Chinese frequently sought to conquer and hold the steppe lands to their north. Rather than seeing the Great Wall as a line of fortified defence against the nomads, in fact, it is more appropriate to regard it as the outer perimeter of an expanding Chinese empire. [727] The names of the fortifications reveal the nature of the Chinese intent: ‘Tower for Suppressing the North’ and ‘Fort Where the Barbarians are Killed’. The Chinese saw the nomads as much their inferior, referring to them as barbarians. It was the long-running conflict between the Chinese and the steppe nomads that shaped the Chinese sense of cultural superiority, gave rise to the distinction between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarians’, and largely conditioned Chinese thinking about ‘self’ and ‘the other’. [728] The cleavage is not surprising: settled agricultural communities everywhere looked down on nomads as backward and primitive. Nevertheless, the Chinese and the steppe nomads, although more or less constantly at war, also experienced something of a symbiotic relationship. On many occasions, the ‘barbarians’ successfully conquered China and became its rulers, most famously in the case of the Mongols and later the Manchus of the Qing dynasty. Indeed, as testimony to the extent of mutual incursion and interaction over the millennia, the ruling Chinese caste was essentially a racial mix of the northern Chinese and the nomadic steppe tribes. [729] The ascendancy of the Chinese, however, is illustrated by the manner in which both the Mongols and the Manchus — and all other conquerors of China from the steppes — invariably, sooner or later, went ‘Chinese’ once in power. The historian Wang Gungwu has suggested that ‘in the last thousand years, the Chinese can only claim to have ruled their own country for 280 of those years’, yet in every case the ‘foreign’ rulers adopted Confucian culture and the Confucian system of governance. [730] There is no more powerful demonstration of the advanced nature of Confucian civilization and the hegemonic influence that it exercised over the peoples around its borders.

The conquest of the lands to the south is less well known. It took place over a period of nearly three millennia and involved the movement of whole populations, the intermixing of races, and the disappearance or transformation of cultures. Some races vanished altogether, while substantial kingdoms were either destroyed or subject to a process of absorption and assimilation. The rich foliage of these subtropical lands lent themselves to guerrilla warfare and the Han rulers, during the Qin and Han dynasties in particular, were kept in a more or less permanent state of insecurity. [731] By far the largest single expansion — and certainly the most rapid — took place in the early phase of the Manchu-controlled Qing dynasty, from 1644 until the late eighteenth century, when the territory under Chinese rule more than doubled. This involved the conquest of lands to the north, notably those occupied by the Mongols, and to the north-west, the homelands of the diverse Muslim populations of Turkestan. [732] Many of the peoples conquered, particularly in Central Asia and Tibet, had little or nothing in common with the Han Chinese. These lands became colonial territories of the Qing empire, huge in extent, sparsely populated and rich in some natural resources. China ’s expansion usually involved a combination of military force and cultural example. This was certainly true of the southern and central parts of China as well as the steppe lands. But the Qing conquest of the north-west and west was different, being achieved by the use of particular force and brutality. [733] Most of the Zunghars, for example, who occupied much of what we now know as Xinjiang, were exterminated. [734]

The expansion of the Chinese empire over such a long historical period involved what might be described as a steadily moving frontier or, to be more precise, many moving frontiers. One of the characteristics of Chinese expansion was the resettlement of enormous numbers of people across China, with population movement, always highly regulated, being an important instrument of government policy. The Qin, for example, deployed it on a massive scale to occupy and pacify their greatly expanded territory. One of the most remarkable examples was the huge resettlement of Sichuan province in the south-west, whose population had fallen to around half a million by 1681, but which reached 207 million in 1812 as a result of the movement of migrant-settlers, organized and orchestrated by the Qing dynasty. [735] This process is still evident today, with the steady influx of Han migrants into Inner Mongolia, where they now constitute a very large majority, and into Tibet and Xinjiang, where they represent substantial minorities, possibly even a majority in the case of the latter. Resettlement has been a key tool in the process of Chinese expansion and Hanification.