April 20, 2007
China's dream of EMPIRE! -- part Deux
Completing the story of the mysterious map of China.
Joseph Eros, friend of this blog and occasional houseguest, is now a law student at a large state university in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This gives him access to libraries! So, Joe did some research. All on his own time, bless him, because he cares.
So is the map real or not?
Yes. The book exists, and the map is in it. It's a textbook history of modern China, published in Beijing c. 1953. The map is just as the Indians depicted it (except for the numbers, which they added). They seem to have obtained it via an Indian student in Peking.
Here's the bibliographic information (no Chinese characters):
Title: Zhongguo jin dai jian shi.
Author: Liu, Peihua.
Published: [n.p.] 1953.
Description: 10, 253, 16 p. maps (7 fold.) 19 cm.
Call Number: DS 757.L81 C94
So, what's the significance?
Well... on one hand, not much. Even on its face, the map doesn't advance PRC claims; it just shows (inaccurately) what Manchu China is supposed to have controlled in 1840. Xinhua disowned the map; they were lying, of course, but it's still indicative.
It does suggest that the Chinese Communist Party went through a certain period of wildness in its youth. But at the time the map was published, the CCP had only been in power a few years; China had just come out of a brutal civil war, and was still fighting a war with "imperialists" in Korea. Some goofy-ass stuff gets published in wartime, even in liberal democracies.
It seems to have been a brief and passing phase. China has been pretty modest in its territorial claims for a while now; at the moment, they have only two outstanding border disputes (with India in the Himalayas and the one around the Spratly Islands).
On the other hand, the map seems to be out there. I've had three people mention it online in the last couple of years. I'm still not sure if they're talking about this map or about a later, Soviet version adapted from it. But one or more versions is definitely in circulation in Russia, where it's taken as evidence of the Yellow Peril.
And that's all.
I think that Alain Peyrefitte mentioned this map in his two-volume account of his trip to China. I'll check and see what's up there.
Posted by: Randy McDonald at April 23, 2007 09:40 PMRussian authors love to quote such maps of course - and, fortunately, have no lack of genuine ones.
Here's a fairly minor, but recent, example:
http://new.hist.asu.ru/biblio/ruskit/0.html
(It is from a book on Russian-Chinese relations in Central Asia in the 19th century, and is said to have come from a 1979 Chinese book on "Russian aggression on China's northwestern borders" (ed.
Guo Shengwu, Cheng Hua. In this case, the Russian historian won't of course deny that the shaded area was, at least nominally, part of the Qing Empire in the early 19th century, but will make a point that Chinese presence in this area was very thin on the ground, and that the local Muslims often did not have much love lost for the Qing rulers).
Reprinting maps like this was quite popular with Soviet authors of the 1970s and 80s writing about "Han chauvinism", "Maoist hegemonism", and "Beijing's imperial ambitions". Any Chinese maps that showed a really big empire - wheher Han, Qing, or Yuan - would do, the Yuan ones of course being the best, considering that Yuan, being a Mongol empire, although not really centralized, included all of Northern and Central Asia, and a chunk of Eastern Europe too, via the Golden Horde),
I have little doubt that maps so shown were genuine, and were in soe cases indeed taken from textbooks and similar sources, as purported by the Soviet propagandists who reprinted it. But in reality of course the maps aren't necessarily "incriminating" as they may have been originally presented in a historical context - not too differently from a map of Russian Empire with Congress Poland, Finland and Alaska in a Russian history text, or one of a pre-1846 Mexico in a Mexican textbook.
Posted by: Vladimir Menkov at April 27, 2007 02:28 AMlook at the title:"zhongguo jin dai jian shi".
jin dai in China is used to describe the period between 1840 and 1949. This map just shows the history of China and nothing more of modern China.
look at the title:"zhongguo jin dai jian shi".
jin dai in China is used to describe the period between 1840 and 1949. This map just shows the history of China and nothing more of modern China.