Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2023. US$32.00, paper. ISBN 9781503636842.
To call this book ambitious is an understatement, yet it befits the author’s breadth of knowledge. In her preface, Wu recounts how her trips to Gansu and Xinjiang opened her eyes to how “frontiers” (not just in China) have shaped the modern world. Her introduction spans a dazzling array of events and figures, from historians Frederick Turner and Marc Bloch, to FDR, Chiang Kai-shek, Friedrich Naumann, Nitobe Inazo, and Rudolph Kjellén. Connecting North America, Russia, Japan, Europe, and China, Wu’s narrative also examines “geopolitics” and her own coinage, “geo-modernity,” and contends with their assumed differences (2).
While China appears in the book’s subtitle, Wu places it in a global context, covering the late nineteenth century through the Cold War era. She devotes ample space to Meiji Japan, Germany’s Second Empire, and turn-of-the-century America, giving a global perspective on China’s developments. Still, China remains central to her inquiry: Why does the modern Chinese regime persistently claim Qing territories, and how has it maintained its imperial territorial integrity (11, 4)? Her observation that China is unique in this regard oddly overlooks the United States, which has retained its late nineteenth-century territory.
As for her question about the former, her suggestion seems to be that readers should look to the history of the late Qing for an answer: though faced with serious crises that threatened its existence, the dying empire never abandoned its attempt to expand its frontier for land reclamation. Wu cites the efforts of Zuo Zongtang, the able Qing governor-general, to “introduce new crops, farming techniques, and manufacturing machinery into the development of frontier regions” in northwestern China (34). She believes that what Zuo attempted was comparable to Horace Capron’s work in Texas, William Clark’s introduction of agricultural technology in Hokkaido, and Bayard Taylor’s anthropological fieldwork in Ryukyu (chapter 1). In chapters 2 and 3, Wu continues to explore how this global circulation of geographical and agricultural knowledge not only fuelled and sustained the imperial growth of each country, but also enabled them, especially the US, to realize their ambitions for new frontiers. Undoubtedly, Wu’s account builds on the scholarship of the New Qing History but goes further; her goal is to place Qing China on a par with the newly emerging empires of Germany, Japan, and the United States.
Chapter 4, which bears the same title as the book, deals with the “birth of the geopolitical age” in the post-World War I era. She rightly describes the rise of the US as a global empire, but regarding China, Wu chooses to discuss the transfer of modern geographic knowledge and the rise of geography as an academic discipline, but overlooks the publication of the Shidi xuebao (Journal of history and geography) and glosses over the persistent woes that continually plagued the fledgling republic. Some may also be puzzled by her association of Versailles with the “birth of the geopolitical age,” since the idea of geopolitics (Geopolitik) had emerged in the pre-World War I era, as had its proponents, such as Rudolf Kjellén and his influencer Friedrich Ratzel (both well covered in the book), whose advocacy of Germany’s Lebensraum contributed to the outbreak of war. Granted, Karl Haushofer, whose promotion of geopolitics influenced Hitler, was active in the interwar period. But “geopolitics” had been “born” before that. The “Warring States Clique” in China, which emerged some two decades later in World War II, registered some of its influence. But a more notable development in wartime frontier studies was Gu Jiegang’s scholarly turn to Xinjiang and Mongolia through the founding of the Yugong Monthly, which is not mentioned.
A similarly peculiar choice of comparison is made in chapter 5, where Wu discusses Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored scientific research (e.g., Land Utilization in China by John Buck in 1937) in parallel with the rural reconstruction efforts of Chinese regional warlords, ignoring Liang Shuming’s Rural Reconstruction Project during the same period. Then, in chapter 6, Wu returns to Nazi Germany, analyzing Paul Rohrbach’s checkered career on the country’s wartime aggression and then comparing it to the Kuomintang’s land reclamation project, just as the latter was fighting for its tenuous survival after retreating to Chongqing on the southwestern periphery. Chapter 7 focuses on postwar China, describing how officials and scientists made a concerted effort, based more on geographical than agricultural studies, to rebuild and reinforce the country’s status as a new empire in the Cold War era.
Through her writing, Wu hopes to convey a clear message: since the 1850s, regardless of the political turmoil of wars and revolutions, China, like Germany, Japan, and the United States, has sought to pursue its imperial ambitions through geographic exploration and rural development. This global scaffolding owes much to the work of environmental historians such as John Richards, author of The Unending Frontier. But because she seeks to view the cultivation of the frontier not only as an action on the environment, for which she coins the term “geo-modernity” to foreground the “wider cultural, social, and scientific context” of such efforts (2), it becomes necessary to distinguish historical time from chronological time, so to speak. That is, while Germany, Japan, and the United States sought to expand their empires, China struggled to survive, whether as a troubled nation or as a hollowed-out empire, for most of the period covered by her book. Of course, in recent decades China has become, more rhetorically than in reality, a “new empire,” as Wu’s conclusion implies. But perhaps such grandeur cannot be projected back to a century earlier. Finally, a word about her neologism “geo-modernity,” which seems unwarranted since its meaning overlaps with “geopolitics”—not only is “geopolitics” a modern concept, but, as her own examples show, its implementation has invariably involved geography and other sciences. Overall, Wu’s comparative approach underscores the common challenges and strategies of nations navigating the complexities of frontier expansion. While a bold attempt to chart the historical intersections of geography, politics, and culture, the book is limited by its conceptual framework and its arbitrary, uneven treatment of certain figures and events.
Q. Edward Wang
Rowan University, Glassboro