Aaron Glasserman
We hear a lot today about China’s border conflicts, from high-altitude skirmishes with Indian forces in the Himalayas to legal tussles over maritime sovereignty in the South China Sea. But the People’s Republic of China (PRC) does not just have a border problem. It also has a borderlands problem, or what in official Chinese rhetoric is known as the “frontier question” (bianjiang wenti): the disparity—in terms of development, culture, security, and, ultimately, political control—between the country’s core regions and its vast periphery, delineated by 14,000 miles of land borders shared with 14 countries across nearly 200 county-level jurisdictions and inhabited by dozens of distinct ethnic groups.
The frontier question is not new. Retaining control over the enormous territory of the former Qing dynasty, which collapsed in 1912, has arguably been the defining challenge of the modern Chinese state. It is also closely related to another political problem, the “national question” (minzu wenti). The PRC is formally a multiethnic state comprising 56 officially recognized “nationalities,” consisting of the Han majority and 55 minorities, each of which possesses its own developmental trajectory yet is also (or must be) an inalienable part of the overarching “Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu). In order to defuse separatist aspirations and preserve its unified rule, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established a system of regional ethnic autonomy—including the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the Tibet Autonomous Region, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and over a hundred other units across the provincial, prefectural, and county levels—in which relatively large and territorially concentrated minorities ostensibly enjoy special cultural and political rights.
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