Regional and Local Approaches to the Frontiers in North China from the Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries

Regional and Local Approaches to the Frontiers in North China from the Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries Jinping Wang Nearly two decades ago, Nicola Di Cosmo and Don Wyatt noted that the rise of regional perspectives after the 1980s had greatly advanced the Western scholarly understanding of China. Previously many scholars in North America and Europe had long held an ingrained stereotype of imperial China as "an isolated and xenophobic monolith, a static empire mostly turned inward upon itself against the outside world and especially against its own vast and predatory northern 'Inner Asian' frontier."1 This image resulted from a conventional approach to area studies that separated the history of China from that of Inner Asia. As a result, this approach "has unquestionably led us to a myopic preoccupation with Chinese civilization in a cultural vacuum and, consequently, to an overly narrow focus on the influential but hardly totalistic history and culture of the ethnically dominant Han people."2 Since the 1980s, a range of regional or regionalist paradigms, such as G. William Skinner's model of macroregions as socioeconomic systems, have reshaped the ways in which scholars view Chinese history.3 One subdiscipline that has begun [End Page 1] to gain currency within this paradigm shift in Western scholarship on China is the study of frontiers and border regions, which, as Di Cosmo and Wyatt put it, "are being studied no longer or not exclusively as marginalized zones of Sinitic influence, but rather as separate areas in their own right."4 Much has changed in the field of frontier studies in the past two decades, and this special issue reflects recent developments in the subfield of northern frontiers in Middle Period China.5 The frontiers straddling the entities that we have retrospectively called "China" and "Inner Asia" figure significantly in historical research on Middle Period China. The case of north China has been particularly inspiring to scholars interested in frontier spaces. The region experienced intense political, social, and cultural exchanges between the "Chinese" and "Inner Asian" worlds for almost four centuries after fall of the Tang 唐 dynasty (618–907).6 A large portion of the region became the frontlines in sometimes violent, sometimes peaceful relationships between successive Chinese dynasties—especially the Song 宋 (960–1276)—and their northern and northwestern neighbors: the Khitan Liao 遼 (907–1125), the Jurchen Jin 金 (1115–1234), the Tangut Xi Xia 西夏 (1038–1227), and ultimately the mighty Mongol Empire. Among these "Chinese" and "Inner Asian" states, political, geographical, and cultural boundaries between "Chinese" and "nomadic" peoples were constantly shifting. In the past two decades, scholarly studies on the northern frontier have overlapped with those on the interactions between "Chinese" and "Inner Asian" states and cultures. Scholars have explored how communities perceived or defined boundaries and borders, how the blurring of boundaries affected practices conventionally characterized as "Chinese" or "nomadic," and what interstate interactions took place at and across political borders.7 [End Page 2] While previous scholarship on the frontier during this period has largely adopted dynastic and top-down perspectives, this special issue proposes an alternative that focuses instead on regional and local perspectives. It is not a completely bottom-up approach, as the articles in this issue do recognize the importance of understanding the court's indispensable role in shaping border affairs. Instead, as Ong Chang Woei's article in this issue suggests, we call for "moving beyond the fixation on seeing everything from the perspective of the center." In their shared commitment to giving voices to borderland peoples, societies, and cultures, the five articles in the pages that follow have much in common in their premises, interests, and findings. Stressing several themes, this introduction puts the articles of this special issue into conversation and comparison. It teases out the major contributions of this special issue to the field of Middle Period China, focusing on how it advances ongoing debates, revises entrenched biases, and makes methodological interventions in multiple subfields. All five articles engage extensively with existing scholarship in related subfields such as the Song state's frontier management, the Song elite's political discourse, and cultural exchanges between north-China regimes and their northern neighbors as well as those between Han and non

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