garbage-sorting initiatives that can be interpreted in different ways and can be of use to future researchers working on related topics. ADAM LIEBMAN DePauw University adamliebman@depauw.edu The Making of the Modern Chinese State: 1600–1950. By HUAIYIN LI. London: Routledge, 2020. 336 pp. ISBN: 9781138362451 (paper). doi:10.1017/S0021911821000164 How did the Chinese state become what it was before 1949? How did China maintain continuities in its territorial, demographic, and administrative patterns throughout the Qing, Republican, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) eras? Addressing all these ques- tions, Huaiyin Li’ s The Making of the Modern Chinese State: 1600–1950 offers a system- atic account of the making of the modern Chinese state from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Drawing on studies of late imperial and modern China, as well as archival records, memoirs, and officials’ works, Li traces the mechanics of the Chinese state’ s geopolitical setting, fiscal constitution, and identity building. He argues that the distinctive formation of the Qing state was essential to the continuity of China’ s territo- riality and ethnic composition. Challenging the perception that China’ s transformation from the Qing to the Repub- lican era was a disruptive transition from an empire to a nation-state, Li contends that this painstaking process should be viewed as a transformation from a territorial state into a sovereign state (pp. xi, 48–50). The Qing, to Li, was not an “empire” because it was “neither a typical expansionist empire nor an emerging fiscal-military state resembling its counterparts in early modern Europe and beyond.” Instead, it was an “early-modern territorial state,” as it “had stable frontiers and effectively controlled its territory that had fixed borders clearly demarcated with the neighboring states” (p. 11). While the Qing departed from the preceding Chinese dynasties by creating a large state encompassing both the Han population and the frontiers of the Inner Asian nomads, its military expe- ditions beginning in the late seventeenth century were primarily defensive, and its geo- political goal was to safeguard its strategic security instead of demanding taxes or tributes from the frontiers (p. 9–10). Chapter 2 analyzes the dynamics and limits of the Qing’ s territorial expansion. As Li demonstrates, it was driven primarily by the imperial rulers’ pursuit of geopolitical secur- ity (pp. 23–29). The Qing rulers considered the ideological, social, and geopolitical con- texts of both the frontier and interior regions and developed different policies and strategies to govern the diverse populations (pp. 31–44). Chapter 3 further reveals how the Qing’ s “low-level equilibrium”—a static and rigid structure of regular revenues and routine expenditures—helped fulfill the state’ s geopolitical goals and maintain its mil- itary operation. Yet, as Li argues, when this equilibrium lost balance and became increas- ingly unfavorable to the state in the late eighteenth century, it also determined the limits of the Qing’ s war efforts and caused a decrease in the government’ s capacity of handling interior and frontier crisis (pp. 53–69, 77–79). Chapter 4 examines how the Qing managed to survive the devastating wars and even doubled its officially reported revenues in the three decades following the Taiping 458 The Journal of Asian Studies at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911821000164 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 46.193.3.215, on 17 May 2021 at 11:28:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available