Associate Professor in the Department of History at Binghamton University, State University of New York
Yi Wang specializes in the social and cultural history of late imperial and modern China, with a research focus on the history of borderlands and trans-regional migration in the Qing and the 20th century.
Her first book, Transforming Inner Mongolia: Commerce, Migration, and Colonization on the Qing frontier (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), analyzes the dramatic impact of Han Chinese migration into Inner Mongolia during the Qing era. It examines how processes of commercial expansion, land reclamation, and Catholic proselytism transformed the Mongol frontier long before it was officially colonized and incorporated into the Chinese state.
Her current project focuses on Inner Mongolia’s quest for autonomy and explores the intertwined relationship between competing forms of nationhood, frontier-making, and knowledge production across East and Inner Asia in the twentieth century.
Professor Wang teaches an introductory survey of East Asian civilizations, as well as thematic courses on late imperial, twentieth-century China, and ethnic minorities of China. Her graduate seminars (often cross-listed with senior seminars) deal with imperialism, nationalism in East Asia, and China’s borderlands.
Panel 2 | Borderlands
Borderland Modernity: Railway, Plague, and Autonomy in a Qing-Russian Frontier, 1900–1912
ABSTRACT
The border town of Manzhouli, situated in Hulunbuir along the Sino-Russian border, has long been a historical crossroads where nomadic tribes interacted with Chinese dynasties. In early 20th Century, this borderland became a contested space, as the expanding Russian and Japanese empires vied for influence against a centralizing Qing state.
Manzhouli played a pivotal role in three key events that transformed the power dynamics in northeast Asia. It is the westernmost terminus of the Chinese Eastern Railway, constructed by Imperial Russia between 1897 and 1902. In 1910-1911, the town was the epicenter of a bubonic plague that swept across Manchuria, claiming 60,000 lives. In 1912, Manzhouli became the seat of Hulunbuir Autonomous Government, marking the earliest attempt at self-rule among the indigenous Mongols.
This paper explores the development of Manzhouli as a case study of the complex interplay between technology, urbanization, and globalization in a historical frontier. It examines the role of modern technology in enacting imperialism and organizing urban spaces, facilitating transborder trade, migration, resource extraction, and the spread of disease. Meanwhile, it was instrumental in advancing settler colonization and state penetration, causing the marginalization of the nomadic communities.
Focusing on a diverse array of multinational entrepreneurs, migrants, professionals, and indigenous nomads, this paper highlights how these actors experienced and negotiated modernity in ways distinct from those in China’s core parts. I argue that, far from being an economic and cultural backwater, borderlands like Manzhouli were dynamic sites of global interactions that reshaped the broader history of northeast Asia.
