CHUS #3. Human Trade and Slavery in and beyond China, 1600–1900
Saturday, January 4, 2025: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
New York Hilton, East Room
Session Organizer: Chenxi Luo, Reed College
Chair(s):
Qin Fang, McDaniel College
Papers:
“Barbarian Women” on the Riverbank: Ethnicity, Prostitution, and Human Trafficking in Qing Southwest China
Chaoran Ma, University of Toronto
Across the Boundaries: Human Trade and the State in Qing Southwest Sichuan
Hong Song, Stanford University
Disputes over Distance: Absentee Banner Masters, Far-Off Slaves, and Ownership Conflicts in 17th-Century Manchuria
Chenxi Luo, Reed College
Kitad: The Dual Meaning of “Chinese” and “Slave” in Qing Mongolia
Sam Bass, University of Toronto
Comment: Qin Fang, McDaniel College
Panel Description
Our panel centers its attention on the most invaluable commodity: human beings. Specifically, we focus on the human trade and slavery in China and beyond from the early modern to the modern period and situate the lived experience of sold people in local and global contexts. Chaoran Ma’s article deals with sex trafficking of ethnic minority women in Qing Southwest China who were abducted and sold into prostitution. It argues that regional imbalances, gender inequality and frontier governance played important roles in shaping the network of trading women. Hong Song pays attention to the traffic in women in the context of mobility and legal pluralism in Qing southwest frontiers. By illustrating how the women survived in negotiations between polyethnic institutions and communities, his paper reveals how the local order of frontier societies relied upon a multi-layered legal system. Shifting from South China to Northeast Asia, Chenxi Luo’s work inspects legal disputes on slave ownership in Qing Manchuria. Her research shows that the division of banner households, due to a military migration, caused difficulty in reclaiming faraway slaves among banner masters. Sam Bass shifts the discussion to terminology by tracing out the use of the Mongolian word kitad (Chinese) as a term of enslavement in the northern frontier of the Qing empire. He argues that the term became taboo, at least in writing, due to the conflation of the ethnic terms “Manchu” and “Chinese” in the Mongolian language. Together, this panel brings various perspectives, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and mobility, to illuminate the practice of trafficking and the institution of slavery from a non-Western perspective.
Paper Abstracts
“Barbarian Women” on the Riverbank: Ethnicity, Prostitution, and Human Trafficking in Qing Southwest China
Chaoran Ma, University of Toronto
This paper aims to reveal a hidden commercial network that involved abduction and forced prostitution of ethnic minority women, including underage girls, in southwest China during the Qing Dynasty (1636-1912). It will highlight how bureaucratic control (gaitu guiliu), regional imbalances, and gender inequality contributed to turning women from the southwestern borderlands into highly profitable commodities. Meanwhile, the article will indicate that Chongqing, Sichuan Province emerged as a major hub for human trafficking and sex trafficking in southwest China. On the north bank of the Jialing River, there was even a place known as the “Barbarians’ Camp” where a large number of ethnic minority women were sold and forced into prostitution. Despite the the legislations and campaigns by the Qing central and local governments to outlaw and combat human trafficking, this practice was never completely eradicated and was even tolerated with tacit approval. By drawing from both central and local government archives, this article also seeks to restore the life experiences and voices of women who fell victim to human trafficking and forced prostitution. Furthermore, it will explore how issues of gender and sexuality can be integrated into the study of late imperial China’s empire-building, frontier policies, and ethnic dynamics.
Across the Boundaries: Human Trade and the State in Qing Southwest Sichuan
Hong Song, Stanford University
In 1782, Jiang Shi, a Han peasant woman was kidnapped by four yi and Han men near Mianning County and sold to a yi family in Liangshan in southwest Sichuan. Only after a year did Jiang Shi find a chance to escape. She spent six days walking across mountains and returning home. Jiang Shi’s experience reveals the danger that the local people encountered in southwest Sichuan. While scholars have mainly focused on human trade as family strategies or marriage forms in China Proper, little attention has been given to the frontier. This paper focuses on the phenomenon of human trade involving both Han and yi in southwest Sichuan and the state’s efforts toward it. Relying on legal cases from the Mianning County Archive and the First Historical Archives, gazetteers, and ethnographies, I examine how human trade developed in the local circumstance of frequent border-crossing mobility and ethnic exchanges and challenged the state’s designed political boundaries. Resolving human trade then often involved power negotiations between the state’s and the local population’s ideas and practices of boundary-making. By investigating how the phenomenon of human trade suggested the multiplicity of boundary-making in southwest Sichuan, this paper contributes to the future scholarship that explores the extent and limits of the state’s governance out of complexities of political geographies in frontier societies.
Disputes over Distance: Absentee Banner Masters, Far-Off Slaves, and Ownership Conflicts in 17th-Century Manchuria
Chenxi Luo, Reed College
This paper studies slavery in a post-migration society in Qing China ruled by the Manchus, a group of ethnic people coming from Northeast Asia who formed their socio-military institution called the Eight Banners. The research traces the aftermath of the Qing conquest of China proper: following the occupation of the former Ming capital Beijing in 1644, two million banner soldiers and their Han Chinese slaves moved from Manchuria to China proper. This relocation brought enslaved people a range of migratory experiences from relocation, returning, and escaping, to remaining. In particular, my paper deals with a set of legal disputes between absentee banner masters and their far-off slaves. After the trans-Great Wall migration in 1644, most banner masters relocated to Beijing, while some slaves remained in Manchuria to take care of landed property and ancestral graveyards. The long-distance relationship with their banner masters in Beijing created new possibilities for remaining slaves in Manchuria. Left-behind slaves outside the Great Wall enjoyed a certain level of autonomy in the absence of their masters, generating many legal disputes with their masters in Beijing. As legal evidence has demonstrated, conflicts centered around the property issue: masters charged their slaves based on the reason that the slaves took advantage of their absence, seized their household property, and even denied their slave status. Through examining legal cases involving masters and their slaves far afield, I argue that the new geographical relationship between masters and slaves was an important factor mapped onto the maintenance of the Manchu slavery institution.
Kitad: The Dual Meaning of “Chinese” and “Slave” in Qing Mongolia
Sam Bass, University of Toronto
This presentation explores the use of the Mongolian word kitad, which means “Chinese” or “China,” as a term of slavery in Mongolian literary and administrative contexts from the 16th and 19th centuries. While kitad originally referred to Kitans of the medieval Liao Dynasty, and then later China and Chinese people, it also took on the meaning of “slave” in the early modern period after the dissolution of the Mongol Empire. I trace out the use of kitad as “slave” in Mongolian language literary works, legal codes, lexical works, and archival records related to emancipation and fugitive capture. I suggest that the diminishing use of kitad as “slave” in literary and official contexts in the 18th century was due to Qing literary censorship as the term was not only associated with the Chinese but also with the Manchu ruling house, making it a potentially anti-Manchu and anti-Qing term and therefore taboo. Nonetheless, use of the term persisted in records of colloquial Mongolian and in Buryatia in the Russian Empire. By examining language as a site of contestation at the intersection of ethnic and hierarchical categories, this paper complicates formalistic approaches to social histories of slavery in the Qing and draws our attention to the complexities of trans-lingual practices in imperial frontiers.