Xiao Chen

The book project, "Punishment, Frontier, and Ethnicity in the Making of the Qing Empire" (1636-1912) tells the story of a core paradox of Qing imperialism through the lens of law and punishment. It examines the transportation of convicts from the Qing heartlands to Northern Manchuria and Xinjiang—a vast system of coerced migration that linked the “metropolitan centers” of China Proper to the “peripheries” of Inner Asia—forming one of the world’s largest and most complex networks of penal transportation by the early nineteenth century. This book has charted the rise of a new convict labor regime engaged in categorizing, exploiting, and “rehabilitating” convicts, which grew out of Qing colonial practices in Northern Manchuria, Western Mongolia and Xinjiang.