Tibet and Nationalist China's Frontier: Intrigues and Ethnopolitics, 1928-49 (Contemporary Chinese Studies) [Paperback]

Hsiao-Ting Lin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2007 | Series: Contemporary Chinese Studies

China's policies towards Tibet and other ethnic border territories during the political reign of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists are often understood as a deliberate exercise of power. In this groundbreaking study, Hsiao-ting Lin demonstrates that the frontier was the subject neither of concerted aggression on the part of a centralized and indoctrinated Chinese government, nor of an ideologically driven nationalist ethnopolitics.

Lin utilizes recently declassified Chinese official documents to reveal how the Nationalist sovereignty over Tibet and other border regions was more the result of rhetorical grandstanding on the part of Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist regime than a definite plan to exert control over the region. He reveals that it was not until the Sino-Japanese war (1937-45) that the besieged wartime Nationalists took the opportunity to push Han Chinese authority farther west. Whether a matter of state building or regime survival, this development pressed postwar China's territorial extension of its previously imaginary state control into Central Asia, the consequences of which still reverberate in the region.

Tibet and Nationalist China's Frontier makes a crucial contribution to the understanding of past and present China-Tibet relations. A counterpoint to erroneous historical assumptions, this book will change the way Tibetologists and modern Chinese historians frame future studies of the region.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Lin’s insightful, carefully documented book describes the Nationalist regime’s evolving attempts to move from ‘imagined sovereignty’ to nation building in its relationship with a de facto independent Tibet. Including valuable comparisons with Xinjiang and Mongolia, Lin reshapes the history of modern China’s relations with its vast frontiers. This is an original and noteworthy contribution to our understanding of the creation of today’s China.” – Jonathan Lipman, author of Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China “This book adds an important Chinese dimension to the current scholarly discourse on the Tibet question. Lin’s coverage of recently declassified Chinese government files and his mastery of the literature in both English and Chinese is remarkable. De-centralizing and de-ideologizing Chinese Nationalists’ frontier policies, his provocative arguments will certainly invite serious responses from others in the field.” – Xiaoyuan Liu, author of Frontier Passages: Ethnopolitics and the Rise of Chinese Communism, 1921-45 “A crucially important topic on the intricacies of Chinese policy-making with regard to frontier peoples. The notion that the Chinese Nationalist government was a powerful aggressor against Tibet now stands to be corrected by Lin’s book, a powerful revisionist study of the Sino-Tibetan relations during the first half of the twentieth century.” – Uradyn Bulag, author of The Mongols at China’s Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity

About the Author

Hsiao-ting Lin is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 285 pages
• Publisher: University of British Columbia Press (August 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0774813024
• ISBN-13: 978-0774813020
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,878,991 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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