Tibet and Nationalist China's Frontier
Tibet and Nationalist China's Frontier
Intrigues and Ethnopolitics, 1928-49
In this ground-breaking study, Hsiao Ting Lin demonstrates that theChinese frontier was the subject neither of concerted aggression on thepart of a centralized and indoctrinated Chinese government nor of anideologically driven nationalist ethnopolitics. Instead, Nationalistsovereignty over Tibet and other border regions was the result ofrhetorical grandstanding by Chiang Kai-shek and his regime. Tibetand Nationalist China’s Frontier is invaluable for anunderstanding of past and present China-Tibet relations.
Tibet and Nationalist China’s Frontier makes acrucial contribution to the understanding of past and presentChina-Tibet relations. A counterpoint to erroneous historicalassumptions, this book will change the way Tibetologists and modernChinese historians frame future studies of the region.
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.
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.
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.
Preface
Part 1: The Setting
1 The Nationalist Government, National Image, and TerritorialFragmentation in the Prewar Decade (1928-37)
2 The Professed Policy, the Policy Planners, and the ImaginedSovereignty
Part 2: The Prewar Decade, 1928-37
3 The Unquiet Southwestern Borderlands
4 The Mission to Tibet
5 The ‘Commissioner’ Politics
Part 3: The Wartime Period, 1938-1945
6 Building a Nationalist-controlled State in Southwest China
7 The Issue of China-India Roadway via Tibet
8 Rhetoric and Reality in Wartime China’s Tibetan Concerns
Part 4: The Postwar Period, 1945-49
9 Postwar Frontier Planning vis-à-vis non-Han SeparatistMovements
10 The Sera Monastery Incident
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
