Xiaoyuan Liu - Böcker

The status of Tibet is one of the most controversial and complex issues in the history of modern China. In To the End of Revolution, Xiaoyuan Liu draws on unprecedented access to the archives of the Chinese Communist Party to offer a groundbreaking account of Beijing’s evolving Tibet policy during the critical first decade of the People’s Republic.Liu details Beijing’s overarching strategy toward Tibet, the last frontier for the Communist revolution to reach. He analyzes how China’s new leaders drew on Qing and Nationalist legacies as they attempted to resolve a problem inherited from their predecessors. Despite acknowledging that religion, ethnicity, and geography made Tibet distinct, Beijing nevertheless forged ahead, zealously implementing socialist revolution while vigilantly guarding against real and perceived enemies. Seeking to wait out local opposition before choosing to ruthlessly crush Tibetan resistance in the late 1950s, Beijing eventually incorporated Tibet into its sociopolitical system. The international and domestic ramifications, however, are felt to this day.Liu offers new insight into the Chinese Communist Party’s relations with the Dalai Lama, ethnic revolts across the vast Tibetan plateau, and the suppression of the Lhasa Rebellion in 1959. Placing Beijing’s approach to Tibet in the contexts of the Communist Party’s treatment of ethnic minorities and China’s broader domestic and foreign policies in the early Cold War, To the End of Revolution is the most detailed account to date of Chinese thinking and acting on Tibet during the 1950s.

The status of Tibet is one of the most controversial and complex issues in the history of modern China. In To the End of Revolution, Xiaoyuan Liu draws on unprecedented access to the archives of the Chinese Communist Party to offer a groundbreaking account of Beijing’s evolving Tibet policy during the critical first decade of the People’s Republic.Liu details Beijing’s overarching strategy toward Tibet, the last frontier for the Communist revolution to reach. He analyzes how China’s new leaders drew on Qing and Nationalist legacies as they attempted to resolve a problem inherited from their predecessors. Despite acknowledging that religion, ethnicity, and geography made Tibet distinct, Beijing nevertheless forged ahead, zealously implementing socialist revolution while vigilantly guarding against real and perceived enemies. Seeking to wait out local opposition before choosing to ruthlessly crush Tibetan resistance in the late 1950s, Beijing eventually incorporated Tibet into its sociopolitical system. The international and domestic ramifications, however, are felt to this day.Liu offers new insight into the Chinese Communist Party’s relations with the Dalai Lama, ethnic revolts across the vast Tibetan plateau, and the suppression of the Lhasa Rebellion in 1959. Placing Beijing’s approach to Tibet in the contexts of the Communist Party’s treatment of ethnic minorities and China’s broader domestic and foreign policies in the early Cold War, To the End of Revolution is the most detailed account to date of Chinese thinking and acting on Tibet during the 1950s.

Wei and Liu argue that Chinese nationalism is a multifaceted concept. At different historical moments and under certain circumstances, it had different meanings and interacted with other competing motives and interests. The authors of this timely volume, all of whom are of Chinese origin and bi-national education, have produced a balanced and non-culture-bound work of scholarship. It contains diverse, provocative, and in-depth analysis of both historical and recent case studies that can shed light on the contemporary incarnation of Chinese nationalism.This interdisciplinary anthology looks at variants of Chinese nationalism upheld and contended by social groups, classes, and power-holders from the past to the present. The authors argue that nationalism can be supported by both patriotic and group- or party-oriented interest calculations. Forms of Chinese nationalism can result from situational as well as ideological conditions.

China is a site for the evolution, not only of Chinese nationalism, but the nationalism of various non-Han ethnic groups. During the 20th century, these ethnic groups constructed and expressed their own identities and nationalism through interaction with one another and with outside influences. This interdisciplinary anthology contains nine original works that pluralize our understanding of nationalism in China by illustrating the various intellectual strains of China's nationalist discourse, the dichotomy between the political authorities' and grass roots' experiences, and the nationalizing efforts by various ethnic and political groups along China's inland and maritime frontiers.First, contributors explore the controversy surrounding the contested issue of China's national and international identity from pre-modern times to the present. Next, the authors examine China's nationalist encounters with foreign influences such as U.S. Marines in Shandong, Soviet experts in Manchuria, and recent friction between the United States and the PRC. Finally, essays expand beyond the ethnographic regions of the Han-Chinese and the political domain of the PRC to discuss the odyssey of Taiwan's nationalism in both a political and a cultural sense. Many selections are based on newly declassified archival materials.

A Partnership for Disorder examines American-Chinese foreign policy planning in World War II for decolonising the Japanese Empire and controlling Japan after the war. This study unravels some of the complex origins of the postwar upheavals in Asia by demonstrating how the US and China's disagreements on many concrete issues prevented their governments from forging an effective partnership. The two powers' quest for long-term cooperation was further complicated by Moscow's eleventh-hour involvement in the Pacific War. By the war's end, a triangular relationship among Washington, Moscow, and Chongqing surfaced from secret negotiations at Yalta and Moscow. Yet the Yalta-Moscow system in Asia proved too ambiguous and fragile to be useful even for the purpose of defining a new balance of power among the Allies. The failure of the system was compounded by its obliviousness to Asia's dynamic nationalist forces.

A Partnership for Disorder examines American-Chinese foreign policy planning in World War II for decolonising the Japanese Empire and controlling Japan after the war. This study unravels some of the complex origins of the postwar upheavals in Asia by demonstrating how the US and China's disagreements on many concrete issues prevented their governments from forging an effective partnership. The two powers' quest for long-term cooperation was further complicated by Moscow's eleventh-hour involvement in the Pacific War. By the war's end, a triangular relationship among Washington, Moscow, and Chongqing surfaced from secret negotiations at Yalta and Moscow. Yet the Yalta-Moscow system in Asia proved too ambiguous and fragile to be useful even for the purpose of defining a new balance of power among the Allies. The failure of the system was compounded by its obliviousness to Asia's dynamic nationalist forces.

In this pathbreaking book, Xiaoyuan Liu establishes the ways in which the history of the Chinese Communist Party was, from the Yan'an period onward, intertwined with the ethnopolitics of the Chinese "periphery." As a Han-dominated party, the CCP had to adapt to an inhospitable political environment, particularly among the Hui (Muslims) of northwest China and the Mongols of Inner Mongolia. Based on a careful examination of CCP and Soviet Comintern documents only recently available, Liu's study shows why the CCP found itself unable to follow the Russian Bolshevik precedent by inciting separatism among the non-Han peoples as a stratagem for gaining national power. Rather than swallowing Marxist-Leninist dogma on "the nationalities question," the CCP took a position closer to that of the Kuomintang, stressing the inclusiveness of the Han-dominated Chinese nation, "Zhongua Minzu."

The author's purpose in writing this book is to use the Mongolian question to illuminate much larger issues of twentieth-century Asian history: how war, revolution, and great-power rivalries induced or restrained the formation of nationhood and territoriality. He thus continues the argument he made in Frontier Passages that on its way to building a communist state, the CCP was confronted by a series of fundamental issues pertinent to China's transition to nation-statehood. The book's focus is on the Mongolian question, which ran through Chinese politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Between the Revolution of 1911 and the Communists' triumph in 1949, the course of the Mongolian question best illustrates the genesis, clashes, and convergence of Chinese and Mongolian national identities and geopolitical visions.