Recast All under Heaven

Reviews / Votes

"In this collection of well-argued essays, Professor Xiaoyuan Liu offers an extremely valuable perspective on the evolution of China's "geo-body" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--that is, its evolution from an empire to a "modern" nation state. This complex process involved a constant effort to reconcile the unifying impulses of the central government with the vibrant ethnic particularism that existed within China's constantly shifting borders."Richard J. Smith,George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities and Professor of History, Rice University, USA "The rise of China to the status of a global power necessitated its transformation from a loosely integrated empire into a modern state. This process entailed the assertion of central control over Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, Inner Asian lands that had long been contested by foreign powers and nurtured their own aspirations for independence or genuine autonomy. In this illuminating set of essays, Liu Xiaoyuan, the master of China's frontier history and ethnopolitics, ranges widely across the boundaries of space and time to examine how modern China came into being. By emphasizing the seemingly paradoxical centrality of the periphery in the consolidation and legitimation of Chinese political authority, Liu explains Beijing's concern about trouble on its Inner Asian frontiers and expands our understanding of China's modern history." --Steven I. Levine, Senior Research Associate, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center, The University of Montana "Xiaoyuan Liu has provided a most compelling study of frontier in the shaping of modern China modern territorial identity. Ethnopolitics, usually confined to the domestic sphere, must now be "recast" and brought to the forefront of any attempt to understand China's international relations, and vice versa."--Uradyn E. Bulag, University of Cambridge