Recast All Under Heaven

Book excerpt: "Xiaoyuan Liu has provided a most compelling study of frontier in the shaping of modern China's 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, UK "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 centuriesùthat 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 "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, University of Montana, USA In applying the two interpretative themes of "frontier" and "ethnicity", Recast All Under Heaven examines the externalization from and internalization to China by a number of the tributary affiliates and outlying territories of the by-gone Qing Empire. This unique book blends analyses of "domestic" and "international" developments involved in China's modern reincarnation and provides an integral narrative that links historical themes pertinent to the eastern and western halves of China. This is the first study contending that "frontier China" has remained a fitting characterization of the rising Asian giant.