International Center for Cultural Studies

2019/03/13 Entanglement of Nation, Class, and State: The Case of PRC-Mongolian Border Demarcation(11)-Xiaoyuan Liu

2019-03-13

Topic：Entanglement of Nation, Class, and State: The Case of PRC-Mongolian Border Demarcation

Time：2019/3/13 14:00-17:00
Venue：Room 106A, HA Building 2, Guangfu Campus, NCTU
Speaker: Xiaoyuan Liu, David Dean Professor of East Asian Studies, University of Virginia
*Mandarin speech, English simultaneous translation provided.

Xiaoyuan Liu is the David Dean Professor of East Asian Studies and a Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He specializes in China’s ethnic frontiers, and Chinese-American relations in the 20th century. Professor Liu has written four books: A Partnership for Disorder: China, the United States, and Their Policies for the Postwar Disposition of the Japanese Empire (1996), Frontier Passages: Ethnopolitics and the Rise of Chinese Communism (2004), Reins of Liberation: An Entangled History of Mongolian Independence, Chinese Territoriality, and Great Power Hegemony (2006), and Recast All Under Heaven: Revolution, War, Diplomacy and Frontier China in the 20th Century (2010).

After 1949, the PRC government had to confront with the historical problem of identifying its national border, a move that involved many neighboring countries. Among them, the border between China and Mongolia has its own specific feature. First of all, it was China's first border dispute in the 20th century which started in 1945. Secondly, this issue, after 1949, involved a complicated notion of the border, one that integrated the meanings of inter-nation, inter-party and nation/ethnicity. Thirdly, since the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, the border area between China and Mongolia became one of the most strategic frontiers. Not only did the Soviet place massive forces in Mongolia, but Inner Mongolia also became the only dismembered province during the "Cultural Revolution". China-Mongolia border treaty was signed in 1962 against the backdrop of the gradual deterioration of the inter-party relations and the "normalization" of state-state relations, in which the concept of territory had been significantly modified. The completion of border demarcation not only depended on the diplomatic decisions made by China, Mongolia, and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but it also manifested an inevitable result of the transformation of the nature of territory in Modern China and the modernized development of international relations in East Asia.