HIST 484MChina's Borderlands

Catalog

HIST 484M/576K/AAAS 484G - China's Borderlands Professor Yi Wang Fall 2023 Course description: This course examines the history of China's borderlands from the tenth century to the present, with an emphasis on the transformation of the frontiers and buffer zones of the Qing empire into the border regions of territorially bounded Chinese nation-state. This represents an important and often neglected dimension of emergence of the global system of nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It not only affects the peoples and lands of these territories, but also the self-conception of the people in the core regions. We will examine a wide range of geographical areas, such as Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Southwest China, in terms of international rivalries, inter-communal relationships, and historical and spatial imaginaries. We will use a variety of approaches such as the theory of the frontier, the history of anthropology, and concepts from the study of nationalism and imperialism to illustrate the problems.