In this ground-breaking study, Hsiao Ting Lin demonstrates that the Chinese frontier was the subject neither of concerted aggression on the part of a centralized and indoctrinated Chinese government nor of an ideologically driven nationalist ethnopolitics. Instead, nationalist sovereignty over Tibet and other border regions was the result of rhetorical grandstanding by Chiang Kai-shek and his regime. Tibet and Nationalist China’s Frontier makes a crucial contribution to the understanding of past and present China-Tibet relations. A counterpoint to erroneous historical assumptions, this book will change the way Tibetologists and modern Chinese historians frame future studies of the region.

Diana Lary's profile page

• Longlisted for the 2007 International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) Book Prize

Diana Lary is a professor of history and director of the Centre of Chinese Research at the Institute of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia. Among her many publications, she is co-editor with Stephen MacKinnon of Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern China.

By presenting new work, much of it by younger and Canadian scholars, this volume, complete with a comprehensive bibliography, offers access to a burgeoning literature on China’s borders from the Ming to the present.

International History Review XXX, 3