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Frontier Passages: Ethnopolitics and the Rise of Chinese Communism, 1921-1945

Frontier Passages: Ethnopolitics and the Rise of Chinese Communism, 1921-1945 by Xiaoyuan Liu

Publisher

Woodrow Wilson Center Press with Stanford University Press, 2003

ISBN

0-8047-4960-4 hardcover
Frontier Passages: Ethnopolitics and the Rise of Chinese Communism, 1921-1945 by Xiaoyuan Liu

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In this pathbreaking book, Xiaoyuan Liu establishes the ways in which the history of the Chinese Communist Party was, from the Yan’an period onward, intertwined with the ethnopolitics of the Chinese “periphery.” As a Han-dominated party, the CCP had to adapt to an inhospitable political environment, particularly among the Hui (Muslims) of northwest China and the Mongols of Inner Mongolia. Based on a careful examination of CCP and Soviet Comintern documents only recently available, Liu’s study shows why the CCP found itself unable to follow the Russian Bolshevik precedent of inciting separatism among the non-Han peoples as a stratagem for gaining national power. Rather than swallowing Marxist-Leninist dogma on “the nationalities question,” the CCP took a position closer to that of the Kuomintang, stressing the inclusiveness of the Han-dominated Chinese nation, “Zhonghua Minzu.”

About the Author

Xiaoyuan Liu (Historian)

Xiaoyuan Liu

Former Fellow;
David Dean 21st Century Professor of Asian Studies at Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia

Xiaoyuan Liu is David Dean 21st Century Professor of Asian Studies at Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia, and a specialist in the ethnic frontiers of East Asia in a 20th-century international setting.

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