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The Mongolian question
Xiaoyuan Liu has returned to a place of his youth for his latest
book on ethnic groups in China
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Six years Xiaoyuan Liu spent in Inner Mongolia.
Six years where as a youth, he saw the "massive persecution of many
Inner Mongols" by the Mao Zedong's "Cultural Revolution."
Yet, despite his personal history with that region of the world, Liu,
now an associate professor of history at Iowa State University, didn’t
decide to focus his research efforts on Inner Mongolia. Instead he turned
his attention to other historical topics in China.
His first book, which was published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press,
dealt with U.S. and Chinese relations in World War II.
A publisher is reviewing a second book on the development of the Chinese
Communist Partys ethnopolitics.
Lately however, Liu's interests have taken him to China's frontier and
back to Inner Mongolia.
"My research in this direction has been to study China's foreign
and frontier affairs," Liu said. "But I didn't decide to do
anything on Inner Mongolia until after my first book was published."
Liu's research has attracted the attention of the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars and the Elliott School of International Affairs of
the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He has been awarded
a prestigious Wilson Fellowship in the Asian Program for the 2002-03 academic
year.
The Wilson Center awards approximately 25 residential fellowships annually
to individuals with outstanding project proposals in a broad range of
the social sciences and humanities on national and/or international issues.
The project topics have to intersect with questions of public policy or
provide the historical and/or cultural framework to illumine policy issues
of contemporary importance.
The intense competition for the fellowships is open to scholars both in
the U.S. and throughout the world.
Liu's accepted proposal is "The 'Mongolian Question" and the
Genesis of China's Multiethnic System: A Historical Inquiry." He
plans to write his third book on this subject, specifically in the early
Cold War timeframe.
"I'm studying the interaction during the Cold War, the Chinese Civil
War and the 'minority’ peoples' struggle for autonomy," Liu
said.
Inner Mongolia was one of these "ethnic frontier" regions of
China. Before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China
(PRC) in 1949, these frontier regions had either developed strong secessionist
movements or had already achieved "de facto" separation from
China.
"Their relatively peaceful reintegration with China under the Chinese
Communist Party cries for understanding," Liu said. "The conventional
history of post-World War II China has largely neglected the developments
in China's northern and western frontiers."
Liu's "Mongolian question" sheds light on the making of the
PRC multiethnic structure, one that he says has an important significance
to contemporary Asia-related policy issues.
"The issue has existed ever since the disintegration of the multinational
Soviet Union, but its priority in policymakers' agendas has been on the
rise steadily," he says. "By presenting a comprehensive analysis
of the simultaneously international, national and regional process which
temporarily 'settled' the 'Mongolian question,' my study clarifies the
genesis of the contemporary multiethnic system of China."
Liu says the case of Inner Mongolia indicates that along China's ethnic
frontiers a "sub-national" group's "natural" propensity
for territorial autonomy or even secession tends to be balanced or restrained
by many factors. These include the character of the group’s historical,
cultural and economic ties with China's majority population.
Also the policy behaviors of the U.S. and the Soviet Union are case studies
that show how decisive international forces may influence China’s
national development by becoming entangled positively or negatively in
China's ethnopolitics.
Around LAS
September 23 to October 6, 2002
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