Events
From Soviet Frontier to Chinese Frontier: Northwestern Xinjiang in PRC China, 1949–1963
20 Sep 2018
12:00 – 13:30
USC, 8/F, Tin Ka Ping Building, CUHK
Dr. Sheng Mao, Academia Sinica
Sheng Mao received a PhD degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. His research interests include frontier studies, Cold War history, and comparative history of China and USSR.
Free Admission, HK$40.00 for Lunch
3943 8762/ usc@cuhk.edu.hk
By placing its ethnically distinct borderlands at the forefront of China’s modern history, this talk examines how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attempted to eradicate the Soviet influence over the borderland of Xinjiang and to integrate this region with China proper in the 1950s and 1960s. It shows that the CCP’s strategies of administering this region were shaped by the threat of Soviet territorial ambitions, real or imagined. While previous scholars have usually examined Xinjiang from the perspectives of ethnic policies or human rights, the speaker argues that the relations between the Chinese communist state and its peripheries would better be understood in the context of nation-building than the conflict between communist ideology and liberal ideology.
