Frontier Fieldwork: Building a Nation in China's Borderlands, 1919-45

by Andres Rodriguez

Overview

How early-twentieth-century fieldwork put the Sino-Tibetan borderlands at the center of China’s nation-making process.

The center may hold, but borders can fray. Frontier Fieldwork explores the work of social scientists, agriculturists, photographers, students, and missionaries who took to the field on China’s southwestern border at a time when foreign political powers were contesting China’s claims over its frontiers. In the early twentieth century, when the threat of imperialism loomed large in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, these fieldworkers undertook a nation-building exercise to unite a disparate, multi-ethnic population at the periphery of the country. Drawing on Chinese and Western materials, Andres Rodriguez exposes the transformative power of the fieldworkers’ efforts, which went beyond creating new forms of political action and identity. His incisive study demonstrates that fieldwork placed China’s margins at the center of its nation-making process and race to modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780774867566
Publisher:	University of British Columbia Press
Publication date:	07/19/2023
Series:	Contemporary Chinese Studies
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Andres Rodriguez is a lecturer in modern Chinese history at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1 Soldiers and Scholars on the Frontier
2 Missionary Explorers in the Field: The West China Border Research Society, 1922–37
3 Frontier Fever: Reporting from the Field
4 Chinese Anthropologists at War: Frontier Reconstruction in the Field, 1937–45
5 Service in the Field: Wartime Students and the Frontier, 1940–45
Conclusion
Glossary; Notes; Bibliography; Index