Modern Chinas Ethnic Frontiers: A Journey to the West by Hsiao-ting Lin

Author:Hsiao-ting Lin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Built Environment
Publisher: T & F Books UK
Published: 2010-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

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6

Reconfiguring ethnic frontier territoriality

The summit, rising prestige, and grand planning

In the fall of 1943, when Chiang Kai-shek was invited to meet with Allied leaders at the Cairo Summit and stood recognized as one of the Big Four, the Nationalist regime had every reason to believe that its prestige and influence had reached historic heights. In January of that year, Chongqing signed treaties on an equal basis with the United States and Britain, its two major Allied powers, who officially relinquished the privileges they had enjoyed in China during the past century, the most important of which included extraterritoriality and the rights in China’s “treaty ports.” At the Cairo Summit, Chiang Kai-shek and his top aides secured Allied support for recovering China’s lost territories of Manchuria, Taiwan and the Pescadores from the Japanese.1 These developments were universally recognized to be outstanding achievements for the Nationalists, allowing China to recover much of the status it had lost over the past century. At this juncture, it seemed that the pendulum of the Nationalist ethnopolitics had swung back from pragmatism to its grandiose, idealistic end.

Ultimately, China’s bitter war with the Japanese extended the Nationalists’ influence westward, thus giving them an unexpected opportunity to reinforce their hitherto tenuous control over China’s westernmost frontiers. By the time of the Cairo Summit, Nationalist ground and air forces had been deployed in the strategically vital Gansu Corridor and eastern Xinjiang, and the resignation of Xinjiang autocrat Sheng Shicai was only a matter of time. As international circumstances began to turn in favor of Nationalist China, confident officials in Chongqing began to plan postwar China’s ethnic frontier territoriality and new policies of national security and border defense. It was against this backdrop that Chiang Kai-shek’ treatise, China’s Destiny, elicited mixed reactions both domestically and internationally. Chiang depicted a “physical configuration” of postwar China that would form an integral defense system. According to Chiang, peripheral areas of the system including Manchuria, Taiwan, Inner and Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, were all strategically essential for national defense. As supreme leader of Nationalist China, Chiang argued that to cut off any of these territories would gravely endanger China’s security.2

Chiang’s confidence and optimism rose after his inspection tour of Chinese western border provinces in the summer of 1942. Upon completing the tour, Chiang architected an ideal border security landscape for postwar China in his personal diary. In the west, he wrote, the Tian Shan and Kunlun ranges in Xinjiang, shielded by the Altai and Himalayan ranges in the outer areas respectively in the north and the south of that province, should be developed into new defensive bases. In the east, Manchuria and Taiwan should be returned to the Chinese control with the exception of allowing the formerly Japanese naval and air bases in the two territories to be used by the United States as a way of strengthening China’s postwar relationship with Washington.3 In retrospect, Chiang’s tour and his spatial imaginary of the nation that was then articulated in China’s Destiny,

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