Event

Tibet’s incorporation into the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s is a familiar historical event, but why and how did Beijing do it? Speculative answers have been plentiful but empirical investigations can be done only recently. Dr. Xiaoyuan Liu will talk about his most recent book, To the End of Revolution: The Chinese Communist Party and Tibet, 1949-1959, which is the first archive-based study of the subject. The book reveals the thinking, debating, and power maneuvering around the Tibetan question within the inner circles of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from Beijing to Lhasa. Questions explored in the book include how the CCP differed from its Manchu and Nationalist predecessors in dealing with Tibet, how “unique” Tibet was in Mao Zedong’s revolutionary strategy, how “patient” the CCP leadership was when trying to solve the Tibetan question, and so on. In the Cold War years, Tibet was also part of a new “minority relationship” between China and the United States. In the remaining of his talk, Dr. Liu will briefly discuss his current research project on how the supposedly domestic issue of ethnic or racial minorities in the Chinese and the American societies entered the two powers’ ideological and geopolitical maneuverings.

Xiaoyuan Liu is David Dean 21st Century Professor of Asian Studies and Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Prior to UVA, he held visiting and permanent positions at University of Chicago, State University of New York, Harvard University, and Iowa State University. He earned a doctoral degree in history from the University of Iowa and was a Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Foundation Fellow and an Asian Policy Studies Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He has published several books, including A Partnership for Disorder: China, the United States, and Their Policies for the Postwar Disposition of the Japanese Empire, 1941–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Frontier Passages: Ethnopolitics and the Rise of Chinese Communism, 1921–1945 (Stanford University Press and the Wilson Center Press, 2004), Reins of Liberation: An Entangled History of Mongolian Independence, Chinese Territoriality, and Great Power Hegemony, 1911–1950 (Stanford University Press and the Wilson Center Press, 2006), Recast All Under Heaven: Revolution, War, Diplomacy and Frontier China in the 20th Century (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010),《边疆中国：二十世纪周边暨民族关系史述》(Frontier China: twentieth-century peripheral and interethnic relations) (The Chinese University Press, 2016), and To the End of Revolution: The Chinese Communist Party and Tibet, 1949-1959 (Columbia University Press, 2020).