(颱風取消)Mediating Feuds and Making Minorities: Frontier Territorialization and Minoritization on the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands of Late Republican and Early Maoist China (調解紛爭與製造少數民族：1940至1960年代中國漢藏邊緣的邊境領土化與少數民族化)

日期： 2024/07/24

時間： 15:00~17:00

地點： 檔案館第三會議室

主持人： 喬舒亞‧弗里曼教授（中研院近史所助研究員）

主講人：魏本岩Benno Weiner教授（卡內基美隆大學歷史系副教授）

主辦單位： 西學與中國研究群

Abstract:
In early 1941, the Kuomintang dispatched a well-known scholar-official, Gao Yihan, to investigate a “grassland dispute” between two Tibetan chiefdoms on the Qinghai-Gansu border. As Gao quickly discovered, the Gyelwo-Gengya feud was part of a much larger contest put into motion by the collapse of Manchu Qing power and competition between a host of regional actors to shape the post-imperial order. It also pitted statist desires to create and enforce bounded political-legal jurisdiction against the mobile nature of pastoral society and the norms of monastic/religious authority that often stretched across state boundaries and into sometimes distant, non-contiguous communities. A decade later, state media touted the Chinese Communist Party’s purported success in finally resolving the Gyelwo-Gengya feud to be one of its foremost achievements in “nationality work” during the early period of the PRC. This paper examines efforts by the late-Republican and early-PRC states to mediate grassland disputes as key components in state-making processes designed to territorially and epistemologically discipline the Sino-Tibetan frontier according to the demands of progressively more powerful and interventionist state formations. It also suggests that the state’s inability to eliminate these types of disputes is an avenue through which to measure the incomplete nature of these transformations.

Introduction:
Benno Weiner is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. He is author of the Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier and co-editor of Contested Memories: Tibetan History under Mao Retold. His most recent article, “‘This Absolutely is not a Hui Rebellion!’ The Ethnopolitics of Great Han Chauvinism in Early Maoist China,” was published in the October 2023 issue of the journal Twentieth Century China.