Modern China Seminar: “O Frontiers! The Reinvention of modern Chinese territoriality”

Speaker: Shellen Wu, Associate Professor, University of Tennessee

Abstract: Efforts by military officers, politicians, social scientists, and historians from across the political spectrum to bolster the Chinese frontiers from the Northeast to the Northwest and the Southwest helped define the territorial extent of the modern Chinese state. In doing so, they used the language of science and modernization and liberally borrowed from and adapted globally circulating ideas about frontier development. An examination of these reclamation efforts on the frontier reflected how the spatialities of empire and nation overlapped in complex ways as both Japanese officials bent on expanding the empire and nationalist Chinese officers who sought to reinforce border defenses resorted to the language of science and modernization to define supposedly “blank spaces” on the map.