| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Liu Xiaoyuan. Reins of Liberation: An Entangled History of Mongolian Independence, Chinese Territoriality, and Great Power Hegemony, 1911–1950. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 2006. Pp. xxvii, 474. $65.00.
Liu Xiaoyuan's dense but thought-provoking volume focuses on the Mongolia Question in Chinese politics in the first half of the twentieth century and its connection to China's search for a national and geopolitical identity. It is an essential tome for contemporary Chinese historians as well as those who follow Mongolia, not only because it throws new light on the period, but also because it offers a new paradigm to analyze the Chinese communist drive for national sovereignty. Liu exposes the imperial foundation of both Nationalist and Communist China's relationship with its Mongolian minority as China shook off colonialism and transformed into a modern national state. He analyzes the paradox of Chinese nationalism that sought its legitimacy in restoring the political and territorial domains of its imperial enemy, the Qing. Complicating the picture was the Mongolian secessionist movement after the fall of the dynasty, which challenged China's sense of territoriality and ethnicity.	1
Liu sees the "Outer Mongolian" de facto successful separation from the Chinese heartland as a multilayered inspirational narrative not only for the Inner Mongolians, but also for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres attracted to the internationalist, communist philosophy espoused by the Soviet Union. He references CCP documents in the 1940s that "defined the Mongolian nation as a member of the zhonghua minzu while treating the Mongolian People's Republic (MPR) as its `liberated' half" (p. 109). CCP leaders were confident that the unification of Inner and Outer Mongolia was inevitable and that this unified Mongolian nation would join a Chinese communist federation (pp. 110–111). One of Liu's themes is that Sovietization, not Russification, of the MPR helped keep the Mongolia Question on China's nation-building agenda, because "Soviet leaders unwittingly left the door open for a revolutionary China to reclaim the MPR's allegiance" (p. 24).	. . .

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