A Frontier Made Lawless

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the region of Liangshan in southwest China was plagued by violence. Indigenous Nuosu communities clashed with Han migrants, the Qing and Republican states, and local warlords. The first English-language history of Liangshan, A Frontier Made Lawless challenges the view that ongoing violence was the result of population pressures, opium production, and the growth of local paramilitary groups. Instead, Joseph Lawson argues that the conflict resulted from the lack of a common framework for dealing with property disputes, compounded by the repeated destabilization of the region by turmoil elsewhere in China.

In the first Western language history of Liangshan, Joseph Lawson argues that the region was not inherently violent but made violent by turmoil elsewhere in China.

An Ugly Place To Die There's nothing pretty about Mexico in 1914. On the verge of a bloody civil war that's spiraling out of control, it's no place for hotheads or weak hearts--a place where only real men survive. . .if they're lucky. As an officer for the U.S. War Department, Myles Adams knows all about keeping a cool head. And he's just the man who can help his former partner-in-arms Stewart Cook rescue his soon-to-be fiancée, Alexia Garcia, from the rebel forces. But this is a country where a man would shoot you as soon as look at you. . . An Even Uglier Place To Live. . . With Alexia safe in hand, the two Americans find themselves in even greater danger. On the run from Jorge Trevino, a ruthless bandito who would kill to have what Myles has--namely the gorgeous Carmen Cologan--these men are about to witness all the horrors that the Mexican frontier has to offer--war, poverty, and human suffering too agonizing to be believed. They'll have to use every drop of courage they have to survive, but in a land with no law and order, sometimes a man has to kill to stay alive. . . "A classic adventure. . .riveting!" --Richard S. Wheeler, Spur Winning author of Vengeance Valley

The centre may hold, but borders can fray. Frontier Fieldwork explores the work of social scientists, agriculturists, photographers, and missionaries who took to the field in China’s southwest at a time when foreign political powers were contesting China’s claims over its frontiers. In the early twentieth century, when the threat of imperialism loomed large in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, these fieldworkers undertook a nation-building exercise to unite a disparate, multi-ethnic population. Andres Rodriguez exposes the transformative power of the fieldworkers’ efforts, which placed China’s margins at the centre of its nation-making process and race to modernity.

What does China’s regional diplomacy tell us about its geopolitical position and ambitions? Yuxing Huang argues that in an environment of numerous regional competitors and alignments, China practises asymmetric statecraft toward its many weaker neighbours. In the South China Sea, it maintains a uniform strategy toward Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia. Whereas in South Asia, it employs selective strategies to maintain the status quo with India and to enhance Pakistan’s position. This perceptive interpretation of the different narratives and paradigms that constitute China’s foreign policy alerts us to the potential future of its diplomatic endeavours in a dramatically changing international environment.

The YWCA arrived in China as a cultural interloper in 1899. How did activist Christian Chinese women maintain their identity and social relevance through the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century? The YWCA in China explores how the Young Women’s Christian Association responded to the needs of Chinese women and society both before and after the 1949 revolution ushered in a communist state. Western secretaries originally defined the Chinese YWCA movement, but successive generations of Chinese leadership localized its Western-defined organizational ethos. Over time, "the Y" became class conscious and progressive as Chinese women transformed it from a vehicle for moral and material uplift to an instrument for social action and an organizational citizen of China. And after 1949, national YWCA leaders supported the Maoist regime because they believed the social goals of the YWCA aligned with Mao’s revolutionary aims. The YWCA in China is a fascinating investigation of the lives, thinking, and action of women whose varied forms of Christian and Chinese identity were buffeted by historical events that moulded their social philosophies.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Canada's prairies were still sparsely populated. Crimes such as horse theft, random murders, and prison escapes were the order of the day, and the North West Mounted Police continued to rely on their horses, their contacts, and their wits to apprehend the culprits. By the mid-1930s, a sea change in technology and police science had changed the game. Major advances in transportation, communications, and sleuthing techniques made crime-solving a new art--but the criminals also had access to the new ways. The US had Bonnie and Clyde, and John Dillinger, but Canada had its fair share of bad apples committing equally vicious crimes: a serial rapist and strangler who most often chose female proprietors of rooming houses as his victims; a father-and-son murder team, tracked by an enterprising detective all the way to Kentucky; and a group of murderous youths who sparked a manhunt across two provinces and a bloody shootout resulting in the deaths of four policemen. These stories offer an intriguing look at the skill, determination, and bravery of Prairie law enforcers as they risked their all to bring ruthless outlaws to justice.