Securing China S Northwest Frontier

David Tobin analyses how Chinese nation-building shapes identity and security dynamics between Han and Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Xinjiang is the ‘pivot of Asia’, where the frontiers of China, Tibet, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia approach each other. The growing Uyghur demand for a separate homeland and continuing violence in Xinjiang have brought this region into the focus of national and international attention. With Xinjiang becoming the hub of trans-Asian trade and traffic , and also due to its rich energy resources, Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang are poised to assert their ethno-political position, thereby posing serious challenge to China’s authority in the region. This book offers a new perspective on the region, with a focus on social, economic and political developments in Xinjiang in modern and contemporary times. Drawing on detailed analyses by experts on Xinjiang from India, Central Asia, Russia, Taiwan and China, this book presents a coherent, concise and rich analysis of ethnic relations, Uyghur resistance, China’s policy in Xinjiang and its economic relations with its Central Asian neighbours. It is of interest to those studying in Chinese and Central Asian politics and society, International Relations and Security Studies.

This groundbreaking book provides the first comprehensive analysis of Ming China’s pursuit of national security along its 1,700 miles of northern frontier. Drawing on a wealth of original sources, John Dardess vividly portrays how Ming China’s emperors, officials, and commanders in the field thought, argued, and made decisions in real time as they worked to defend their country. Despite common perceptions of the central role of the so-called Great Wall of China, Dardess convincingly shows that the wall was but a minor piece in a much bigger effort to battle Tatar looting. Dardess immerses readers in the day-to-day world of the Ming as he explores the question of how leaders kept their country safe over the 276 years the dynasty ruled.

This book provides a comparative study of the strategies of great powers in the Asia-Pacific, namely, the United States, China and Japan, known as the Pacific Three. It examines the evolution of each power’s strategic thinking and analyzes the three powers’ respective foreign policies and internal debates in the policymaking process. It analyzes the three countries’ conflict and cooperation from past to the present. It stresses the importance of the interactions between internal and external factors in the policymaking process, and emphasizes the great significance of these interactions for international relations theory. For example, it highlights the role of strategic advisers in think tanks and government agencies in the United States, Japan's informal and balanced policymaking process, and the impact of traditional culture in China, especially Confucianism, and the part played by Chinese think tanks.

In Strategic Asia 2012-13: China’s Military Challenge, leading experts assess and forecast the impact of China’s growing military capabilities. What are China’s strategic aims? What are the challenges and opportunities facing the United States? How is the region responding to China’s military power and to the U.S. policy of “strategic rebalancing”?

This handbook offers a collection of cutting-edge essays on all aspects of strategic culture by a mix of international scholars, consultants, military officers, and policymakers. The volume explicitly addresses the analytical conundrums faced by scholars who wish to employ or generate strategic cultural insights, with substantive commentary on defining and scoping strategic culture, analytic frameworks and approaches, levels of analysis, sources of strategic culture, and modalities of change in strategic culture. The chapters engage strategic culture at the civilizational, regional, supra-national, national, non-state actor, and organizational levels. The volume is divided into five thematic parts, which will appeal to both students who are new to the subject and scholars who wish to incorporate strategic culture into their toolbox of analytical techniques. Part I assesses the evolving theoretical strengths and weaknesses of the field. Part II lays out elements of the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field, including sources and components of strategic culture. Part III presents a number of national strategic cultural profiles, representing the state of contemporary strategic culture scholarship. Part IV addresses the utility of strategic culture for practitioners and scholars. Part V summarizes the key theoretical and practical insights offered by the volume’s contributors. This handbook will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, defense studies, security studies, and international relations in general, as well as to professional practitioners.

"Increasingly powerful, prosperous, and authoritarian, China under the leadership of Xi Jinping has become a more intense competitor across the globe-economically, technologically, diplomatically, militarily, and in seeking to influence people's hearts and minds. But what does China ultimately want in the world? This timely and illuminating book explains the fundamental motivations driving the country's more dynamic, assertive, and risk-taking approach to the world under Xi Jinping. With original and perceptive analysis, Daring to Struggle focuses on six increasingly important interests for today's China-legitimacy, sovereignty, wealth, power, leadership, and ideas-and details how the determined pursuit of them at home and abroad profoundly shapes its foreign relationships, contributing to a more contested strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. The book offers rich insights on the increasing role of the Chinese Communist Party in the country's international affairs, the looming risks of conflict in areas of contested sovereignty around China's periphery, Beijing's dramatically changing approach to foreign economic relations, its expanding use of economic leverage and military coercion, China's aspirations to greater leadership in global governance, and the well-resourced promotion of its ideas, image and influence across the world. This lively and accessible perspective on China's global ambitions draws from authoritative Chinese-language sources. The resulting analysis will inform policymakers, executives, China watchers, students, and other globally engaged citizens seeking to understand China's ambitions and how our governments and societies can respond"--

Presenting the life stories of ten Uyghur women, this book applies the techniques of narrative analysis to explore their changing worldviews and conversions to political engagement. Born and raised in East Turkestan/Xinjiang in the 1970s-90s, each woman, after personally experiencing incidents of ethnic discrimination, chose to leave China before 2005. Settling in a western country, they strive to become the voice of the Turkic people who are silenced or detained in the “re-education” camps. The narratives are based on interviews conducted online between 2020 and 2021, collected as a form of oral history. The book focuses on the escalating tensions, turning points experienced in their youth, and the religious, political and psychological factors that prompted their transformations in self-identity, ideology and the emergence of a new Uyghur–Muslim feminism. Through the women's stories, the book describes how women activists are navigating the competing reality constructions of the dire situation in the Uyghur Homeland and actively restorying a genocide to bring about social and political change.