Liu, Xiaoyuan 1952- (Hsiao-yuan Liu)

PERSONAL:

Born 1952. Education: University of Iowa, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—623 Ross Hall, Department of History, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011. E-mail—xyliu@iastate.edu.

CAREER:

Historian, educator, writer, and editor. Iowa State University, Ames, professor of history.

MEMBER:

American Historical Association, Chinese Historians in the United States, Association for Asian Studies, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Foundation Fellow, 1997-99; Wilson Fellowship in the Asian Program, 2002-03.

WRITINGS:

A Partnership for Disorder: China, the United States, and Their Policies for the Postwar Disposition of the Japanese Empire, 1941-1945, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor, with C.X. George Wei) Chinese Nationalism in Perspective: Historical and Recent Cases, foreword by William C. Kirby, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 2001.

(Editor, with C.X. George Wei) Exploring Nationalisms of China: Themes and Conflicts, foreword by William C. Kirby, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 2002.

(Editor, with Vojtech Mastny) China and Eastern Europe, 1960s-1980s: Proceedings of the International Symposium: Reviewing the History of Chinese-East European Relations from the 1960s to the 1980s, Beijing, 24-26 March 2004, ETH Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland), 2004.

Frontier Passages: Ethnopolitics and the Rise of Chinese Communism, 1921-1945, Woodrow Wilson Center Press (Washington, DC), 2004.

Reins of Liberation: An Entangled History of Mongolian Independence, Chinese Territoriality, and Great Power Hegemony, 1911-1950, Woodrow Wilson Center Press (Washington, DC), 2006.

Contributor to journals, including the Journal of American-East Asian Relations, Newsletter of Modern China Studies, Modern Asian Studies, Inner Asia, and Historical Studies.

SIDELIGHTS:

Xiaoyuan Liu spent much of his youth in Inner Mongolia. As a historian, his primary interests are Chinese nationalism, ethnic conflicts of Chinese Central Asia, Chinese-American Relations, and East Asian international history. In his first book, A Partnership for Disorder: China, the United States, and Their Policies for the Postwar Disposition of the Japanese Empire, 1941-1945, the author explores American-Chinese foreign policy planning in World War II for decolonizing the Japanese Empire and controlling Japan after the war. "Well apprised as to the Chinese checker board complexity of the wartime Asia Pacific theatre, Liu has narrowed his gaze at the wartime American-Chinese relationship, which, with some justification, he claims, has been overlooked in existing historiography," noted Geoffrey C. Gunn in the Journal of Contemporary Asia.

Writing in the book's introduction, the author notes: "The comparative approach of this study is based on the conviction that by juxtaposing the stands of the United States and China on the same set of postwar issues in Asia, new insights can be brought to both the American and Chinese experiences." As a part of this effort, Liu also discusses how Chiang Kai-shek and his Chinese Kuomintang government tried to become an established empire unencumbered by foreign imperialism and interests that had plagued China for years. According to the author, as Chinese nationalism exploded in the 1920s and 1930s, problems arose because of discord between the Kuomintang and communist movements as Japan became more and more aggressive. While Chiang Kai-shek focused on expanding his power, he called on American resources to bolster China's efforts against Japan. In the process, the author reveals how disagreements among the nations in American-Chinese foreign policy planning prevented the two governments from creating an effective partnership, especially since U.S. leaders such as President Franklin Roosevelt came to be suspicious of the Chinese leader. Among the primary disagreements were the role of the Soviet Union and the meaning of Asian nationalism.

"Eventually, American-Chinese cooperation in searching for peace culminated in failure," the author writes in his introduction. "When World II ended, a fragile configuration of international forces emerged in East Asia that consisted principally of stopgap compromises and improvised arrangements among China, the Soviet Union, and the United States. An effective American-Chinese partnership was not an element in the new status quo. Nor did the status quo promise a lasting peace. Although the American-Chinese collaboration in war succeeded in crushing the Japanese Empire, in an American-Chinese-Soviet political triangular relationship for a postwar settlement in East Asia, the link between America and China proved weak and ineffectual."

A Partnership for Disorder received many favorable reviews. "Liu has produced a lucid account based on a wide range of Chinese and American sources," wrote Peter Lowe in the English Historical Review. Sayuri Shimizu wrote in the Historian: "In this impressively researched study of Sino-American relations during World War II, Xiaoyuan Liu refreshingly attributes agency to China and challenges the entrenched interpretation that China, despite its vision of grandeur, was a hopelessly divided and ineffectual belligerent."

Frontier Passages: Ethnopolitics and the Rise of Chinese Communism, 1921-1945, published in 2004, examines how the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was, from the Yan'an period onward, linked with the ethnopolitics of the Chinese "periphery." According to the author, as a Han-dominated party, the CCP had to adapt to a hostile political environment in many places in China but particularly among the Hui Muslims of northwest China and the Mongols of Inner Mongolia. "Frontier Passages is a carefully researched monograph that draws upon a wealth of newly available documents to provide compelling interpretations of the theory and praxis of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with respect to non-Han peoples within and on the borders of an emerging Chinese nation-state," wrote Tina Mai Chen in the Canadian Journal of History.

Commenting in the book's preface that his primary theory is that the CCP obtained "a practical ethnopolitical strategy only after its leading body migrated from Southern China to a border region in the remote northwest," the author goes on to note that his theory "is partially conceived from my own experience." The author adds: "In those years, my co-‘intellectual youths’ and I had to learn how to live in a nomadic Mongolian community after we were temporarily separated from the Han Chinese ethnographic zone. At first glance, my approach may seem to have violated the canon about the objectivity of the discipline of history. Yet, because history cannot be relived, a historian's parallel experience to a historical event or process may help generate some relevant insight."

Using on documents that were previously unavailable, Liu reveals why the CCP was unable to follow the Russian Bolshevik precedent by inciting separatism among the non-Han peoples as a strategy for gaining international power. Liu writes that instead of adopting the Marxist-Leninist dogma on the "nationalities question," in which minority nationalities were incited against the central authority of the Czar, the CCP stressed inclusiveness of the Han-dominated Chinese nation.

Calling Frontier Passages "a well-researched and well-argued volume," American Historical Review contributor Patricia Stranahan went on to note in the same review that the author "presents a thorough and valuable examination of the evolution of CCP ‘ethno-politics’ from its founding in 1921 to the end of the Anti-Japanese War in 1945."

In his next book, Reins of Liberation: An Entangled History of Mongolian Independence, Chinese Territoriality, and Great Power Hegemony, 1911-1950, Liu examines the "Mongolian question" in Chinese politics in relation to national identity during the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to looking at how the issue was handled at the local level, the author explores "the interaction during the Cold War, the Chinese Civil War and the ‘minority’ peoples' struggle for autonomy," as Liu noted in an article on the Iowa State University College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Web site. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Lucian W. Pye commented that this historical aspect of Chinese politics concerning Mongolia "has not received the attention that it probably deserves." Pye went on to write in the same review that the author explores it "in great detail."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Liu, Xiaoyuan, Frontier Passages: Ethnopolitics and the Rise of Chinese Communism, 1921-1945, Woodrow Wilson Center Press (Washington, DC), 2004.

Liu, Xiaoyuan, A Partnership for Disorder: China, the United States, and Their Policies for the Postwar Disposition of the Japanese Empire, 1941-1945, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, February, 1998, review of A Partnership for Disorder, p. 255; April, 2005, Patricia Stranahan, review of Frontier Passages, p. 453; December, 2007, Alicia Campi, review of Reins of Liberation: An Entangled History of Mongolian Independence, Chinese Territoriality, and Great Power Hegemony, 1911-1950, pp. 1519-1520.

Asian Ethnicity, June, 2007, Michael Clark, review of Reins of Liberation, pp. 191-192.

Asian Studies Review, June, 2008, David Brophy, review of Reins of Liberation, pp. 261-262.

Canadian Journal of History, autumn, 2006, Tina Mai Chen, review of Frontier Passages, p. 424.

China Journal, Volume 58, Colin Mackerras, review of Reins of Liberation, pp. 258-259.

Choice, April, 1997, review of A Partnership for Disorder, p. 1395; July-August, 2004, V.J. Symons, review of Frontier Passages, p. 2101; August, 2007, V.J. Symons, review of Reins of Liberation, p. 2157.

Diplomatic History, summer, 1998, Youli Sun, review of A Partnership for Disorder, p. 477.

English Historical Review, April, 1998, Peter Lowe, review of A Partnership for Disorder, p. 534.

Foreign Affairs, March-April, 2007, Lucian W. Pye, review of Reins of Liberation, p. 181.

Historian, winter, 1999, Sayuri Shimizu, review of A Partnership for Disorder, p. 445.

International History Review, August, 1997, Richard T. Phillips, review of A Partnership for Disorder, p. 632; September, 2005, Odoric Y.K. Wou, review of Frontier Passages, p. 649; September, 2007, Douglas Howland, review of Reins of Liberation, p. 632.

Journal of American History, June, 1997, Odd Arne Westad, review of A Partnership for Disorder, p. 294.

Journal of Asian Studies, February, 1997, Leonard H.D. Gordon, review of A Partnership for Disorder, p. 155.

Journal of Contemporary Asia, October, 1998, Geoffrey C. Gunn, review of A Partnership for Disorder, p. 539.

Pacific Affairs, fall, 1997, Colin Green, review of A Partnership for Disorder, p. 425; fall, 2004, Henrietta Harrison, review of Frontier Passages, p. 565.

Pacific Historical Review, February, 1998, Judith Munro-Leighton, review of A Partnership for Disorder, p. 148.

Reference & Research Book News, May, 2004, review of Frontier Passages, p. 155; February 1, 2007, review of Reins of Liberation.

ONLINE

Iowa State University College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Web site,http://www.las.iastate.edu/ (May 19, 2008), "The Mongolian Question," profile of author.

Iowa State University Department of History Web site,http://www.history.iastate.edu/ (May 19, 2008), faculty profile of author.