Historians of China have explored the history of China’s borderlands, Han migration to the peripheries, as well as the expansion of state power. This presentation uses the lens of settler colonialism to explore how non-Han communities adopted Han cultural, religious, and educational institutions to strengthen their group identities and social control, challenging the stereotypical model of assimilation and Han dominance in China’s border regions.
Diana Duan is assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University. She is an expert on China and Southeast Asia, focusing on borderlands, ethnic economy, culture, migration, environmental history, and the history of the Chinese Communist Party. Her book Contingent Loyalties: State Agents in the Yunnan Borderlands (1856–1911) was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2024.
Part of our winter 2024 lecture series, "Authoritarianism and Its Discontents."