Unbounded Loyalty investigates how frontiers worked before the modern nation-state was invented. The perspective is that of the people in the borderlands who shifted their allegiance from the post-Tang regimes in North China to the new Liao empire (907-1125). Naomi Standen offers new ways of thinking about borders, loyalty, and identity in premodern China. She takes as her starting point the recognition that, at the time, China did not exist as a coherent entity, neither politically nor geographically, neither ethnically nor ideologically. Political borders were not the fixed geographical...
Unbounded Loyalty investigates how frontiers worked before the modern nation-state was invented. The perspective is that of the people in the borde...
For westerners, China's history is often reduced to a choice between timeless Confucian ideals or incomprehensible barbarisms such as footbinding or mass slaughter, fueled by generalizations such as "China has five thousand years of history," "China was a Confucian society," "Chinese women were victims," "China is a communist country," and many more. But China is now too globally important to allow such oversimplifications to continue unchallenged, and this engaging and deeply knowledgeable volume counters them vigorously. In concise and accessible style, the contributors scrutinize a range...
For westerners, China's history is often reduced to a choice between timeless Confucian ideals or incomprehensible barbarisms such as footbinding or m...
