Tibet and Nationalist China’s Frontier
Intrigues and Ethnopolitics 1928-49
Hsiao-Ting Lin, 2006, Prologue, p. 3-6, 9-11.
Shen Zonglian, our former Representative to Tibet, has been teaching in Lynchburg College (VA) since the government retreated to Taiwan. He is both capable and reliable, with a good command of both Chinese and English, and he is able to use the Tibetan language. While I was serving as Foreign Minister I used to entrust him with matters of contacting the Dalai Lama’s followers … My opinion is that now we should secretly dispatch Shen to India, and make contact with [the Dalai Lama’s brother] Gyalo Thundrup who is now in Kalimpong. After Shen has explored the whole situation more clearly in India, he may come to Taiwan to give you a firsthand report … It is better that Shen should not come to Taiwan [before he goes to India], and for the time being his secret contact with us should be kept completely confidential … In your future instructions I beg your Excellency to use “Mary” as nickname for Shen, “Li Da” for the Dalai Lama, and “Hua Sheng” for Gyalo Thundrup. Continue reading…
From 1945 to 1947, Muriel Kitagawa wrote numerous articles exhorting the Japanese Canadian community to respond to injustice. She believed that if those who advocated the denial of Nikkei rights remained unopposed, other groups would soon feel the sting of oppression, with the wholesale curtailment of their human rights. Although the leading Canadian and American public advocates for the Nikkei were almost exclusively white males from religious or professional backgrounds, they were not alone. American and Canadian Nikkei did not sit passively while others defended their rights. Instead, they typically expressed their activism through the organizations that represented them: the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and, in Canada, the Japanese Canadian Citizens League (JCCL), the Japanese Canadian Citizens Council (JCCC), and the Japanese Canadian Citizens for Democracy (JCCD). The Nikkei also conveyed their views through their community publications. In the United States, the Pacific Citizen, the so-called mouthpiece of the JACL, was perhaps the most important of these. In Canada, the New Canadian, initially Vancouver-based, voiced the opinions of the JCCL; the Toronto-based Nisei Affairs promulgated the largely Nisei views of the JCCD. These newspapers acted as important vessels for the Nikkei in North America, facilitating awareness of developments in both nations.
What constitutes an “Asian Canadian”? Can the concept represent the broad spectrum of individuals and communities it is literally supposed to represent? What exactly does it mean to be “Asian Canadian” culturally? Conventional notions of ethnicity, which emphasize one’s cultural heritage, cannot adequately explain self-fashioned identities such as “Asian Canadian” or “Asian American.” Since its conception in the late 1960s Asian American Studies has conducted extensive research on the formations of Asian American communities and, in particular, on the formation of Asian American identity. Without a specific institutional space similar to Asian American Studies, Canadian studies of the Asian population in Canada have been restricted by single-discipline approaches and narrow conceptual frameworks. Asian Canadians as objects of study are largely treated as distinctive, separate ethnic groups, and their identities are analyzed mostly in terms of their maintenance vis-à-vis the dominant culture. Literary scholars’ recent engagement with “Asian Canadian literature” and “Asian North American literature” indicates a breakaway from conventional conceptual frames and approaches.
