China Studies Research Centre, La Trobe University
2:30 – 4:00pm Thursday 16 May
2019
Room 318, Education 2 (ED2), La Trobe University
Early last century, the Kham region was a borderland on the cusp of political and societal transformation. Situated between Sichuan Province and central Tibet, the Kham region was also at the centre of a local struggle for authority between Chengdu and Lhasa, a struggle with regional and imperial implications. This presentation explores the reorientation of imperial frontier settlement policies in Kham region in the early twentieth century, the role of Sichuanese settlers in establishing Chinese authority throughout the borderland, and projecting it to the global community.
About the Speaker
Dr. Scott Relyea is a Fulbright U.S. Scholar and senior visiting scholar in the School of History and Culture at Sichuan University in Chengdu, PRC. An Assistant professor of Asian history at Appalachian State University in Boon, N.C., USA, he is in the midst of a two-year research visit to China, funded by a Fulbright grant and a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in China Studies. A historian of late imperial and modern China, Dr. Relyea’s research centres on state-building and nationalism in the southwest borderlands of China and the global circulation of concepts of statecraft and international law in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.