Asymmetrical Neighbors

Enze Han is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include ethnic politics in China, China's relations with Southeast Asia, and the politics of state formation in the borderland area between China, Myanmar, and Thailand. He is the author of Contestation and Adaptation: The Politics of National Identity in China.

• AcknowledgementsList of AbbreviationsNotes on Transliterations and ReferencesChapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: The Neighborhood Effect of State and Nation BuildingChapter 3: The Historical Pattern of State Formation in Upland Southeast AsiaChapter 4: Spill-over of the Chinese Civil War and the Militarization of the BorderlandChapter 5: Communist Revolutions at the BorderlandChapter 6: Dynamics of Trans-boundary Economic FlowsChapter 7: Comparative Nation Building across the Borderland AreaChapter 8: Continual Contestations at the China-Myanmar BorderChapter 9: ConclusionNotesChinese BibliographyThai BibliographyBurmese BibliographyEnglish BibliographyIndex

Han has given readers a timely, up-to-date study of state-building in the China-Myanmar-Thailand borderland zone. This text is especially interesting as the author provides a new understanding of this complex borderland in the modern era, a process that illustrates how deeply intertwined China is with its neighbors Myanmar and Thailand. Han's approach is a welcome shift from the traditional area studies method of treating each country separately, facilitated further by his distinction of state- and nation-building as different but interrelated processes most affected by cross-border dynamics, what Han calls the "neighborhood effect". Specialists will appreciate the author's use of sources in multiple languages, while general readers will welcome how this highly accessible account makes sense of a complex geographic, political, and ethnic context.