Xiaoyuan Liu is professor of history at Iowa State University. He has worked on the issue of modern China's territories and ethnic frontiers for more than a decade. He is the author of Reins of Liberation: An Entangled History of Mongolian Independence, Chinese Territoriality, and Great Power Hegemony, 1911 - 1950 (Stanford UP, 2006), Frontier Passages: Ethnopolitics and the Rise of Chinese Communism (Stanford UP, 2004), and A Partnership for Disorder: China, the United States, and Their Policies for the Postward Disposition of the Japanese Empire, 1941 - 1945 (Cambridge UP, 1996 and 2002). He is a leading scholar in the field of East Asian international history and a pioneer historian who provides fresh paradigms and opens new grounds.