WHAT HOLDS CHINA TOGETHER?

Not coincidentally, China’s ongoing crises in Hong Kong and Xinjiang are at its unstable and ill-defined borderlands. In this essay for the New York Review,

I look at how China inherited its borders and why it’s been unable to come up with workable values or a national narrative to hold the country together. 

The article is paywalled but you can get a trial subscription or ChinaFile’s NYRB archive–the magazine makes its China-related content there free after a month.