Union College Union | Digital Works Honors Theses Student Work 6-2014 Maintaining the Mandate: China's Territorial Consolidation MarcAnthony Parrino Union College - Schenectady, NY Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalworks.union.edu/theses Part of the Asian Studies Commons Recommended Citation Parrino, MarcAnthony, "Maintaining the Mandate: China's Territorial Consolidation" (2014). Honors Theses. 574. https://digitalworks.union.edu/theses/574 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Work at Union | Digital Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of Union | Digital Works. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Parrino 1 Maintaining the Mandate: China’s Territorial Consolidation By MarcAnthony Parrino ************** Submitted in partial fulfillment Of the requirements for Honors in the Department of Political Science UNION COLLEGE March 14, 2014 Parrino 2 Table of Contents 1. Introduction 4 2. Century of Humiliation 12 3. Case Studies of China’s Border Wars 28 4. Xinjiang 39 5. Tibet 57 6. Hong Kong and Macau 74 7. Taiwan 79 8. South and East China Seas 101 9. Conclusion 113 10. Works Cited 124 Parrino 3 Parrino 4 Introduction: This thesis constitutes an attempt to better comprehend and understand the People’s Republic of China (PRC) effort to consolidate territory it believed rightfully belonged to China and its implications moving forward. China is a fascinating, complicated and confusing country. It is the most populated country in the world with 1,349,585,8381 people, 91.5% of whom are ethnic Han Chinese. The remaining 8.5% of the population is split amongst 55 ethnic minorities.2 While 8.5% may seem like a small number, 8.5% of 1,349,585,838 is just under 115 million people.