Invading Inner Mongolia’s painful past
TOKYO — To Sakura Christmas, borders are where the action is. They are messy places where worlds collide: people, cultures, sometimes armies. And the symbols of change that they signify tell us something important about the values of the shifting societies, about what is retained, what is lost, and how hard people fight to retain what they have. Borders also say much about the new societies that emerge from tumult. “I’m very much interested in cultural encounters and the meetings between different sorts of people and societies,” Christmas said. “Some of the issues I work on now — ethnic tensions, land rights, informal imperialism — still resonate today, especially in China.” Christmas, a doctoral student from Harvard’s History Department, is wrapping up work in the archives and libraries of Tokyo and headed for 10 months of study in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region in northern China that spans much of China’s northern border. Christmas’...