Zentrum für Ostasienwissenschaften Workshop: Between Empires and Revolutions: The Sino-Burma Borderlands Reconsidered

This workshop reimagines the Sino-Burma borderlands as a vital space where cartographic negotiations, transnational reform movements, revolutionary struggles, and religious mobilization converged across the long twentieth century. Moving beyond state-centric narratives, we explore how diverse actors—diplomats, diaspora intellectuals, communist volunteers, and Buddhist communities—shaped territorial imagination, contested identities, and forged unexpected connections that continue to resonate today.

The workshop consists of four presentations:

• Mapping the Sino-Burmese Borderlands: Qing Territorial Claims and the Circulation of Cartographic Knowledge in the late Nineteenth Century (Prof. Dr. Eric Vanden Bussche, Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan)
• Taw Sein Ko, Li Zhuchi, and the ‘Rangoon Society for Broad Equipment with Knowledge’: Burma and Political Reform in Early Twentieth-Century China (Dr. Egas Bender de Moniz Bandeira, Assistant Professor at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg & Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Theory)
• The Buddhist Battlefield: Centering Transculturation in the Sino-Burma Borderlands during World War II (Dalu Zhong, PhD Candidate at Heidelberg University)
• Whose Revolution, and for Whom? Chinese Youth, Overseas Chinese, and the Crisis of Identity in the Burmese Communists Armed Struggle (Dr. Ning Zhang, Research Associate at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and a Visiting Fellow of the Göttingen branch of Worldmaking project)