The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China by David Eimer

Thousands of miles from Beijing, China reveals itself as far from homogenous: The Independent

From the very first days of republican China in 1911 there has been an official ambivalence towards the non-Han inhabitants of this multi-ethnic empire. The early racial rhetoric of the first president of China, Sun Yat-sen, marginalised them. Yet the nationalists were terrified of the new China breaking apart and were desperate to keep hold of the territories where these “non-Chinese” minorities lived. The Communists who took power in the 1950s adopted the same logically fuzzy strategy.