Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and Their Disputed Frontier

This work could not have been completed without the help of many persons. I am particularly grateful to the many devoted teachers who, over the years, taught me how to read modern and classical Chinese, grass writing, Russian, and Japanese. Without their help, the documentary material on which this work is based would have been inaccessible to me. In particular, I would like to thank Pei-yi Wu for his infinite patience and willingness to share his erudition in a year-long individual tutorial, and also for his comments on a draft of this work; Yin Shih-tsung, for helping me decipher grass writing in a year-long individual tutorial at the Taipei Language Institute; and the late Michael Kreps for his imaginative and accessible presentation of Russian literature in three seminars at the graduate program of the Middlebury College Russian School. Finally, I am indebted to dozens of language teachers at the Middlebury College Russian School master's program, the Inter-University Center for Chinese Language Studies in Taipei, the Taipei Language Institute, and International Christian University in Tokyo. My career will rest in large measure on the linguistic foundation that these people were instrumental in helping to lay.

In addition, I would like to thank those who helped me at various stages of my education. For the intellectual foundation, I am indebted to John P. LeDonne who has set such a high standard in his own books and has also taken the time to ferret out errors in a draft of the current work; to my undergraduate Special Concentration advisers, the late Karl W. Deutsch and Stanley Hoffmann, who encouraged me to pursue my own research regardless of how far removed from the current trends in scholarship; to Richard S. Wortman for greatly improving a draft of my dissertation; and to Stephen F. Cohen for taking the time both to develop a fascinating seminar on Soviet history and to write detailed comments on my seminar paper, which enabled me to go on to write much improved papers thereafter. For help in navigating through graduate school, I am grateful to Madeleine Zelin, who kindly agreed to be my dissertation adviser, even though my topic was far removed from her own specialty, and who tirelessly wrote so many letters of recommendation. For reading drafts of the present work, in part or in full, I would like to thank, in addition to the persons specified above, Thomas Christensen, John B. Paine III, Mary E. M. Snitow, Charlotte F. Wunderlich, and Yu Miin-ling. I am also grateful to Yu Miin-ling for providing me with various Chinese sources. Nathanael V. Evans and Randy S. Harden created the maps. At M. E. Sharpe, I greatly benefited from the help of Ana Erlic, Kimberly E. Herald, Paricia A. Kolb, Angela Piliouras, and Debra E.

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