Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1973. / Typewritten.

This Master’s thesis examines the reasons for the failure of the Soviet advisers’ mission in Chinese warlord Feng Yuxiang’s army in 1925-1927. The USSR had strategic interests in Northern China and needed an ally to help it promote them. Soviet leadership chose prominent Chinese political and military leader Feng Yuxiang as one of its main allies in Northern China and sent advisers to help him strengthen and indoctrinate his army. This mission’s goals were to establish close relations with Feng and his officers, to influence the organizational and military planning of his army and to promote Soviet nationalist and ideological interests. However, the Soviet advisers did not succeed. This thesis focuses on the three main reasons of the mission’s failure: the advisers’ group’s political, ideological and internal problems. Chapter I examines Soviet strategic interests in North China as well as reasons for Soviet-Feng alliance. Chapter II discusses the conflicts between Feng and advisers that were caused by differences in their political views, strategic interests and plans for China’s future. It also focuses on the ideological differences between Feng and the Soviet advisers, including Feng’s disapproval of the communist ideology and the advisers’ disapproval of Feng’s use of Christianity to improve the discipline in his army. Finally, Chapter III discusses a factor that has long been neglected in other studies: the group’s internal problems. Indeed, insufficient preparation of the mission caused communicational and cultural issues on a personal level between the advisers and Feng Yuxiang’s officers. This thesis brings together information from previous works and uses rare documents from the Communist International archives. Declassified advisers’ reports and letters, in combination with personal memoires of the survived advisers, allow the study to research this topic in a new, more personal perspective. / Graduate / 2019-09-06

This thesis presents a holistic study of connections in the Altai Mountains of the eastern Eurasian Steppe, as shown by rock-art. Currently divided by four countries, pecked images (petroglyphs) and painted images from the 2^nd-1^st millennium BCE have been subjected to very separate research traditions, exacerbated by language barriers. This thesis focusses on the entire Altai Mountain range as a study area, integrating research published in Chinese and Russian, with supplementary literature in Kazakh and Mongolian consulted. To demonstrate the potential for connectivity and, consequently, movement, a map of accessibility was generated, showing that there are various optimal routes for movement throughout the Altai. The locations of rock-art sites relative to these routes indicate that movement was a key feature contributing to the creation of rock-art. Examining topographic features in the vicinity of rock-art sites of three regions (Mongolia, Russia, PRC) highlighted an association between watercourses and sites, whilst studying the micro-landscape within panels found that the creators of rock-art were not representing the tangible spatial relationship of figures to the landscape. More broadly, similarities between motifs at rock-art sites, as well as on portable art, demonstrate that the people making them, regardless of whether they were aware of it or not, were part of a wider understanding of how to depict subjects. Evidence of this understanding can be found even in regions with very different cultural backgrounds to the Steppe, such as the Chinese Central Plains, demonstrating that groups outside of the Steppe were aware of and using this way of representing. By combining analysis of motifs with that of the landscape, this thesis demonstrates that rock-art as a practice was inherently linked with to the landscape, whereas content and style are more indicative of a wide-ranging belief system amongst Steppe pastoralists, which was expressed aesthetically.

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The Tuoba's success in the making of the Northern Wei as a conquest dynasty in fifth century northern China will be argued in this thesis as a result of their ability to cross between the traditions and practices of the Chinese sphere and those of the Eurasian steppe, through the construction of a "dual presence" in the Pingcheng period (398-494 CE). A negotiation of material culture in this formative phase of state-building allowed for new notions of kingship, dynastic identity, and representations of daily life to be (re)created. This was manifested separately through the application of mountain-side stone sculptures, tomb repertoires, as well as the conception of Pingcheng as a capital city. The material cultural expressions explored in this thesis reflect significant changes in the socio-cultural atmosphere at this point in history. In effect, these ritual, funerary, and commemorative discourses wove together to create new notions of "Chineseness" in fifth century northern China. In the following discussion, we will come to recognize the Tuoba’s maintenance of a "dual presence", not only as "Son of Heaven" to the conquered subjects, but also carrying over practices that befit a Khagan in the Central Asian tradition, as an act of ingenuity.