Exile from the Grasslands: Tibetan Herders and Chinese Development Projects

Abstract

“It is extremely good that the counterrevolutionaries of Qinghai are rebelling; this will create an opportunity for the laboring masses to be liberated”, scribbled Mao on a provincial report (56). Class struggle, writes Li, would be “the theoretical underpinning for the ensuing religious persecution of ethnic minorities” (57). Li further presents a fleeting but important post-Cultural Revolution opening of the local archives in Qinghai in the early 1980s as part of an official reassessment of the 1958 suppression. The core business of the book is to put forth a very detailed narrative of spring 1959. Ultimately, one important theme that emerges from the text is that of Tibetan incoherence, rather than universal push toward rebellion or resistance, as well as the CCP reading of this incoherence as a coherent and directed conspiracy (72). As Qiang Zhai noted in his review of Volume 2 of A History of Modern Tibet in this journal in 2009, Goldstein has already established this idea clearly—but, as in the hard sciences, it is useful to see that an experiment conducted essentially autonomously has come up with an independent result. The book also contains regular insights into Ngabo’s perspective and the huge holes or discrepancies present in his official memoir. Figures like Tan Guansan, Ding Sheng, and Ji Youquan get regular analysis, and the author’s interviews with Tibetan participants now in exile in the US and India, including the Dalai Lama, appear to have been quite oriented toward checking against specific documents or incidents, and thus are put to good use. Mao emerges throughout as both mercurial and patient, at times opportunistic, actually eager to bring Tibetan violence to the surface so as to forcefully repress it (165–67). A detailed discussion of the sections of Mao’s 12 March 1959 order which have come to light amid censorship and selective release is quite useful. The book’s tone is bifurcated, mainly enjoyably so. Some of the longer descriptive passages of Tibetan rituals or town scenes dance on the edge of orientalism, but do give the reader a chance to breathe a bit from the intense personalities and debates occurring in the text. A few too many footnotes provide vague references to other chapters rather than page numbers, and the prose can drag in the middle, meaning the book requires dedication of its readers. Ultimately this is a useful supplement to a growing body of work.