Pub Date : 2020-06-15DOI: 10.7591/CORNELL/9781501749391.003.0001
B. Weiner
This introductory chapter explains that the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state building but also nation building, which required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Amdo Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community. It argues that Communist Party leaders implicitly understood both the administrative and epistemological obstacles to transforming an expansive, variegated, and vertically organized imperial formation into an integrated, socialist, multinational state. Moreover, the ideological underpinnings of the CCP demanded the active participation of individuals and communities in this new sociopolitical order, albeit in heavily scripted ways and as part of a distinct hierarchy of power. The CCP therefore adopted and adapted imperial strategies of rule, often collectively referred to as the United Front, as means to “gradually,” “voluntarily,” and “organically” bridge the gap between empire and nation. As demonstrated, however, the United Front ultimately lost out to a revolutionary impatience that demanded more immediate paths to national integration and socialist transformation. This led in 1958 to communization, large-scale rebellion, and its brutal pacification. Rather than a voluntary union, Amdo was integrated through the widespread and often indiscriminate use of violence, a violence that lingers in the living memory of Amdo Tibetans and many others.
{"title":"Amdo, Empire, and the United Front","authors":"B. Weiner","doi":"10.7591/CORNELL/9781501749391.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/CORNELL/9781501749391.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This introductory chapter explains that the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state building but also nation building, which required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Amdo Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community. It argues that Communist Party leaders implicitly understood both the administrative and epistemological obstacles to transforming an expansive, variegated, and vertically organized imperial formation into an integrated, socialist, multinational state. Moreover, the ideological underpinnings of the CCP demanded the active participation of individuals and communities in this new sociopolitical order, albeit in heavily scripted ways and as part of a distinct hierarchy of power. The CCP therefore adopted and adapted imperial strategies of rule, often collectively referred to as the United Front, as means to “gradually,” “voluntarily,” and “organically” bridge the gap between empire and nation. As demonstrated, however, the United Front ultimately lost out to a revolutionary impatience that demanded more immediate paths to national integration and socialist transformation. This led in 1958 to communization, large-scale rebellion, and its brutal pacification. Rather than a voluntary union, Amdo was integrated through the widespread and often indiscriminate use of violence, a violence that lingers in the living memory of Amdo Tibetans and many others.","PeriodicalId":290987,"journal":{"name":"The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123849146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0006
B. Weiner
This chapter explores the period from summer 1955 to summer 1956, a year that saw the sudden introduction of class analysis and protocollectivization into Amdo's grasslands. Spurred by the nationwide “High Tide of Socialist Transformation,” which sought to collectivize agriculture at a sudden and startling pace, in fall of 1955, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organized “intensive investigations” into Amdo's pastoral society, efforts meant to pave the way for the staged introduction of pastoral cooperatives. By early 1956, Qinghai's leadership had made cooperativization (hezuohua) the year's core task in pastoral areas. Under these circumstances, the underpinnings of the United Front came under pressure as socialism itself was declared the means to achieve nationality unity and economic development. With revolutionary impatience threatening to overwhelm United Front pragmatism, the rhetoric used to describe Tibetan elites began to shift as well. Rather than covictims of nationality exploitation, headmen and monastic leaders were increasingly transformed into representatives of the pastoral exploiting class.
{"title":"High Tide on the High Plateau","authors":"B. Weiner","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the period from summer 1955 to summer 1956, a year that saw the sudden introduction of class analysis and protocollectivization into Amdo's grasslands. Spurred by the nationwide “High Tide of Socialist Transformation,” which sought to collectivize agriculture at a sudden and startling pace, in fall of 1955, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organized “intensive investigations” into Amdo's pastoral society, efforts meant to pave the way for the staged introduction of pastoral cooperatives. By early 1956, Qinghai's leadership had made cooperativization (hezuohua) the year's core task in pastoral areas. Under these circumstances, the underpinnings of the United Front came under pressure as socialism itself was declared the means to achieve nationality unity and economic development. With revolutionary impatience threatening to overwhelm United Front pragmatism, the rhetoric used to describe Tibetan elites began to shift as well. Rather than covictims of nationality exploitation, headmen and monastic leaders were increasingly transformed into representatives of the pastoral exploiting class.","PeriodicalId":290987,"journal":{"name":"The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126127046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0009
B. Weiner
This chapter focuses on the aftermath of the Amdo Rebellion and its pacification. It highlights the scale of the violence committed in 1958 and afterward and considers its impact on both the lives of Amdo Tibetans and the Chinese state's nation-building ambitions. Evidence of this violence is littered throughout official Chinese sources and a spattering of Tibetan eyewitness accounts. If the latter are to be believed, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and auxiliary security forces responded to the rebellion with a campaign similar in tactics and cruelty to many of history's infamous counterinsurgencies. This included the widespread use of torture, extrajudicial killings, the emptying of population centers, mass incarcerations, and strategy-induced famine and epidemics. State security forces were not the only ones to commit acts of brutality. One report accused the insurgents of massacring livestock, looting, arson, sabotage, and even murdering and dismembering cadres and activists. Nonetheless, Chinese documents tend to buttress Tibetan descriptions of the state's systematic use of violence and terror against Tibetan and other communities.
{"title":"Empty Stomachs and Unforgivable Crimes","authors":"B. Weiner","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on the aftermath of the Amdo Rebellion and its pacification. It highlights the scale of the violence committed in 1958 and afterward and considers its impact on both the lives of Amdo Tibetans and the Chinese state's nation-building ambitions. Evidence of this violence is littered throughout official Chinese sources and a spattering of Tibetan eyewitness accounts. If the latter are to be believed, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and auxiliary security forces responded to the rebellion with a campaign similar in tactics and cruelty to many of history's infamous counterinsurgencies. This included the widespread use of torture, extrajudicial killings, the emptying of population centers, mass incarcerations, and strategy-induced famine and epidemics. State security forces were not the only ones to commit acts of brutality. One report accused the insurgents of massacring livestock, looting, arson, sabotage, and even murdering and dismembering cadres and activists. Nonetheless, Chinese documents tend to buttress Tibetan descriptions of the state's systematic use of violence and terror against Tibetan and other communities.","PeriodicalId":290987,"journal":{"name":"The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124103376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-15DOI: 10.1515/9781501749421-008
B. Weiner
{"title":"3. Becoming Masters of Their Own Home (under the Leadership of the Party)","authors":"B. Weiner","doi":"10.1515/9781501749421-008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501749421-008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":290987,"journal":{"name":"The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier","volume":"111 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124250795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-15DOI: 10.1515/9781501749421-015
{"title":"Appendix A: Zeku’s Chiefdoms (ca. 1953)","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9781501749421-015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501749421-015","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":290987,"journal":{"name":"The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier","volume":"294 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125752694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0008
B. Weiner
This chapter surveys events leading up to the Amdo Rebellion, its devastating course, and its immediate consequences. Both contemporary and secondary Chinese-language sources describe the Amdo Rebellion as a principally pastoral affair prompted by elite resistance to collectivization. Some even refer to the uprising as “Qinghai's pastoral region armed rebellion.” However, it is important to note that under a policy referred to as Strike and Reform (Bianda Biangai), in most pastoral regions it would be during the pacification of the rebellion that “democratic reforms” were finally fully implemented and socialist transformation completed. In fact, at the time, Qinghai's leadership claimed that the rebellion was most ferocious in places where pastoral cooperatives had yet to be established and the power of “feudal” elites therefore was still largely intact. Rather than a response to the implementation of cooperatives, as both Chinese sources and popular memory frequently suggest, it appears that the rebellion began as an attempt to preempt collectivization in pastoral areas.
{"title":"Reaching the Sky in a Single Step—the Amdo Rebellion","authors":"B. Weiner","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter surveys events leading up to the Amdo Rebellion, its devastating course, and its immediate consequences. Both contemporary and secondary Chinese-language sources describe the Amdo Rebellion as a principally pastoral affair prompted by elite resistance to collectivization. Some even refer to the uprising as “Qinghai's pastoral region armed rebellion.” However, it is important to note that under a policy referred to as Strike and Reform (Bianda Biangai), in most pastoral regions it would be during the pacification of the rebellion that “democratic reforms” were finally fully implemented and socialist transformation completed. In fact, at the time, Qinghai's leadership claimed that the rebellion was most ferocious in places where pastoral cooperatives had yet to be established and the power of “feudal” elites therefore was still largely intact. Rather than a response to the implementation of cooperatives, as both Chinese sources and popular memory frequently suggest, it appears that the rebellion began as an attempt to preempt collectivization in pastoral areas.","PeriodicalId":290987,"journal":{"name":"The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124759644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0002
B. Weiner
This chapter discusses the subimperial practices pursued in the Repgong area of Amdo by the Republican-era “Ma family warlords.” It begins by providing a brief look at the development of these institutions from their founding in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries during the Mongol Yuan Empire. Over the centuries, various imperial centers frequently invested members of Amdo's religious and secular leadership—including the Shartsang lineage of Rongwo Monastery, the Rongwo nangso, and a multitude of qianhu and baihu—with honors, titles, and rewards in exchange for expressions of loyalty and their service as intermediaries between the imperial state and local society. Rather than clearly demarcated institutions in perpetual competition, it might be best to think of authority in Amdo as operating within an integrated, syncretic, often conflict-ridden, but mutually authenticating web of personal and institutional relationships. This syncretism did not vanish in 1912 with the collapse of the imperial system. Instead, the new rulers of Amdo would reconstruct, if not quite replicate, imperial-style linkages with many members of the Amdo elite.
{"title":"Amdo at the Edge of Empire","authors":"B. Weiner","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses the subimperial practices pursued in the Repgong area of Amdo by the Republican-era “Ma family warlords.” It begins by providing a brief look at the development of these institutions from their founding in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries during the Mongol Yuan Empire. Over the centuries, various imperial centers frequently invested members of Amdo's religious and secular leadership—including the Shartsang lineage of Rongwo Monastery, the Rongwo nangso, and a multitude of qianhu and baihu—with honors, titles, and rewards in exchange for expressions of loyalty and their service as intermediaries between the imperial state and local society. Rather than clearly demarcated institutions in perpetual competition, it might be best to think of authority in Amdo as operating within an integrated, syncretic, often conflict-ridden, but mutually authenticating web of personal and institutional relationships. This syncretism did not vanish in 1912 with the collapse of the imperial system. Instead, the new rulers of Amdo would reconstruct, if not quite replicate, imperial-style linkages with many members of the Amdo elite.","PeriodicalId":290987,"journal":{"name":"The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114435102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-15DOI: 10.1515/9781501749421-fm
{"title":"Frontmatter","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9781501749421-fm","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501749421-fm","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":290987,"journal":{"name":"The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115874466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0004
B. Weiner
This chapter investigates the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) practical and ideological motivations for creating Zeku County and Amdo's other autonomous nationality administrations, within which—Party leaders repeatedly promised—minority communities would at last become “masters of their own homes.” In 1950s Amdo, nationality autonomy was considered the key mechanism by which non-Han people would be both administratively and psychologically integrated into the new state and nation. It was a central component of the Maoist “high-modernist” project, its aim to reterritorialize ethnocultural frontiers into component parts of a unitary nation-state, a process referred to as “minoritization.” The chapter then traces efforts by Guo Min's County Work Group to build a consensus among the region's divided headmen for founding Zeku County. This almost certainly was to be the first time in its history that the region would be territorialized and administered as a whole and distinct entity. Party leaders were aware that this not only demanded drawing boundaries and building administrative organs where none had previously existed—it also necessitated creating a county-level constituency from the disparate interests and loyalties of the region's divided population.
{"title":"Becoming Masters of their Own Home (under the Leadership of the Party)","authors":"B. Weiner","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter investigates the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) practical and ideological motivations for creating Zeku County and Amdo's other autonomous nationality administrations, within which—Party leaders repeatedly promised—minority communities would at last become “masters of their own homes.” In 1950s Amdo, nationality autonomy was considered the key mechanism by which non-Han people would be both administratively and psychologically integrated into the new state and nation. It was a central component of the Maoist “high-modernist” project, its aim to reterritorialize ethnocultural frontiers into component parts of a unitary nation-state, a process referred to as “minoritization.” The chapter then traces efforts by Guo Min's County Work Group to build a consensus among the region's divided headmen for founding Zeku County. This almost certainly was to be the first time in its history that the region would be territorialized and administered as a whole and distinct entity. Party leaders were aware that this not only demanded drawing boundaries and building administrative organs where none had previously existed—it also necessitated creating a county-level constituency from the disparate interests and loyalties of the region's divided population.","PeriodicalId":290987,"journal":{"name":"The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121911845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-15DOI: 10.7591/CORNELL/9781501749391.003.0010
B. Weiner
This concluding chapter explains that the violence of 1958 not only destroyed lives but also damaged the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) mechanism of nationality rapprochement and severed its narrative of nationality unity. In order to repair this rupture, in Qinghai the post-Mao leadership sought to return to the promise of the early United Front, even as it continued to condemn the Amdo Rebellion as a counterrevolutionary putsch. While the uprising is blamed on mostly unnamed tribal and religious elites, with few exceptions Amdo's actual secular and monastic leaders have not only been rehabilitated but also memorialized in a myriad of state-sponsored publications as embodiments of nationality unity. Similarly, the “early-Liberation period” is celebrated as a time of ethnic reconciliation, economic development, and nationality unity. In this post-Mao narrative, the United Front era has been transformed from the transitional period of New Democracy—as it was contemporaneously understood—to one purporting to represent the ipso facto integration of the Amdo region and its people into the modern Chinese state and nation.
{"title":"Amdo and the End of Empire?","authors":"B. Weiner","doi":"10.7591/CORNELL/9781501749391.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/CORNELL/9781501749391.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"This concluding chapter explains that the violence of 1958 not only destroyed lives but also damaged the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) mechanism of nationality rapprochement and severed its narrative of nationality unity. In order to repair this rupture, in Qinghai the post-Mao leadership sought to return to the promise of the early United Front, even as it continued to condemn the Amdo Rebellion as a counterrevolutionary putsch. While the uprising is blamed on mostly unnamed tribal and religious elites, with few exceptions Amdo's actual secular and monastic leaders have not only been rehabilitated but also memorialized in a myriad of state-sponsored publications as embodiments of nationality unity. Similarly, the “early-Liberation period” is celebrated as a time of ethnic reconciliation, economic development, and nationality unity. In this post-Mao narrative, the United Front era has been transformed from the transitional period of New Democracy—as it was contemporaneously understood—to one purporting to represent the ipso facto integration of the Amdo region and its people into the modern Chinese state and nation.","PeriodicalId":290987,"journal":{"name":"The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130268742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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