Benno Weiner's The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier is a detailed and powerful account of how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attempted to incorporate Tibetans living in Amdo into the newly created Chinese socialist nation-state in the 1950s. The book focuses on Zeku (Tibetan: Tsékhok), an administrative unit that the CCP carved out of the Amdo grasslands south of Repgong and labelled a Tibetan Autonomous County in 1953. Weiner raises two central questions in his book: “How have [Chinese] state representatives tried to integrate Tibetan regions into the modern Chinese nation, and why has this project been less than successful?” (p. 3). In addressing these questions, Weiner employs the historical anthropologist Uradyn Bulag's theory of sub-imperialism, in which the modern state taps “into the heritage of the former empire's techniques of rule in the service of nationalism” (Collaborative Nationalism: The Politics of Friendship on China's Mongolian Frontier, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, 61). Weiner maintains that the CCP utilized the United Front (tongyi zhanxian) – a strategy designed to turn enemies into friends by bringing non-Party members into the political process – in order to “‘gradually’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘organically’ bridge the gap between empire and nation” (p. 4).
In the early 1950s, most Party cadres in Qinghai Province were Han Chinese and they lacked detailed knowledge of the social, economic, religious and geographic conditions in Zeku. To build local networks, win over the support of the local people, and “lead Tibetans and other minority nationalities of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau on a gradual and voluntary path toward nationality unity and socialist transformation,” the Party recruited indigenous religious and secular leaders into a “patriotic United Front” (p. 21). The Party's sub-imperial practice of allying with indigenous elites was a temporary compromise designed to expand the Party's know-how and influence in the region. By using the tactics of consultation and persuasion, the Party intended to transform the political consciousness of the local indigenous leaders, while paving the way for future socialist reforms. Yet, United Front gradualism and pragmatism existed in constant tension with CCP leaders’ revolutionary impatience. In the increasingly radical atmosphere of 1958, revolutionary impatience won out, and Qinghai provincial leaders ordered pastoral areas to be rapidly collectivized. Weiner asserts that the Amdo rebellion of 1958, which was only suppressed though the mobilization of state violence, reveals the extent to which the Party failed to convince Amdo Tibetans of their membership in a wider Chinese political community. The profound repercussions of this failed attempt at nation-building on China's Tibetan frontier continue to this day.
The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier relies on sources primarily generated by the party-state, such as internally circulated reports (neibu cankao), gazetteers, Party histories, and state-sponsored oral history collections (wenshi ziliao), and as such, it is “largely told from the perspective of the Party-state and its representatives” (p. xv). In researching this book, Weiner consulted a remarkable collection of 2,500 individual folios, which were created between 1953 and 1960 and stored in the Zeku County Communist Party Committee Archives and the Zeku County People's Government Archives. Weiner readily acknowledges the dearth of Tibetan voices in these archives that were not at some level sanctioned by the Chinese party-state. Rather than attempting to tell this narrative from Tibetan secular and religious leaders’ perspectives, Weiner reminds us that his book is firmly focused on the Chinese party-state itself. He carefully reads between the lines of his archival sources, and in the process, he makes an exceptional contribution to our understanding of the CCP's “achievements, frustrations, and fiascos” as it attempted to create a new socio-political order on the Tibetan frontier (p. xv).
Given that access to CCP archival materials from inside Tibetan areas has become increasingly restricted in the Xi Jinping era, Weiner's meticulously researched and theoretically ground-breaking study makes a critical and timely contribution to both Tibetan studies and Chinese studies. While other recently published monographs, such as Melvyn Goldstein's A History of Modern Tibet, Volume IV: In the Eye of the Storm, 1957–1959 (University of California Press, 2019) and Xiaoyuan Liu's To the End of Revolution: The Chinese Communist Party and Tibet, 1949–1959 (Columbia University Press, 2020), analyse the CCP's involvement in Central Tibet, Kham and Amdo, Weiner's study is much more narrowly focused on one specific Tibetan county in Amdo. This narrow geographic scope enables him to closely trace the evolving relationships between Party cadres, United Front representatives, and local secular and religious leaders in Zeku County in the 1950s. Scholars of empire, nationalism and socialism in East Asia and Inner Asia will significantly benefit from reading The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier. Instructors teaching graduate seminars and upper-level undergraduate seminars in modern Chinese and Tibetan history could productively assign this book alongside Nakstang Nulo's memoir, My Tibetan Childhood: When Ice Shattered Stone (Duke University Press, 2014), which chronicles his life as a nomad on the Amdo grasslands in the 1950s. Finally, this volume is a must read for specialists in modern Tibetan history and anyone seeking to understand the history of CCP policies along China's ethnically complex frontier.
