The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University) - Hardcover

Weiner, Benno

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501749390 ISBN 13: 9781501749391

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2020

Synopsis

In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, Benno Weiner provides the first in-depth study of an ethnic minority region during the first decade of the People's Republic of China: the Amdo region in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Employing previously inaccessible local archives as well as other rare primary sources, he demonstrates that the Communist Party's goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state-building but also nation-building. Such an objective required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community.

As Weiner shows, however, early efforts to gradually and organically transform a vast multiethnic empire into a singular nation-state lost out to a revolutionary impatience, demanding more immediate paths to national integration and socialist transformation. This led in 1958 to communization, then to large-scale rebellion and its brutal pacification. Rather than joining voluntarily, Amdo was integrated through the widespread, often indiscriminate use of violence, a violence that lingers in the living memory of Amdo Tibetans and others.

About this title

About the Author

Benno Weiner is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University and coeditor of Conflicting Memories.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501749390
• ISBN 13: 9781501749391
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 312