Benno Weiner
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781501749391
- eISBN:
- 9781501749421
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.003.0010
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Benno Weiner
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781501749391
- eISBN:
- 9781501749421
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501749391.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
This book 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 ...
More
This book 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, the book 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 the book 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.Less
This book 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, the book 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 the book 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.
