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LIU, Xiaoyuan. 2020. To the End of Revolution: The Chinese Communist Party and Tibet, 1949-1959. New York: Columbia University Press.

Françoise Robin
Translated by Elizabeth Guill.
p. 81-82

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1Using Chinese sources, some of which have never been published before, Liu Xiaoyuan (University of Iowa) explores a decisive decade extending from the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the year in which the Dalai Lama (born in 1935) fled to India where he soon set up his Tibetan government in exile, which is still active today. Liu attempts to explain why the Chinese government, far from having settled the “Tibetan question,” has created a “Tibetan problem” (p. 1).

2The introduction delineates four “timescapes” taken from conclusions reached in previous works by the author that contribute to explaining the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) stance on the Tibetan question. The first is the “ethno-geo-security” aspect inherited from the Manchu Empire. According to the author, the CCP saw central Tibet as playing a pivotal geostrategic role, placed between the Chinese world and the world under Indo-British influence. The second timescape is that of the “transformation of Chinese territoriality,” the concept of the frontier, vague under the Manchu Empire, becoming central in international relations. Post-imperial China had to create a legal position concerning its frontiers, laying itself open to dispute over territories where Manchu authority was precarious, Tibet included. The third timescape is the Chinese revolution: Manchu Imperial China was a centripetal cultural and political power. With the arrival of the PRC, it became a power forcibly exporting its new values in a centrifugal movement. The fourth timescape, the most original and least studied, is that of the Cold War.

3The work is made up of six chapters of equal weight. The first, “A Protracted Agenda,” summarises previous policies (Imperial Manchu, Republican, and Nationalist) towards the frontiers and shows the extent to which CCP policy towards Tibet was fluctuating and vague in the beginning, as was the perception of the geographical extension of Tibet, sometimes going as far as encompassing ethnic Tibet in its entirety.

4The second chapter, “The ‘Dalai’ Line,” retraces the negotiations that preceded the signature in May 1951 in Beijing of the 17-point Agreement that sealed the “return” of Tibet (understood in that case as the future Tibet Autonomous Region or TAR) to China at an undetermined date. Liu shows that this agreement was forced on the Tibetans, a fact that the CCP has always denied. The chapter also describes the complex alliance strategies that the CCP and its different offices and authorities had to deploy with the Tibetan rulers and elites in 1950 and 1951 in the hope of quickly putting into place “democratic reforms.”

  • 1 Xikang refers to an ephemeral Tibetan province created by the Chinese Republicans in 1928 and that (...)

5The third chapter, “A Time to Change,” is devoted to Chinese revolutionary impatience in Xikang1 and the Tibetan zones of Sichuan in the mid-1950s. There, the road linking Sichuan to Lhasa, finished in 1954, favoured Tibetan private capitalist businesses and Indian imports. A response was needed: “democratic reforms” were initiated, guns “borrowed” (meaning seized), and monastery property confiscated. However, this provoked massive revolts. “Democratic reforms” became a “reform war” involving the bombing of monasteries with the approval of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, who was posted in Sichuan at the time (p. 140).

6Chapter Four, “A New Phase,” shows that the Central United Front department was probably behind the September 1956 directive that obliged the Tibet Work Committee to postpone once again the inevitable reforms in central Tibet.

7“A Waiting Game,” the fifth chapter, is devoted to this pause. In May 1957, Mao granted a six-year reprieve (until the next Five-year Plan) to the Tibetan government to undertake “democratic reforms.” The chapter ends with the mention of a rarely cited economic problem, the lucrative cross-border trade between India and central Tibet (and its national consequences), tolerated until it was banned in December 1957.

8The last chapter, “The Showdown,” describes “the reform war of Sichuan (…) duplicated in Gansu” (p. 249). The situation was “even more violent” in Qinghai (ibid.) and the victims more numerous. Liu shows, moreover, that Mao Zedong had planned to send more than one million young colonists organised as “people’s communes” into Tibetan territory (central Tibet, Sichuan, and Gansu) to settle on its outer fringes, but functioning as armed troops inside. This old tactic known as tunken (a military-agricultural camp implanted on a border to be conquered) is well known in China and its purpose is to take over new territories (p. 260-1), but Liu shows that Mao postponed its launch until January 1959.

9In the epilogue, Liu returns to the international consequences of the absorption of central Tibet by the PRC, for example the rapprochement between the United States and India.

10Not without provocation, Liu claims a “Sino-centric and historic approach” (p. 5) based on Chinese sources. Paradoxically, this is the great value of this study, carried out with remarkable rigour and critical distance. This fascinating account, punctuated by quotation marks that indicate both the ideological weight of the terms used and their reality, often very different and contradictory in the field, highlights the specific problems the rulers and cadres of the CCP at the central, provincial, and local levels had to face in order to extract themselves from what one might call, in more contemporary terms, the Tibetan quagmire, which they had contributed to creating through their lack of understanding of this society, its history, and its aspirations. Sixty years later, this lack of understanding is still relevant. Finally, the book is full of data and information that to my knowledge have not been published before – data to which the brief format of this review cannot do justice. However, one must point out that the author has had the good taste to render proper and common Tibetan nouns in a transcription that owes nothing to pinyin, a choice that demonstrates a respect for the conventions in force in Tibetan studies not that often found in the work of sinologist researchers.

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Notes

1 Xikang refers to an ephemeral Tibetan province created by the Chinese Republicans in 1928 and that encompassed Tibetan areas on the Sino-Tibetan frontier. It was dissolved in 1955 by the CCP and merged with Sichuan Province.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Françoise Robin, LIU, Xiaoyuan. 2020. To the End of Revolution: The Chinese Communist Party and Tibet, 1949-1959. New York: Columbia University Press.China Perspectives, 2022/1 | 2022, 81-82.

Electronic reference

Françoise Robin, LIU, Xiaoyuan. 2020. To the End of Revolution: The Chinese Communist Party and Tibet, 1949-1959. New York: Columbia University Press.China Perspectives [Online], 2022/1 | 2022, Online since 30 March 2022, connection on 28 March 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/13323; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/chinaperspectives.13323

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About the author

Françoise Robin

Françoise Robin is Professor of Tibetan language and literature at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations (INALCO) and member of the French Institute of Research on Eastern Asia (IFRAE). Her research centres on Tibetan literature and cinema (twentieth – twenty-first centuries), the Tibetan feminist movement, and the Tibetan diaspora. IFRAE, 2 rue de Lille, 75007 Paris, France (frobin@inalco.fr).

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Copyright

The text and other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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