A History of Modern Tibet, Volume 2. The Calm Before the Storm 1951–1955, and: Tibet and Nationalistic China's Frontier: Intrigues and Ethnopolitics, 1928–1949 (review)

The growing interest in Tibet over the past twenty to twenty-five years, coupled with the increasing availability of primary sources, has produced a wealth of new scholarly studies that explore the depths of Tibet's history, particularly its modern history, to a degree unimaginable not so long ago. The two books under review are excellent examples of the quality of research that is now possible about Tibet.

Hsiao-ting Lin recounts the story of the policies of the Chinese Nationalist governments (Guomingdang, GMD) toward its border regions: Xinjiang; Mongolia—both Inner and Outer; Manchuria; and, especially, Tibet. In particular it focuses on the activities of the two most important government agencies responsible for those policies, the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission (MTAC) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Waijaiobu). The author is especially interested in their frontier policies and the political motives served by these policies.

Using mostly GMD archival sources, including some only newly available, Lin begins with two chapters of historical background, then there are three chapters on the 1928–1937 period. This is followed by three additional chapters on the period of the Sino-Japanese war and, finally, two chapters on the postwar era.

Lin's intent, as he describes it, is to "reveal . . . how an originally weak, power-limited Han nationalist regime played ethnopolitical games, utilizing the Tibetan agenda as a means to elevate its prestige, to reinforce its authority, and to initiate its state-building projects, from China proper to the Inner Asian border region" (p. 14). In the course of researching this book, he discovered that "there is a discrepancy between what can be learned from the superficially presented facts on which previous works and political stereotypes have relied and how policy makers of the wartime Nationalist government genuinely perceived and implemented their frontier agendas" (p. xi).

The resulting volume—originally Lin's doctoral dissertation at Oxford University—tells a familiar tale to anyone knowledgeable of the history of this era. There are no major revelations, no need totally to rewrite previous histories. Indeed, many of his claims are obvious and have been asserted by others for years. For example, he posits that all GMD policies were "premised upon the Han belief that border peoples only wanted equal treatment under a Chinese administration, not freedom from Chinese control altogether" (p. 10). And, "the practice of Nationalist China's relations with Tibet and other frontier regions was often deliberately clouded in ambiguity and political calculation" (p. 13). And, one more: "It is evident that, due to the lack of substantial authority in peripheral China at the early stage of their rule, Chiang Kai-shek and his Nanking regime were in far too weak a position to control the frontier districts effectively from afar" (p. 44). These are all familiar conclusions.

Nevertheless, Hsiao-ting Lin has written an important book that deserves our attention. The new sources Lin employs provide a host of details that were unavailable in the past. The majestic and, to date, definitive history of this era¹ was published almost two decades ago and, obviously, could not make use of these sources; indeed, it used no Chinese sources at all except for those found in Western diplomatic archives and those translated into Tibetan. Another important history of the era² relies predominately on British sources while the current and most comprehensive history of the Kham region of Tibet,³ covering much of the same ground as Lin, also uses no Chinese sources.

As Lin accurately points out, "previous scholars have neglected to...