Building New China, Colonizing Kokonor: Resettlement to Qinghai in the 1950s by Gregory Rohlf (review)

In this ambitious monograph, Gregory Rohlf illustrates the rationales for and tensions throughout the movement to resettle Qinghai in the 1950s. As state-building efforts, the resettlement and reclamation programs aimed to increase agricultural production and consolidate the Communist state’s frontier control. Yet few resettlers remained in Qinghai, proving that the Communist state’s assimilation of rural Qinghai had failed in the 1950s.

Rohlf starts with Sun Yat-sen’s call for colonization of the Northeast and Northwest of China in 1920. Under the Nationalist government, cultivated lands had been doubled in Qinghai by the 1940s. In the 1950s, the Chinese Communist state continued this practice at an unprecedented scale and pace. A variety of push factors formed the mechanism for the state-sponsored resettlement to the frontier regions in the 1950s. According to Rohlf, those factors included social welfare resettlement of the poor and veterans, reservoir displacement, deployment of soldiers and prisoners, and ethnic discrimination against Hui, a Muslim minority in China. Rohlf incisively points out that many of those resettlements were not explicitly designed to consolidate state power in border regions. In particular, he uses reservoir displacement in Henan to exemplify local government’s incentive “to make local problems disappear” (51). In 1956, more than 70% of resettlers were Hui Muslims from North China (54). However, due to restricted access to relevant archival documents, the author remains ambivalent about whether targeting Hui people was a provincial initiative or a policy made by the central government. Considering its wide practice in multiple provinces, it seems more likely to have been a policy from the top.

In chapter 2, through analysis of the Communist state’s administrative structure, Rohlf identifies three streams of agricultural resettlement to border areas: the Ministry of Agriculture’s state-owned farms, the Ministry of the Interior’s social welfare programs, and the laogai (劳改 reeducation through labor) system’s exile of political prisoners. Rohlf argues that these three streams were “brought together to protect and expand Chinese sovereignty through farm settlements” (70). Unsurprisingly, the resettlement program in the 1950s was also subject to influence from the Soviet Union. Rohlf reveals that the resettlement organized by the Communist Youth League was a brainchild of Hu Yaobang, who was directly inspired by Nikita Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands program. More importantly, the agricultural resettlement program worked in close connection with other projects in Qinghai. It was designed to produce grain for several key projects, such as the building of a railroad and 221 nuclear labs in Haiyan County. It would have been fascinating if Rohlf had fleshed out this part of the story further.¹

Furthermore, Rohlf strives to find the personal agency of those resettlers who participated in the state-sponsored resettlement of Qinghai. Many youth team members believed state propaganda and were willing to settle in the most disadvantaged places for the sake of the country. Other invisible factors, such as political and peer pressures and [End Page E-19] curiosity about the outside world, also drove them to leave their homes. As to the majority of the rural resettlers, however, because of the lack of memoirs and other historical records, Rohlf reminds us that it is hard to provide a complete “grassroots” explanation of their incentives for joining the resettlement.

The next two chapters provide a more grassroots narrative of the resettlement process. Chapter 3 examines the response of local people in Qinghai to the state-sponsored resettlement. The cost of resettlement was not fully covered by the government. Instead, Qinghai locals were under pressure to provide household necessities and food to newcomers. Moreover, collectivization in the 1950s complicated the resettlement process. In contrast to the hospitality and harmony depicted in official narratives, many locals worried that resettlers would squander their already limited resources. For example, “a vice co-op chief destroyed kang beds in his home, leading others in the co-op to do the same or move into hitherto...