The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier by Benno Weiner (review)

Benno Weiner’s Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier is an impressive and timely achievement. It is a landmark study in a number of ways: the first exploration of the 1950s in a non-Han-majority region based on archival sources, the first detailed treatment of the 1958 Amdo rebellion in English, and a rare study of the interior workings of the United Front through the 1950s. Weiner made a conscious choice to focus on archival documents and, in so doing, to take the ideology of the United Front seriously. Weiner argues that the United Front, defined as both the theoretical justification and the institutional mechanism by which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could work with nonparty elements, was a key feature of the high Maoist project to create a socialist multiethnic state. It should then be seen as a meaningful attempt to find a platform to unite the former imperial China beyond a narrow Han ethnonationalism. United Front ideology thus was the “institutional ethos” (205) of the CCP in Amdo and its gradualism thus was not a dampening of Communist radicalism but rather the necessary path to progress. If anything, in Weiner’s conception, the United Front had the potential to be more radical as it sought the basis for the construction of a state that rejected ethnonationalism entirely.

The book is chronologically ordered across eight pithily titled chapters. Each chapter is also loosely themed, allowing Weiner to dive deep into the tensions inherent within United Front ideology. Throughout Weiner shows a deft hand in tying the shifting of political tides in Central China to policy change (or sometimes to its absence) in his case-study region of Zeku (泽库; Tsékhok in Tibetan). Zeku, a remote county in the Qinghai grasslands created in 1953 by CCP planners, anchors the monograph with a delightful specificity in time and space. At the book’s best, Weiner is able to translate the rhetoric of CCP policy and the utopian dreams of United Front cadres into examinations of what it all meant for Zeku’s minority elites and herders. There are times when, for this reader, the structure of the book meant that certain later revelations came as a surprise: although Weiner deals with armed resistance prior to the 1953 defeat of Ma Yuanxiang (马元祥) in chapter 2 and later briefly mentions the uprisings that followed the 1956 socialist “high tide,” it is not until chapter 7 that the persistence and continuity of violent resistance across the 1950s as a whole is properly explored—thereby giving truth to the author’s earlier assertion that Amdo can be seen as existing in a state of low-level warfare throughout the decade, despite United Front efforts. But this is to nitpick at an extremely thorough exploration of the introduction of socialism to the grasslands.

Weiner may well be correct in saying that it is only with the benefit of hindsight that the United Front seem doomed to failure, that perhaps in that heady 1950s moment its utopian dream might have seemed achievable. Nevertheless, for this reader it is the contradictions inherent in United Front thought that shine through the narrative. Under the United Front, the people of Zeku were to voluntarily choose revolution, but it had to be revolution that they chose. At times, Weiner’s narrative seems intent on undermining his case that the voluntarist, compromise approach of the United Front was a genuine attempt: how else to read the tale of the creation and naming of Zeku, a county carved out of the grasslands and named “Mao’s treasure house,” a name selected a full year before [End Page E-16] the consultative exercise with local leaders to determine what the new county should be called? Those same contradictions mean that the occasional tendency of the text to refer to Tibetan leaders as “members of the United Front” can be jarring: even if the United Front was invested in...