Pg. 99: Benno Weiner's "The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier by Benno Weiner.

About the book, from the publisher:

In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, Benno Weiner 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, he 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 Weiner 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.

Learn more about The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier.

--Marshal Zeringue