Mao’s China · CHAPTER 3 ·
Tibet and Xinjiang under Mao
Chapter 3 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976: “Tibet and the Frontiers”
The People’s Republic claimed every frontier once ruled by the Qing. Xinjiang came over without a battle in 1949 and was settled by soldier-farmers, while Tibet, self-governing for nearly four decades, was taken by force and a bargain; revolt spread in 1956, and in 1959 the Dalai Lama went into exile in India.
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The map above is the world of China, March 1956 — Kham and Amdo in revolt.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1960 · Europe in 1960.
Part of IB History: The People’s Republic under Mao →
SHORT EXPLANATION
The new People’s Republic claimed the frontiers of the Qing, the Manchu dynasty that had governed China and its frontier peoples from 1644 to 1912. What sort of relationship would it establish with those peoples? A nation-state presents itself as the homeland of one people; an empire governs distant peoples with histories, languages and faiths of their own. The Soviet Union, for example, ruled the lands of the tsars. Beijing described China as a “unified multi-national state” and offered minorities “regional autonomy”: local self-government resembling devolution, with the army and the purse controlled by the center. That center was the Communist Party, which ran every level of government.
The means of establishing control differed. In the far northwest, Xinjiang came over without a battle in 1949, and soldiers settled to farm and guard it. Tibet had governed itself since 1913. In October 1950 some 40,000 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army defeated its small army at Chamdo. The PLA was the Party’s own army, a party militia grown to national size. Local elites who yielded could be used to govern; where they did not, Beijing employed force.
A settlement followed. The Seventeen-Point Agreement of May 1951 recognized Chinese rule while retaining the government of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s highest religious teacher and head of state—rather like a pope who also reigns as king. Its protection applied within the tan region on the map. Kham and Amdo, Tibetan lands east of that line, belonged to Sichuan and Qinghai. There the Party carried out campaigns, nationwide drives against named enemies, including land reform and collectivization: private farms and herds were pooled into units worked in common, like a compulsory cooperative.
Resistance began in Kham in early 1956, in the dashed red zone, and the army bombed Lithang’s monastery. Refugees brought the conflict west. In March 1959 Lhasa rose, the army crushed the uprising, and the Dalai Lama fled to India along the dark arrow. Beijing secured the frontier, but the autonomy it had promised survived only so long as the center found it useful.
The full story
The Qing empire had governed Han Chinese alongside Mongols, Tibetans, Uyghurs and other peoples until 1912. Its successor, the Republic of China, lost control of Outer Mongolia, Tibet and much of Xinjiang. The Communists claimed the old imperial borders for the new People’s Republic. That ambition left a question: how would a state presenting itself as a nation govern peoples whose histories were bound to those borders in different ways?
In Xinjiang the transfer of power came without a major battle. Chiang’s government had fled, leaving its Nationalist garrison isolated; it surrendered in September 1949. Beijing then made settlement part of its control. Demobilized soldiers formed the Production and Construction Corps in 1954, a farming army with its own towns, comparable to the military settler colonies of earlier empires. Han Chinese, over nine in ten of China’s population, had been about 6 percent of Xinjiang’s people; Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people, were the largest group. The Corps settled Han there. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was created in 1955, but the Party secretary outranked the regional government, much as an owner outranks local managers. Uyghur officials could hold office while decisive power remained in Han hands.
Tibet had a longer experience of governing itself. The 13th Dalai Lama, its religious leader and head of state, rather like a pope who also reigned as king, expelled the Qing garrison in 1913. Lhasa maintained an army, currency and foreign relations for nearly four decades. No great power recognized its independence, however, and in 1950 it had neither a modern army nor an ally able to defend it.
The arrows show the PLA, the Communist Party’s own army, advancing toward Chamdo in October 1950. About 8,000 Tibetan troops were trapped and their governor surrendered. Military defeat brought a negotiation: under the Seventeen-Point Agreement of May 1951 Tibet agreed to “return to the big family of the motherland” and admit the army. Beijing undertook to preserve the political system and the Dalai Lama’s powers. The PLA entered Lhasa that October; roads completed in 1954 made its presence permanent. Tibetan government continued, but a Chinese garrison now stood behind the agreement.
The settlement covered the tan region, while other Tibetan lands were governed as parts of Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu and Yunnan. From 1955, “democratic reforms” in Kham and Amdo redistributed land, disarmed households and attacked monastery property. They also introduced collectivization, combining family farms and herds into units worked in common, like a compulsory cooperative. Kham rose in early 1956; the army bombed the besieged monastery at Lithang. By 1958 revolt and repression had spread through Amdo.
The provincial boundary could not keep the effects of those campaigns out of Lhasa. Refugees arrived there, and the Chushi Gangdruk resistance formed in 1958 with covert American training. In March 1959 rumors that the Dalai Lama would be detained drew crowds around his summer palace. He fled on the night of 17 March, and three days later the army shelled the city. Beijing had preserved a bargain in one Tibetan region while pursuing policies elsewhere that drove people and resistance across its boundary.
FULL EXPLANATION
Empire or nation-state?
The frontier can be described as reunification or as the extension of imperial power, depending on the relationship one examines. Beijing holds that Tibet and Xinjiang have belonged to China since the Yuan or Qing dynasties. On that account, 1950 restored a prior unity. Melvyn Goldstein’s multi-volume History of Modern Tibet, based on interviews and archives on both sides, finds that Tibet functioned as a de facto independent state from 1913 to 1950; its lack of international recognition nevertheless left it legally exposed. Tsering Shakya’s The Dragon in the Land of Snows gives Tibetan politics and choices their own weight, including the Lhasa elite’s misreading of Beijing and the outside world. James Millward’s history of Xinjiang traces a different transformation: Qing rule through local elites gave way to PRC settlement by soldiers and migrants, changing the population itself. The Soviet comparison brings the question into focus. Both states retained imperial borders while claiming to abolish empire, and both offered cultural autonomy to minorities in exchange for political obedience.
The Seventeen-Point Agreement as a bargain
On 23 May 1951 Tibetan delegates signed the agreement in Beijing under military pressure, without authority to concede sovereignty and using seals made for the occasion. The Dalai Lama accepted it only in October, with the PLA on the road to Lhasa. Yet the agreement was more than a demand for submission: Mao left the Dalai Lama’s government, monasteries and aristocratic estates in place and promised that reform would not be compelled. In 1957 he reduced Chinese personnel and announced that Tibet would have no reform during the Second Five-Year Plan, meaning not before 1963. Goldstein argues that this “gradualist” policy might have succeeded across all Tibetan areas. Kham and Amdo, however, were treated as ordinary Chinese provinces. Campaigns there sent some of the most militant Tibetans as refugees to Lhasa, so policy outside the agreement weakened the bargain Beijing had made inside it.
Counting the cost of 1959
How many people died in 1959? The available figures answer different questions. Estimates for fighting in Lhasa alone range from roughly 2,000 to 10,000 dead. A 1960 political report of the PLA’s Tibet Military District claimed that 87,000 “enemies” had been “eliminated” in central Tibet between March 1959 and October 1960; the Dalai Lama and historians later cited it. ‘Eliminated’ included people captured or wounded as well as killed, so it cannot simply be read as a death toll. Exile organizations have published much higher totals for the whole period of Chinese rule, which most historians regard as unverifiable. Chinese military reports counted enemies to demonstrate success, refugee testimony recorded personal losses, and no independent observer was present; all the sources are partisan. The political result is clearer: about 80,000 Tibetans followed the Dalai Lama into exile, the old government was dissolved, and most monasteries were emptied within a few years. The Tibet preserved by the 1951 bargain had ended.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The Qing borders as a national claim. Nationalists and Communists both claimed the Qing empire’s borders at their height as China’s rightful borders. On that view, Tibetan self-government after 1913 was a loss incurred during national weakness. Recovering the frontier would show that the century of humiliation had ended. Tibet also mattered strategically: it bordered India, and its plateau commanded approaches to southwest China.
A Tibet that could not defend itself. Tibet’s own choices and its international position left Lhasa poorly equipped in 1950. Its army numbered about 8,000 to 10,000 men and had few modern weapons. The elite had resisted military reforms in the 1920s, fearing that a strong army would weaken the monasteries. Britain, Tibet’s old patron, had left India in 1947; Nehru’s new Indian government sought good relations with Beijing. With no ally willing to fight, Tibet had no force capable of stopping the PLA at Chamdo.
Campaigns built for Han villages. Party work teams had developed land reform and collectivization around landlords and tenants in Han villages. Kham and Amdo included pastoral nomads, powerful monasteries and people accustomed to carrying arms. When officials treated lamas and chieftains as class enemies and tried to confiscate guns and monastery land in 1955–56, reform appeared as an attack on a way of life. Resistance followed, and the methods used to reorganize villages could not contain it.
Settler colonies and new roads. Settlement and roads gave Beijing different means of holding the frontier. Xinjiang’s Production and Construction Corps, formed from demobilized soldiers in 1954, settled hundreds of thousands of Han migrants over subsequent decades. Highways from Qinghai and Sichuan opened in Tibet in December 1954, and a road across Aksai Chin was completed in 1957. Trucks could now bring troops and supplies, making later interventions easier.
THE TURNING POINT
Lithang, February–March 1956. Lithang showed how difficult it was to confine the effects of reform to one side of a provincial line. In February–March 1956 the army besieged and bombed the monastery. Beijing could still describe its policy inside Tibet as patient and voluntary, but refugees from Kham carried news of bombed monasteries and fighting to Lhasa, and determined fighters organized an army. Mao postponed reform inside Tibet after resistance had already crossed the boundary. The conflict continued toward the Lhasa rising of March 1959 and the Dalai Lama’s exile.
What it changed
Tibet transformed after 1959. Beijing used the rising to end the 1951 settlement. It dissolved the old government, undertook land reform in Tibet in 1959–61, closed most monasteries and established the Tibet Autonomous Region in 1965. In 1962 the Panchen Lama, the senior lama who remained, sent Zhou Enlai a long petition about hunger and the destruction of religion in Tibetan areas. He spent most of the next fifteen years in prison or detention. Within six years the Tibet preserved by the agreement had disappeared.
War with India. India’s discovery in 1958 of a Chinese road across Aksai Chin, a plateau claimed by India, and its later grant of asylum to the Dalai Lama strained the friendship of the early 1950s. Patrols from both countries pushed forward in the border dispute. The PLA attacked in October 1962, routed Indian forces in the northeast and Ladakh, then withdrew. The earlier slogan “Indians and Chinese are brothers” had not survived the decade.
A government in exile. Exile gave Tibet an international voice it had lacked in 1950. At Dharamsala in northern India, the Dalai Lama established a government-in-exile and later a parliament, schools and monasteries for some 80,000 refugees. The regional rising became a lasting international cause, and the question of Tibet has followed every Chinese government abroad since 1959.
Xinjiang’s changing population. The Corps and subsequent migration changed who lived in Xinjiang. Han people rose from about 6 percent of the population in 1953 to roughly two-fifths by the late 1970s. Yet control remained fragile: in 1962, amid hunger after the famine, tens of thousands of Uyghurs and Kazakhs fled into the Soviet Union. Beijing sealed the border, and Xinjiang became a front line of the Sino-Soviet split.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the People’s Republic of the 1950s a nation-state or an empire on its frontiers?
The constitution and the exercise of power suggest different answers. The PRC’s 1954 constitution recognized minority nationalities; autonomous regions included local officials, and minority languages received support in schools and publishing. By its law and self-description it was a multi-national state. But Han Party secretaries and the army made decisions in Lhasa and Urumqi, settlement changed Xinjiang’s population, and aircraft and artillery met Tibetan resistance to campaigns in 1956–59. Those relationships resemble imperial rule. Goldstein emphasizes Beijing’s caution in Tibet proper until 1959; Shakya and other historians stress that caution prevailed where Chinese control was weakest. Like the Soviet Union, the PRC claimed to end empire while retaining its borders and methods. The name a constitution gives a state and the way its center governs its peoples can point in different directions.
An interesting fact
The Dalai Lama’s life spanned both sides of the 1951 bargain. Born in 1935 at Taktser, a farming village in Amdo in today’s Qinghai province, he was found there by a search party of monks in 1937 and enthroned as a small child. The Chinese invasion led him to take full power in 1950 at fifteen, nearly three years before the customary age of eighteen. In 1954–55 he spent months in Beijing, met Mao several times and became a vice-chairman of the National People’s Congress, evidence of both sides’ effort to make the settlement work. He fled in 1959 and has lived in India for more than six decades, far longer than he ruled in Lhasa.
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