Was Mao’s China a nation-state or an empire at its edges?

The short answer

• 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.

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.