On September 11, 1953, a dozen Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres led by thirty-six-year-old Party veteran Guo Min arrived on the grasslands south of Rongwo Township, Qinghai Province, by crossing the Tséchu River. Their brief was simple: establish a new administrative county that would allow the 10,000-odd Tibetan pastoralists to “become masters of their own homes” (p. 69). Yet with few resources and no shared vocabulary, the Party officials found it difficult to “consult” (协商) and “persuade” (说服) the locals to follow the Party's lead as its United Front (统一战线) doctrine dictated.

In fact, more than a year before Guo Min marched up the 12,000-foot highlands, his boss back in Rongwo, Du Hua'an, decided to name the new county the Zeku Tibetan Autonomous County, selecting the character ze (泽) from Party leader Mao Zedong's name and the character ku (库) from the term “treasure house” (宝库), while ignoring indigenous toponyms for the region (pp. 71–72). In this case, and others, the Party would define the terms of Tibetan autonomy, imposing increasingly rigid boundaries, appellations, and bureaucratic structures on a fluid set of premodern logics and spaces, and thus beginning the long (and still incomplete) process of firmly incorporating the vast ethnic frontier into the People's Republic of China (PRC).

In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, Benno Weiner masterfully reconstructs the CCP's colonial encroachment on the Tibetan-speaking population of Amdo during the 1950s. The region was declared the Chinese province of Qinghai in 1928 and placed under the nominal control of the Muslim warlord Ma Bufang, but the Chinese state and its institutions were paper-thin until the CCP sought to actively “liberate” its territory and “civilize” its inhabitants. Weiner navigates a range of rarely consulted Chinese- and Tibetan-languages sources—chiefly from the Party and state archives of Zeke County—to write the first history of 1950s Amdo. In doing so, he lays bare the missteps and impatience that ultimately led to a string of antistate revolts that engulfed Qinghai in 1958 and continue to periodically plague the region.

Weiner, an associate professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University, convincingly demonstrates the centrality of Amdo (one of three major ethnolinguistic subregions of “cultural Tibet,” which now straddles the provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, and Sichuan in the PRC) to the processes of revolution, state building, and nation building in western China, and he explains how and why it has been overlooked by scholars focused on its neighboring regions to the west of central Tibet (Ütsang) and Xinjiang. Weiner has done an exceptional job of piecing together a coherent, chronological narrative from fragmented, value-laden archival and published documents, and he reads his sources with critical and judicial adroitness, bringing a sharp analytical focus to the process. He openly admits the limitation of his sources, pointing out the curated and often muted nature of indigenous voices. In his words, the book is “primarily about the Party-state, the vision that propelled it, and the policies and practices it employed in its ultimately failed effort to ‘gradually,’ ‘voluntarily,’ and ‘organically’ incorporate the Amdo grasslands into New China” (p. xvii).

The central theoretical contribution of the book lies in a critical rethinking of Chinese ethnic policy and the role of United Front work in 1950s China, the “theoretical justification and bureaucratic method for bring non-Party and nonproletarian elements into the political process and thus defining them (at least for the time being) as allies rather than enemies of the CCP and the people” (p. 17). The United Front stratagem has been understudied, with only two books of note,Footnote ¹ despite its centrality to the processes of revolution, state and nation building, and colonial rule in modern China. Weiner seeks to demonstrate an unresolvable contradiction at the heart of United Front work between consultation and persuasion, and between revolution and transformation. He argues that revolutionary impatience (as well as the lack of capacity and discipline among low-ranking Han cadres) ultimately lead to the abandonment of persuasion and United Front work in Amdo, with catastrophic consequences (captured here for the first time). The manuscript provides an illuminating picture of the messy and violent processes and institutions of state and nation building on China's western frontier, revealing the persisting unresolved contradictions that the Qing imperial formation bequeathed to modern Chinese states and the historical legacy of empire for the Chinese nation-state today.

This book will be of great interest to scholars of modern Chinese history; Chinese ethnic policy, theory, and relations; Tibetan history; colonial history; the history of nationalism and state building; comparative history; and those who seek to understand China's United Front ideology and stratagem. Given the renewed interest in United Front work and China's western fronter regions, the book will surely attract considerable attention.