This book makes use of recently declassified documents from the Foreign Ministry of the PRC to argue that incidents on the Tibetan border after the 1959 revolt (that are discussed in those documents) revealed to Beijing its weakness in Tibet. For example, Khan writes, “The new documents show just how weak Beijing's rule of the Tibetan Plateau was. The central government had no idea of who its citizens were, or where its boundaries lay.” (p. 134). Khan contends that the realization of this weakness had a major impact leading Beijing to end its policy of “empire-lite, which permitted local collaboration and autonomy” (p. 135). It took direct control of Tibet's administration, and with regard to foreign affairs, discarded its 1950s' policy that had “sought to work with India to unite the Afro-Asian world against imperialism” (p.132). The book's basic thesis is further explained,

While the uprising of 1959 unquestionably led to major changes in Chinese policy in Tibet as well as in China's relations with India, the book's explanation of why that happened is not supported by the historical record.

First, it is historically incorrect to portray Tibet as a stateless entity. From 1913 to 1951, Tibet operated as a de facto independent state with a ruler, a bureaucracy and a state-wide system of several hundred rural district headquarters staffed by officials sent from Lhasa. The government levied and collected taxes, had its own currency, maintained and recruited its own standing army, had its own Foreign Affairs Bureau (after 1943), and adjudicated disputes and punished criminals. These are all the classic attributes of states, and it was precisely because there was a Tibetan state (that Beijing called the “local government’”), that Beijing could allow it to look after most internal administrative functions in Tibet.

A second, and related, problem is the book's failure to distinguish clearly between Tibet (“political Tibet” – the Dalai Lama's state), and “ethnographic Tibet,” (the stateless mix of ethnic Tibetan localities in parts of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan that were under loose Chinese authority). Tibetans in ethnographic Tibet were not part of the Tibetan state in modern times, and a common source of confusion in the book results from its conflating the two, such as using incidents that occurred in “ethnographic Tibet” to make points about “political Tibet.” For example,

However, this is not evidence of competing foreign policies or statelessness because those Khambas who rebelled were located in ethnographic Tibet (mostly Sichuan) and had rebelled because the Chinese started to implement land reforms in ethnographic Tibet (but not in political Tibet). Tibet had only one foreign policy.

Third, the book contends that China maintained cooperative and friendly relations with India until the 1959 revolt made the border an issue of conflict between them. Actually, controlling the border was a major issue for India and China from 1950 when China invaded Tibet, and there were border issues long before 1959. For example, India used China and Tibet's preoccupation with the invasion of Tibet in 1950 to quietly send troops to take control of the Tawang tract from its Tibetan administrator. And even as China and India were signing the famous Sino-Indian friendship agreement in 1954, the Government of India was protesting (e.g. in 1954, 55, 56) to Beijing about Chinese incursions on border territory that India claimed belonged to it (Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, Volume Three, 2013: 168). When Zhou Enlai visited Delhi in 1956 and 1957, Nehru attempted to persuade him to make concessions about the Tawang tract, but was unsuccessful. Likewise, Zhou protested to Nehru about India's allowing anti-Chinese Tibetan émigré organizations to operate in Kalimpong and asked Nehru to stop them using Indian soil to oppose China. He also failed. India at the same time was secretly assisting Jenkhentsisum, the main Tibetan émigré opposition group in Kalimpong; moreover, some Indian officials were privately telling Jenkhentsisum that India would increase its assistance after war with China broke out over the border (ibid, 131–206; 335–382). Thus, before the 1959 uprising, Sino-Indian relations were strained over a number of issues, border delimitation and Indian support for Tibetan opponents of Beijing, being two of the most important. The book is somewhat naïve to portray the pre-1959 period as a time of real Sino-India friendship and trust, e.g.

Finally, Khan incorrectly asserts that China's pre-1959 “empire-lite” policy was a form of what today is called the “one country, two system” model: “The phrase ‘one country, two systems' which CCP leaders would use to describe their governance of Hong Kong, was just as appropriate a label for PRC rule over Tibet” (p. 22). To the contrary, from the very beginning in 1950, Mao and the CCP were totally committed to Tibet at some point undergoing political, economic and land reforms like all other parts of China. Mao was pursuing what I have called a “gradualist policy,” wherein the Tibetan government would be allowed to exercise considerable internal autonomy over its subjects until it gradually came around and agreed to major reforms. This was the same policy that Mao initially used in ethnographic Tibet, but there it was decided in 1955, well before the 1959 revolt in Lhasa, that the time was ripe to implement full reforms, so these started in ethnographic Tibet in January 1956 and immediately precipitated the famous revolt in Sichuan that lasted from 1956–59/60 (Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, Volume Two, 2007). Thus, the termination of the “gradualist” or “ethnic-lite” policy in ethnographic Tibet obviously was not the result of anything to do with the Tibet border, but rather was due to core Chinese policy goals that called for the implementation of reforms in ethnographic and political Tibet when conditions were ripe. Beijing had decided that there were not going to be two different social-politico-economic systems in China; the only issue was when to implement the transformation of the traditional societies. This difference is critical to understanding why China discarded its gradualist policy in 1959.

In political Tibet, the Chinese government had been trying hard to persuade the Dalai Lama and Tibetan government to use its own army to control the Khambas from ethnographic Tibet who had fled to Tibet in 1956–58, after losing in Sichuan, and who established military headquarters in Southern Tibet from which to launch an insurgency. While this was developing, the Chinese repeatedly warned the Tibetan government that if the Khambas launched a full-scale revolt in Tibet, Beijing would not only send the PLA to destroy the rebels, but would also immediately end the “gradualist” policy and implement full reforms, ending the Tibetan government and the traditional social system. Tensions over this issue played a major role in generating the Lhasa uprising of 1959, which was suppressed in less than a week. China, then, as they had threatened, immediately ended the old society and set out to destroy the Khamba rebels who were systematically defeated.

China's change in policy, therefore, was not due to the border crossings of nomads, but because the Tibetan government could not continue to successfully control Tibetans in Tibet, and because Beijing was convinced that the Tibetan government was secretly encouraging and supporting the Khamba rebels. As mentioned above, reforms were always going to be implemented at some point, and the uprising in Lhasa led Beijing to conclude that it would be pointless and dangerous to wait longer because the Tibetan government had shown that it was never going to accept reforms.

Consequently, while this ambitious book brings to the fore many new ideas and documents, its core thesis is overly simplistic and historically inaccurate.