Qinghai Province was created by the Kuomintang (KMT) in 1928 when it was ruled over by the Muslim warlord General Ma Qi. Its remoteness precluded it from much of the ensuing chaos of the Sino-Japanese and civil wars until the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) incorporated it into the People's Republic of China (PRC) on 1 January 1950, although resistance against CCP rule continued throughout the 1950s.
Qinghai's current population of a little over five million includes 37 officially designated ethnic groups with national minorities making up 46.5 per cent of the population. The Han (54.5 per cent), Tibetans (20.7 per cent), and Hui (16 per cent) make up the three largest groups.
Gregory Rohlf prefers to use the traditional name for the province – Kokonor “… to emphasize that the Qinghai region was more a frontier zone in the 1950s than it was a province … Kokonor … [being] a Mongolian-derived name … [that] came to be used after the Mongol conquest … in the thirteenth century” (p. 4).
When the CCP came to power one of its most urgent tasks was incorporating the frontier regions (such as Qinghai, Tibet, Xinjiang, Manchuria and Hainan) into the newly formed state. Qinghai's population at the time was about 1.5 million and had been ruled less by the KMT government in Nanjing/Chongqing than by the warlord Ma Bufang as his own personal fiefdom.
One aspect of this consolidation meant recruiting settlers predominately “… from North China and … from the collective sector of the economy … [and] disproportionally Hui” (p. 108). Rohlf reminds us that Sun Yat-sen, as early as 1920, was decrying the “spatial imbalance of human and land resources in China [which] prevented [China's] development” (p. 33). He also describes the efforts on the part of the KMT to conduct similar projects with limited success.
The heart of this book tells the history of the newly arrived agricultural resettlers (nongken yimin) in Qinghai from 1956 to 1962. The programme seemed to be modelled on Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschchev's Virgin Lands programme designed to quickly develop state farms. In the Soviet case the impetus was largely economic but in China there were also nationalist and state-building goals in addition to territorial consolidation. Quick economic development meant building up gas and oil production and comprehensive infrastructure advancement; including the “221” nuclear lab and establishing a laogai prison system which added up to some three dozen by the end of the Great Leap Forward.
In this very detailed, in-depth and heavily sourced scholarly study (81 of the 273 pages are devoted to notes), Rohlf takes us through the various stages of this programme as a state-financed nationalistic enterprise, recounting its successes and failures.
Through a combination of coercion and encouragement both Han and Hui were urged to voluntarily move to Qinghai. While the policy of the early 1950s was to encourage ethnic harmony and minimum government interference (one Chinese history described it as “a policy of not dividing property, not doing class struggle and not drawing class lines”), by 1958 more coercive tactics were employed. And while the population grew (2.6 million in 1959), many were there on limited assignments and many others returned prematurely to their home regions.
As a result of this migration 25 per cent of the population was considered urban by 1960 – far above the national average – after some 750,000 people had migrated to Qinghai between 1954 and 1959. Nonetheless, as Rohlf points out, “internal reports from the time document little economic or social success on the farms” (p. 249).
In chapter five, Rohlf chronicles the tensions which arose between the original inhabitants of Qinghai and the resettlers, and the strains within the multi-ethnic co-ops, communes and among the resettled Hui. The locals often felt that resettlers were being privileged by receiving government subsidies.
Ultimately Rohlf wants to go beyond chronicling the resettlement movement to make “… an argument about contemporary Chinese history: state building – not revolution – should be the main interpretive framework to understand the history of modern China. Chinese nationalism and deeply-held beliefs about the Chinese “geo-body” are essential to the legitimacy of the government as the age of communism and the Party-state fade into the past” (p. 264). Unfortunately the footnote for this passage is missing.
This is a fascinating and detailed look at Beijing's efforts to create a new Chinese state in its earliest years. It goes a long way to broadening our understanding of the history of the frontier areas and as such is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the People's Republic of China.
