The “Tibet question” (the political status of Tibet vis-à-vis China) was at the center of the Qing dynasty's frontier strategy in the eighteenth century. But Tibet's past has been heatedly politicized since Communist China's incursion into Tibetan-inhabited regions in the 1950s. Over the last few decades, scholarly interest in the history of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands during the Mao era has steadily increased. Historians and political scientists have sought to explain the dynamic process by which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established control over the Tibetan regions. Xiaoyuan Liu, a specialist on China's ethnic frontier affairs at the University of Virginia, presents a substantial and meticulously researched work that contributes to this literature. Liu's study is primarily concerned with what came to be called the Tibet Autonomous Region or what the CCP called Xizang, which had been under the Dalai Lama's political control (hereafter, Tibet). To the End of Revolution offers a detailed and comprehensive account of China's Tibet policy during the first decade of the PRC.

Scholars have developed various methods and models to examine the complexities of the CCP's political control in Tibet. Liu differs from other Tibetologists such as Melvyn Goldstein, Tsering Shakya, and Jianglin Li, who have adopted a “Tibetocentric approach” by studying the arduous experience of Tibetan society after the Communist takeover.Footnote ¹ By contrast, Liu takes a Sinocentric perspective to investigate the CCP's internal policy-making dynamics. Such an approach is not easy given the continued inaccessibility of the Central Archives in Beijing, which prevents a full assessment of China's ethnic minority–related subjects. However, Liu was able to access the provincial and regional archives of Gansu, Qinghai, the Tibet Autonomous Region, and Sichuan, which contain “‘directives’ and ‘circulars’ from the ‘Center’” (p. 4) to local officials. This enabled him to seek out information regarding the CCP's Tibet policy at the time.

The Communist troops succeeded in occupying Lhasa in late 1951. However, political and military consolidation proved more difficult than military conquest. The CCP initially promised considerable autonomy in the region historically under the Dalai Lama's control, but the impatience of revolutionary activists led to grassroots resistance, which was finally crushed by force of arms in 1959. Drawing on his unprecedented access to CCP archives, the book sets out to examine Beijing's Tibet policy “within a multilayered and temporally cumulative frame that makes sense of China's modern developments” (p. 5). Throughout the work, Liu convincingly claims that no single factor can explain the dynamics of policy change during the 1950s. Beijing's policy making about Tibet in the 1950s, he argues, should be understood in terms of four interweaving spatiotemporal processes of nation building, or what Liu refers to as “timescapes”: geo-ethno-security landscaping, modern transformation of Chinese territoriality, the Chinese Revolution, and the Cold War (pp. 5–12).

According to Liu, the new CCP-led government in 1949 inherited territorial claims from its imperial and Republican predecessors. But, as of 1959, the CCP leadership had turned the inherited Tibet question into “a question of its own creation” (p. 296). As discussed in chapter 1, Mao Zedong and other CCP leaders, just like the Manchu rulers, saw control of the area under the Dalai Lama's government as a crucial step for maintaining “a geopolitically secure and ethnographically stable environment” (p. 5). But they also used Tibet to demonstrate the legality and political legitimacy of the Communist Party, a necessary step toward becoming “a modern territorial entity” (p. 7).

Liu argues that Beijing's goal in Tibet after 1949 was not only to claim administrative power but also to introduce a set of new political and social systems. The “modern transformation” of Tibet was seen as an integrated part of the Chinese Communist revolution to bring about “fundamental sociopolitical changes” (p. 10). Yet CCP leaders were aware of the palpable incompatibility between the Communist revolution and Tibetan communities. To win over Tibetan people's minds, as discussed in chapters 2 and 3, CCP leaders chose to use the Tibetan establishment centered around the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama to make political infiltration easier. With the signing of the Seventeen-Point Agreement in 1951, the CCP expected to use Tibetan elites as a ready “bridge” to obtain some access to the Tibetan masses. However, Liu argues that the promise of gradual reform, with which the two Tibetan leaders had shown a willingness to cooperate, was merely a stalling tactic for the revolutionary government, whose goal was to achieve “a realm of great harmony consisting of all nationalities” (p. 95).

In the mid-1950s, CCP leaders in Beijing felt the era of radical change had arrived. Political control appeared as a contingent and dynamic process. However, as discussed in chapter 5, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping laid out a “waiting strategy,” tolerating Tibet as an isolated zone, free of frenzied revolution. Liu noted that Tibet was initially viewed as a buffer against the capitalist world during the early Cold War years. Simultaneously, the brutal efforts of socialist reforms started in the Tibetan prefectures of Sichuan, Qinghai, and Gansu Provinces, the areas outside the Dalai Lama's political domain, to provide a model of socialist transformation for Tibet.

Chapter 3 details the grassroots “missionary” efforts by the rank-and-file soldiers and CCP cadres in eastern Kham. However, they later encountered violent resistance from within the very communities they sought to mobilize and collaborate with. The CCP accorded high priority to the mobilization of the ordinary people in the movement and took class struggle as the key in social control problems. Local people's resistance to the Communist program and their rejection of class ideology prevented a smooth social transition. Liu's work thus provides an invaluable template to investigate how the class struggle orientation was practiced and “contradicted by ethnopolitical realities” (p. 146), which, to the surprise of CCP officials, alienated many Tibetans from the Communist revolutionary enterprise. Before the Tibetan uprising in Lhasa in 1959, the Tibet question remained tense for CCP leaders in Beijing, who waited for an opportunity to practice more antagonistic tactics. The Lhasa revolt in March 1959 “came in an unexpected way” (p. 245) and provided a pretext for the CCP's subsequent coercive intervention.

The allure of archives always challenges historians to embrace the complexity of human and state agency. But, as Liu shows in chapter 4, archival resources could be constructed to serve political needs. Having reviewed the archival sources before and after the 1959 revolt, Liu demonstrates how the CCP distorted and constructed historical records on the Dalai Lama's efforts in the 1950s. Through careful research, Liu finds that the narrative of the Dalai Lama's decisive role in provoking the Tibetan revolts from 1956 did not appear in the official accounts until after the Dalai Lama fled into exile. The false narrative, later substantiated with details, became the official historical account. However, pre-1959 CCP archives told a rather different story, indicating the Dalai Lama's genuine willingness to collaborate. The dynamic of the contradiction in historical accounts was undoubtedly the result of state power.

As the first archive-based comprehensive study of the CCP's policy making about the Tibet Autonomous Region, To the End of Revolution offers a timely and groundbreaking contribution to the field of China's ethnic policy during the Cold War. This book is highly recommended to those with interests in the Chinese Communist revolution and the People's Republic of China's frontier strategy.