Benno Weiner's excellent book makes two main contributions to what we know about the history of the Amdo / Qinghai region in western China. His careful empirical narrativization of the political history of the southern Qinghai highlands from the 1940s to the 1960s is pathbreaking, detailed, and nuanced. Second, his focus on the United Front as a set of ideas and policies similarly establishes a compelling baseline framework for regional and national historical analyses that connect the imperial past, Chinese socialism, and the Xi Jinping present. But Weiner also makes an important contribution to how we ought to think about the region. In reviewing the shifts in the Chinese Communist Party's “verdicts” on the 1958 rebellion of Tibetans in Amdo—with Tibetan leaders being transformed from arch-villains into great heroes, for example—he demonstrates the essential role that historical inquiry must play for post-trauma reconciliation among and between peoples like Tibetans and their local and national governments.

Weiner tells a story that is mostly local and focuses on a region of the Tibetan highlands that was drawn up as Zeku county, Qinghai province in the early 1950s. This was the first time in history that these Amdowas came under direct territorial administration of a national government. Weiner, associate professor of History in the Dietrich College at Carnegie Mellon University, does a masterful job nesting this local story in the regional and national mechanisms that drove Zeku's political integration with the People's Republic of China. He relies on published and archival written sources as well as on fieldwork and interviews in the province. The account he constructs is chronological in eight chapters, beginning with the arrival of People's Liberation Army units in 1949—ROC-era Qinghai warlord Ma Bufang and his forces make an appearance, too, of course—and ending around 1962 in the grim aftermath of both the Great Leap Forward and the Amdo Rebellion, both of which combined to shrink the province's population. Though it is a local history in a region that requires it in part because of the irreducibly complex linguistic, ethnic, and cultural landscape, it is also a history of the Chinese Party-state. The written sources produced by it convey bias, beginning with the linguistic bias of the mainly Han Chinese authors, but Weiner expertly triangulates and corroborates what he finds in the sources to generate an accurate and reliable account. Scholars of both the Tibetan and Chinese worlds will find useful his appendices that list the chiefdoms of the Zeku highlands in 1953 as well as a glossary of pinyin, Chinese characters, and Wylie Tibetan romanized names and terms, as well as the maps created for the volume. Readers with an interest in comparative frontiers or the history of China's borderlands will also find valuable Weiner's careful contextualization of local events within the concepts, models, and case studies of these fields.

But the main contributions of the book are empirical, and they document how two worlds collided in the 1950s in Zeku, a story that Weiner builds event by event, policy by policy, and person by person from multiple sources. He shows, for example, how the first efforts to administer social welfare policies starting in 1952 supporting the poor with livestock loans and relief grants of grain foundered because of administrative and political inexperience. Distributing benefits both intruded on the wealthy chiefs’ sense of tribal control and stirred up rivalries and resentments from those who did not receive aid. The Party-state needed help with more basic but coercive state functions, such as tax collection, where it also lacked administrative capacity and state political power. Progressive tribal chief Wagya of the Hor qianhu, the largest chiefdom in the region, stepped up to help convince Tibetans that paying taxes in livestock was a patriotic duty in the new nation-state, a claim that was likely not well received by proudly independent livestock raisers. The Chinese side had begun their state-building by designating and setting up a new county seat for Zeku with a handful of tents, but not until the second half of 1953. CCP leaders knew that real power rested with formidable aristocratic chiefs like Wagya and Wangchen Dondrup. During the first years of the PRC the Party sent multiple delegations to woo Wangchen, an occasional ally of Ma Bufang when it had suited him. Wangchen was a seasoned and charismatic leader who could send hundreds of cavalrymen into battle with the nod of his head and around whom armed resistance by thousands of Tibetans coalesced in 1951–1952. Weiner documents how the Party affirmed the leadership of men like Wangchen in a deliberate state- and nation-building policy—the United Front—that recognized that the legitimacy of PRC rule would come gradually, would be based on the incorporation of Tibetan peoples en masse via their chiefdoms, would be mediated through good faith discussions, negotiations, respect for different customs and beliefs, and education on both sides, including Tibetan language training for the almost exclusively Han cadres. The name and location of the county seat were decided through a consultative process, for example. Decision-making incorporated men like Wangchen into CCP governance in a way that was “subimperial” and familiar to them. Weiner shows that the United Front approach was genuinely consultative and leveraged the existing politics of the highlands in a way that showed continuity with the past. There is a lot that is documented for the first time in English in these chapters. Weiner's book shows us that there is much more research to be completed about this place and men like Wangchen Dondrup and the long-lived Wagya (d. 1995) and, on the Chinese side, Sun Zuobin, Yuan Renyuan, Wang Zhao, and many others.

There is much more to say here about the how the narrative confirms and adds to what we know about the Qinghai-Tibet plateau and the province during these years. The Amdo rebellion was not caused by radical anti-religion, social leveling, and redistribution of wealth policies. Instead, “democratic” social reforms, the closure of religious institutions, and collectivization of resources were launched during and after the turmoil of armed rebellion. Chinese forces committed atrocities and massacres during the fighting, in effect, treating all Tibetans as enemies of the state. Monastic power and doctrinal rivalries among Buddhist leaders were in play in the region but were much less important politically than the politics of the chiefdoms. The CCP was severely undermined by its inability to communicate with Tibetans in their own language; and despite the accomodationist rhetoric and practice of the United Front in the early 1950s, astute locals could sniff radicalism in the Communist air, as a man named Tseten was reported saying in 1955, “Sooner or later the herds will be divided anyway” (p.114).

As a story of China's borderlands, Weiner's analysis of the United Front policy era in Zeku evokes US historian's Richard White's “Middle Ground” of the Great Lakes region of North America.Footnote ¹ In Weiner's telling, one gets the feeling CCP officials accommodated and relied on aristocratic chiefs and respected Tibetan cultural norms because they had to. Through the 1950s, qianhu chiefs continued jockeying for power with their rivals, negotiating or fighting as conditions merited, as they previously had. The CCP was a new power on the highlands, but despite its intentions to rule directly, they simply did not have the experience, expertise or capacity to exercise sovereignty themselves, let alone dominate the highlands. Accommodation came from both sides: Wangchen was showcased as a United Front V.I.P. just months after he had led thousands of fellow highlanders in an armed revolt in which more than 250 locals were killed by People's Liberation Army troops, who themselves lost more than eighty lives. In fact, Weiner reports that, despite the rebellion, the PLA protected the wealth and positions of the qianhu and monastic personnel and even granted a two-year tax holiday and relief grain to the region! It seems to me that the CCP response to Wangchen's rebellion showed how desperately they needed to keep the social and political order of the highlands in place until they could run it with their own staff and methods. In the end, instead of capable and deft administration, the CCP used the frontier policy it knew best from its own history and from that of the dynastic history: overwhelming violence and brute destruction of local power. More than 15,000 Tibetans were killed over five years, leaders like Wangchen Dondrup and other qianhu were arrested and mistreated in prison. Few lived past their imprisonment or their fifties.

Overall, one would like to read more about the images and photographs included in the book and figures like Gyelon, a Tibetan who joined the Zeku government as a teen at its founding and aligned himself with the egalitarian and scientific spirit of the CCP. Men like Gyelon and other Tibetans who came to power with the toppling of the old guard were perhaps the “subalterns” of the national CCP Party-state, though the term borrowed from the history of the British empire in India suggests a powerless collaboration in the face of colonial-metropolitan tyranny. Or did these Tibetans who chose to work with the new Chinese government play a role not unlike the subimperial chiefs of their own historical and cultural milieu, accommodating and negotiating on behalf of their local community? Only additional research on Gyelon and figures like him will help us fill in more of this history of the borderlands.

Weiner ends the book with consideration of Xi Zhongxun (d. 2002), a CCP official who had a hand in crafting the 1950s United Front policies in the borderlands and also the father of current supreme leader Xi Jinping. The younger Xi has revived the United Front as a vehicle for promoting political pluralism while enhancing the autocratic, Leninist power of the CCP. Professor Weiner's observation in these pages about the importance of reconciliation as a way to enable Tibetans to gain a sense of membership in the modern Chinese nation situates the local story of the Amdo peoples in a global context of state-caused trauma and nation-building. One hopes that as the government of Xi Jinping gains confidence in itself and the Chinese nation-state, it will undertake a courageous process of open and transparent inquiry and truth-telling about History in Amdo in the way that the South African government did in its Truth and Reconciliation Commission dealing with the violence and injustice of the apartheid era. Until it does, we can only conclude that the People's Republic of China is still an empire, one whose leaders see History as tool of state power to crush and control, rather than as a science-based liberation from half-truths, omissions, and the dominion of state secrecy.