Making Minorities in Late Republican and Early Maoist China: A View from the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands

In early 1941, the Kuomintang dispatched a well-known scholar-official, Gao Yihan, to investigate a violent, decades-old “grassland dispute” between two Tibetan chiefdoms on the Qinghai-Gansu border. As Gao quickly discovered, the Gyelwo-Gengya feud was part of a much larger contest put into motion by the collapse of Manchu Qing power and competition between a host of regional actors—including Muslim militarists, Mongol princes, and Tibetan headmen and lamas—to shape the post-imperial order. It also pitted statist desires to create and enforce bounded political-legal jurisdiction against the mobile nature of pastoral society and the norms of monastic/religious authority that often stretched across state boundaries and into sometimes-distant, non-contiguous communities. A decade later, state media prematurely touted the Chinese Communist Party’s success in finally resolving the Gyelwo-Gengya dispute to be one of its foremost achievements in “nationality work” during the early period of the PRC, only to see the feud reignite several times…