Making Minorities on the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands of Socialist China

In this talk, Benno Weiner describes the incorporation of the Amdo region of Eastern Tibet into the People’s Republic of China as an act of 'minoritization' which, despite the pluralistic promises made by the early Maoist state, would marginalize Amdo Tibetans and other borderland communities, leaving them vulnerable to majoritarian state violence. Declaring nationality disunity to be the fault of the Han majority, the Chinese Communist Party initially pursued policies meant to persuade minoritized groups of their membership in the new socialist Chinese nation. These commitments would be undone by a combination of revolutionary impatience and Han ethnocentrism which led in 1958 to large-scale rebellion and its brutal pacification. In the end, Amdo was incorporated into the modern Chinese state through the overwhelming deployment of violence, all within living memory.

The speaker is Benno Weiner, Associate Professor in History at Carnegie Mellon University and author of The Chinese Revolution on…