The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier

Benno Weiner

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501749414
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, Benno Weiner provides the first in-depth study of an ethnic minority region during the first decade of the People's Republic of China: the Amdo region in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Employing previously inaccessible local archives as well as other rare primary sources, he demonstrates that the Communist Party's goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state-building but also nation-building. Such an objective required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community.

As Weiner shows, however, early efforts to gradually and organically transform a vast multiethnic empire into a singular nation-state lost out to a revolutionary impatience, demanding more immediate paths to national integration and socialist transformation. This led in 1958 to communization, then to large-scale rebellion and its brutal pacification. Rather than joining voluntarily, Amdo was integrated through the widespread, often indiscriminate use of violence, a violence that lingers in the living memory of Amdo Tibetans and others.

1

Amdo at the Edge of Empire

On August 27, 1949, units under General Wang Zhen of the People’s Liberation Army “traversed the rarified air of the high mountains” that separate Linxia in Gansu from neighboring Qinghai Province. By four o’clock that afternoon, Xunhua County, an ethnically mixed region on the southern bank of the Yellow River, had become the first area of Qinghai officially “liberated.” As if to emphasize the impact of Xunhua’s capture, that same day the “Muslim warlord” Ma Bufang, long the leading power broker in northwest China, fled the provincial capital of Xining, never to return. A week later, on September 5, 1949, vanguard troops of the PLA’s First Regiment, First Corps, entered Xining, “liberating the ancient city of the plateau” and “ending the Ma Bufang family’s long forty years of bloody rule in Qinghai, opening a new historical era where the masses of each nationality were to become the masters of their own home.”¹

Back in Xunhua, the leader of the Tibetan Linggya tsowa hurried south to neighboring Repgong to confer with the region’s most prominent Tibetan authorities. These men had been keeping a close eye on events that for months had been unfolding over their eastern horizon. For example, the Seventh Shartsang Lama, Lozang Trinlé Lungtok Gyatso, abbot of Repgong’s Rongwo Monastery, had regularly sent representatives to Gansu’s capital of Lanzhou to receive the latest updates on the military situation.² And some days earlier, grain stored at the local military barracks had been destroyed by fire. Suspecting sabotage and fearing for his safety, Tséring Gyel, the ethnically Tibetan, Ma Bufang–appointed county head, requested a meeting with the men PRC sources would later refer to as the “three-in-one feudal rulership of Tongren County”—Rongwo nangso (a secular, panchiefdom leader) Trashi Namgyel, Zongqianhu Gyelwo Dorjé, and the chief steward (chakdzö) of Rongwo Monastery and younger brother of the Shartsang Lama, Gélek Gyatso.³ “The provincial leaders have ordered me to return to Xining, but currently society is in chaos,” Tséring Gyel allegedly exclaimed. “Please will you three take responsibility for maintaining the area’s law and order and managing the granary and trade office. I will return when my business is done.” The next day, having collected horses, supplies, and the county’s wireless equipment, Tséring Gyel set fire to the local archives and fled with a small coterie of loyal officials.⁴

Abandoned by Xining, representatives of Repgong’s elite soon gathered at the manor house of the Rongwo nangso to hear the Linggya chieftain’s report. In addition to the trio of Trashi Namgyel, Gyelwo Dorjé, and Gélek Gyatso, also present were the qianhu and baihu (hereditary chieftains) of the “Twelve Tribes of Repgong,” the region’s eighteen nangchen (leading monastic figures), and the heads of Rongwo Monastery’s three dratsang (monastic colleges), as well as members of Rongwo and Bao’an Townships’ merchant communities (including Hui Muslims). Seemingly aware that momentous changes were at hand, these ad hoc representatives of Repgong’s various constituencies accepted the Linggya chieftain’s suggestion and quickly dispatched to Xunhua a thirty-seven-person “private” delegation tasked with welcoming the PLA to Repgong.⁵

Upon their arrival in Xunhua, the mission presented General Wang Zhen with “grain, horses, khatak [ceremonial scarves] and other gifts.” Accepting the khatak (C. hada) but refusing the other items, Wang responded noncommittally to the delegates’ purported request that troops be sent to Repgong to establish a new county government. Instead, like Tséring Gyel several days earlier, Wang Zhen instructed the delegates to ask Repgong’s indigenous leadership to take personal responsibility for maintaining social order and protecting state property.⁶ The general had little choice. The Chinese Communist Party was painfully aware that it had no preexisting organizational foundation in Qinghai.⁷ Yet, by recognizing the authority of Repgong’s traditional leadership, Wang Zhen and the CCP were also tapping into a long tradition of imperial-local relations that for centuries helped shape the region’s political and social worlds.

Scholars of twentieth-century China have commented extensively upon the friction generated between champions of various versions of the Chinese nation-state and practices they perceived as backward, feudal, or traditional and therefore antithetical to their modernizing agendas. More recently they have also begun to appreciate the ways in which Chinese statesmen, many with well-known modernizing credentials, were at times forced to accommodate or appropriate what might be considered imperial strategies of rule in the service of nation building, a dynamic that Uradyn Bulag refers to as “subimperialism.”⁸ Following Bulag, this chapter employs the institutions of the Rongwo nangso, Rongwo Monastery, and the qianbaihu zhidu (system of one thousand and one hundred households) to examine the subimperial practices pursued in the Repgong area of Amdo by the Republican-era “Ma family warlords.”

First, however, it provides a brief look at the development of these institutions from their founding in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries during the Mongol Yuan Empire. Over the centuries, various imperial centers frequently invested members of Amdo’s religious and secular leadership—including the Shartsang lineage of Rongwo Monastery, the Rongwo nangso, and a multitude of qianhu and baihu—with honors, titles, and rewards in exchange for expressions of loyalty and their service as intermediaries between the imperial state and local society. Rather than clearly demarcated institutions in perpetual competition, it might be best to think of authority in Amdo as operating within an integrated, syncretic, often conflict-ridden, but mutually authenticating web of personal and institutional relationships. This syncretism did not vanish in 1912 with the collapse of the imperial system. Instead, the new rulers of Amdo would reconstruct, if not quite replicate, imperial-style linkages with many members of the Amdo elite.

Lamas, Chieftains, Mongols, and Manchus

It is difficult to determine how sovereignty, territoriality, and political identity were historically experienced and understood by individuals and communities within Amdo and how these may have changed over time. However, certain generalizations can be made. Charlene Makley suggests that prior to the final destruction of Amdo’s traditional political system in 1958, rulership often consisted of “patrifilial alliances between Tibetan lamas and lay male leaders.”⁹ Makley is referring on the one hand to the institution of the trülku (lit. “emanation body”) and on the other to hereditary (usually) lay rulers of varying prominence and power.

Unique to Tibetan Buddhism, the trülku or incarnate lama refers to highly evolved Buddhist masters (usually understood to be earthly emanations of a bodhisattva) who—in distinction from the more mundane rebirths the rest of us experience—can both remember past lives and direct their future births “in order to continue their salvation project in a series of successive reincarnations.”¹⁰ In more temporal terms, by creating a mechanism through which religious authority is transferred across a series of lifetimes, a continuum is produced that can help preserve and expand religious prestige, political influence, and economic power that otherwise might dissipate or fragment with the death of a charismatic religious leader. Although there are sporadic recorded instances of individual trülku dating back to the eleventh century, the trülku system, which Peter Schwieger describes as “a fully established line of succession of ecclesiastical hierarchs,” is generally considered to have emerged in Central Tibet during the late-thirteenth century. By the end of the sixteenth century, it had been adopted by all four major orders of Tibetan Buddhism, including the ascendant Gelukpa tradition—the order to which the Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas belong—which during the seventeenth century became the dominant sectarian force in Amdo. By then, generally speaking, the trülku had replaced the hereditary lay nobility at the pinnacle of Tibetan society.¹¹

The relationship between monastic authority and lay chieftains could be quite complex and intertwined. In many but certainly not all cases, a headman and his chiefdom might owe direct or indirect fealty to a prominent trülku, such as the Jamyang Zhépa lineage of Labrang Monastery. It also was not uncommon for the reincarnation of a deceased lama to be found within an already notable noble family, thereby creating interwoven layers of monastic-lay authority. Moreover, the authority of a trülku and his monastery might be reinforced through the patronage, protection, and recognition of greater powers, including those in Amdo, Central Tibet, and, as is the focus in this chapter, the Mongol Yuan, Chinese Ming, and Manchu Qing Empires. At the same time, China-based imperial states often recognized lay headmen as hereditary leaders of their chiefdoms, what in Chinese were referred to as qianhu (T. tongpön), or leader of one thousand households, and baihu (T. gyapön), or leader of one hundred households, designations that could both reflect and affect local power relations. Although the qianbaihu zhidu is unique to Amdo and parts of northern Kham, modern Chinese sources generally consider it a subcategory of the better-known tusi zhidu, or “native chieftain system,” a practice of indirect rule commonly deployed on China’s southern and southwestern ethnocultural frontiers. Nonetheless, the qianbaihu system had distinct origins in the Mongol Yuan Empire and in turn most likely developed from the decimal-based system of military and social organization that had long existed in Inner Asia.¹²

In fact, the origins of the qianbaihu system, the Rongwo nangso, and Rongwo Monastery are intertwined and inextricably linked to the thirteenth-century inclusion of the Amdo region into the expanding Mongol Empire. In 1235, Köten Khan, second son of the great khan Ögedei and after 1241 younger brother of the great khan Güyüg, led an expeditionary force through the Sino-Tibetan border regions, reaching as far south as Sichuan. After returning north, Köten was invested with a hereditary appanage at the old Minyak trading town of Liangzhou (near present-day Wuwei, Gansu), giving the Mongols a permanent base on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.¹³

FIGURE 2. Elderly trülku and three monks, Southern Gansu. Joseph Rock, 1926, courtesy of Harvard-Yenching Library.

As early as 1253 but perhaps not until after Köten’s cousin Qubilai proclaimed himself great khan in 1260, a “pacification commission” was established at Hezhou (present-day Linxia) to oversee Amdo and neighboring districts.¹⁴ In today’s Repgong region, the Mongols invested the leader of what apparently was the area’s most powerful local clan, the Awar Téu, with imperial recognition as the head of the Bili Wanhufu.¹⁵ Meaning something akin to “Bili Ten-Thousand-Household Brigade,” it had at least nominal authority over the regions south of the Yellow River in current-day Huangnan and Hainan (T. Tsolho) Prefectures. Below the Awar headman, the Mongols recognized local chieftains as qianhu and baihu, marking the introduction of the qianbaihu system into Amdo.¹⁶

In 1264, a Tibetan Buddhist missionary named Lharjé Draknawa is said to have arrived in the Repgong area with his three sons and as many as thirty clansmen. An “accomplished Buddhist master and medical practitioner,” he had been dispatched by Qubilai Khan’s newly designated state preceptor (guoshi) and leader of the Sakya order of Tibetan Buddhism, the Pakpa Lama, “to spread the Dharma and rule over Rebgong.”¹⁷ It appears that by dint of Lharjé Draknawa’s connections with the imperial throne and the ascendant Sakya tradition, by leveraging his family’s knowledge and patronage of religion and medicine, and by forging marital alliances with local leaders, under his son Dodé Bum and nine grandchildren the clan quickly consolidated authority over the Repgong region.¹⁸

It was from within this convergence of imperial rule, sectarian concerns, and local context that the institution of Rongwo nangso first appeared. Calling it “a completely distinctive development in the history of Tibetan regional administrative positions,” Qin Shijin notes that the particulars regarding the origins, jurisdiction, and authority associated with the nangso title remain unclear.¹⁹ The term seems to have originated in Central Tibet, perhaps coming east with Lharjé Draknawa himself, who may have functioned as an official of the Sakya state. Sonam Tsering maintains that in the early fourteenth century, Dodé Bum was invited to the Yuan capital where he was recognized as the first Rongwo nangso. However, the title would not appear in Chinese-language sources for another century, and it may be that the nangso title was used locally or in intra-Tibetan contexts but not in the bureaucratic language of the Yuan court. In any case, Dodé Bum’s third son would serve as a religious adviser to the Mongol emperor and in 1333 was himself named state preceptor. In 1342, on land donated by the indigenous headman and father-in-law of Dodé Bum, Sakyil Tabéhu, Dodé Bum’s eldest son founded Rongwo Déchen Chökorling (hereafter Rongwo Monastery), at that time devoted to the Sakya tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.²⁰

While the qianbaihu zhidu, Rongwo nangso, and Rongwo Monastery each were established during the extension of Mongol military-administrative power over the Amdo region, each would outlive the Yuan, in part by hitching their fortunes to other sources of authority. This included but was not limited to that which emanated from Beijing. While the actual ability of the imperial center to intercede in local affairs waxed and waned from the fourteenth century to the twentieth, receiving the imprimatur of the throne apparently never entirely lost its majesty. During the Ming dynasty (13...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• A Note on Sources, Transliteration, and Nomenclature
• Introduction: Amdo, Empire, and the United Front
• 1. Amdo at the Edge of Empire
• 2. If You Kill the County Head, How Will I Explain It to the Communist Party?
• 3. Becoming Masters of Their Own Home (under the Leadership of the Party)
• 4. Establishing a Foundation among the Masses
• 5. High Tide on the High Plateau
• 6. Tibetans Do the Housework, but Han Are the Masters
• 7. Reaching the Sky in a Single Step—The Amdo Rebellion
• 8. Empty Stomachs and Unforgivable Crimes
• Conclusion: Amdo and the End of Empire?
• Appendix A: Zeku’s Chiefdoms (ca. 1953)
• Appendix B: THL/Pinyin-Chinese-Wylie Conversion Table
• List of Abbreviations Used in the Notes
• Bibliography
• Index