Was Mao’s China a nation-state or an empire at its edges?

The short answer

• The Qing borders as a national claim. Both the Nationalists and the Communists treated the borders of the Qing empire at its height as the rightful borders of China, so Tibet’s self-government after 1913 looked to them like a theft committed during China’s weakness. The new state wanted to show that the century of humiliation was over, and restoring the frontier was the most visible proof. The claim also had a strategic edge, because Tibet bordered India and its plateau commanded the approaches to south-west China.
• A Tibet that could not defend itself. Lhasa had a small army of about 8,000 to 10,000 men, few modern weapons and no allies willing to fight for it. Britain, its old patron, had left India in 1947, and the new Indian government under Nehru wanted good relations with Beijing. The Tibetan elite had also resisted the military reforms of the 1920s, fearing that a strong army would weaken the monasteries, so in 1950 there was nothing to stop the PLA at Chamdo.
• Campaigns built for Han villages. The campaigns that the Party applied across China, from land reform to collectivisation, assumed a society of landlords and tenants that could be reorganised by work teams. In Kham and Amdo they collided with pastoral nomads, powerful monasteries and a people who carried arms. When officials tried to confiscate guns and monastery land in 1955–56, they provoked a revolt that the same methods could not contain. Officials trained to find landlords in Han villages treated lamas and chieftains as class enemies, which turned a reform into an attack on a whole way of life.
• Settler colonies and new roads. Beijing secured its frontiers by changing their population and geography. In Xinjiang the Production and Construction Corps, created in 1954 from demobilised soldiers, settled hundreds of thousands of Han migrants over the following decades. In Tibet the highways from Qinghai and Sichuan, opened in December 1954, and a road across Aksai Chin, finished in 1957, allowed troops and supplies to arrive by truck. Each road made the next intervention easier.

What it changed

Tibet transformed after 1959. The rising gave Beijing the reason to end the bargain of 1951. With the old government dissolved, it carried out land reform in Tibet in 1959–61, closed most monasteries, and created the Tibet Autonomous Region in 1965. In 1962 the Panchen Lama, the senior lama who had stayed, sent Zhou Enlai a long petition describing hunger and the destruction of religion in Tibetan areas, and he spent most of the next fifteen years in prison or under detention. The Tibet of the 1951 bargain had ceased to exist within six years.

War with India. The Dalai Lama’s asylum in India, and India’s discovery in 1958 that China had built a road across Aksai Chin, a plateau India claimed, turned the friendship of the early 1950s into a border dispute. Both sides pushed patrols forward, and in October 1962 the PLA attacked, routing Indian forces in the north-east and in Ladakh before withdrawing. The friendship slogan of the 1950s, “Indians and Chinese are brothers”, did not survive the decade.

A government in exile. The Dalai Lama settled at Dharamsala in northern India, where he set up a government-in-exile and later a parliament, schools and monasteries for some 80,000 refugees. Tibet thus acquired an international voice it had lacked in 1950, and the question of Tibet has followed every Chinese government abroad since 1959. Exile turned a regional rising into a lasting international cause.

Xinjiang’s changing population. The Corps and later migration raised the Han share of Xinjiang’s people from about 6 percent in 1953 to roughly two-fifths by the late 1970s. In 1962, in the hungry aftermath of the famine, tens of thousands of Uyghurs and Kazakhs fled across the border into the Soviet Union, a sign of how fragile the frontier settlement still was. Beijing sealed the border, and Xinjiang became one of the front lines of the Sino-Soviet split.