ON THIS DAY · 25 DECEMBER 1954

Qinghai–Tibet and Sichuan–Tibet highways

25 Dec 1954 — The Qinghai–Tibet and Sichuan–Tibet highways open to Lhasa, built largely by soldiers over passes above 4,000 metres; Golmud grew from the road-builders’ tent camp. For the first time a Chinese government could move an army and its supplies into Tibet by truck, which made the 1951 agreement enforceable on Beijing’s terms.

The moment in context

The new state inherited a contradiction from the Qing, the Manchu empire that had ruled Mongols, Tibetans, Uyghurs and others beside the Han Chinese until 1912: it claimed an empire’s borders while calling itself the homeland of one nation. The Republic of China that replaced the Qing had lost control of Outer Mongolia, Tibet and much of Xinjiang, and the Communists meant to restore those borders. Xinjiang showed the easy way, because its Nationalist garrison, cut off after Chiang’s government fled, had nothing left to fight for and surrendered in September 1949. In 1954 demobilised soldiers became the Production and Construction Corps, a farming army that ran its own towns, much like the military settler colonies of earlier empires. It settled Han Chinese, over nine in ten of all Chinese, in a region where they had been about 6 percent of the people and where the Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people, were the largest group. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region followed in 1955, and since each region’s Communist Party secretary outranked its government, much as a company’s owner outranks its local managers, autonomy put Uyghur faces in office and left power in Han hands.

From Tibet and Xinjiang under Mao, chapter 3 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976 (1956).

The place: Qinghai–Tibet and Sichuan–Tibet highways — map and full story →

The atlas that shows it

The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976

12 CHAPTERS · AN INTERACTIVE SITUATION MAP