Webinar - The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier with Benno Weiner

Unforgivable Crimes and Open Wounds: Rebellion, Repression, and Remembrance on a Tibetan Borderland of Early-Maoist China

As with Muslims in China's northwestern region of Xinjiang and activists in Hong Kong, the ongoing struggle between Tibetans and the Chinese state is intimately connected to the manner in which they were first absorbed into the People's Republic of China. When in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party "liberated" the frontier region known to Tibetans as Amdo, rather than immediately implement socialist reforms it pursued relatively moderate "United Front" policies meant to "gradually" persuade Tibetans and Amdo's other non-Han Chinese inhabitants of their membership in the new Chinese nation. At the outset of 1958's Great Leap Forward, however, gradualism was jettisoned in favor of rapid, coerced collectivization. This led to large-scale rebellion, which was brutally put down, followed by a devastating famine. Rather than a "voluntary" and "organic" transformation, as imagined by Party leaders, the Amdo region was incorporated through the widespread and often indiscriminate deployment of state violence. In this talk, Dr. Weiner discusses 1958's Amdo Rebellion and explores ways in which the violence of 1958 and its aftermath continue to cloud the state's efforts to integrate Tibetans into the modern Chinese nation-state. 

Benno Weiner is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. He is author of the Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier (Cornell University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Contested Memories: Tibetan History under Mao Retold (Brill, 2020).

6:00pm EDT webinar, gratis. Advance registration required. Registrants will receive the link to view the lecture in the confirmation email.