Reganoff2 [none/use name]

Sure. So in regards to te CIA unprising - it should be noted that the CIA approached the Dalai Lama in 1950, offering to give him supplies to fight the PLA. He refused, for one because he saw what was happening in Korea and didn’t believe that Tibet would win any outright war, but also because he genuinely believed the CCP would be a force for good. The CIA then took to other elements, mostly the regressive elites as well as certain dissents in Kham, trained a few and then airlifted them to try and mount a guerrilla war. That was only in Kham and Amdo, however. The real issue that changed things, and caused the Dalai Lama to flee etc was 1959, when those sporadic rebellions spread to Lhasa as well. Fascinatingly enough, historian Chen Jian notes (I can get you a PDF if you want) that the PLA was actually pretty eager to put these down - mostly as a show of force, but also it would be good martial practice. Take that for what you will.

However, to argue that the CCP had been only respectful up until this point is not entirely fair, I think. VIncent Goossaert and David A. Palmer discuss this in regards to religious institutions, from 1956 onwards (noting again that widespread rebellion had not yet really started outside a few rural areas in Kham), the CCP basically to disregard the 17 point agreement through a bit of a loop hole by arguing that Tibetans in Kham and Amdo, some of which were in Sichuan and not formally ‘Tibet’, would be subjected to land collectivization, including confiscation from monasteries, temples, and traditional land grants. Many landlords and tyrants very thankfully lost their holdings, but a very sizable percentage of the male population were invested in the monastery system. This caused a lot of resentment. Again, even if you can agree that ultimately religious institutions had to be liquidated, this was seen as a breach of trust as from the 1930s onwards when the CCP relied on minorities to keep them safe from the GMD during the Long March, the CCP had promised that the revolutionary measures it would pursue in the mainland and for Han people would not be applied entirely to minority people out of respect for autonomy. That ceased to be the case.

In Tibet itself, as historian Tsering Shakya notes that there was a lot of resentment in places like Lhasa because of the impression that China was ‘taking’ over the country. Shakya even argues that actually the CCP did a lot of good. Pre-revolution Tibet wasn’t all sunshine and roses, and even the Dalai Lama again pretty much agrees that a lot of the early reforms against feudalism etc was necessarsy. But things were a little shakier than the Chinese narrative of thigns also. You had a desire amongst Tibetans to have their own standing army, to be able to conduct its own foreign policy, and also to cap the limit of Chinese settlers and cadres allowed to stay in the territory. A lot of progressive forces wanted the CCP to actually take a harsher stance and to empower them to do the reforms that woudl be necessary. But, Mao was also very cautious about how to go about changing structures in Tibet and other minority areas at this point - he didn’t want to rock the boat, somewhat sensibly. To try and get rid of anti-Chinese sentiments in Lhasa and the Tibetan government, though, the Chinese authorities did want to force the coutnry’s dual Prime Ministers to be dismissed, and so they were. That sort of unilateral action unfortunately also pissed off the people who were hoping that the CCP would empower progressive elements - there was a simmering feeling that ultimately Chinese cadres were on one hand unwilling to take action but also that when they did so they did without the input of Tibetan officials or activists.

What changed the picture was that when China signed a trade agreement with India in 1953, the Tibetan elites were suddenly a lot more in favor of the Chinese government. Dalai Lama himself was wowed by Zhou Enlai’s diplomacy. infrastructure development and roads etc vastly improved. People were given good jobs, Tibet’s international standing grew etc. The ruling elite were very happy; ordinary people were somewhat more mixed, due to again growing resentment at the fact that they had very little input before the revolution and continued to have very little after. In 1955, they moved to create the Preparatory Committee for the establishment of the Autonomous Region of Tibet (PCART). This was seen as somewhat of a compromise - Mao had wanted to actually place the region under Beijing’s direct administration, buit thought the PCART would be a good way to start transitioning Tibet to a socialistic system of governance. Here is where things get a loittle tricky - the PCART would divde Tibet into three separate groups, and one of these (Chamdo) would begin moving to socialism quicker, under the supervision of the PLA. The Dalai Lama accepted this, but there was a lot of frustration here - PCART was designed essentaily to keep two separate Tibetan actors against each other (the Tibetan Government and the Panchen Lama) and to have another section (Chamdo) effectively operate under Chinese control with nominal Tibetan input. China thought this would all be a great success, but this basically just created a lot of disunity in Tibeta and a lot of anxiety about what China really wanted. Trust broke down, and then the uprising in Kham and Amdo start (again noting those regions were legally under Chinese jurisdiction, not ‘Tibet’). Lhasa denounced them entirely, did not want to support the Khampas whatsoever, but all the fighting also craeted a refugee crisis. The root of the fighting, again, was the belief of Tibetans in those areas that Buddhism itself was under attack, and that now a large body of men (monks, many of whom lived quite poorly, particularly the lower level ones) suddenly had no income. This created anxiety in Tibet that the same situation was inevitable there as well.

For what it is worth, Mao himself was not partiularly worried by these anxieties or even the initial rebellions, believing that basically it was a consequence of economic hardship and that Tibetans would cease to resent the Chinese presence eventually. Also aggravating the situation was that PCART was bringing in many more Han cadres, who were alleged of being significantly more callous towards local customs and religion. Chinese officials had to backpedal on some of their initial reforms, tried to placate people, and also outlined that Han Chauvinism was causing resentment throughout Tibet and other autonomous regions. In 1957, after the hundred Flowers speech, Tibetans started voicing a lot more of these anxieties out in the open, and in the context of growing discontent in Kham, Chinese officials were growign a lot more cautious. The whole situation was deteriorating, and local Chinese offiicials in Tibet proper were growing a lot more dismissive of Tibetan complains, basically saying that they believed Tibet belonged in the ‘bosom of the motherland’. And so, Han Chauvinism stopped being the enemy - local nationalism became the greater problem. The Khampa rebellion grew larger, affecting eastern Tibet too, and then with the CIA getting involved, the whole situation basically got set on fire.

The lessons here are sort of mixed. Tibetan elites, including many feudal ones, liked the CCP’s early policies because essentially it helped them grow their own capital and ‘develop’ the region. But a lot of regular peasants were more resentful of what they saw as a sort of cultural elitism amongst the TIbetan elites (including the Dalai Lama) as well as the Chinese cadres. Chinese cadres often barely spoke the language, were not particularly sensitive to local needs, and the shifts in Sichuan in Kham and Amdo made people even more afraid. Couple this with PCART’s disastrous policies and shifting elite sentiments, and stuff went out of control. Again, imo, the solution to this would have just been to set up a Tibetan Communist Party, supply them with funds and training, and have let Tibet develop its own unique course to revolution. It really is ultimately a sad thing that shit went the way it did. To say nothing, obviously, of the famine and some of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution that followed.

But then who gets to decide what ‘China’ is in this context? The CCP did a lot of good but how can we accept that they essentially took the Qing Empire’s borders and made it a singular nation? Even under the Qing, Tibet etc were not regarded as the same as the ‘neidi’ (mainland, internal provinces of China). Imo surely the Party could have just propped up local figures and let Tibet conduct its own revolution ie the Soviet model. Do we excuse India for squashing separatism in the name of unity against imperialism either? That was certainly the excuse for Indian troops smashing down militias in Hyderabad and the northeast. This idea that you need a singular polity no matter the cost is a foolish notion.

Is it indeed? There are actually some pretty clear practices that I think one could certainly suggest that the Muslim faith is not ‘celebrated’ in Xinjiang or in Hui areas in Gansu, Ningxia etc. One thing that comes to mind are the restrictions on fasting amongst students, government officials (including teachers), Party members (which includes a lot of fairly ‘normal’ people, not just officials). The Arabic script, which Muslims worldwide would be familiar with, is largely discouraged from use in places like Ningxia and Henan, where you have a lot of supposedly Han-ified Muslims known as the Hui. The logic is ultimately that if Muslims live in China, they should be at least somewhat ‘Sinicized’. Why this rustles feathers is that even under Mao, where there was certainly a lot of violence against religious institutions (a lot of it justified, of course), there was also a lot of insistence on the necessity for Han people to not pressure ethnic minorities to also necessarily act like the Han. This meant that there were practical limits on Han migration to ethnic minority areas, more employment opportunities in local Party bureaus for minority cadres etc. But following the 80s in particular, a lot of that got tossed out of the window. There is a reason, imo, that violence and separatist tendencies in Xinjiang began in the late 80s - the Han population in Xinjiang had rapidly increased. And it has continued to increase.

There are some elements of cultural erasure that comes with this sort of population manipulation. Yes, Uyghurs learn their language. But the emphasis has changed in some pretty pointed ways. In a lot of ‘bilingual’ schools, where Uyghur was once more dominant or at least taught in a fair amount of classes, it has become somewhat circumscribed as a specialty subject compared to Mandarin, which has gained more of an outsized importance. Bearing in mind that, one of the core tenents of the early PRC’s constitution was that autonomous regions could maintain their own educational standards and policies, and I think it makes sense that people are upset. I would also argue that policies targetting ‘fundamentalism’ are somewhat misguided in that we have to also understand what the source of fundamentalism is. The Chinese government currently uses the language of ‘war’ and ‘terror’ (where did they get that from…) to describe its attitude towards fundamentalism. The argument is that ultimately foreign madrasas and ‘Islamicization’ has eroded what was previously a secular culture, and poses a threat to China. But in my opinion, as with fundamentalism in the US or Europe or wherever, ‘Islamic’ terrorism is ultimately caused by socio-economic factors, namely the economic transformation that has happened in Xinjiang since the reform era, coupled with changing demographics. There is a reason that even Hui people, who again are supposedly much more ‘Chinese’ in their outlook, have also been recently targeted by anti-terror measures. Perhaps fundamentalism is growing, but it is as a consequence to what was a fairly flawed policy of the central government trying to shore up its presence in the periphery in a way that even local officials have grumbled about.

I mean, importantly though, most of the the ‘tankies’ of Western Europe admitted that they were wrong - that ultimately Khrushchev squashing the revolt was not going to solve any of the fundamental issues that were marring relations between the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. Even Sartre, the ‘tankiest’ of them all, admitted that he was wrong.

And I think the idea that 56 was an anti-Semitic color revolution is honestly just not a correct characterization. Of course the Yanks and the Brits were getting involved, but the overwhelming amount of scholarship and primary source research on the uprising has dispelled the myth that reactionary forces powered discontent or manipulated the rebellion. (Happy to refer you to the literature) Sometimes we like to throw around the word color revolution for anything that has a hint of foreign involvement but such distinctions are difficult in a world where big countries are interfering in small ones all the time - you will never get a social movement that is divorced from geopolitical interests. But that doesn’t mean the discontent or the politics behind it all are always completely fabricated. Tiananmen undoubtedly had some foreign reactionary forces melded in, I’m sure, but that doesn’t change that it was also the product of mass discontent caused by shifts in political economy.

But it is also besides the point - ‘tankies’ now is just a weird slur for anyone who believes that violence probably will be necessary in a revolution or just general MLism, but has also twisted to become an insult against people who defend the DPRK or the PRC, because words just don’t have any meaning I suppose. I mean the Dengists fought and beat the Maoists, but modern ones are suddenly the vanguard of the ML revolution or some such.

The problem ultimately I think is in trying to discern what ‘undue’ influence is. I think what bothers me about this view is that it pretty much erases the historical fact that 1. Maoist China existed, 2. It survived despite imperialism and aggression from both superpowers, 3. The nationalist bourgeoisie were liquidated after New Democracy properly came to an end in 1954. What made China a success in my view compared to say India is in fact that they realized that the bourgeoisie could never be CURTAILED so much as they had to be abolished, which is why Mao was so paranoid about capitalist roaders propping up - the revolution would never be complete without them being sequestered from society.

In my view, what you have in China is a situation where many of the elites that Mao and the left of the Party disdained are suddenly in a much better situation. As a personal anecdote - I knew kids who joined the Party in college because it meant that they would be able to get better finance jobs. The Party has become a sort of quasi corporate entity in that as an institution it doesn’t have a hostility to capital per se so much as it uses certain language to proclaim that it is against capital’s dominance. But my bet is that of Mao’s: an iota of capitalist influence will eventually corrupt any political project to overthrow it.

I voted Green. Safe as fuck blue state so I suppose it doesn’t matter at all, but fuck me I’ll probably never vote for a Democratic candidate after the joke that was the primaries.

Or Muslims, don’t forget the Muslims.

This is incredibly funny to me for a few reasons, namely that the Bush administration basically initially designated ETIM as a terrorist organization as a concession to the Chinese in exchange for using airfields in Central Asia and limiting critique of the US war in Iraq. ETIM were a fairly small fry ‘mujahideen’ group that kicked up a fuss briefly in a small township in Xinjiang before operating very small groups in Afghanistan…As a consequence of the designation, many Uyghur organizations that had previously nothing to do with Islamism or even much in the way of separatism were suddenly grouped into an umbrella group UNDER the ETIM, which was basically a green light from the Bush administration for China to securitize Xinjiang and crack down on dissenting factions under the label of the global War on Terror.

AND of course as a kicker, ETIM went from small fry shits to getting some major cred as an Islamist organization worthy of opposition from both the US AND China, so once discontent grew in Xinjiang as a result of all these new policies, they had their arms wide open, thus all their atrocities in Syria. Another consequence of the mindlessness of the US’s War on Terror, and obviously now just a good way to irritate the Chinese.

Um, the governor is essentially a figurehead position that is subordinate to the Party secretary. That is true in every autonomous region. A Tibetan has never been Party secretary. Indeed in comprehensive studies of the local Party personnel, historians have argued that basically most major Party positions have always been Han despite Tibetans making up a decent percentage of lower level cadres.

The point is not that Tibet’s conditions pre revolution were terrible. But I might note that you all are basically saying that an area the size of Western Europe was entirely a hellhole. That shit is deeply ignorant. There were areas of Tibet with slavery, and likewise there were areas full of relatively progressive reformers. What the CCP initially wanted to do was prop up local reformers and you’ll note to that end they worked very heavily with the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. What changed was that progressive reformers grew disenchanted with how little say they actually had following 1956 when policies took a harsher tone, thus the rebellion and the Dalai Lama fleeing, CIA involvement etc.

The point is this - the CCP admits itself that it took Xinjiang and Tibet to secure the rest of China. The risk of balkanization was too great. Hell I am inclined to agree with that. But the charge that they were there just to spread revolution and to enlighten the local populace is pretty much the same argument that the British made with India. It is dumb. I am sorry, if you believe in a straight up violation of all local autonomy and sovereignty for a vision of unilinear progress WITHOUT also accepting that there was a lot of cynicism involved, then you are blatantly misreading history.

Parenti is good but he is not a historian - there is a shit ton of work by both Western and Chinese historians on Tibet before and after the Revolution and the picture is significantly more complicated than you guys paint it to be.

I think one thing that is worth posing is putting China’s reforms in Xinjiang in a wider comparative framework. I wrote my dissertation on Xinjiang and Kashmir and comparative policy from the 50s onwards. It is worth noting that both places, even if they were treated rather roughly by the central government, had little ‘extremism’ or ‘separatist’ tendencies until certain economic shifts in the late 80s and early 90s. This ultimately culminated in a sudden jump in separatist violence, which was then met with mass securitization and surveillance, as well as demographic shifts (Han migration spiked in the 90s, and likewise India’s recent constitutional changes are to try and encourage largely Hindu populations in northern India to move to Kashmri). This securitization and central government intervention creates a cycle of resentment and backlashes, and I think coupled with subtle but pretty effective policy changes to try and destabilize the foundations of local culture and ideology (interventions in the way imams are trained, language policy, education policy, the presence of pseudo-military contractors like the bingtuan in Xinjiang etc) there is definitely something akin to cultural and demographic transformation happening along the scale of what China did in the southeast in 50s, or India in its northeastern states in the 60s. Whether you want to term this cultural genocide is entirely up to you, I suppose, but to be honest there are comparisons to be made with how other settler states have operated in the past, ie racial prejudice, Otherization, attacking traditional institutions etc.

And of course, need to remember that the US is hardly a shining figure here, considering that China literally took the War on Terror framework from Bush, who in turn classified major Uyghur groups as terrorist organizations in return for China acquiescing to the US having a major military operation right on its doorstep (Afghanistan). Don’t believe American propaganda, but I think we should be critical of some of the Han chauvinism that has been being propped up in certain Chinese governmental circles. Mao and Zhou Enlai warned about this all the time, and I think major aspects of the original promises to minorities have been really broken. Ultimately, I have to also ask - Belgium had a shit ton of radicalized Muslims leave the country to go fight for ISIS. If the Belgian government were to suddenly spend all of its time putting Muslims in special schools and training camps, securitizing Muslim suburbs in Brussels, setting up cameras and police checkpoints on major roads in Muslim neighborhoods, etc…Would we not be at least a little appalled? Even if the end result was some level of greater economic development? What about if the US did this to its own problematic minorities (I suppose it does - prison!)? What methods are we really willing to endorse to destroy so-called ‘Islamism’ - how can we actually destroy something if we don’t want to address its root, material causes ie discontent? The old government in China, despite again its pretty heavy-handed policy at times, understood some aspect of this, or certain notioned towards it. I am not sure the same is true today, and it is made worse by the fact that frankly most Han people have some pretty appallingly chauvinistic views towards ethnic minorities as either needing ‘civilizing’, or a bunch of moochers who live off the government.

I dunno man. Maybe it’s just because I am Muslim, and I have grappled a lot with what causes ‘extremism’ and how to rectify it, but I do not think hardline policies will be all that effective in the end. It will simply provoke a simmering resentment that is almost guaranteed to boil over at some point.