Becoming Masters of Their Own Homes: The United Front and Nationality Autonomy on the Tibetan Plateau during the “Early Liberation” Period

This paper analyzes the establishment of the Zeku (Tib. Tsékhok) Tibetan Autonomous County, a “purely Tibetan” pastoral region in southeastern Qinghai Province (Tib. Amdo), within the context of the Chinese Communist Party’s “early-Liberation” discourse on nationality autonomy.  In Qinghai’s minority regions, the CCP formed a “United Front” with pre-Liberation secular and religious elites, often the very same people and institutions that had previously served as local intermediaries of the “Ma Family Warlords” and before them the Qing imperial state. Within their own nationality autonomous regions, and on the basis of equality and mutual respect, minority nationalities were promised that they would at long last become “masters of their own homes” (dangjia weizhu).

Nationality autonomy has largely been dismissed as an in-artful cover for Chinese Communist domination.  However, employing county-level archival sources as well as unpublished internal (neibu) documents from Qinghai’s United Front Work Department, I instead argue that during the early 1950s nationality autonomy was considered to be a democratic institution with the power to isolate counterrevolutionaries, strengthen national unity, develop productive capacities, instill mass consciousness and eventually lead to socialist reforms.  In other words, national autonomy was imagined as a mechanism of “voluntary,” “gradual” and “organic” transformation, and the primary means to transition from empire to nation.