Famine, Religion, and Revolution in Post-Liberation Gansu

Perched on the frontier of northern China’s traditional cultural and political core along the Yellow River, Gansu Province has been a source of great concern for China’s leaders for centuries. This southern part of this historically restive province is home to a diverse mix of ethnic groups, including Han Chinese, Tibetans, Mongols, Kazakhs, Salars, Dongxiang, and one of China’s highest concentrations of Hui people (also known imprecisely as “Chinese Muslims”) in Linxia, located just west of the provincial capital Lanzhou. The area was a key stronghold during a massive Muslim rebellion against the Qing government in the 1860s and 1870s, and saw sporadic unrest throughout the early twentieth century. The founding of the People’s Republic of China was meant to bring a new era of social and political stability in liminal regions like Gansu as well as peaceful coexistence between Han Chinese and ethnic minorities. However, the largely unexamined history of Southern Gansu during the early People’s Republic of China (PRC) period demonstrates the tremendous difficulties the new regime faced in pursuing contradictory aims: promoting nominal ethnic autonomy and assuaging ethnic tensions while pursuing a social revolution meant to eventually eliminate religious and ethnic identity. Using archival sources, this paper will examine the political, social, and economic factors leading to a series of uprisings throughout southern Gansu in the mid-late 1950s. I propose that, as in previous instances of ethnic/religious unrest in the region, ethnic tensions (aggravated by the heavy-handedness of Communist Party cadres) and famine conditions (greatly exacerbated by collective and communal production schemes) combined to produce conditions ripe for rebellion. This paper will also examine the unrest in Gansu within the wider context of early PRC ethnic and religious policies and the comprehensive failure of these policies in the late 1950s.