Reassessing the Failure of China’s Ethnic and Religious Policy in the Late 1950s

When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established the People’s Republic (PRC) in 1949, it had to determine how to approach frontier regions that historically unaccustomed to direct rule from Beijing. These areas were mostly inhabited by non-Han Chinese ethnic groups, also known as “minority nationalities,” who were also often distinguished by their religious traditions. As these frontier areas were essential for national security, and since CCP authority was still limited, the Party initially aimed to win over rather than antagonize minority elites, respect religion, and postpone land reform. This changed, however, in 1955, when a “socialist high tide” initiated land reform in minority regions, and more dramatically in 1958, with the radical collectivization and class conflict policies of the Great Leap Forward led the CCP to jettison its earlier approach of respecting minorities’ religion and culture, setting off mass uprisings in the process. In retrospect, scholars have disagreed as to whether the moderate policies of the early 1950s were a ploy to deceive ethnic minorities into a false sense of security with a hollow promise of “autonomy,” or a genuinely moderate approach that was sabotaged by radicalism and intransigence. Other questions also remain unresolved: How much control did party leaders really have on the situation in the borderlands? Was there a common pattern across different frontier regions or did they follow independent trajectories? To what degree were the CCP’s frontier and ethnicity policies driven by foreign policy concerns? Were the USSR's concurrent Virgin Lands and Anti-religious campaigns an influence on CCP policy? By evaluating the local, national, and international factors behind the unrest of the late 1950s, I argue that the collapse of the PRC’s ethnic and religious policies was caused by fundamental incongruence between the bureaucracies and levels of the CCP, the People’s government, and the international Communist movement.