Geopolitics, Sovereignty, and the Monetary Revolution in Tibet, 1951–62

Until the mid-twentieth century, the Tibetan economy enjoyed relative autonomy from Beijing, where the trade with nearby British India, prohibitive geography, and the Buddhist political culture played equally important, if not larger roles in Tibetan economic life than the Chinese state. Between 1951 and 1959, Tibet was constituted as a “special administrative region” with its characteristic political economy, including the continued use of Tibetan tangka coins and the Indian Rupee. Meanwhile, as the infrastructural power of the nascent Communist party-state rapidly grew from the Han-Tibetan borderland to central Tibet, the local economy in general and the currency system, in particular, was subject to ever-increasing state domination. While the Tibetan elites tried to exert control over the crumbling affairs by mustering symbolic power and customary rights, Beijing imposed the Renminbi through the well-tested model of “material standard” developed during wartime North China. Through material assistance from China proper, land reforms in Kham and Amdo, and diplomatic deals with India, Beijing and its Tibetan military government wrestled the financial system from the Tibetan elites and established the Renminbi as the sole legal currency. The escalating tensions contributed directly to the Tibetan Uprising of 1959 and indirectly to the Sino-Indian War of 1962. By the end of the wars, the triumphant party-state achieved full monetary sovereignty by incorporating Tibet into the socialist monetary order, but the Tibetan economy also became highly dependent on costly fiscal transfer, resources mobilization, and critical transportation infrastructure. Drawing on archival documents, surveys, memoirs, and oral history, this paper shows that Communist state was both an imperial successor and an unprecedented revisionist power when it came to monetary policy on the frontier.