The Cold War on the Tibetan Plateau: Patriotic Herders Resisting Imperialism

Hardly a year after the Communist Party’s victory over the Nationalists in 1949, China sent troops into Korea to repel the United States’ counterattack on the north, greatly exacerbating Sino-US tensions. The emerging Cold War reached far and wide, extending its shadow into China’s loosely incorporated frontiers. This paper explores the Cold War in China’s northwest province of Qinghai. Established only in 1928, Qinghai, part of the region known to Tibetans as Amdo, was home to an ethnically diverse population that included Tibetans, Mongols, Hui, Salar, and Han. While government forces were conducting mop-up operations in Qinghai against anti-communist Muslim forces and attempting to solidify the loyalty of local Tibetan and Mongol rulers in 1950, officials expressed concern that the US entry into the Korean War was undermining confidence in the revolutionary government. Responding to rumors that the government would soon fall, officials organized mass meetings. Local non-Han leaders, entangled in the imperial ambitions of the US and China, were expected to actively participate in these political campaigns. For example, the leader of the Tibetan Kangtsa polity, Huazang (Tibetan: Dpal bzang; 1908-1958), exhorted members to donate silver and wool to the government to aid its fight against the US. The Cold War transformed Qinghai profoundly in other ways. Fearing for the nation’s integrity, in the 1950s the state sent hundreds of thousands of Han settlers to establish farms and destroyed much pastureland in the process. In 1958, Tibetan pastoralists were entangled again as China responded to threats from the US and the USSR by driving pastoralists from their land to open a nuclear weapons facility in eastern Qinghai. This paper will shed new light on the Cold War and Sino-Soviet Split by examining how Chinese efforts to incorporate Qinghai became entangled in preexisting political formations and rising geopolitical tensions.