![]() ![]() Allegedly, this was the beginning of Lhasa’s rebellious conspiracy. According to the story, in the spring of 1955, the Dalai Lama – while ending his official tour in Chinese provinces and passing through the Tibetan area of Xikang (western Sichuan after 1955) on his way back to Lhasa – sent several members of his entourage, disguised as religious preachers, to agitate anti-communist rebellion in different locations. Yet, having suppressed the revolt, CCP officials in Tibet took their cue from Mao and began to circulate a classified story inside the party. From the outset of the Lhasa Revolt, Mao Zedong incriminated the Dalai Lama as the “leader of the reactionaries.” At the same time, however, other top CCP leaders in Beijing and CCP officials stationed in Lhasa were by no means certain about the Dalai Lama’s stance with respect to the revolt and they continued to work to keep him on the CCP’s side. Through careful research, I established that this story emerged right after the Lhasa Revolt of March 1959. The PRC official narrative about post-1949 Tibet contains a central assertion that a “covert plot” of the “Dalai (Lama) clique” was responsible for causing the Tibetan revolts in western Sichuan (eastern Kham) in 1956, in Gansu and Qinghai (Amdo) in 1958, and in Lhasa in 1959. The following example serves to illustrate my point above. My research experience nevertheless attests the perils in coveting “archival power” for PRC history. Based on many years of patient searching, unexpected postponements, cultivation of friendships and scholarly contacts, and fortunate timing, my new book To the End of Revolution(Columbia University Press, 2020) cracks open a small archival window for glimpsing the CCP’s internal policymaking operations in the 1950s. Yet access to all of these repositories is sternly restricted, and Tibet-related materials are largely inaccessible. Resultantly, independent scholarly works on so-called sensitive subjects in PRC history tend to be idiosyncratic in their sources, and their research processes cannot be replicated.Īs far as Beijing’s policymaking about Tibet is concerned, aside from the impossible Central Archives in Beijing, the provincial or regional archives of Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, and the Tibetan Autonomous Region are logical places to seek out information. Under current circumstances, a historian’s ability to get access to PRC archives is rare, contingent, and reversible. This is so despite the modernization of the PRC archives in recent decades and the Chinese government’s adoption of some rather liberal laws and regulations about archival declassification. Yet, Trouillot’s criterion for a “historian” would disqualify nearly all historians working on PRC history, for, deprived of a decent academic environment for pursuing “archival power,” they are often forced to recoil in front of political authorities’ archival stonewall. ![]() The late anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot had this to say about historical writings: “Archival power determines the difference between a historian, amateur or professional, from a charlatan.” For historians, such access to historical archives is a rudimentary condition for their profession. ![]() Healthy intellectual exchanges about any controversial subject would require equal and full access to the same body of information by all sides involved. In these heated contentions, historical facts and reasons are often sacrificed, and bias, misinformation, and fabrication are common commodities. Today, Beijing’s forceful incorporation of Tibet into the PRC is central to political contestations as well as scholarly debates over the status of Tibet. Since then, the Tibet question inherited by the CCP has transformed into a Tibet problem of the CCP’s own creation – and a solution is not on the horizon. ![]() Careers, Fellowships, and Internships Open/CloseĪs the first decade of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended, Beijing’s violent incorporation of Tibet into its political domain not only tarnished the PRC’s image as a benevolent power among its friendly Asian neighbors, but also altered Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders’ reputations as masterful communist operatives among their Cold War adversaries.Wahba Institute for Strategic Competition.Science and Technology Innovation Program.Refugee and Forced Displacement Initiative.The Middle East and North Africa Workforce Development Initiative.Kissinger Institute on China and the United States.Nuclear Proliferation International History Project.North Korea International Documentation Project.Environmental Change and Security Program.Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History and Public Policy. ![]()
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