Confess that before I listened to this New Books Network podcast, I wasn’t even aware that central Tibet, the part we generally here about, was only part of it, and that Amdo was not under the Dalai Lama’s control from the mid-18th century, and before the Communists took over was run by Muslim warlords who allied with the Kuomintang.
Author Benno Weiner is fascinating on what seem to have been genuine Community Party attempts in the Fifties to win the locals over – through the “United Front”, but is also fascinating, and disturbing, on what he sees today as a rising alliance of the Party leadership with Han ethnonationalism – reflecting also on Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, and also Hong Kong. Nation-building visions have changed.
Also very interesting on the idea – heretical to some – that empires might be, as a more laissez faire entity content to leave local cultures and even rulers in place – less repressive in general than nations, which often require acceptance of a single identity, not just rule. Contrasting the Ming, which was essentially a nation with smaller boundaries, to the Ching, an empire.
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