Nation-building Politics: Analyzing China’s Tibet in the 1950s

This article would like to provide an analytical framework studying nationalism, and examines China’s nation-building in Tibet in 1949-59 as a case. Most of the current literature focuses on nation-building politics mainly through either national or international dimension, while this paper argues that both domestic and international contexts are equally the two major factors accounting for it. Moreover, this paper argues that nation-building process in a multi-ethnic country is an ongoingly interactive construction between the ethnic groups and the state, which holds a certain nation-building narrative. Regarding the state-ethnic interactions in such process, this paper argues that the state tends to adopt accommodated policies when recognizing that it has more advantages than the ethnic groups; if not, the state tends to adopt suppressive policies. Utilizing archive and literature from both English and Chinese language sources, this paper then examines the evolevement of the Tibetan issue of the 1950s that is considered as Beijing’s effort to build the Chinese nation in Tibet. With the narrative of “territory integrity and national unity,” the Chinese Communist Party adopted a policy of accommodation towards Tibet in the early 1950s given that Tibetans lowly radicalized. However, in the late 1950s the Beijing-Tibet interactions turned to armed conflicts by intertwined domestic and international conditions, and eventually the CCP chose to suppress Tibetans from its previous accommodation in 1959.