Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania

Tibet’s incorporation into the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s is a familiar historical event, but why and how did Beijing do it? Speculative answers have been plentiful but empirical investigations can be done only recently. Dr. Xiaoyuan Liu will talk about his most recent book, To the End of Revolution: The Chinese Communist Party and Tibet, 1949-1959, which is the first archive-based study of the subject. The book reveals the thinking, debating, and power maneuvering around the Tibetan question within the inner circles of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from Beijing to Lhasa. Questions explored in the book include how the CCP differed from its Manchu and Nationalist predecessors in dealing with Tibet, how “unique” Tibet was in Mao Zedong’s revolutionary strategy, how “patient” the CCP leadership was when trying to solve the Tibetan question, and so on. In the Cold War years, Tibet was also part of a new “minority relationship” between China and the United States. In the remaining of his talk, Dr. Liu will briefly discuss his current research project on how the supposedly domestic issue of ethnic or racial minorities in the Chinese and the American societies entered the two powers’ ideological and geopolitical maneuverings.