Building New China, Colonizing Kokonor: Resettlement to Qinghai in the 1950s

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Building New China, Colonizing Kokonor: Resettlement to Amdo and Qinghai in the 1950s examines rural resettlement to the Sino-Tibetan cultural borderlands in the 1950s. More than 100,000 eastern Han and Hui Chinese were sent to Qinghai provinceknown in Mongolian as Kokonor and Amdo to Tibetansto plow up new fields in areas that were being incorporated into the Chinese state for the first time. The settlers were to bring their skilled labor, literacy, and modern thinking to backward Qinghai to fully exploit its natural resources of oil, natural gas, gold, and empty lands for the benefit of the industrializing nation. The book is a social and political history of resettlement, focusing on the people who were moved and the overall impact the program had on the province. It is a frontier history, but it also narrates a story of state building in modern China that spans the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first.

Reviews

In the 1950s, more than rustication was a systematic migration of a rural resettlement from across China to what is modern Qinghai province. Historian Rohlf examines a western region that remains a frontier project in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands; indeed, in the 1950s, two waves of migration also triggered an ethnic tensionboth intra-Hui and intra-Hanthat collectivized the system while mediating the foundation for socialist control. In sending more than 100,000 Chinese to Qinghai (Kokonor in Mongolian), the new central state solidified an enormous state-building project to lift Qinghai from backwardness to exploit the regions natural resources while indoctrinating a generation of youth in the industrial initiative....Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty. * CHOICE *
This book is the first systematic analysis in Western scholarship of Han Chinese settlement and colonization in Qinghai. A welcome addition to the study of modern Chinas ethnic and frontier issues, this volume is an important source for understanding the present-day Beijing governments strategy for developing Chinas far west. -- Hsiao-ting Lin, Stanford University
Gregory Rohlf's book is a long-awaited account of the making and unmaking of China's northwestern Qinghai province as a frontier zone in service of a new China under Mao. Only someone with Rohlf's dogged patience and nuanced eye could pull this offit takes years to produce a book like this, digging through and translating primary sources in Chinese and reading widely enough to place a region in comparative perspective. All researchers working on China's multiethnic frontier zones must cope with the extreme complexity and political sensitivity of the materials. Rohlf manages to write with both equanimity and empathy, producing a compelling story of a vast and, in places, tragically unsuccessful experiment in settler colonialism, fueled by Chinese fantasies of expanding agriculture as the outer edge of modernity and civilization. This is a story of unprecedented state-building in China, one that helps us grasp the ethnic and gendered heterogeneity of settlers' experiences of state-led farming in highland Qinghai. This study provides crucial historical context for understanding the most recent state-led efforts to encourage the market integration of China's western provinces in the Great Open the West campaign, as well as for recent controversies over a renewed state policy emphasis on resettlement efforts in the highland northwest. -- Charlene E. Makley, Reed College

Author Bio

Gregory Rohlf is associate professor of history at the University of the Pacific.