The thorny issue of Tibetan-Chinese relations is fraught with one-sided views and historical approximations. Like other contested questions, such as the “Historikerstreit” in Germany, it challenges researchers well beyond their professional territory. There is not much a historian can do in order to alleviate the conflict of interpretations, save stressing the independence of research. Which is not saying the historian may not have his or her personal views on the matter. But partisanship will object to scholarship, because the historical enquiry cannot turn narratives into facts without carving what French historian Paul Veyne called a “space of indifference”. Under such constraints, risking a factual history is a most daring project. It proves equally rewarding, as we may judge in reading Dr Raymond’s needed, novel, and seminal work.
1 Daring Factual History
For this is precisely what he does in this study of “the Tibetan policy of the PRC government” at the time of what he refrains from calling the invasion of Tibet by the PRC (1949–1951). But Dr Raymond has not screened a vast documentation for the sheer sake of rehabilitating what might be termed the kaozhengxue style of history. Climbing on a mountain of criticised documents, he can offer a “reinterpretation based on newly released Chinese sources”. This pertains to the balance of war and politics in the unfolding of the military campaign from October 1949 to the Spring of 1951, when the Seventeen Point Agreement granting Tibet inner autonomy under the Beijing government was signed (on May 23). The enquiry addresses the origins of the agreement in a novel way. The argument is that the military expedition proved enough for the Tibetans to feel threatened into surrender, but also, and no doubt to the surprise of many, that it was not decisive enough for securing Tibet under Mao Zedong’s terms as he had ordered in the fall of 1949. The argument runs further by not attributing the political compromise to the politics of moderation that had prepared the communist takeover in China and were continued after October 1949 under the label of “New Democracy”. Claiming that Mao’s communist ideology is unbending, it does not view a Gramscian “historical compromise”. Rather, it states that military setbacks and a fragile balance of power were the true reasons for Mao to enter into political negotiations and offer an agreement that could only be transitory.
In my view, this new history of the annexation of Tibet contributes to the ongoing reassessment of the takeover period (the so-called “Liberation”) in China across the 1949 date-line. It does echo the reconsideration of the balance of power (as well as the interaction of compromise and terror) on local scenes that underpins the new perspective. It also buttresses the emerging argument that the period can be viewed as a new episode in the construction of the post-imperial state, with the CCP leadership under Mao claiming the Qing-enlarged imperial space (including Tibet and Xinjiang), but also building a strong army and a numerous bureaucracy that, however, proved unable to exert control over the vast conquered territories without resorting to compromises with the local powerholders. A further merit of the book is the scanning not only of the military operations in Tibet, but also of the state of the Chinese army there, as well as of the chain of command and communication from the terrain to the leadership in Beijing through regional levels.
The argument on politics, war and ideology that I just phrased in general terms is laid out in the most concrete way by the parallel sequencing of the military events on the ground and of the political reactions to events along the Chinese hierarchical chain. The book explores the inner working of the Tibetan government in a less detailed way because sources are less abundant. It also sheds light on the Tibetan side in what amounts to charting another case of a local political field wobbling between war and politics. The takeover appears as a complex process consonant with the current reappraisal of “Liberation”. Any reassessment of the military-political aspects in and around Tibet during the transition period will have to be indebted to this masterly yet unpretentious analysis.
But is it so humble? Readers may be reassured to know that they are not seduced into a disguised annexation of Tibet’s history to China’s by a “blind” historian—and by the “blind” author of this foreword. Fact is that this period of Tibetan history was under strong Chinese military and political pressure: the study’s perimeter is a novel, more precise and better documented measurement of the pressure, nothing else. A glance at the book will justify the word “unpretentious” in another way. A more than sizeable share is accorded to the footnotes; footnotes are mainly comprised of references to and quotations-translations from primary sources. This unveils a troubling reality. Many of the preceding studies have relied on misquoted and mistranslated Chinese texts (often via Tibetan secondary sources). In not trusting what was so far taken at face value, the book sets the record straight and redresses the rather poor state of a field: it does not prove one side or the other was “right”.
The meticulous examination and use of criticised sources is the least we can expect from a professional historian. Here, however, the conflict of interpretations makes the mustering and the confrontation of documents a research terrain in itself. The parti pris against all parts-pris is the lifeline along which sources are cross-checked. The exceptionally rich critical apparatus amounts to a parallel text unwinding like a double helix, a twin-book that we should read as such instead of censuring it for being heavy. Yet, the technique seems to have to stand for criticism. The bulk of the material is Chinese, mostly of official origin, including a truly astonishing trove of documents recently published in the PRC. No balance can be maintained within the corpus of evidential documentation. Tibetan sources are widely used, and not less criticised than the Chinese ones: many are later reconstructions, and many witnesses prove to be militants. But Chinese documents (official and “private”), if not more reliable, to be sure, are more numerous and in constant flow. The impossible challenge could not be met by an even more impossible challenge. Our tour in the workshop settles the matter. Chinese sources do not support a China-friendly history; ideological sources do not deliver ideology: they deliver facts. Altogether, an unparalleled level of textual and factual accuracy is reached where we are faced with obfuscation on the Chinese side and well-meaning complacency from many Tibetan witnesses. Never failing to call all sides to the bar, Dr Raymond manages to produce valuable historical statements from conflicting reports. A case in point is (in chapter 4) his bilateral account of the battle of Chamdo (October 1950), which, although (or rather, because) it was not the military triumph claimed by Chinese propaganda, paved the way to the political compromise.
In the light of current disquisitions, taking stock of facts is no longer the fundamental research method it used to be. Being construed as narrative or textual constructs, they call for deconstructions—which become the subject of the social sciences. Without going to such extremes, given the present flourishing of historical research in all directions, it takes an uncommon sense of responsibility to fall back on basics: sourced facts. Dr Raymond’s account is not only based on facts, as all should be: it is primarily a history of facts, military and political facts. But even before this, the historian’s responsibility starts with words, and responsible language begins with the title. As with other conflictual topics (e.g. the PRC-Taiwan “cross-strait relationship”), the selection of terms is not a peripheral issue. It is not by chance, but by choice, that “Tibet” is not written in the title. The book makes clear it deals with the part of the Tibetan civilisation area that remained under the Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa after the Chinese Republic and the GMD regime took sizeable portions of historical Tibet. Similarly, “Tibetan policy of the PRC government” spells out a carefully delineated focus: the conqueror’s policies within a span of three short years. Readers might wonder whether it is sensible to address only one aspect (which is by no means one side) of a multiple-entry history by relying mainly on textual sources. On a nearly impossible subject, one that could very well pass for the epitome of self-defeating topics, our historian meets the challenge. What the title does not say, however, is that an entirely new exploration of the said “policy” opens the new vista where we may see the not-so-peaceful annexation of Tibet as the last episode of the not-so peaceful “Liberation” of China.
2 A Tibetan “Case” in the Wars of “Liberation”
Reading Dr Raymond on the military-political conquest of Tibet is like revisiting the dynamics of conquest on the many scenes in China where CCP and PLA dominance was wobbly. As they will follow the military expedition’s astonishingly slow progress towards Lhasa, readers will discover the even more surprising entanglement of war and politics in the process of submitting Tibet to the Beijing government. The fact that the PLA did not win an uncontested victory has been obfuscated by Chinese propaganda and often neglected by historians. Rather, the ill-prepared and poorly equipped expedition got stalled and, at times, narrowly escaped from defeat. The Tibetan war of the “ever-victorious” PLA, if not lost, was not won in the field. The supposedly triumphant battle of Chamdo which I have mentioned was “won in extremis” and opened the way to political negotiations only because the Tibetan government failed to capitalize on its de facto strategic advantage. Contrary to the communist narrative (that Tibet was “peacefully liberated”), we can now be certain that war was not waged as a “last resort”. Political negotiation was the last resort. As a result of his military weakness, Mao was forced to deploy an artful strategy of persuasion and compromise that led to the military occupation of Lhasa which the PLA alone had not been able to secure. Only events—military events—derailed the initial plan. The book’s novelty is to show how the impact of adverse military developments on policy making led to the supplementation of the military conquest by a political one—making it look like a continuation of the policies of “Liberation” in China.
The Tibetan prism, however, shows that a calculus of power, not moderation, was the crux of the matter.1 The entanglement of political and military aspects in the Chinese civil war has long been stressed by historians. Since Suzanne Pepper’s landmark study,2 received wisdom has been that both progressed at the same pace. If one crosses the 1949 border and looks at local terrains, the interplay of military pressure, power and political factors in the establishment of the PRC looks far more complex and uneven than the standard account of military victory delivering local control on a tidal wave of consensus. By increasing the scale of Mao’s system of action, and by being victorious over a brief time-period, the big (civil) war overcame the (by then) nascent state capacity of the CCP and the not unlimited power of its armed forces. Far from being the irresistible force sweeping over China that is usually portrayed, the system was geographically expanding at the expense of control. Compromises with local authorities and local elites were instrumental not just against the GMD regime and until its downfall, but after takeover, for the sake of economic life, social peace and governance. The emerging picture involves on local scenes power contests, unsteady alliances and fragile shared governance. The takeover processes, although they bear the original mark of the communist power apparatus (and ideology), are reminiscent of many local power switches that occurred at the time of the Republican revolution, during the warlord’s era and following Japan’s invasion, not to evoke the Ming-Qing transition. On the large scale, just when the operation in Tibet was launched, the battle of Jinmen was lost, thus putting the invasion of Taiwan in jeopardy. The decision to annex Tibet took place in a global élan of conquest but also in the context of a not completely irresistible state-building momentum, with the CCP leadership well aware that the dynamics of takeover involved complex local processes. These were the conditions under which the victorious PLA marched into Tibet … to less than the victory propaganda and legend have popularised.
Having to make up for military shortcomings, Mao had to play his hand in various modes. Dr Raymond documents how the cunning Chairman managed to open and to master a political terrain among Tibetan elites by playing on their division and seemingly meeting their concerns for inner autonomy, and for Tibet’s security against an artificially enhanced Anglo-American “imperialist” threat coming from India. He appears as a steadfast ideologist endowed with a high degree of tactical agility in whom I recognise my own vision of a first-class technician of power: far more dangerous than a simple opportunist. In fact, what we see emerging is a pattern of dominance that cannot be attributed only to circumstances, but should be traced to what I call a strategy of hegemony underpinning Mao’s practice of politics as war—war understood in several modes of action: interaction between war and politics on specific terrains, and, within politics, between struggle and compromise, division and union.
3 Mao’s Hegemony Strategy
The articulation of the modes of action I just underlined is central to Mao’s strategy for taking power and for wielding it not just as power (state power, party power, social control), but as politicised power. The hegemony strategy works in accordance with the mobilisation of activist agents and the normalised practice of violence that also define Mao’s active-divisive system of action. The two latter aspects grew after the time of conquest as Mao rekindled little and big wars within the socialist state and even against the CCP. I have developed elsewhere the genealogy, the technology and the historical stages of this “algorithm”.3 It explains the apparent contradiction of an unflinching ideology of class struggle harbouring political compromises—an enigma which Dr Raymond solves, rightly in my view, by stressing the unhobbling ideological pivot in the origins and unfolding of the Tibetan war. On this basis, how can we view Mao’s politics as the continuation of war by other means?
Suffice is to recall that, in the historical development of Maoism, two factors contributed to the formation of the war-and-politics format of action. One was the militarised and territorialised ecology of Chinese politics since the 1910s, a feature that was reinforced on the communist side after the CCP lost its mooring in the cities at the end of the 1920s. The other factor was the prevalence of the united front strategy in the history of Chinese communism and in the emergence of Maoism during the 1940s. The (Leninist) “united front” behind “New Democracy” (expounded by Mao in 1940) was one of the three “magic weapons” (together with party building and armed struggle) Mao had listed in 1939 in order to change the scale of communist action and propel the CCP on the level of the GMD state.4 Even before this, the united front had shifted from social strategy to inner geopolitics as early as its inception by Maring (in 1922–1923). Maring not only noted that modern workers and the nascent CCP were confined to the social margin. He also, and primarily, underlined the territorialised and militarised texture of Chinese politics. The Canton-based GMD was viewed (in spite of its weakness) as the prospective agent of a political and military operation of national reunification and state building. Maring thus introduced the power calculus that was to become one of the tenets of Maoism: not that the class revolution must bow to reality by opening the social spectrum, but the dependency of communist action as regards (inner) geopolitical conditions, including the military aspects.
In the long run, the urban front was as instrumental in achieving victory over the GMD as were the great battles of 1948–1949. The “plus” was not so much the class components of the revolution as the relocation and on-the-spots adjustments of CCP power. Stressing this explains why the impression that the united front runs counter to the ideology of class war is wrong. Lenin devised it as an instrument of struggle from below (against the socialist parties from which the communists had split). He added (1920) an ‘exotic’ extension by programming the world expansion of communism in non-industrial societies based on “anti-imperialist fronts” including the elements (the so-called “national bourgeoisie”) that were opposed to colonial (or “semi-colonial”) rule. Far from being incidental, exceptional, contradictory, the front format is axial in Marxism-Leninism. We should view it as Mao viewed it: a way for addressing adverse situations that tightly links a closed class-warfare ideology to an alliances-seeking strategy, an instrument of struggle allowing for the pursuit of power by means of an hegemony strategy.
From his early “class analyses” (1926) to his last pronouncements about the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Mao charts fields of power and views class struggle as the pursuance of power through hegemony. In his view (which, as we know, was challenged but managed to engineer the political wars of the Cultural Revolution), hegemony does not lead to state power but to anti-hegemonic hegemony. Party (and state) power has to be exercised by allowing for continued (and normalised) political action from below. Being a contest of resistance and domination, power has to be conquered and reconquered. The strategy allows a non-dominant or weakly dominant force to move from a marginal position to the centre of a given political field (local, regional, national, sectoral), to saturate it with its own agenda and norms by playing on division and union (through compromises, if need be, as with the united front), and to gain full control of it. Although it aims at the intellectual and cultural spheres as well, it is not the peaceful confrontation Gramsci had in mind. Mao’s conflictual politics are not war in a metaphorical sense. The strategy calls for the packing of one bloc against a common enemy but introduces enmity among “friends” as well. It thus leads from outside to inside, from isolation to overall control, not to stark heresy or political hara-kiri. It creates the conditions for the weak to get strong, eliminate the strong, then the need for alliances, then the allied forces and individuals that do not submit to the new terms, and in this way produces the conditions for the class revolution to reach the level prescribed by the unchanged ideology.
“New Democracy” is one of its applications in China … and in Tibet. To be sure, Mao’s political war, as I just delineated it, was not yet systemised and applied on the scale it reached during the 1960s on the basis of the political building of the 1950s. And the Tibetan agreement was signed with the governing authority, not against it. But resorting to political concessions and refraining from imposing socialism made the Tibetan case fall into Mao’s framework for taking power over China. From the pursuit of politics in war to the pursuit of war in politics, the same strategy was in full swing through various applications. The turn of Chinese and Tibetan events during the second half of the 1950s illustrates the theorem that looking for allies beyond the orthodox frame does not alter the frame but aims at applying it when and where conditions are not adequate. It was continuation with other means of the continued war with other means. The book proves that the debate about the derailing during the 1950s of the Tibetan compromise (as well as of “New Democracy”) by a tyrant suddenly converted to radical politics is a moot point. War was in the matrix. The 1951 Tibetan compromise was cast into the “dustbin of history” just as “New Democracy” was discarded in China. In both cases, context and conjuncture were determining factors, but not to the point of derailing the CCP once it could establish itself as the sole master. Describing with surgical precision the way the magic trick was played (as it was in Shanghai, Beijing, Canton and down to the villages before rural terror was unleashed), the book adds an unexpected chapter to our knowledge of the political crowning of the civil war in China.
4 The Political Impact
The Tibetan “application” shows how the orthodox (and sliding) screen of the united front hides the generative algorithm of power secured through war and politics at war. The strategic view of any situation as a political field calling for a power calculus (of alliances and conflict) means there are several kinds of warfare and political formats in Mao’s wars. The Maoist current is alternating, exclusive or inclusive, warring or not according to need, but always aggressive, divisive, and violent: a real war waged on all kinds of terrains which the war transforms into political fields. Instead of the standard and delusive criteria used for categorising Mao’s action (moderate, radical), we should speak of his metrics of struggle. In the development of Maoism from guerrilla warfare and local action5 to his later divisive tyranny (the so-called “uninterrupted revolution”), through the wars and “New Democratic” policies of “Liberation” (including the conquest of Tibet), war and politics hold the keys inasmuch as they are intertwined in this fundamental way.6
In this light, the book shows that, while the 1951 settlement was a kind of historical “accident” due to the PLA’s underperformance, the political issue was not found by accident. The argument on the political impact of war highlights our historian’s unyielding stance on the unyielding ideological frame. Policies vary, core politics do not. To some readers, it may seem rigid, as compared, for instance (and to limit ourselves to China studies) with Benjamin Schwartz’s “ideology in flux”. However, the book does document an ideological texture that is impervious to the modicum of change it allows. It shows that Mao’s politics do not have to be radical in order to be ideology-driven. The perennial code is not a matter of correct language independent of action, but reproduces and adjusts itself through action, as an algorithm does. My analogy with generative AI gives ideology its due share while allowing for historical change. We may agree with Dr Raymond’s perspective and conclude with him that, if war was not a background noise in the context, ideology was not the background of war either.
The book also demonstrates the possibility of founding robust research on ideological sources. This is not an aside. The bulk of the documentary foundation, if not ideological per se, is marred by ideology. For those who are familiar with the various fields of communist studies, the apparently unpassable barrier of ideology will definitely not be viewed as an original sin. Notwithstanding the numerous field studies on and from the social side of China that have cropped up in recent years, the power apparatus remains a valuable source of information, if not the best informant—provided, of course, the investigator deciphers the language. Many valuable studies have been based on the fact that these regimes are “talkative”: they never stop commenting on their action, expounding their goals, justifying their decisions, and publicising their reasons. Moreover, being all but monoliths, they do it in multiple voices. In sum, the code and the phraseology are the investigator’s best friends in the voyage behind the looking glass. Variations are another friend which an investigator can use for scanning the whole body. Old fashioned as it may sound, discursive scanning not conducive to textual analysis but contextualised by events, has proved time and again that it is a sure guide, especially if one makes use of an even more passé-looking scanner: the chronological sequence. A telling example is the placement in time of the moment when Mao shifted from military to political conquest. The shift was clearly due to Mao’s integrating the impact of the thwarted invasion into his calculus of power. While military commanders and regional leaders (such as Deng Xiaoping) were cautious from the start in view of the deteriorating military situation, Mao planned on a military success (that was slow to come, and not a real breakthrough) and for political forces in Tibet to rally around the compromise he then mellowed in order to placate Tibetan doubts and fears.
I would not go so far as stating that Mao’s brand of Leninism was a war-driven ideology. But it was conducive to violence and war and, in a not so paradoxical way, to the state dimension of his activist politics. It was a matter of scales of action, the large one (securing the national territory, building a central state) being subject to the hegemony strategy no less than the small one. “Liberation” in Tibet as in China was not to be a revolution but the conquest of power and space. The large-scale of action does not have to be attributed to nationalist concerns—unless one has nationalism speak for what it does not say. Given that Outer Mongolia was out of reach, annexing the Tibetan plateau was the final step in rebuilding the state’s space in the wake of the stalled initiatives of the GMD and after the successful conquests of Manchuria and Xinjiang (the latter in the fall of 1949). “National” goals belong to the overall power calculus and are ideology-framed, not the reverse. Admittedly, such calculus could belong to plain geopolitics (and Realpolitik) rather than to ideology. Yet, geopolitics on various scales are embedded in Mao’s ideology.
Going back from the conquest of space at state-scale to that of power on local scenes, we find in Dr Raymond’s book a telling analysis of what I have called a wobbling political field. The sequential scanning of events unveils an impact of war that is far from being one-dimensional. Since the PLA did not have the capacity to submit and occupy Tibet by 1951, and set foot in Lhasa only thanks to the negotiation with the Tibetan government, the issue of the hesitant, reluctant, ambivalent, but finally consented cooperation of many in the divided Tibetan elites is raised. The question is not approached in the light of a collaboration or occupation paradigm, as it is in many current studies concerning the 1940s. The documents show that Tibetan attitudes in 1951 cannot be explained by the patriotism that surfaced during the following years. Overestimating the strength of both the PLA and of their natural barrier, many seem to have been more reluctant to war than they feared actual defeat. Many also believed in the dividends of peace. Between fellow-travelling and resistance, the enquiry observes a wide spectrum of changing and ambivalent attitudes leading to acceptance, compliance and cooperation. Accepting the compromise involved, besides sheer opportunism, a mix of credulity, prudent calculation and reluctant self-persuasion. As was the case with many non-communist Chinese intellectuals, many among the believers were half-believers. Mao’s hegemony strategy was tailored-made for accommodating doubts as well as dreams: it capitalised on cultivating the autonomy of the ones whose autonomy it was bent on destroying.7
Whether or not the 1951 agreement secured Tibet’s autonomy against worse communist policies in stronger terms than did “New Democracy”, many who were not communist agents, fellow travellers, clients or “political idiots”, believed in power-sharing and in bright political and social prospects as the best shelter against the harsh side of communism—which they knew from the fate of the Tibetan territories under CCP rule, from the onslaught of the terrorist “agrarian reform” across rural China, and from the outburst of selective terror in the newly conquered cities. The assumption was that the communists could change. One may say the strategy succeeded, in Tibet as in China and Central and European countries, because it was a cunning calculus of power parading as a Gramscian compromise. Dr Raymond remarks that it would not have been instrumental if Tibetan elites had been united. Mao could rely on their division as much as on their credulity. This factor, also present on the Chinese scenes of “Liberation”, links the mechanism of belief to the political process, that is to a polarised field. Believing was less a matter of knowing than of division. Accepting the “deal” was to take sides. It was also seeking shelter against the “imperialist” threat. Mao’s great success was to have autonomous actors work towards their enslavement. Between credulity based on calculation and calculation based on credulity, the book adds a useful chapter to the story of the ill-resisted appeal of communism on non-communists.
5 Warring War
Yet, the paramount factor is war itself. The PRC had to “bluff” (by threatening more war) because its military advantage was only relative. The argument rests on the detailed exploration of the war-side of the annexation process. I remarked that the interaction of political and military factors is a standard staple of the history of the Civil War. But war is usually treated as the background of politics. The novelty, here, is that it is approached as it was, not a contextual factor but a context in itself. We are presented with a precise picture of the warring machine as it marched into Tibet. Military preparedness, numbers, equipment, weapons, ammunition, communications, draught animals, food, fodder, death tolls, casualties, diseases, morale, commanders, leadership, as well as the configuration of the terrain, weather conditions, strategy and tactics, and the unfolding of military operations from skirmishes to pitched battle, are under scrutiny event by event, thus showing in detail how military and political factors interacted, and how these interactions changed the course of history.
Thanks to the approach of war as war, Mao’s use of political leverage is documented by military facts. Mountains, bad weather, and poor preparation tested the troops and strained logistical capacities beyond their limits. The field sources do not hide a dire reality in reporting to higher echelons: perilously slow progression, diseased soldiers, desertions, shortages, poor lines of communication. The non-heroic side of the Long March surfaces again. Although Tibetan resistance was scarce and poorly coordinated, the Chinese forces were severely decimated and slowed. They managed not to be defeated in battle, but the delay was severe to the point of alarming Chinese regional commanders and central authorities. This was due to the better performance of the military and political bureaucracy. Detailed reports and detailed instructions flowed back and forth, keeping regional commanders and the central leadership on the alert. The interaction between military and political factors could not be expounded in a more concrete way.
Due attention is also granted to the scale of operations. Mao, who was challenged in 1932–1934 on this very issue, and by Wang Ming (in 1937–1938), operates in Tibet on the basis of the mutation of the 1940s from localised guerrilla to large-scale war involving field battles. The war in Tibet belongs to the latter category. The Soviet air force took part on the Chinese side. To the surprise and dismay of some observers and participants whom the book does not fail to quote, the Tibetan government did not engage in guerrilla warfare. If it had not committed the blunder of regrouping its army along the Yangzi river, guerrilla warfare could have stopped the Chinese progression towards Lhasa probably for several years.
I have underlined four lessons one may learn from this book that go beyond its declared scope (“the Tibetan policy of the PRC government”): verifying sources and checking facts, deciphering the ideological code of “Liberation”, connecting war and politics, revisiting the ambivalence of compliance. The fifth one is that by exploring the warring side of war it does not separate the fabric of war from the fabric of politics. The way for doing so is remarkable. “Fabric of war” does not mean the investigation bears on the state-building aspects of war (as does an ancient axis of research8 ). Similarly, “war context” does not refer to a thriving school of history focusing on violence.9 The enquiry highlights the complex interactions between terrain, logistics, scale of operations, armament, troops, tactics, military strategy, policy making and political decision. Addressing these intricated factors has not been (to say the least) the predominant concern in mainstream China studies.10 Dr Raymond adds a brilliant chapter to an approach that was sketched in the past by Jacques Guillermaz (a general in the French army), who paid attention to the “big” field-battles of 1948–1949.11 Hu Chi-hsi examined the connection of local geopolitics, logistics, army growth, strategy and changing warfare in Jiangxi from 1932 to 1934—a focus that was William H. McNeill’s in a global history approach including China but not belonging to the China field.12
Thanks to our painstaking historian, students of the “Liberation” period who focus on the war-side of China at war will learn as much from this aspect of the enquiry as from its political side. This remark should be extended to the climate of violence war entailed. To be sure, the CCP did not parade as a warmonger, peace and welfare were a widespread aspiration. Yet, the ambivalent acceptance of the politics of “Liberation” was not based on the fact that they were mellowed. It seems to me that the reluctant believers bypassed the less palatable aspects because they were drenched with radical violence pouring from the war context. Mao’s technique of power spread a climate of disruption. This is what his war did in Tibet. Although no war against a common enemy could solidify a friendly front, his acute sense of power managed to balance division and union and to prevent the cementing of a front against him.
As time flows, the historical portrait of the early years of the PRC becomes more … historical. Dr Raymond’s work is an invaluable contribution to the new picture. A major addition to our understanding of the annexation process in Tibet, his new interpretation of the military-political conquest is also a major counterpoint to our renewed comprehension of “Liberation” in China. Far from being a self-serving monograph, it lends its erudite scholarship to other reinterpretations. It will not escape the attention of those who aim at reevaluating war and politics in the political trajectory of China and in the rise of Maoism across the twentieth century. Their entanglement was the paramount structuring factor in the making and unmaking of Chinese politics after the early collapse of the constitutional order and of the central state: during what I call the “fifty years war” between the start of the Northern Expedition under Jiang Jieshi (1926) and Jiang’s and Mao’s death in 1975–1976. This is not the author’s topic but the advantage we may gain from his steadfast connection to the sequence of events. As a result, readers will be ready to follow him on a new path across the 1949 border. It certainly vindicates historical research against divided opinions, and will definitely inform in the best possible way our personal judgement on the tragedy of Tibet.
Yves Chevrier
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Chinese History École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris
This is how I introduce the Tibetan “case” on the strength of Dr Raymond’s argument in L’empire terrestre. Histoire du politique en Chine aux XXe et XXIe siècles (Paris: Editions du Seuil, I, 2022): 763 sq.
Suzanne Pepper, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle, 1945–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978; Lanham and Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
L’empire terrestre (I, 2022), chap. VI–VII, (II, 2023), chap. IX–X.
Emmanuel Jourda, “Les armes magiques : propaganda et front uni dans la trajectoire du PCC”, in Jérôme Doyon and Chloé Froissart (eds.), The Chinese Communist party: A 100-Year Trajectory (Canberra: NAU Press, 2023): 147–168.
Moving from a marginal to a dominant position and holding it thanks to “unnatural” allies had been at the core of Mao’s early guerrilla warfare in Jiangxi. See: Emmanuel Jourda, « Mao et les bandits. L’enrôlement des brigands et des sociétés secrètes dans la révolution chinoise (1919–1954) », Sociétés politiques comparées, N° 60, May–August 2023:
I hasten to add that Mao’s activist-divisive-warring hegemony does not preclude the use of the standard means of a genuine Stalinist dictatorship: police, terror, bureaucracy, social control and classification, purges, propaganda, politicised justice.
Christine Vidal, « D’un régime à l’autre : les intellectuels ralliés au pouvoir communiste », Etudes chinoises, XVII, 2008: 41–86.
See Joseph W. Esherick, « War and Revolution: Chinese Society during the 1940s », Twentieth-Century China, Vol. 27, No. 1, November, 2001: 1–37.
See Stéphane Audouin-Rouzeau, Combattre. Une anthropologie historique de la guerre moderne, XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2008); S. Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, Understanding the Great War (London, New York: Macmillan, 2002 and 2014); Victor Louzon, L’étreinte de la patrie. Décolonisation, sortie de guerre et violence à Taïwan, 1947 (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 2023).
They bend either to the social (Diana Lary, China’s Civil War: A Social History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015) or to military history per se (Liu Tong, Yuan Dejin and Jin Lixin, Jiefang zhanzheng, 6 vols., Shanghai Renmin chubanshe, 2017–2018).
Jacques Guillermaz, A History of the Chinese Communist Party, Vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1972).
Hu Chi-hsi, L’Armée rouge et l’ascension de Mao : essai d’interprétation sur la montée au pouvoir de Mao Zedong au sein du parti communiste chinois (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 1982). William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982). Studies in the same vein are not numerous. A detailed history of the battle of Jinmen by Stéphane Malsagne is under way. A landmark was Harold M. Tanner, “Guerilla, Mobile, and Base Warfare in Communist Military Operations in Manchuria, 1943–1947”, The Journal of Military History, 2003, 67–4: 1177–1222. On the re-conquest of Xinjiang, James A. Milward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (London: C. Hurst and C°, 2021). On the conquest of Hainan Island in 1950: Yoshihara Toshi, Mao’s Army goes to Sea: The Island Campaigns and the Founding of China’s Navy (Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2023). I am indebted to Dr Malsagne for the two latter references.