The “Tibet question” (the political status of Tibet vis-à-vis China) was at the center of the Qing dynasty's frontier strategy in the eighteenth century. But Tibet's past has been heatedly politicized since Communist China's incursion into Tibetan-inhabited regions in the 1950s. Over the last few decades, scholarly interest in the history of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands during the Mao era has steadily increased. Historians and political scientists have sought to explain the dynamic process by which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established control over the Tibetan regions. Xiaoyuan Liu, a specialist on China's ethnic frontier affairs at the University of Virginia, presents a substantial and meticulously researched work that contributes to this literature. Liu's study is primarily concerned with what came to be called the Tibet Autonomous Region or what the CCP called Xizang, which had been under the Dalai Lama's political control (hereafter, Tibet). To the End of Revolution...

You do not currently have access to this content.