Becoming Masters of their Own Home (under the Leadership of the Party)

Abstract

This chapter investigates the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) practical and ideological motivations for creating Zeku County and Amdo's other autonomous nationality administrations, within which—Party leaders repeatedly promised—minority communities would at last become “masters of their own homes.” In 1950s Amdo, nationality autonomy was considered the key mechanism by which non-Han people would be both administratively and psychologically integrated into the new state and nation. It was a central component of the Maoist “high-modernist” project, its aim to reterritorialize ethnocultural frontiers into component parts of a unitary nation-state, a process referred to as “minoritization.” The chapter then traces efforts by Guo Min's County Work Group to build a consensus among the region's divided headmen for founding Zeku County. This almost certainly was to be the first time in its history that the region would be territorialized and administered as a whole and distinct entity. Party leaders were aware that this not only demanded drawing boundaries and building administrative organs where none had previously existed—it also necessitated creating a county-level constituency from the disparate interests and loyalties of the region's divided population.