If you Kill the County Head, how will I Explain it to the Communist Party?

This chapter examines efforts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the very early months and years of the People's Republic of China to consolidate its control over Amdo's vast terrain and attract the support of its diverse inhabitants. Far from a comprehensive history of Qinghai during this transitional period, it focuses on the CCP's immediate motives and methods for wooing Tibetan elites—who not only were members of Amdo's “feudal ruling class” but with few exceptions had been implicated in the Ma regime—into a “patriotic United Front.” In doing so, CCP leaders made a distinction between hardline “bandits and spies” and Tibetan and Mongol chieftains and religious leaders. Even in the case of headmen “hoodwinked” into taking up arms against the CCP, Party leaders insisted that open resistance should not be treated as a manifestation of class struggle but as the residual effect of centuries of nationality exploitation. The chapter then considers the responses of several members of the Tibetan elite to the Party's United Front overtures.