Amdo and the End of Empire?

This concluding chapter explains that the violence of 1958 not only destroyed lives but also damaged the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) mechanism of nationality rapprochement and severed its narrative of nationality unity. In order to repair this rupture, in Qinghai the post-Mao leadership sought to return to the promise of the early United Front, even as it continued to condemn the Amdo Rebellion as a counterrevolutionary putsch. While the uprising is blamed on mostly unnamed tribal and religious elites, with few exceptions Amdo's actual secular and monastic leaders have not only been rehabilitated but also memorialized in a myriad of state-sponsored publications as embodiments of nationality unity. Similarly, the “early-Liberation period” is celebrated as a time of ethnic reconciliation, economic development, and nationality unity. In this post-Mao narrative, the United Front era has been transformed from the transitional period of New Democracy—as it was contemporaneously understood—to one purporting to represent the ipso facto integration of the Amdo region and its people into the modern Chinese state and nation.