In the 1950s, more than rustication was a systematic migration of a rural resettlement from across China to what is modern Qinghai province. Historian Rohlf examines a western region that remains a frontier project in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands; indeed, in the 1950s, two waves of migration also triggered an ethnic tension—both intra-Hui and intra-Han—that collectivized the system while mediating the foundation for socialist control. In sending more than 100,000 Chinese to Qinghai (Kokonor in Mongolian), the new central state solidified an enormous state-building project to lift Qinghai from backwardness to exploit the region’s natural resources while indoctrinating a generation of youth in the industrial initiative....Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty.

Choice Reviews

The book is a significant addition to the histories of the early People’s Republic, Sino-Tibetan borderlands, and migration in twentieth century China, and will prove useful for specialists in these fields as well as students in courses dealing with the Chinese/Inner Asian frontiers.

Mongolian Studies

This book is the first systematic analysis in Western scholarship of Han Chinese settlement and colonization in Qinghai. A welcome addition to the study of modern China’s ethnic and frontier issues, this volume is an important source for understanding the present-day Beijing government’s strategy for developing China’s far west.

Hsiao-ting Lin, Stanford University

Gregory Rohlf's book is a long-awaited account of the making and unmaking of China's northwestern Qinghai province as a frontier zone in service of a new China under Mao. Only someone with Rohlf's dogged patience and nuanced eye could pull this off—it takes years to produce a book like this, digging through and translating primary sources in Chinese and reading widely enough to place a region in comparative perspective. All researchers working on China's multiethnic frontier zones must cope with the extreme complexity and political sensitivity of the materials. Rohlf manages to write with both equanimity and empathy, producing a compelling story of a vast and, in places, tragically unsuccessful experiment in settler colonialism, fueled by Chinese fantasies of expanding agriculture as the outer edge of modernity and civilization. This is a story of unprecedented state-building in China, one that helps us grasp the ethnic and gendered heterogeneity of settlers' experiences of state-led farming in highland Qinghai. This study provides crucial historical context for understanding the most recent state-led efforts to encourage the market integration of China's western provinces in ‘the Great Open the West’ campaign, as well as for recent controversies over a renewed state policy emphasis on resettlement efforts in the highland northwest.

Charlene E. Makley, Reed College