Agricultural resettlement to the Sino-Tibetan frontier, 1950-1962.
详细信息
- 作者：Rohlf ; Gregory Charles.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：1999
- 导师：Arkush, R. David
- 毕业院校：The University of Iowa
- 专业：History, Asia, Australia and Oceania.;Agriculture, General.
- ISBN：0599471727
- CBH：9945445
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：23824018
- Pages：561
文摘
In this dissertation I describe and analyze the resettlement of 210,000 people from eastern China to rural parts of Qinghai province between 1955 and 1960. The policy was advocated by the Ministry of the Interior as a rural social welfare policy, by the Ministry of State Farms and Land Reclamation as one aspect of state farm development, and by the Communist Youth League as a national service campaign for young volunteers. The specific and institutional origins of the policy and its goals were themselves embedded in a complex matrix of historical legacies, individual actors and contemporary exigencies. It was conceived as a means to redistribute Chinese population to western areas and to expand China's cultivated area. The plan was inspired partly by the Soviet Union's agricultural modernization measures, especially the Virgin Lands program, but had been proposed already in the 1920s and had an ancient historical lineage. I conceptualize resettlement as a frontier policy component of a grand strategy to increase the national wealth and security of the People's Republic. The policy was certainly shaped by the tumultuous Party struggles in the late 1950s but its most important impetuses were strategic, developmental and instrumental rather than political or ideological. The larger historical context is Chinese frontier policy generally and the expansion of the agricultural frontier in Qinghai province.;Most of the agricultural resettlers, were urban poor or farmers. In this, they were quite different from the educated youth and sent-down cadres of the Cultural Revolution. They were recruited under the banner of “supporting the frontiers and building the motherland,” made the thousand kilometer journey west and lived in what seemed a foreign land. Social friction between locals and in-migrants was exacerbated by Qinghai's poverty; the Party struggled to get the newcomers to “put down roots, blossom and bear fruit.” As a local history, my dissertation begins to mesh the short-term, national and political history of this population movement with the long term, local and ethnic history of the Sino-Tibetan frontier.