Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy by Sulmaan Wasif Khan

There are also a number of maps to familiarize readers with the geography of the region. Khan's Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy opens with a cast of characters and a sequence of events - a welcome inclusion given the complexity of the topic to non-specialist readers. Khan includes the peoples of the peripheries into the history of the demarcation of Chinese borders during the Cold War. At its heart, the book addresses the ageold question of state-making and the perceived illegibility of nomadic peoples on the edges of empire. Border incidents involving Tibetans created a rapprochement between the Chinese state and their Southeast and South Asian neighbours, showcasing how Tibetans played an active role in the development of Chinese foreign policy during the Cold War (82). Unlike Taiwan, Xinjiang or Korea, Tibet became a place where the PRC could 'articulate its outward looking foreign policy' (28). As the PRC government consolidated their new state, they had to rely on and came into more frequent contact with 'non-state actors' on the frontier, who, Khan argues, 'had a dramatic impact on the nature of diplomacy in China' (2). However, after the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959, the PRC transitioned from what Khan calls 'empire-lite to a harder, heavier imperial formation' (2) in the Tibetan borderlands. As Khan describes it, throughout the early years of the Cold War, the central government in Beijing had little control over both the nomadic herders and the settled peoples who inhabited and traversed the Tibetan plateau. Khan succeeds in fulfilling the aim of the series: to introduce readers to unknown conflicts in the Cold War through the use of new archival sources in a number of different languages.

The book is part of the 'New Cold War History' series edited by Odd Arne Westad. Sulmaan Wasif Khan's Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy describes the process through which the newly-formed government of People's Republic of China (PRC) de-limited and made the border between Tibet and the surrounding states less porous throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy by Sulmaan Wasif Khan