Battle for Fortune , livre ebook

THE BATTLE FOR FORTUNE
STATE-LED DEVELOPMENT, PERSONHOOD, AND POWER AMONG TIBETANS IN CHINA
C HARLENE M AKLEY
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Ithaca and London
Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia.
For the Rebgong Tibetan community , in the words of the song I heard often at the close of festive gatherings:
To the native lands of the great Tibetan people of this cool snow mountain region, And especially to Rebgong, the origin of wisdom, May the auspiciousness of timely rain and excellent harvests come, To all the snowland regions may the auspiciousness of increase in wealth come, May all have abundant prosperity and happiness!
And for Cain, my partner in all things
C ONTENTS List of Illustrations Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Note on Language Introduction: Olympic Time and Dilemmas of Development in China’s Tibet 1. The Dangers of the Gift Master 2. The Mountain Deity and the State: Voice, Deity Mediumship, and Land Expropriation in Jima Village 3. Othering Spaces, Cementing Treasure: Concrete, Money, and the Politics of Value in Kharnak Village School 4. The Melodious Sound of the Right-Turning Conch: Historiography and Buddhist Counterdevelopment in Langmo Village 5. Spectacular Compassion: “Natural” Disasters, National Mourning, and the Unquiet Dead Epilogue: The Kindly Solemn Face of the Female Buddha Notes References Index
I LLUSTRATIONS
  1. Olympics countdown clock, Tianamen Square, Beijing, 2005
  2. Map of Tibetan regions in the PRC
  3. Rebgong Culture magazine cover with Palden Lhamo, 2007
  4. Rongbo Monastery and Shartshang Palace, 2007
  5. Foreign donors at Tibetan school opening, Rebgong, 2005
  6. Shachong painting, Jima temple, 2007
  7. Longwu town and abandoned fields, 2007
  8. Tshering’s voice shifts
  9. Rebgong main valley floor and fields, 1990
10. Deity medium personas
11. Dorje and the lama Shartshang, 2007
12. View of Upper Narrows and villages, 2008
13. Kharnak school wall 1990s quality slogan
14. Xining billboard, 2005
15. Artist’s fantasy of ideal Tibetan boarding school
16. Donor money lovingly displayed with offering scarves, Kharnak school meeting, 2008
17. Treasure bundle prepped for placing in gate concrete, 2008
18. Painted walls slogan, 2011
19. Billboard artist’s fantasy of ideal urban settlement, 2011
20. Dorje Gyap contemplates former communal lands, 2008
21. Photo of the third Arol Tshang, Lobzang Longdok, displayed in elder’s home, 2007
22. Abandoned peak village, 2008
23. Location of Tibetan protests relative to Sichuan earthquake, 2008
24. Premier Wen Jiabao comforts crying orphan girl, 2008
25. Benetton Colors magazine centerfold ad, 2008
26. Montage of CCP-led official postquake fundraising campaigns, 2008
27. PLA troops greeted with scarves in Huangnan prefecture, 2008
28. Montage of Tibetan monks’ postquake fundraising, 2008
29. Drolma Statue and Tibetan circumambulators, 2008
30. Drolma Square from across the valley, 2008
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is the culmination of some fifteen years of collaborative work both in and outside of the People’s Republic of China. Ultimately, this work is my own synthesis of multimedia and multivocal sources on the cultural and linguistic politics of development for Tibetans in China. I take full responsibility for the stances I assume here and for any errors that may have escaped my notice. But the book is also fundamentally a collective product, the result of ongoing learning from multiple teachers and colleagues, which took me down a path far from where I had begun. I had never anticipated writing about protest and military crackdown among Tibetans, but the whirlwind events of China’s “Olympic Year” (2008) overtook me like everyone else. It took several years for me to process those events and to figure out how I might ethically and credibly write about them. Through conversations with Tibetan and non-Tibetan colleagues, friends, and students, I came to reject the readily available roles (like media pundit or humanitarian “savior”) held out to white foreigners who witness states of emergency. Paying attention to the multivocal ways Tibetans in and outside of China were responding to the events helped me understand how a more dialogic approach would be necessary, one in which I acknowledge my own complicities and confusions in the story.
State repression remains a reality of life in Tibetan regions of China. I thus have to extend my utmost gratitude to my Tibetan friends and colleagues there in the awkward and oblique terms of vague allusions and pseudonyms (see below). The courage and resilience of my Tibetan interlocutors across the Rebgong community in the face of capricious state repression continue to inspire me; they have been my teachers in ways that extend far beyond specifically Tibetan culture and language. I am particularly indebted to my Tibetan colleagues and teachers who worked closely with me on translating and comprehending Tibetan language materials: LG and Abho in the United States, but also Donyod Dongrup, SG, TP, TRB, PBT, LMT, GP, PMT, and DJT in Beijing, Xining, and Rebgong. Any depth of understanding I might have achieved about Tibetan culture and history stems largely from their teachings.
As always, family remains foundational to my ability to pursue such long-term research projects. My husband Cain’s gentle yet firm partnership in and outside of China, and his unconditional support at home make all of my work possible. My curious and opinionated children, Noah, Anna, and Rosa, challenge any imperiousness in my views or attitudes. And my parents, John and Kathryn, continue to provide their indispensible emotional and financial support. I am particularly grateful to my sister, the independent documentary filmmaker Mary Makley, for all her help over the years with digital media and photography. While in Rebgong and Xining, my expat friends became key supporters during the state of emergency; I extend my heartfelt gratitude for their hospitality and recourse to KS, GR and EM, TV and SW, and to CJ. For their generous provision of that essential “room of my own” to write the final manuscript, I am deeply grateful to my friends, colleagues, and neighbors, Bill Ray and Kate Nicholson, and Brad and Liz Malsin.
I have been exceedingly fortunate to benefit from the constructive criticism and guidance of interdisciplinary colleagues as I have presented and debated my arguments about development and personhood in Rebgong. Emily Yeh, in particular, valiantly read the entire manuscript and gave me very helpful advice for a tighter and more accessible story. I thank as well my colleagues at Reed College for the inspiration of their incisive work, Betsey Brada, Robert Brightman, miishen Carpentier, Courtney Handman, China Scherz, Paul Silverstein, Rupert Stasch, and LaShandra Sullivan. Colleagues in anthropology, Chinese and Tibetan studies elsewhere have also been instrumental in honing my arguments: David Akin, Robert Barnett, James Benn, Anya Bernstein, Dominic Boyer, Katia Buffetrille, Jane Caple, Chris Coggins, Sienna Craig, Giovanni da Col, Donyod Dongrup, Yangdon Dhondup, Larry Epstein, Tom Felton, Allen Feldman, Magnus Fiskesjo, Frances Garrett, Jennifer Hubbert, Sarah Jacoby, Oren Kosansky, Robert Linrothe, Ralph Litzinger, Carole McGranahan, Dasa Mortensen, Françoise Robin, Geoffrey Samuel, Tsering Shakya, Andrew Shryock, Nicholas Sihlé, Antonio Terrone, Tim Thurston, Gray Tuttle, Benno Weiner, and Emily Yeh.
With the generous support of my mentors and recommenders, Jennifer Robertson, Webb Keane, and Eric Mueggler at the University of Michigan, this book project was funded by multiple national and international awards. I am grateful to the Fulbright Scholar Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, without whose financial help and logistical support I could not have undertaken the complicated fieldwork on which this book is based. Reed College sabbatical funding supported both the fieldwork and the write-up stages of the project, and the Department of Anthropology’s Harper-Ellis Fund supported multiple summer research trips as well as conference travel. Finally, the penultimate preparation of the manuscript was supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
A BBREVIATIONS
CCP Chinese Communist Party
CCTV China Central Television
PAP People’s Armed Police
PLA People’s Liberation Army
PRC People’s Republic of China
TAR Tibetan Autonomous Region
NSC New Socialist Countryside campaign
KVUF Kharnak Village Uplift Foundation
N OTE ON L ANGUAGE
This book is based on ethnographic research conducted in both Chinese and a dialect of Amdo Tibetan that is pronounced quite differently from the more well-known dialects spoken in and around Lhasa. Therefore, I want to be very clear about how I rendered those languages in print. In the main text and endnotes, all first mentions of foreign language terms, except proper names, are italicized. In parenthetical glosses of words I rendered in English, I identify the language with an abbreviation before the word: “Tib.” for Tibetan words, “Ch.” for Chinese words, and “Skt.” for the occasional Sanskrit word. For Chinese words, I used the standard pinyin transliteration system, minus tone markers for ease of printing.
At present, there is no commonly accepted system for writing Tibetan phonetically. Recent efforts to develop such a system have for the most part been based on the pronunciation of Lhasa dialects. I felt strongly though that I should represent, as clearly as possible, the Amdo dialect spoken in Reb-gong. Yet I also wanted to preserve the etymological relationships of words spoken in A