Taming Tibet , livre ebook

T AMING T IBET
L ANDSCAPE T RANSFORMATION AND THE G IFT OF C HINESE D EVELOPMENT
E MILY T. Y EH
C ORNELL U NIVERSITY P RESS
Ithaca & London
To RS and the people of Lhasa
Contents
List of illustrations
Preface
Note on Transliterations and Place Names
Abbreviations and Terms

Introduction
A Celebration
1. State Space: Power, Fear, and the State of Exception
Hearing and Forgetting

P ART I. S OIL
The Aftermath of 2008 (I)
2. Cultivating Control: Nature, Gender, and Memories of Labor in State Incorporation

P ART II. P LASTIC
Lhasa Humor
3. Vectors of Development: Migrants and the Making of “Little Sichuan”
Signs of Lhasa
4. The Micropolitics of Marginalization
Science and Technology Transfer Day
5. Indolence and the Cultural Politics of Development

P ART III. C ONCRETE
Michael Jackson as Lhasa
6. “Build a Civilized City”: Making Lhasa Urban
The Aftermath of 2008 (II)
7. Engineering Indebtedness and Image: Comfortable Housing and the New Socialist Countryside

Conclusion

Afterword: Fire
Notes
References
Illustrations
Maps
1. Tibet Autonomous Region
2. Lhasa Chengguanqu and Lhasa Municipality
3. Social-spatial relations in a peri-urban village
Figures
1. “Marching upon wasteland”
2. Vice Premier Chen Yi helping plant apple seedlings at the July First State Farm
3. Plastic greenhouses in Lhasa’s peri-urban landscape, 2001
4. The new urban landscape
5. Michael Jackson as Lhasa
6. Sacred City Flower Garden brochure
7. Resettlement houses of those relocated from the Economic and Technological Development Zone, 2007
8. Posters of Chinese leaders adorn a sitting room, 2007
9. Image engineering, 2007
10. Flags atop a Comfortable House, 2007
Preface
In March 2008, Tibetan protestors set fire to, damaged, and destroyed roughly one thousand shops run by Han and Hui migrants in Lhasa, killing nineteen people and sending much of the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region up in flames. The violent unrest, which fueled a nationalist backlash across China, became the subject of starkly competing interpretations premised on fundamentally different understandings of development, migration, and the place of Tibet within the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The transnational Tibet Movement views Han migration as a key component of a deliberate policy of “cultural genocide.” In contrast, the state and most Chinese citizens view these same migrants as a natural and inevitable part of the process of economic development, modernization, and progress that began with the “peaceful liberation” of Tibetans in 1951. A week after the March 14 riot, a New York Times reporter interviewed a Han Chinese businessman, one of whose Tibetan trinket shops had been smashed and burned. “Our government has wasted our money in helping those whiteeyed wolves,” he said, referring to Tibetans. “Just think of how much we’ve invested…Is this what we deserve?” This comment stood out for its mildness among the Han in Lhasa, who consistently described Tibetans as “lazy and ungrateful for the economic development they have brought.” 1
The angry sentiments of Han migrants in the aftermath of the unrest drew directly from state discourse about the benevolence and generosity of the state and its Han citizens toward Tibet. Indeed, PRC legitimation of its sovereignty over Tibet has always rested heavily on the presumption of Tibetan gratitude, first for liberation from the cruel, barbaric, and feudal pre-1950s “old society” and then, starting in the 1980s, for the bestowal of the gift of development, through the skills brought by Han migrants as well as the provision of large-scale infrastructure and massive subsidies from the government. In this narrative, all but a few radical separatists are grateful for this largesse. Thus, the official explanation of the 2008 unrest is that it was instigated and masterminded by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and a “conspiracy of the Dalai clique and Western anti-China forces.” 2 From this vantage point, Tibetan citizens, grateful for development brought by the state and their “older brother” in the Chinese nation-family, the Han, would not protest unless they were duped and manipulated by evil forces abroad, intent on destroying China’s territorial sovereignty.
The violence in Lhasa was exceptional among the more than one hundred protests and demonstrations across Tibetan areas in the spring of 2008, the vast majority of which were peaceful. However, the March 14 incident in Lhasa, or simply “3-1-4” as it has become known, quickly became a flashpoint within China. A severe crackdown followed the protests, with de facto martial law, greatly heightened surveillance, large numbers of arrests, and in Lhasa a dramatic militarization of the city. Several years later, People’s Armed Police were still stationed around the clock at intersections throughout the city, and armored vehicle and daily helicopter patrols became part of the urban landscape. Tibetans across the PRC began to face new forms of discrimination, as they were routinely turned away from hotels and restaurants and subjected to extensive background checks and questioning at airports and hotels. In Lhasa, ethnic tensions sharpened considerably following the state response to the unrest, creating new fault lines in spaces such as government offices. Ordinary Han Chinese continued several years later to express bewilderment and resentment at the apparently inexplicable ingratitude of the Tibetans.
The dynamics set in place in the decades before the 2008 protests continue unabated. In response to protest, state authorities intensify restrictions on the one hand and offer visible forms of material development on the other. The provision of goods, infrastructure, and GDP growth is meant to deepen Tibetans’ conviction of and gratitude for belonging to the PRC. After 2008, many Tibetan areas were targeted by a Gratitude Education campaign, in which households receiving everything from posters of Chinese Communist Party leaders to new houses and tents were asked to show gratitude to the state and Party by opposing separatism, criticizing the Dalai Lama, and strengthening national integrity. The ongoing intensification of the processes and struggles that have led to multiple forms of violence suggests the urgent need to analyze their dynamics in the hopes of future resolution.
Taming Tibet provides a critical analysis of the modes of power that have produced the landscapes of struggle, compromise, and violence afflicting Tibet today. Focusing on Lhasa, I illuminate the production of state power, tracing attempts to foster and improve Tibetan livelihoods by expanding markets, subsidizing the building of new houses, and shaping Tibetans as subjects who desire development. I also show how these efforts have worked together at different points in time with the control over movement and space, and the exercise of the sovereign right to take life, and how they are experienced in everyday life. This approach helps to clarify the limits of the oversimplified explanatory frameworks that dominate discourse about the Tibet Question for various publics by highlighting the complexity of development, which works as a form of state territorialization. Development processes, particularly of agrarian change, Chinese migration, and urbanization, produce both the material landscape and contradictory Tibetan subjectivities.
Ethnographic analysis is a powerful way to open up the specificities of the everyday production of state power, as well as of the encounter between the market rationality posited and fostered by projects of development and selves shaped by multiple and contested forms of value. It is also useful for understanding spatiality and the production of place. Studies of contemporary Tibet have tended to adopt conventional assumptions about space as a backdrop or container rather than as a social product, and about places as isolated rather than produced through relationships with other places and through embodied everyday practices. Statist accounts defend government actions in Tibet by arguing, “it’s the same as everywhere else in China.” In this view, citizens of different ethnicities, classes, or origins interact with each other and are positioned relative to each other in the same way regardless of geographical location. This fails to account for the way in which past social relations create the particular spaces in which new social relations unfold and are spatialized. In contrast, my analysis is deliberately geographical, emphasizing the active social production of place and space.
Taming Tibet privileges ethnographic moments in the decade between 1998 and 2009, relying heavily on nine months of field research from 2000 to 2001. My interest in Tibet was first sparked, perhaps unusually, not by a fascination with Tibetan Buddhism, nor by the momentum and visibility of the transnational Tibet Movement’s political campaigns in the late 1990s, but rather by an interest in development, a chance trip to Lhasa as a tourist in 1993, and the opportunity to work as a project officer in China’s Agenda 21 Office in Beijing from 1995 to 1996. During that time, I visited Tibet again, realized that the “sustainable development” we were discussing in Beijing had very little to do with what I saw in Lhasa, and began to question what it meant to be engaged in development. Then, as a language student at Tibet University from 1998 to 1999, I noticed Lhasa’s plastic-covered landscape and discovered that its plastic greenhouses had been set up by Han migrant farmers to grow the vegetables I bought in the city’s markets from Chinese retailers. At that time I also first encountered Tibetans who told me that they rented their land out to these migrants because they themselves were “too lazy” to grow vegetables for the market. These experiences inspired my desire to understand the relationship between development, l