Suchergebnisse

The current phase of political conflict in Tibet began with pro‐independence protests in the late 1980s and saw a significant surge of unrest in 2008. But that unrest was not continuous and for much of the last 25 years was at a low level of intensity. Yet the Chinese authorities have categorised the situation in Tibet as a 'life‐and‐death struggle' against pro‐independence forces throughout this period. This paper notes earlier debates in Chinese history about political strategies for managing borderland peoples, including late imperial era attempts by Chinese officials to forcibly change Tibetan culture that provoked rather than assuaged conflict. It suggests that this happened again in the 1990s when a group of Chinese officials proposed policies that sought directly to change core cultural practices among Tibetans. These policies of selective cultural intervention, unprecedented in the post‐Mao era in Tibet, fuelled long‐term resentment, leading to the violence and unrest of 2008. The paper argues that these policies were inseparable from the institutional interests of the agency within the Chinese Communist Party, the United Front, which had promoted them, to the extent that its status and influence within the state bureaucracy depended on it preventing them from being challenged or reversed. It made cultural intervention in Tibet seem normative to the Chinese policy elite by invoking three interlocked imaginings about ways of managing borderland peoples – the perception of perpetual war, Han expertise at borderland management, and latent threat within borderland cultures. That these have led to the prolonging of conflict in Tibet for over a quarter‐century is a reminder of the importance of considering institutional dynamics in the analysis of ethnic conflict.

In 1994, at a meeting known as the Third Forum on Tibet Work, the Chinese authorities announced a series of restrictions on religious practice in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Described by many outsiders in terms of abuses of rights, in fact those measures differed in important ways. By analysing the target, rationale and procedure of these restrictions, it becomes clear that some were relatively routine, while others were anomalous - their purpose was not explained by officials, the source of their authority was not clear, or the restrictions were simply not admitted to at all. These anomalous orders can be linked to major changes in underlying discourses of modernization and development among officials in Tibet at the time. They reflected undeclared shifts in attitudes to religion and cultural difference, and seeded the dramatic worsening in state-society relations that has taken place in Tibetan areas since that time. (JCCA/GIGA)

AbstractA film, a television series, four plays and an opera have been produced in China since 1997 dramatising the invasion of Tibet by the British in 1903 04. These works were part of an official effort to enhance patriotic spirit among Chinese and Tibetan people through historical example, as well as an attempt to represent Tibetans as participants in a broader Chinese resistance to Western aggression and humiliation. They coincided with an official call for film-makers to make propaganda more appealing and a decisive turn in Chinese cinema towards commercialised films and Hollywood-style narrative. The paper contextualises these dramatisations and their ideological features within the history of Tibetan representations in Chinese film and television dramas, and discusses foreign critiques of the most influential of the dramatisations of the Younghusband expedition, Feng Xiaonings 1997 film Honghegu (Red River Valley). It notes difficulties with criticisms about the lack of accuracy in these Chinese films, discusses several ways in which they match the historical record, and compares them with the little-known television series Jiangzi 1904.

AbstractThis paper aims to stimulate discussion about the complexity of oral history as a practice by recalling its origins and early associations, such as criminal confessions, war-reporting, the novel, exotic art and other early forms of first-person narratives, and by tracing some of their recurrent echoes in contemporary work. It looks at some of the uses to which oral history or related practices have been put in the field of Tibetan studies, ranging from rigorously academic studies through nostalgic political testimonies to wholly invented pseudo-histories. It discusses the importance of silent oral histories, the ones that cannot be recorded, as well as of failed ones, which are recorded but rejected by certain types of researchers because they do not meet their desires for a certain kind of narrative. Commoditisation of the archive is described, not just in the obvious cases where large amounts of money are exchanged, but also an instance in Tibetan studies in which an important archive was stolen, apparently just for the prestige of secretly possessing it. These forms of prototypical oral history and its near relatives still hover on the sidelines of the practice, despite the efforts of scholars to insulate academic practice from them. The widespread circulation of fabricated narratives produced within the contemporary Tibetan exile economy to gain access to western countries underlines the pervasive and under-acknowledged role of the state throughout all these practices, banning, allowing, celebrating, regulating and exploiting all forms of oral history.

Preliminary assessment of 95 of the 150 or more protests in Tibetan areas in the spring of 2008 suggests that they were far more widespread than during previous unrest, and also that there was greater involvement of laypeople, farmers, nomads, and students than in the past. It argues that the struggle in China and elsewhere over representation of the unrest has been dominated by the question of violence, with little attention paid to policy questions and social issues. This paper outlines the basic concepts that underlie that debate and summarises the historical factors that might have led to protest. (China Perspectives/GIGA)