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This groundbreaking book explores China's efforts to assimilate Tibet, in the process rewriting Tibetan history to conform to Beijing's goals. Warren W. Smith Jr. provides the historical context for understanding the current situation through an overview of China's actual--as opposed to its promised--policies toward Tibet over time. His clear-eyed appraisal of Chinese policy convincingly shows that the PRC's ultimate intention is assimilation rather than autonomy. The author argues that Beijing fears that any genuine autonomy or dialogue with the Dalai Lama will fuel renewed nationalism in "China's Tibet," as the Chinese leadership calls its possession. The book highlights China's past and c...
This book pursues both narrative and analytic approaches to better understand China’s spatial economic development and its implications for Tibet. Accordingly, this book focuses on Tibet – an autonomous region in the far west of China – as the subject of an in-depth case study, highlighting its unique geopolitical and socioeconomic features and external and boundary conditions. China’s great diversity in terms of physical geography, resource endowment, political economy, and ethnicity and religion has posed challenges to the studies of spatial and interprovincial issues. Indeed, the Chinese nation is far too huge and spatially diverse to be easily interpreted. The only feasible approach to analyzing it is, therefore, to divide it into smaller geographical elements so as to arrive at better insights into the country’s spatial mechanisms and regional characteristics. In this context, the book combines analytic and narrative approaches.
The state of Tibetan culture within contemporary China is a highly politicized topic on which reliable information is rare. Based on fieldwork and interviews conducted between 1998 and 2000 in China's Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures, this book investigates the present conditions of Tibetan cultural life and cultural expression.
The most pressing economic challenges facing the Tibetan areas of western China relate to the marginalization of the majority of Tibetans from rapid state-led growth. The urban-rural divide plays an important role in this polarized dynamic but alone only partially explains differences with other Chinese regions, all of which generally exhibit strong spatial inequalities. This book therefore focuses on several further factors that determine the ethnically exclusionary character of current peripheral growth in the Tibetan areas. These include processes of urbanization, immigration, employment, and education as key factors underlying structural economic change.
Only fifty years ago, Tibetan medicine, now seen in China as a vibrant aspect of Tibetan culture, was considered a feudal vestige to be eliminated through government-led social transformation. Medicine and Memory in Tibet examines medical revivalism on the geographic and sociopolitical margins both of China and of Tibet�s medical establishment in Lhasa, exploring the work of medical practitioners, or amchi, and of Medical Houses in the west-central region of Tsang. Due to difficult research access and the power of state institutions in the writing of history, the perspectives of more marginal amchi have been absent from most accounts of Tibetan medicine. Theresia Hofer breaks new ground both theoretically and ethnographically, in ways that would be impossible in today�s more restrictive political climate that severely limits access for researchers. She illuminates how medical practitioners safeguarded their professional heritage through great adversity and personal hardship.
The Tibetan plateau constitutes the world's vastest high-altitude rangeland. It has featured a unique pastoralist culture where, based on yak and sheep production, on complex exchange systems with agricultural areas and the lowlands, and in the context of ever-changing political conditions, pastoralists developed livelihood systems that helped them adapt not only to the harsh environmental conditions, but also to the ever-changing political and economic trends. The 20th century, most prominently the plateau's ever closer integration into the Chinese state, has brought profound changes to pastoral Tibetans. It has opened the plateau to the influence of a wide array of policies directed at 'de...
Regional Autonomy, Cultural Diversity and Differentiated Territorial Government assesses the current state of the international theory and practice of autonomy in order to pursue the possibility of regional self-government in Tibet. Initiated by a workshop and roundtable with political representatives from different autonomous regions, including His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, this book brings together a group of distinguished international scholars to offer a much-needed enquiry into solutions to the Tibetan quest for ‘genuine’ autonomy. Examining the Chinese framework of regional self-government, along with key international cases of autonomy in Europe, North America and Asia, the contributors to this volume offer a comprehensive context for the consideration of both Tibetan demands and Chinese worries. Their insights will be invaluable to academics, practitioners, diplomats, civil servants, government representatives, international organisations and NGOs interested in the theory and practice of autonomy, as well as those concerned with the future of Tibet.
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Cvilizing China's western Peripheries -- The gift of development in pastoral areas -- Sedentarization in Qinghai -- Development in Zeku County -- Sedentarization of pastoralists in Zeku County -- Ambivalent outcomes and adaptation strategies -- Glossary of Chinese and Tibetan terms.
An important new study by a leading Tibetan scholar of the historical Sino-Tibetan relationship - traditionally two rival and interlocked states.