The Battle for Fortune: State-Led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China

By Charlene Makley

In a deeply ethnographic appraisal, based on years of in situ research, The Battle for Fortune looks at the rising stakes of Tibetans’ encounters with Chinese state-led development projects in the early 2000s. The book builds upon anthropology’s qualitative approach to personhood, power and space to rethink the premises and consequences of economic development campaigns in China's multiethnic northwestern province of Qinghai.

Charlene Makley considers Tibetans’ encounters with development projects as first and foremost a historically situated interpretive politics, in which people negotiate the presence or absence of moral and authoritative persons and their associated jurisdictions and powers. Because most Tibetans believe the active presence of deities and other invisible beings has been the ground of power, causation, and fertile or fortunate landscapes, Makley also takes divine beings seriously, refusing to relegate them to a separate, less consequential, "religious" or "premodern" world. The Battle for Fortune, therefore challenges readers to grasp the unique reality of Tibetans’ values and fears in the face of their marginalization in China. Makley uses this approach to encourage a more multidimensional and dynamic understanding of state-local relations than mainstream accounts of development and unrest that portray Tibet and China as a kind of yin-and-yang pair for models of statehood and development in a new global order.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781501719660

Book preview

THE BATTLE

FOR FORTUNE

STATE-LED DEVELOPMENT, PERSONHOOD, AND POWER AMONG TIBETANS IN CHINA

CHARLENE MAKLEY

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

CONTENTS

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

ILLUSTRATIONS

  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

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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.

ABBREVIATIONS

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

NOTE ON LANGUAGE

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 Amdo Tibetan for readers unfamiliar with those dialects. Thus, I render Tibetan terms and important proper names in forms approximating their pronunciation in the lowland Rebgong Amdo dialect. But I also use the Wylie transliteration system in parenthetical notes to include the exact spellings of most Tibetan words I mention.

Since geographic nomenclature in this frontier region is notoriously complex, I include both Tibetan and Chinese names only for the most important sites and geographic features mentioned. For the sake of simplicity however, for the most part I use the name (rendered phonetically) that is most commonly used by Tibetan residents. In many cases the Chinese term, especially for administrative units newly demarcated with the establishment of the PRC, is the one both Tibetans and Chinese use most frequently. This is reflected on my maps and photos.

In order to protect the identities of my interlocutors living under intensifying state repression, I use pseudonyms for all persons’ names except for main officials at the prefecture level and higher. In order to render them more generic, the pseudonyms I chose are all extremely common names among Tibetans in the region. Further, I do not give information about my interlocutors’ work units, and I use pseudonyms for all the community and place names relevant to my main interlocutors (including lineage or tribal groupings) below the county level (e.g., township, village). Finally, I altered some of my principal interlocutors’ main identifying characteristics.

All translations from Chinese language conversations and media are my own unless otherwise noted. All translations from Tibetan language conversations and media are the result of collaborative work between me and my Tibetan colleagues and teachers unless otherwise noted.

In any direct quotes from the original Tibetan or Chinese, I tried to keep diacritics to a bare minimum. Italicized words within such quotes designate oral emphasis in the original unless otherwise noted.

Introduction

Olympic Time and Dilemmas of Development in China’s Tibet

On a hazy evening in September 2004, Olympic time officially began in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), four years before the opening of the Beijing Summer Olympic Games. The forty-six-foot-high Olympic countdown clock was unveiled on the steps of the National Museum of China on Tiananmen Square. That was the same spot where, seven years earlier, the countdown clock for the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule had marked that epic event. On the Olympic clock, the elegant, multicolored Beijing Olympics logo replaced the five national stars that had adorned the top of the Hong Kong turnover clock, and below, where on the Hong Kong clock a few Chinese corporate sponsors had been listed, a single logo had pride of place: Omega, Swiss maker of luxury watches, manufacturer of the countdown clock, and official timekeeper for the 2008 Olympics. The clock was beautifully backlit at night and featured red digital numbers, which, unlike the Hong Kong turnover clock that displayed only days and seconds, ticked off the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the auspicious date of August 8, 2008.

The Hong Kong countdown clock, brainchild of a Chinese corporate media official and entrepreneur in Beijing, had firmly established the countdown as a part of mass national culture in China. That first clock at Tiananmen had played maestro to a crescendo of countdown clock copies across the nation in anticipation of the return of Hong Kong, digitally performing the passage of a precise block of time that would finally end the humiliations of nineteenth-century European colonization.¹ At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Olympic countdown clock vastly expanded that quasi-millenarian culture of anticipation and national triumph in a narrative of China’s global arrival as a political and economic superpower. The partnership with Omega, of Olympics and James Bond fame, added a luxurious and cosmopolitan gloss to China’s Olympic time, beckoning to other high-end foreign investors to join the stream of progress—before they missed out.

FIGURE 1. Olympics countdown clock, Tiananmen square, 1,161 days, 7 hours, 46 minutes, 20 seconds remaining until the Opening Ceremonies, Beijing, 2005. Author’s photo.

Kicking off a four-year ceremonial period of preparation for the games, a delegation including the Chinese vice president of the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee and the Swiss president of Omega started the countdown at precisely 6:00 p.m. From then on, in an era of digital cameras and the Internet, the Olympic countdown clock attracted people’s participation in national linear time on a far grander scale than had the Hong Kong clock. Each digital milestone was marked with grand celebrations on Tiananmen, and Chinese families and foreign tourists frequently posed with the clock, posting their photos online. Copycat clocks and charts proliferated across China and abroad as the games drew near. As the one-year mark approached, foreign media watched amazed at the breakneck speed of Beijing’s transformation into a premier global city and host to the world.

On August 8, 2007, fireworks above Tiananmen exploded at the exact moment the clock began the one-year countdown, and scenes from simultaneous celebrations across the city and country were projected on giant screens flanking the square. Echoing the national jubilation that had erupted when China won its bid for the Olympics in 2001, a massive celebration had been staged on the square for some ten thousand carefully arranged spectators in the final minutes before the one-year mark. The state-of-the-art stage, the central platform of which was also a giant LCD screen, was framed behind by the famous vista of the red Gate of Heavenly Peace, entrance to the erstwhile imperial palace, now adorned with Mao’s portrait and backlit by radiating searchlights. As the Olympic Anthem played, national and International Olympic Committee flags were placed onstage, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo member Wu Bangguo spoke: It is a century-old dream of the Chinese people to stage an Olympic Games. By hosting the Olympic Games, we intend to further promote the Olympic spirit, world peace and development. Then, in the highly produced style of China’s beloved song and dance pageants, a series of Olympic-themed performances unfolded, nationally broadcast on China Central Television (CCTV) and quickly uploaded to YouTube by fans abroad. Of those, the official theme song was We Are Ready. As a digital clock in the upper right corner of the TV screen counted down the remaining minutes, singers from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong lip-synched the rousing pop tune in Mandarin Chinese for global viewers:

Waiting year after year

We can finally see the future

Together with hard work and sweat, we’ve nurtured

The five Olympic colors

Waiting day after day

Our emotions surge even more

Building the world’s largest stage

For this most heroic era

We are ready! [in English]

Uniting heart to heart

We are ready! [in English]

Uniting heaven and earth

We surpassed ourselves

and won a glorious victory

We use time to commemorate

the magic of our dream

We are ready! [in English]

Waiting each and every minute and second

The moment has finally arrived

Filling the sky, brilliant fireworks

proudly bloom.

It is a warm day in the third week of June 2008 in China’s northwestern province of Qinghai. I am getting my breakfast in my little apartment in the old People’s Congress building at the center of Longwu town in Qinghai’s historically Tibetan region of Rebgong. I’m on edge listening to a BBC radio report online called The Age of Terror, describing the horrific hijacking of a French plane by Algerian terrorists, an event said to have been a precursor to 9/11 in the United States. I’m thinking the story’s tension and violence are too much for me, especially now, and I move to turn it off. My back is turned to the windows in my tiny kitchen when I catch a glimpse of a brilliant flash of light reflected in the metal cabinets and sink and then . . . BOOM. The roar of a massive explosion above sends me cowering for cover. I curse and run to the windows, searching the sky along with the women in the apartments facing me across the courtyard. I watch their alarmed faces as the smoke from the blast disperses above the town’s main street, knowing that they know that this was no fireworks display. My first thought is that Tibetans had set off a bomb. My second is that the explosion came from the sports stadium in the middle of town, where Chinese troops had been garrisoned that spring. I realize finally that this is the troops’ field artillery, firing blanks (I assume) from the stadium across the street. Over the next three days, such explosions go off at random intervals, enough to keep me and other town residents constantly anxious, but never surprised. The Olympic torch is on its way to Lhasa.

This book is a story of China’s momentous Olympic year (2007–8), experienced from the nation-state’s margins out west. That was the year I happened to be there pursuing anthropological research on what I was calling dilemmas of development among Tibetans in Qinghai Province. I had not anticipated, however, how the joyous countdown to the Olympics that year would set a collision course with Tibetans who felt excluded from the celebration. In the spring of 2008, as the Olympics shone a global spotlight on China, Tibetan Buddhist monks and laity airing a variety of grievances clashed with security forces in Lhasa and then attacked some Chinese businesses and shopkeepers. The scale and vehemence of the unrest that then spread across Tibetan regions in four western provinces took state officials and foreign observers alike by surprise.²

The subsequent military crackdown felt unprecedented for many; the Rebgong region where I lived had not seen such militarized state violence since the 1950s. By April 2008, there had been multiple street clashes between Tibetan residents and Tibetan and Chinese security forces in Longwu town. The town, along with many other rural Tibetan county seats, was then under de facto martial law, complete with military patrols, raids, detentions, and curfews. The silence that descended on the town’s public spaces was stretched thin and tight as the goatskin drums that Tibetan village men use to fete the warlike mountain deities.

The Rebgong region’s wide Guchu River valley (altitude around 8,200 feet) is about 850 miles southwest of Beijing and far off the radar of ordinary Beijingers. Long a center of Tibetan Buddhist heritage in the mountains that rise to the vast expanses of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, the region was relatively new to me. I had spent years focused on the Sangkok River valley (altitude 9,600 feet), another important Tibetan Buddhist center just a couple mountain passes to the southeast and not coincidentally a major hotspot in the 2008 unrest. These are lower Tibetan regions far east and north of the high Himalayan city of Lhasa (altitude 12,000 feet), erstwhile seat of the great medieval Tibetan kings and much later of the ascendant Dalai Lamas. Here, the mountains rise to the plateaus and peaks where Tibetan nomadic pastoralists have for centuries run their herds of yak and sheep, trading with lowland Tibetan, Han Chinese, and Muslim Chinese farming communities. These regions, which Tibetans refer to as Amdo, are not counted as part of Chinese-administered Tibet (Ch. Xizang, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, or TAR). They are instead designated as Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures under Gansu and Qinghai provinces. Those PRC administrative units only approximate the former realms of the Tibetan Buddhist polities under Rebgong’s Rongbo Monastery and Sangkok’s Labrang Monastery.

FIGURE 2. Map of Tibetan regions in the PRC. Based on a map by Atelier Golok.

Rebgong has a uniquely complex history of state-local and interethnic relations that links it to Qinghai’s capital city of Xining as well as to Lhasa in the TAR, and differentiates it from those cosmopolitan centers. According to the 2008 Qinghai Province Yearbook, the registered provincial population of 5.5 million was majority Han Chinese (almost 55 percent), most of whom lived in Xining. Meanwhile the percentage of registered Tibetans in the province had dipped from 27 percent in 1952 to 21 percent in 2007. Muslim Chinese (Hui) were 16 percent, and other minorities made up the rest.³ The Rebgong region in the southeast however has long been home to a complex array of non-Chinese ethnic and linguistic groups.

Rebgong’s Longwu town (after the Tibetan name of the monastery) is now the seat of both Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (population 231,000, established in 1953) and of the more rural Tongren County (population 80,000, established in 1928). Statistics from 2005 reported online claimed 91.4 percent of prefecture population to be non-Chinese minorities, including 65 percent registered as Tibetan, 13.6 percent as Mongolian, and 7.3 percent as Hui. There are also other smaller communities of residents such as those identifying as Mongour (Ch. Tuzu) and Salar. Meanwhile, Tongren County, which administers a wide range of highland Tibetan communities, reported 72 percent Tibetan residents in 2007, with the majority of non-Tibetans living either in Longwu town or in lowland agricultural villages. Most Tibetan residents speak dialects of both Tibetan and Chinese, and my Tibetan interlocutors tended to associate the Tibetan language with everyday domestic interactions and the work of the local state. Meanwhile they associated Chinese language with the more cosmopolitan contexts of higher-level state offices as well as the commercial pursuits of merchants and businesspeople.

I had come to Rebgong in the early 2000s to expand my understanding of the consequences for Tibetans of China’s Great Open the West campaign (Ch. Xibu Da Kaifa). That was an effort launched by President Jiang Zemin in 2000 (as part of the tenth five-year plan) aimed at directing domestic and foreign investment to developing China’s poorer western regions. Official rhetoric had it that the campaign was finally making good on former leader Deng Xiaoping’s promise to allow the west to catch up with the wealthier central and eastern cities. Those metropolises were the powerhouses of China’s rise that had benefited from preferential policies for capitalist economic growth since the 1980s reforms. The 2000 campaign drew unprecedented national and international attention to the marginalized western provinces where most of the country’s ethnic minorities live, resulting in a gold rush mentality among would-be entrepreneurs and investors by the early 2000s.⁴ Knowing about Rebgong’s proud Buddhist heritage and Tibetan residents’ robust support for Tibetan language secular education since the 1980s, I wanted to understand Tibetans’ own forms of value and aspiration (development on Tibetan terms) as new sources of money and opportunity came to the valley.

During my visits in 2002 and 2005, my Tibetan friends and acquaintances in Rebgong expressed sentiments similar to those I and others have encountered among Tibetans throughout China: great optimism for the possibilities of post-Mao Tibetan cultural revival tinged with an intense ambivalence about their present situations and a dark anxiety about their futures as ethnic minorities left behind in China’s rush to develop and link up with the rest of the world. Elders especially talked of their great relief at the improvement in standards of living since the traumatic Maoist years (1958–79) and the capacity to openly practice the rituals that were the very grounds of their communities. By the time I returned in summer 2007, however, Tibetans across the community were haunted by a deepening sense of cultural and economic crisis as they saw their children assimilating to Chineseness, lagging far behind their Chinese peers in school, and losing out to jobs taken by Chinese and Muslim Chinese residents and migrants.⁵

My roles in the valley that summer quickly became complex as I was pulled into supporting primary school renovation projects in highland Tibetan villages. In those restive regions, residents representing a wide variety of interests and jurisdictions urgently competed for foreigners’ attention, and projects under the rubric of development (Ch. fazhan) were the safest, most sanctioned form of participation for visitors from abroad. Rebgong’s proximity to the provincial capital Xining made the rural region a model site for developing, or uplifting, Tibetan communities. As an increasing number of foreign NGOs and UN groups converged on the valley in the 2000s to pursue projects, mostly in Tibetan cultural preservation and education, Tibetan schools had became a crucible of translocal development politics in the valley.

But the spring 2008 unrest and subsequent martial law made it very clear that development and state violence were two sides of a coin in those parts. Reinvigorated development, backed by military presence, was provincial and local state leaders’ response to Tibetan unrest, both as an indictment and as a promise (see the epilogue).⁶ When most foreigners were banned from Tibetan regions that March, I was only able to stay in my capacity as a school fundraiser. Yet the guns, riot gear, and surveillance vans of the Chinese troops sent to the valley enforced the clear message to all of us that development taken as Tibetan community-building was a threat—development should be on Chinese state terms, and that meant peaceful market participation.

In April 2008, Beijing authorities opened a major exhibition displaying the boons of development in Chinese-liberated Tibet, while another televised pageant marked the hundred-day countdown to the Olympics. Yet by then the ubiquitous Olympics media in Tibetan regions came across as the propaganda of another Maoist campaign. State-sponsored Olympic Education was intended in eastern cities to model to Chinese kids the cosmopolitan values of fair play, mutual respect, selfless service, and world peace.⁷ In Tibetan regions however, the same slogans played as mandatory Patriotic Education, an iron-fisted message to protect social stability above all. That fall, for example, the sports stadium in the center of Longwu town had been a site for local state workers’ participation in Olympics-style contests sponsored by their offices. But after the unrest, the stadium served as a barracks for the troops sent to enforce such displays of proper citizenship and loyalty.

A Dialogic Ethnography

Why didn’t I see it coming? I had been immersed in the ethnography and history of those regions for some twenty years. Still, China’s Olympic Year was a turning point for me. The events of that year in Rebgong, I learned, were far from inconsequential conflicts at the periphery of the nation-state. They in fact encapsulated the nature and high stakes of China’s meteoric rise as a key political and economic player in Asia and across the globe.⁸ The happenstance of my presence there as a researcher meant that, similarly to how the anthropologist Frank Pieke (1995, 78) found himself conducting accidental anthropology amidst the 1989 protests on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, I faced the extreme liminality of a state of emergency that for many residents came to eclipse and reframe all past and present agendas and concerns.⁹ As Antonius Robben and Carolyn Nordstrom and others point out, anthropological research on the front lines of conflict and violence raises profound questions about the nature and ethics of ethnography.¹⁰ Ethnographers who first witness open violence, they say, can experience a sense of existential shock. They describe that sensibility as a state of extreme disorientation and uncertainty about the boundaries of social order, life, and death that can dissolve the ethnographer’s conceit of objective (and safe) distance from her interlocutors. In such circumstances, they remark, there seems to be no higher ground from which to observe violence with relative detachment (Robben and Nordstrom 1995, 13).

Of course my original ethnographic project for Rebgong, framed in compulsory social science terms for grant proposals, was always a conceit, especially for such politically sensitive Tibetan regions of China. Yet under the 2008 state of emergency there was absolutely no question of a simple comparative village study like the one I had outlined. And there was no possibility for the open collection of data through household surveys, interviews, and fly-on-the-wall participant observation. My primary concern under martial law, however, was not my own greatly curtailed access to information, but ensuring the safety of my interlocutors. My very presence as a Westerner with ties abroad was now dangerous in public spaces. Immediately after the unrest and crackdown in town my cell phone went silent as people retreated indoors. Just as observers of postprotest Lhasa have described it, life in Reb-gong under martial law was not a relentless series of public clashes.¹¹ Instead, as everyone cleaved tightly to daily routines under the watchful eye of armed Chinese patrols, the deafening silence of public spaces spoke of thousands of private, furtive conversations. With a new unity of concern, Tibetans young and old, rural and urban, were grappling with the implications of this new era: How could they prosper in the new China if their very nature as Tibetans was so clearly a threat and a liability?

Just as Pieke found on Tiananmen Square, however, the state of emergency in Rebgong did not preclude anthropological understanding for me. The existential shock of state violence instead was an unprecedented challenge to my assumptions about development, culture, and the state, and about my own capacity to comprehend Tibetans’ experiences of them: I needed to rethink my presence and project in Rebgong from the ground up. In the coming chapters, I tell the story of this process of rethinking as it played out in my own and my interlocutors’ dawning awareness of the intertwined nature of development and state violence, our oftentimes awkward or uncertain mutual learning before and after the 2008 crackdown. I offer this book then as an effort in what I will call a dialogic ethnography of state-led development in Rebgong. Proponents of such an approach in anthropology have argued for decades that this is not about the ethnographer crafting narratives of harmonious dialogues with ethnic others, and thereby claiming an easy intimacy on equal grounds.¹² Dialogic ethnography pushes one instead to grapple with the everyday realities of unequal access to communication and voice. By that I mean the historical relations of hierarchy and power that render some people disenfranchised and disproportionately vulnerable in this ever-connected world.

In the wake of Americans’ shock and grief after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the philosopher Judith Butler wrote a trenchant book called Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. In it, she reconsiders the transnational roles and responsibilities of relatively privileged people in the United States and Europe. She imagines as a new starting point for global community and social action a common, human vulnerability and interdependence as fundamentally social beings. Such an awareness, she argues, would fly in the face of American fantasies of self-sufficiency and mastery so ascendant during the George W. Bush years especially. What grief displays, she says, is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain . . . in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control (2004, 23). But she also wonders whose lives count in policy and practice as fully human in that way? Who gets to feel confident, secure, indeed entrepreneurial? When misfortune strikes, whose lives and what losses are publicly grievable?

A dialogic ethnography in the wake of state violence entails facing these questions head on. But that is easier said than done. This kind of anthropological understanding, I found, moves at a pace outmoded by the frenetic imperatives of market-driven goals.¹³ The world China has worked so hard to join (an effort epitomized in China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001) is now a tightening web of capitalist markets. Economic development has created gleaming, high-tech infrastructures to quickly move people (and financial speculation) through and away from the abject margins (the poor rural, the urban slum, the shuttered factory). In the face of time and political constraints, the best intentions to help the less fortunate can find little purchase within recipient communities. But those constraints can also serve conveniently as alibis for givers—to limit exposure to the vulnerability of the marginalized so as to maintain intact one’s own sense of security and recourse.

My goal in the writing here is thus not to dwell on the existential struggles of my ethnographic self, nor is it to merely give voice to Tibetans as simply traumatized victims or heroic resisters. I seek instead to move beyond the shock of moments of open violence to understand the larger cultural, historical, and communicative conditions in Rebgong for people’s vulnerability and complicity, as well as for their creative coping, resistance, and survival. As Robben and Nordstrom put it, from an anthropological perspective, violence emerges not as an extraordinary domain of death, but as a fundamental dimension of everyday living (1995, 6). The specter of violence in everyday interactions, they argue, drawing on Foucault and others, can both shape and fragment the moral and historical grounds of recognized personhood and citizenship—the very boundaries of the social human. This is the ongoing process of mutual remembering, (mis)recognition, and evaluation of persons among Tibetans and their interlocutors that I came to call the politics of presence.

Thus, for example, I found that for many Tibetans I met, the significance of the 2008 military crackdown could only be understood within a communal legacy of painful memory. The events of the late 1950s were world shattering for their elders. That was when Chinese troops under Mao Zedong finally put down Tibetan resistance to CCP-led collectivization and enforced the imprisonment of most Buddhist lamas, monks, and lay male leaders, the prohibition of most Buddhist and lay ritual, and the collectivization of all land and production. Since then, Tibetan communities in China have been rebuilt on searing, but silenced grief—the simultaneous loss of lives and social worlds coalesced for many elders especially in an anguished longing for the presence of the Dalai Lama, who escaped to exile in India in 1959.

Development, Culture, and the State

In chapter 1 I delve further into what a dialogic ethnography entails methodologically, and I unpack what I mean by the politics of presence. Here I sketch out how the 2008 state of emergency compelled me to rethink the nature of development, culture, and the state in this light. My accounts in the five main chapters will then illustrate key aspects of this approach to state-led development as they became salient within a variety of encounters across multiple Tibetan communities in Rebgong.

In retrospect, I realize that I did not see the 2008 Tibetan unrest coming because I had not fully grasped what the anthropological critique of economic development agendas meant in practice. My previous work in Labrang, as well as my research proposals for the Rebgong project, took for granted the argument, most famously laid out by Arturo Escobar (1995), that cultural anthropology offers urgently needed qualitative methods to counter the standardizing quantitative approaches to development in economics and other social sciences. Such economistic approaches in the West, argued Escobar, came to the fore after World War II. Proponents at that time construed economic development and modernization for marginalized peoples as capitalist market integration. In the 1980s, capitalist frameworks for development were increasingly globalized in the agendas of international organizations like the World Bank and IMF. The methods and premises of economics thereby came to prominence among a variety of national elites as global standards for discovering and modeling objective truths and primary causes. Indeed Deng Xiaoping famously promoted his post-Mao market reforms in the PRC, especially after the crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen protests, with the slogan economic development is the first principle [lit., the hard truth].¹⁴

The recent development push in Qinghai seems to have left my Tibetan friend Wanma with little time to dwell on ethnic tensions. She’s in the public relations department of a prominent provincial government bureau in Xining, in charge of entertaining the many Chinese official visitors (all men) from the interior. The summer months when I visit in the early 2000s are prime official tourism months and Wanma travels hundreds of kilometers a day picking up VIP guests of her bureau, accompanying them to tourist spots and sending them off again. She comes from an illustrious Tibetan family and she seems to know all well-placed and well-off Tibetans and Chinese in the city. Tonight, her round and jovial Chinese friend Little Wang hosts us for dinner at a sumptuous hotel, ostensibly to welcome me to Xining. He is the married son of a construction business boss, poised to take over his father’s company. He likes me too much, Wanma jokes, as Little Wang plies us with drinks and expensive delicacies and grabs her in hugs. He’s the one she had tapped to pick me up at the airport in his dark blue Lincoln town car with the leather seats. Sealed inside that car, we had cruised by the dusty villages, defunct factories and massive billboards touting luxury cars and cell phones that now ring the city. Little Wang styles himself my ambassador to Qinghai, even though he says his father only came to Xining from Suzhou in the 1980s, and he himself only after college in 1995. As he teaches me Qinghai drinking etiquette with a bottle worth several times Wanma’s weekly salary, he jokes that he is just one of the ordinary folk. Wanma protests, matching his joking tone. "I am a member of the old aristocracy, you belong to the new aristocracy, she tells him, now I’m just one of the ordinary folk!"

By the early 2000s in places like Rebgong’s Longwu town, I found, the fundamental premises of market-based economics could be shared by a surprising array of competing agents. Many residents and officials had welcomed post-Mao decollectivization and celebrated the great promise of cultural, including Tibetan Buddhist, revival under market reforms. The Open the West campaign had reinvigorated market-based claims for a new era (Ch. xin shiqi) of modernity and development. Thus many of my Tibetan and Chinese interlocutors spoke approvingly of universal, quantitative standards (e.g., relative prices or wages, income and debt levels, amounts of consumer goods purchased) for assessing the appropriate futures and values of persons and things, construed as exploitable resources for monetary profits. Like the English term development, the Chinese term fazhan (lit., expand, spread out, evolve) in practice could conflate forms of capitalist market expansion with the supremely generous gift of money and infrastructure for post-Mao community uplift and modernizing advance. However, as Escobar and other anthropologists have argued, such standardization efforts under the sign of money can elide the actual sociocultural and political processes by which economic development projects, even under the best of intentions, can starkly marginalize the very populations they seek or claim to benefit.¹⁵

By contrast, cultural anthropologists’ qualitative methods treat people as dynamic meaning-makers above all. Economics in this light is first and foremost an interpretive politics over the nature and sources of value, moral personhood, and proper exchange. Ethnographers must then use subtle analytic tools to understand the actually messy, unequal, and multivocal nature of development practices situated within specific sociohistorical and political contexts. Such work, theorists argued, counters older ethnographic methods that treated localities as isolated islands of culture and local residents as mere purveyors of collective beliefs and practices. This approach instead calls for historically grounded ethnographic research within a broader analytic horizon. Local processes are in fact seen to be inextricably linked to the translocal, and ordinary residents are treated as analytically commensurate agents with development industry elites, who are often operating with competing development premises and goals.¹⁶

However, when I began my research in the early 2000s, even though people in Rebgong, including prefecture police (PSB), knew me as a student and