Dibyesh Anand argues that there are two related parts to the Tibetan problem, one political, the other imaginative. The first has arisen from the “forceful interpretation of Sino-Tibetan relations in the language of nation states and sovereignty”. This is the language of the Westphalian international order, a set of European concepts exported to the East with European imperialism and sustained by the continuing Eurocentrism of international relations discourse. In response to a century of aggressive Western encroachment, China under Mao finally succeeded in making the tortuous leap from an imperial order to an unambiguously sovereign nation on the Western model. Whereas in the past China’s subjects were considered before territory – power extended over people more than over land – and the imperial centre exercised a loose and often only nominal overlordship over the political elites of its peripheries (Tibet being the loosest and most inaccessible of such peripheries), in the modern zero-sum nation state paradigm, boundaries became of primary importance.

The dominance (and inadequacy) of the essentially Western political concept of sovereign independent nations as the indissoluble building blocks of the international order stands at the heart of the current impasse between Chinese and Tibetan nationalist claims and counterclaims. But Anand tries, in Geopolitical Exotica, to say more than this. In an approach borrowed directly from Edward Said’s Orientalism, he sees the sinister hand of Western “strategies of representation” at the core of the Tibetan problem, still persistent because popular opinion is a primary player in political dealings with Tibet. Western ways of thinking about Tibet, which have their foundation in colonial encounters in Asia, have fostered fantasies of “Tibetanness”, which have in turn been adopted and used by Tibetans, and thereby (it is implied) distorted the issue and played a “constitutive role” in the ongoing conflict over Tibet. Among the Western “imaginings” of Tibetans Anand discusses are Rudyard Kipling’s Teshoo Lama in Kim, Lobsang Rampa’s fraudulent autobiography of a Tibetan monk in The Third Eye (Rampa was in fact the son of a Cornish plumber and had never been to Tibet) and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, an adventure story which first coined the term “Shangri-La” – a monastery high in the Himalaya peopled by enlightened Europeans who never grow old. These have combined to create what Anand calls “Exotica Tibet” – the projection of Tibet as unique, spiritualized and utopian, which has nurtured the Tibetan issue as an international dispute.

Anand’s arguments are engaging, provocative and at times entertaining, but his book falls well short of its claims. As a post-colonial critique of the Tibetan geopolitical issue, it is both premature and glaringly incomplete. It fails to engage with or even to notice the elephant in the room: contemporary Chinese colonialism in Tibet. For Tibet, says Robert Barnett in Volume Eleven of Tibetan Modernities, a collection of recent essays by Western and Tibetan scholars, is “an unusually sharp example of colonial modernity”. All areas of cultural life are circumscribed by state intervention (to be sure much less intrusive than thirty years ago but nevertheless pervasive). Tibetans on internet forums and on mobile phones must discuss the pressing issues of the time in a kind of code, never addressing politics directly, and never uttering the name of the one cherished leader who unites them. The spoken Tibetan language is being eroded by Chinese as the language of administration and higher education, and traditional Tibetan livelihoods are under threat from mass resettlement programmes and the influx of Chinese traders and goods. China depicts Tibetans as backward, colourful, childish and imprisoned by superstition. It casts itself in a paternal, caring role, helping Tibet to develop and progress. Tibetan consent to this development is an irrelevance in a country where consent has no place in the political process. But Dibyesh Anand fails to consider the subtle and covert Tibetan strategies of cultural resistance which are also defining the contours of modern Tibetan identity.

The political contestation of Tibet is pervasive and multifaceted, and it infects the discussion of Tibetan culture at every level. On the one hand, Tibet is an “inalienable and integral” part of the “multi-ethnic Chinese nation” according to the Chinese government and the millions of Chinese nationalists who swamp internet forums and university lecture rooms across the globe. On the other hand, according to most Tibetan voices, it is a country with centuries of independent history, intellectual and religious traditions, and literary culture, which has been forcibly annexed by China in the modern period. The two views are hard to reconcile because of the absolutism of the Chinese stance. To engage with China’s arguments concerning Tibet is to be subjected to a kind of intellectual entrapment, familiar in the Palestinian conflict, whereby the dispute is corralled into questions which the plaintiff had never sought to dispute. Tibetans complain of being robbed of their dignity in their homeland by having their genuinely loved leader incessantly denounced, and of being swamped by Chinese immigration to the point of becoming a minority in their own country. But China insistently condemns such complaints as separatism, an offence in China under the crime of “undermining national unity”, and pulls the debate back to one about Tibet’s historical status. Foreigners raise questions about human rights and the environment, but China again denounces this as a foreign intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, and pulls the debate back to Tibet’s historical status.

The question of Tibet’s historical status is a closed book in China. Tibet, according to the official narrative, has been a part of China since the Mongol Empire of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century. This is proved by the official titles and seals bestowed by the rulers of China on the rulers of Tibet since that time. Only in the nineteenth century, when China was weakened and dismembered by European encroachment, did Tibet, egged on by the British, who invaded in 1904, begin to foster the historical fantasy of independence. When China was finally able to “stand up” with the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949, Tibet was “reunited with the motherland”, since which time it has been given support and special treatment (“autonomy”) by the central government in recognition of its unique and distinct cultural life. What mistakes the government has made in Tibet, such as the devastations of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s, were not problems with the basic policies of the Chinese Communist Party, but with their implementation.

One of the clearest and most detailed statements of China’s position on Tibet is a booklet first published in Beijing in English in 1989, and reissued without major changes in 2001, called 100 Questions About Tibet, which in 120-odd pages covers everything from Tibetan history, population, human rights, the Dalai Lama, religion, culture, autonomy and economy. In response to this, two scholars from the renowned Tibetan Studies faculty at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, Anne-Marie Blondeau and Katia Buffetrille, assembled an international group of distinguished specialists in Tibetan history, language, religion, economics and politics from universities across Europe and the Americas. Each scholar was assigned a number of the Chinese questions and asked to write their own clear, concise and accurate answers. This project resulted in a book, Le Tibet est-il chinois? (2002), which has now been revised and translated into English as Authenticating Tibet: Answers to China’s 100 questions. What the answers in this book serve to show is that China’s arguments concerning Tibet are misleading, not in what they address, but in what they fail to show. In terms of history, those centuries when Tibet enjoyed independence (during the Ming dynasty, for example, or the late Qing and Republican periods) are glossed in a few lines, while those periods during which Tibet was more integrated with the Chinese Empire (for example, the Mongol-Yuan dynasty and the mid-eighteenth century) are given special attention. Authenticating Tibet is therefore a valuable resource for filling in the gaps that China’s official narrative of Tibet’s history blatantly omits. Fault is similarly found with the Chinese answers concerning Tibet’s cultural, political and economic life, and its misleading use of statistics; for example, to cover up the shortfall in the Tibetan population during the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. For the most part, however, the answers in Authenticating Tibet are nitpicking, and simply serve to illustrate a fundamental point: that China’s narrative on Tibet is constrained by an absolutist nationalism which allows for no ambiguity and no criticism of government policies.

One of the main strategies of the Chinese narrative is the depiction of Tibetan society before the 1950s as a cruel, oppressive feudal tyranny. New publications continue to be published in China and Tibet to back this perspective and counteract the utopian depictions of traditional Tibetan society propagated by the exile community. Eye Witnesses to 100 Years in Tibet, published in 2005, contains several articles by elderly Tibetan and Chinese Communists, describing the class oppression of the old society and giving glowing accounts of the “peaceful liberation” of Tibet in 1950–51; the heroic efforts of Democratic Reform in the early 1960s; and the glorious construction of a new electrified and industrialized urban Tibet since the 1980s. Articles also celebrate the success of village self-government and improvements in rural livelihoods, while the text is littered with photographs of smiling Tibetan peasants.

There is no doubt that in material terms Tibetans have benefited from China’s boom during the past twenty-five years, and indeed that China has also liberalized its cultural policies in Tibet. It has even allocated considerable funds to the rebuilding of monasteries. However, the insistence on denouncing the Dalai Lama, and the refusal to respect Tibetan linguistic autonomy, have failed to win the Communist Party the popular legitimacy that it has clearly achieved throughout mainland China. A lesson from history might be appropriate: Tibetan culture produces its own leadership. The Chinese would do well to recognize that in Tibet they do not bestow power, they can only acknowledge it.

Dibyesh Anand
GEOPOLITICAL EXOTICA
Tibet in Western imagination
190pp. University of Minnesota Press. $25; distributed in the UK by NBN. £15.50.
978 0 8166 4766 8

Robert Barnett and Ronald Schwartz, editors
TIBETAN MODERNITIES
Volume Eleven
456pp. Brill. ¤89 (US $121).
978 90 04 15522 0

Anne-Marie Blondeau and Katia Buffetrille, editors
AUTHENTICATING TIBET
Answers to China’s 100 questions
364pp. Berkeley: University of California Press. $24.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £14.95.
978 0 520 24928 8

George FitzHerbert has a DPhil in Tibetan Studies from Oxford University. His first book, on the Tibetan national epic of Gesar, is soon to be published

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