Urbanization, education, and the politics of space on the Tibetan Plateau: Critical Asian Studies: Vol 51 , No 1

ABSTRACT

This article provides an introduction to a special collection of five articles showcasing the work of rising scholars in the geography and anthropology of Tibetan regions in China (Eveline Washul, Andrew Grant, Tsering Bum, Huatse Gyal and Duojie Zhaxi, published in Critical Asian Studies 50: 4 and Critical Asian Studies 51: 1). It contextualizes the authors’ contributions in the recent promotion of planned urbanization in Tibetan regions as the key to achieving the “Chinese Dream” under President Xi Jinping. The paper calls attention to these authors’ focus on Tibetan experiences of new urbanization policies and practices, as well as their less-appreciated entanglement with shifting education priorities. Providing brief summaries of each author’s case study and arguments, it points to the ways in which all five articles address the relationship between space and subjectivity, as well as the issue of constrained agency (versus simple notions of “choice”), in statist urbanization processes.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Robert Shepherd for his encouragement to put this collection together.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Emily T. Yeh is a professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. She studies development and nature-society relations in Tibetan parts of the PRC, including the political ecology of pastoralism, vulnerabilities to climate change, ideologies of nature and nation, and emerging environmental subjectivities. Her book Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development (Cornell University Press, 2013) explores the intersection of political economy and cultural politics of development as a project of state territorialization. She has also edited several books and special issues, including Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands (University of Washington Press, 2014).

Charlene Makley is a professor of anthropology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Her work has explored the history and cultural politics of state-building, economic development, and Buddhist revival among Tibetans in China’s restive frontier zones of southeast Qinghai and southwest Gansu since 1992. Her first book, The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China (University of California Press, 2007) was based on her fieldwork at Labrang (Xiahe) in Gansu. Her second book, The Battle for Fortune: State-Led Development, Personhood and Power among Tibetans in China (Cornell University Press, 2018) is an ethnography of state-local relations in the historically Tibetan region of Rebgong (southeast Qinghai) in the wake of China’s “Great Open the West” campaign and the 2008 military crackdown following Tibetan unrest.