Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development. By Emily T. Yeh

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Largely due to its daunting inaccessibility, politically and culturally produced, Tibet has not yet received much sophisticated scholarly treatment, especially by a geographer. Emily Yeh’s Taming Tibet is a timely and laudable contribution, beautifully woven with rich ethnographic illustrations and nuanced theoretical reasoning. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork, Yeh brings her considerable knowledge and depth of research to a range of fascinating topics and offers fresh angles to understanding both Tibet and the subject of uneven development in general. It is a thought-provoking study that raises broader questions about how modernity and sovereignty can live in peace with deep-held religious traditions and ethnic identity, something that has relevance far beyond the Tibet issue per se. This book not only is a must read for people who are interested in Tibet’s uneasy relations with the Chinese state but also deserves a wide audience in geography and other social science disciplines. Yeh’s critical and nuanced narratives present a rich and sober account of Tibetans’ involvement in the transformation and production of Tibet’s landscape and socialeconomic structure, as well as the cultural politics of how Tibetans negotiate their desires, interests, and values during the process. The book’s central argument is that the Chinese state’s top-down territorialization of Tibet is best viewed as a hegemonic process of indebtedness engineering. Chinese leaders in Beijing have taken pains to cultivate a sense of indebtedness among Tibetans by generously bestowing various gift projects and massive public spending, wishing to buy the loyalty and obedience of Tibetans to the party state, and thus to tame Tibet. In reality, however, such hegemonic governance, supplemented by harsh crackdowns and heightened surveillance, has resulted in further marginalization and resentment of the Tibetans. Through rich ethnographic materials, Yeh depicts the complexity and contradictions of Tibetan agency with regard to China’s state building and development pushes. Popular narratives about Tibet have generally been crude and polarized: Tibetans are portrayed as either pure victims of the repressive, authoritarian rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or happy and grateful citizens living in the liberated, modernized postslavery new Tibet. Yeh’s nuanced account interrogates and contests both perspectives. The three parts of the book correspond to the three major stages/types of landscape transformations: Maoist state farms, market-based vegetable cultivation, and urban (re)development. The first part looks at the introduction of state farms and later communes as key sites of state territorialization in the 1950s when Maoist state socialism and the People’s Republic of China’s sovereignty over Tibet was first established. Yeh shows that at the time the Chinese state was actually successful at convincing at least some Tibetans that Chinese presence was positive and desirable. Soldiers were disciplined to respect local people and customs, and elements of consent, especially from young women out of impoverished and landless families, were forged through the promise of gender mobility. The second part focuses on the production of the Lhasa landscape in the 1990s when state socialism was replaced with decollectivization and selective marketization.