From wasteland to wetland? Natureand nation in China's Tibet

Environmental History

Volumn 14, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 103-137

  Yeh, Emily T ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY; POLITICS; SOVEREIGNTY; WETLAND;

ASIA; CHINA; EURASIA; FAR EAST; LHASA; XIZANG;

EID: 62549124558     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/14.1.103     Document Type: Article

References (87)

1. http://www.tibet.net/en/index.php?id=85&rmenuid=11 website of the Environment and Development desk of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
2. Toni Huber, "Green Tibetans: A Brief Social History," in Tibetan Culture in the Diaspora, ed. Frank Korom (Wien: Verlag der Östereichischen Akademie der Wissenchaften, 1997), 103-19;
3. Toni Huber, "Shangri-la in Exile: Representations of Tibetan Identity and Transnational Culture," in Imagining Tibet, ed. Thierry Dodin and Heinz Räther (Boston: Wisdom, 2001): 357-72.
4. PRC State Council, Ecological Improvement and Environmental Protection in Tibet, 2003, http://english.people.com.cn/whitepaper/tbpaper/tb.html.
5. For readability, I use "Tibet" interchangeably with "Tibet Autonomous Region" (TAR), The definition of "Tibet" is a key dispute between China and Tibetan exiles. Only the TAR is recognized as "Tibet" by the PRC However, it is home to less than half of the Tibetan population in China and covers only about half of the total area where Tibetans live.
6. http://zt.tibet.cn/tibetzt-en/bhq/1generalization/1menu.htm. This website is a rebuttal to the London-based Tibet Information Network.
7. K. Sivaramakrishnan and Gunnel Cederlöf, "Introduction," in Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods and Identities in South Asia, ed. Gunnel Cederlöf and K. Sivaramakrishnan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 1-42. Ecological nationalism refers to "ways in which varieties of nationalism are mediated and constructed through reference to the natural" (p. 35) and to "a condition where both cosmopolitan and nativist versions of nature devotion converge ... in the process of legitimizing and consolidating a nation" (p. 6).
8. Bruce Braun, The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada's West Coast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 12;
9. William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 69-90;
10. Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
11. The latter quote is from the Tibetan government-in-exile's White Paper on Tibet's environment, released in response to the Chinese White Paper. It focuses mainly on the gaps between China's environmental policy and implementation, the environmental consequences of large-scale infrastructure projects, and on refuting the Chinese White Paper's more outrageous political claims, such as the assertion Tibetan exiles wish to revert to "feudal serfdom." However, it also invokes Tibetans' past relationship with nature: "China's White Paper... has failed to recognise the wisdom in Tibet's traditional knowledge of sustainability. Buddhist philosophy considers not only self, and not only this life, but also the welfare of all beings-including generations yet to be born."
12. Peter Brosius, "Endangered Forest, Endangered People: Environmentalist Representations of Indigenous Knowledge," Human Ecology 25 (1997): 47-69;
13. Peter Brosius, "Analyses and Interventions: Anthropological Engagements with Environmentalism," Current Anthropology 40 (1999): 277-309;
14. Anna Tsing, "Becoming a Tribal Elder and other Green Development Fantasies," in Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality, Power, and Production, ed. Tania Murray Li (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999), 159-202.
15. Ralph Litzinger, "The Mobilization of 'Nature': Green Collaborations, Antimountaineering and the Yunnan Great Rivers Project," (colloquium paper, University of Washington, 2003); Braun, The Intemperate Rainforest, 12-13.
16. Bruce Braun, "Buried Epistemologies: The Politics of Nature in (Post)colonial British Columbia," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87 (1997): 3-32. Braun, The Intemperate Rainforest.
17. Political ecology directs attention toward the ways in which the imposition of parks and protected areas may be forms of enclosure that criminalize local people's access to and control over their customary resources, as well as to questions of everyday resistance, and to histories of resource use that may be obscured by nature protection.
18. Bruce Braun, The Intemperate Rainforest; Noel Castree and Bruce Braun, eds., Social Nature: Theory, Practice and Politics (New York: Blackwell, 2001);
19. Sarah Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces (London: Sage, 2002);
20. Bruce Braun, "Nature and Culture: On the Career of a False Problem," in A Companion to Cultural Geography, ed. James Duncan, Nuala Johnson, and Richard Schein (New York: Blackwell, 2004), 151-79.
21. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993);
22. Paul Robbins, "Tracking Invasive Land Covers in India, or Why Our Landscapes Have Never Been Modern," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91 (2001): 637-59.
23. Erik Swyngedouw, "Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890-1930," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (1999): 443-65;
24. Erik Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water-flows of Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004);
25. Maria Kaika, "Dams as Symbols of Modernization: The Urbanization of Nature between Geographical Imagination and Materiality," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96 (2006): 276-301.
26. Richard Peet and Michael Watts, eds., Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 1996), 263.
27. Anna Tsing, "Notes on Culture and Natural Resource Management" (UC Berkeley Environmental Politics Workshop, 1999) http://repositories.cdlib. org/iis/bwep/WP99-4-Tsing/.
28. That is, they are premised upon an understanding of a linear, teleological unfolding of historical time, which seeks to conceal its own aporias through an appeal to the timeless core of the nation. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000);
29. and Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
30. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 294.
31. For the early twentieth century, I draw primarily upon oral history, supplemented by brief passages from two Tibetan memoirs. The TAR archives are completely off limits to foreign researchers, compounding the methodological questions that always attend to the recovery of subaltern agency; see Ranajit Guha, "The Prose of Counter-insurgency" in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1988), 45-86;
32. and Gyan Prakash, "The Impossibility of Subaltern Studies," Neplanta: Views from the South 1 (2000): 287-94. Furthermore, though many foreign visitors to Lhasa in the early twentieth century, including Alexandra David-Neel, Edmund Candler, Sarat Chandra Das, and L. A. Waddell, wrote memoirs and accounts, they were surprisingly terse about Lhasa's wetlands if they mentioned them at all. That the memoirs by Lhalu Tsewang Dorje and Thupden Khatsun, both elites, create a space for Tibetan agency in relationship to nature, in contrast to the dominant ecological nationalist narratives, points to the fact that the Tibetan agency I seek to create a space for here is not limited to that of the "subaltern" in the usual sense of the lower classes. Indeed, Tibetan aristocratic officials were directly involved in transforming the wetland, and it was only after the PRC takeover that these former officials were largely silenced (even then, it is questionable to call them "subaltern"). It is (other) members of the elite class themselves who, in exile, waging a discursive struggle with China on the terrain of national history, have produced narratives of pristine nature that erase, in a sense, their own agency.
33. LapagerDuojie, The Ecology and Development of Lhalu Dhamra, a Marshland in Lhasa, Tibet (MA thesis, University of Bergen, Norway 2002);
34. Tibet Plateau Institute of Biology. Lhasa Lhalu Wetland and its Protection (Lhasa, no date). In Chinese, Tibetan, and English.
35. For vegetation and soils, and how they have changed over time, see Lapager Duojie, The Ecology and Development of Lhalu Dhamra; Tibet Plateau Institute of Biology, Lhasa Lhalu Wetland and Its Protection.
36. Except for common names, I render Tibetan names and words in the Wylie system.
37. Lha klu tshe dbang rdo rje (Lhalu Tsewang Dorje). Bod kyi lo rgyus rig gnas dpyad gzhi'irgyu cha bdams bsgrigs (A collection of materials on Tibetan history and culture, vol. 7 (in Tibetan) (Beijing: Nationalities Publishing House, 1993), Dungkar Rinpoche. mkhas dbang dung dkar bio bzang 'phrin las mchog gis mdzad p'i bod rig p'i tshig mdzod chen mo shes bya rab gsal zhes bya ba bzhugs so (The great Tibetological dictionary illuminating knowledge by the scholar dung dkar bio bzang 'phrin las) (in Tibetan) (Beijing: China Tibetology Publishing House, 2002), 2145-46.
38. Rod Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).
39. They were offered the Palace only after, as Landon puts it, a "veiled threat brought the Tibetans to some sense of the respect that must be paid to the English representative."
40. Perceval Landon, Lhasa (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1905) 232; 240-44,
41. "Because I often played there [and was good with the boat], His Holiness said, 'Kid, you are good at navigating the boat, so let's make a circle around.' After that... [He] told my father, 'This kid is smart. Don't spoil him.'" Lhalu Tsewang Dorje, Bod kyi lo rgyus, 37; 35-8.
42. dud chung (landless peasants) and taxpayer families (khral pa).
43. These included the Rwa sgreng, Rdo ring, Tsha rong, Gyu thog, and Dpal ling aristocratic families, and among the colleges, a college of Sera monastery (one of the largest monasteries in Tibet, just north of Lhasa) owned a piece of wetland, as did the Sgo mang college of Drepung monastery.
44. For example, 'dam byi'i gis 'khyog la gser srang yin (literally: "the area of marsh able to lift a bird is a gold srang"). This phrase referred to the fine of one gold unit of money that was levied per unit of marsh the size of a bird, for illicit livestock grazing or marsh grass harvesting. "Outdoor treasury" is bang mdzod phyi ma.
45. The monk official was called rtse drung and the other lay official, drung 'khor, the office was named rfsa gnyer las khungs.
46. Sir Charles Bell, People of Tibet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 230.
47. However, these claims that taking "more is better" clearly are also partly a way of expressing their anger at contemporary regulations. Furthermore, there are several ways to explain the claim, even if implausible in an absolute sense, from an ecological viewpoint. Before the 1950s the wetland was significantly wetter than it is now and the soils were submerged more or less year round, stimulating the production of organic matter. The digging of organic matter under submerged conditions should have been relatively sustainable compared to digging the same layer now that the wetland has been mostly drained. In addition, the wetland was much larger and the population of resource users much smaller. Finally, the most intense lama harvesting took place not during the "old society" but in the 1970s.
48. Gregory Rohlf, Agricultural Resettlement to the Sino-Tibetan Frontier, 1950-1962 (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1999), 252.
49. XizangNongkeng Zhuangkuang (The Situation of Tibet's Agricultural Reclamation) (in Chinese) By the writing group responsible for "Xizang nongkeng zhuangkuang" (Lhasa, TAR, PRC, 1986), 4.
50. A mu is a unit of area equivalent to 1/15 hectare.
51. Judith Shapiro, Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (New York: Cambridge University Press).
52. Karl Marx, Capital. vol. 1., trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling. (1897; reprint, New York: International, 1977), 283;
53. Donald Moore, Anand Pandian, and Jake Kosek, "The Cultural Politics of Race and Nature: Terrains of Power and Practice," in Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference, ed. Donald Moore, Anand Pandian, and Jake Kosek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 7.
54. A Tibetan intellectual who now lives in the United States, he became accustomed to bitterly hard work after four years of prison labor and several more years of supervised labor. Nevertheless, when he went to labor on the wetland in the late 1960s because there was no other employment, he found it extraordinarily difficult both mentally and physically. After describing the process, he writes that the task "is apropos [of the] Tibetan saying: 'A chance for the strong person to show off his strength; a hell for the strength-less'... thus all of the workers were concerned about losing even one piece of turf, worth 0.2 yuan each." Thupten Khetsun (Thub bsdan mkhas btsun) 1998. dk'a sdug 'og gi byung ba brjod pa (The Events that Happened under Suffering) (in Tibetan) unpublished memoirs (1998), 440-41. Now published in English as Tubten Khetsun, trans. Matthew Akester, Memories of Life in Lkasa under Chinese Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). This essay uses the original Tibetan version.
55. In response, young people in Lhasa came up with a ditty: "The all-yellow uncles [PLA wore yellow uniforms] turned the turf all red [sending them up in flames]." Ibid., 446, 444.
56. Barry Naughton, "Cities in the Chinese Economic System: Changing Roles and Conditions in Autonomy," in Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China, ed. D. S. Davis, R. Kraus, B. Naughton, and E. Perry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 61-89;
57. Clifton Pannell, "China's Continuing Urban Transition," Environment and Plannings 34 (2002): 1571-89.
58. Uradyn Bulag, "From Yeke-juu League to Ordos Municipality: Settler Colonialism and Alter/Native Urbanization in Inner Mongolia" Provincial China 7 (2002): 196-234;
59. Carolyn Cartier, "Symbolic City / Regions and Gendered Identity Formation in South China," Provincial China 8 (2003): 60-77;
60. Carolyn Cartier, "City-space: Scale Relations and China's Spatial Administrative Hierarchy," in Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space, ed. Lawrence Ma and Fulong Wu (London: Routledge, 2005), 21-38.
61. Emily T. Yeh and Mark Henderson, "Interpreting Tibet's Urbanization: Administrative Scales and Discourses of Modernization," Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, in press.
62. As Swyngedouw argues with regard to water engineering in Spain during the early twentieth century, "the intertwined transformations of nature and society are both medium and expression of shifting power positions that become materialized in the production of new water flows and the construction of new waterscapes." Erik Swyngedouw, "Modernity and Hybridity," 460.
63. http://www.lhalu.org/.
64. Though the tourist industry was still minimal in the early 1990s, by 2004, the TAR saw 1.22 million tourists, most of them domestic.
65. Charlene Makley, discussant comments for panel "Ethnographic futures in China and Tibet," (presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, 2005).
66. Emily T. Yeh, "Tropes of Indolence and the Cultural Politics of Development in Lhasa, Tibet," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97 (2007): 593-612.
67. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay. A spatial history is one in which space does not simply exist as an empty container, but is produced through language.
68. The Dharma Wheel Festival is celebrated on the fourth day of the sixth Tibetan month.
69. Paul Carter argues that explorers of Australia preferred English names to aboriginal ones because "if the essence of possession was to arrest... to neutralize the otherness, then the euphonious, but untranslatable, names with which Aborigines inhabited the landscape could have no epistemological place: they ... conveyed no useful facts" for the explorers and traveler. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, xxiv; 61.
70. Robert Barnett, "The Chinese Frontiersman and the Winter Worms: The Traditions of Chen Kuiyuan in the TAR, 1992-2000," in Tibet and Her Neighbours, ed. A. McKay (London: Curzon, 2003).
71. A saying that accompanies the place is lha lung dpal dor ri la rdzags/rta'i zhabs rjas sham la lhag ("Lhalu Dpaldor Climbed the Mountain, His Horse Left a Footprint Beside").
72. Charlene Makley, "Review: Angry Monk: Reflections on Tibet," by Luc Shaedler, Visual Anthropology Review, forthcoming.
73. Bod rgya tshig mrdzod chen mo (The Great Tibetan-Chinese dictionary) (in Tibetan) (Beijing, Minorities Publishing House, 1993), 2318.
74. Melvyn Goldstein, ed., The New Tibetan-English Dictionary of Modern Tibetan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 896.
75. My attempts afterward to solidify the "legend" of the mtsho glang, to find out more details about the mechanisms of its fortune and wealth-producing powers, produced many more testaments to the mtsho glang's existence, the fact that it had not been seen or heard in decades, and its associations with fortune. However, when I pressed for further detail, or new stories, there were only gaps and silences.
76. Emily T. Yeh, Taming the Tibetan Landscape: Chinese Development and the Transformation of Agriculture (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003); Yeh, "Tropes of Indolence."
77. Zhidak are powerful place deities that, in Repgong, Qinghai "are supposed to be 'tamed' to the service of Buddhist incarnate lamas and... specialize in protecting and mediating access to worldly fortune and wealth for lay villagers and their households." From Charlene Makley, "Pirate Infrastructures? Zhidak Worship and the Enchantments of Value among Tibetans in the PRC" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Jose, CA, 2006).
78. Braun, The Intemperate Rainforest, 3.
79. As I have argued elsewhere, despite the fact that Tibetans are frequently included in considerations of indigenism, neither Tibetans in exile nor in Tibet articulate their claims in terms of indigeneity (indigeneity has not found a political subject in Tibetans). Emily T. Yeh, "Tibetan Indigeneity: Translations, Resemblances, and Uptake," in Indigenous Experience Today, ed. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 69-97.
80. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 16.
81. Prominent exile intellectual Jamyang Norbu writes in an essay, "Enduring phobias and superstitions in Tibetan society," (2005) "All [Tibetan lamas] are looking for in science are possible similarities or parallels in Buddhist philosophy, essentially, it seems, to prove to themselves and their followers that they are as modern as is necessary and do not need to change." His critique, he writes, is an effort "to understand our [Tibetans'] predilection to deal with national emergencies by burying our collective heads in the sands of superstition." The enchantment of the mtsho glang finds nothing but scorn in such nationalist narratives, http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=9394&t=i&c=4 (part one), http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=9412&1=1&1&c=4 (part two).
82. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, 94.
83. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 9.
84. Ibid., 41.
85. In striving to write the nation without replicating forms of colonial power/knowledge, postcolonial scholarship has problematized the translation of analytical categories (such as capital, or nature), calling into question the assumption that they have transcended the particular (European) histories from which they arose. The assumption that a rough translation of [English-language] nature is adequate for the task because of nature's status as a universal category produces what Chakrabarty has described as "neither an absence of relationship... nor equivalence... but precisely that partly opaque relationship we call 'difference.'" Ibid., 17.
86. Dungkar Rinpoche, 1887-88.
87. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 73.