Emily T. Yeh

GREEN GOVERNMENTALITY AND PASTORALISM IN WESTERN CHINA: 'CONVERTING PASTURES TO GRASSLANDS'

One of China’s newest large-scale ‘ecological construction’ projects, ‘converting pastures to grasslands’ (tuimu huancao), calls for the creation of three new types of zones on existing pastures: zones in which grazing is to be permanently banned, zones in which grazing is to cease for a period of several years, and zones in which pasture is to be seasonally closed. This project is likely to significantly alter the livelihoods of tens of thousands of pastoralists living in Western China. The paper discusses the policy context in which tuimu huancao emerged, analyzing both continuities with and disjunctures from previous ecological restoration and rangeland management policies, including ‘Open up the West,’ the Sloping Land Conversion Project, and the ‘four that form a complete set’ (si peitao). Differences suggest that tuimu huancao constitutes a deepening of state control over territory, and can be understood as an emergent form of green governmentality in China. The paper then discusses tuimu huancao implementation on the Tibetan plateau, specifically in Qinghai and Sichuan provinces. Finally, directions for future research are outlined.

Tibetan Range Wars: Spatial Politics and Authority on the Grasslands of Amdo

This article focuses on one of the most disturbing features of life on the Tibetan grasslands today: intractable, violent conflicts over pasture. The author argues that understanding spatial and historical dimensions of the process through which Amdo was incorporated into the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) helps us make sense of these conflicts. State territoriality attempts to replace older socio–territorial identities with new administrative units. However, histories remain inscribed in the landscape and lead to unintended consequences in the implementation of new grassland policies. The author draws on Raymond Williams’ insight into residual formations to theorize the relationship between range conflicts and secular state officials’ lack of authority. At the same time, dispute resolution by religious figures challenges both triumphalist readings of state domination and romantic notions of Tibetan resistance.

Exile Meets Homeland: Politics, Performance, and Authenticity in the Tibetan Diaspora

Tibetans are often imagined as authentic, pure, and geographically undifferentiated, but Tibetan identity formation is, in fact, varied and deeply inflected by national location and transnational trajectories. In this paper I examine the frictions of encounter between three groups of Tibetans who arrived in the USA around the same time, but who differ in their relationships to the homeland. The numerically dominant group consists of refugees who left Tibet in 1959 and of exiles born in South Asia; second are Tibetans who left Tibet after the 1980s for India and Nepal; and third are those whose routes have taken them from Tibet directly to the United States. Whereas the cultural authority claimed by long-term exiles derives from the notion of preserving tradition outside of Tibet, that of Tibetans from Tibet is based on their embodied knowledge of the actual place of the homeland. Their struggles over authenticity, which play out in everyday practices such as language use and embodied reactions to staged performances of ‘traditional culture’, call for an understanding of diaspora without guarantees. In this paper I use habitus as an analytic for exploring the ways in which identity is inscribed on and read off of bodies, and the political stakes of everyday practices that produce fractures and fault lines.

Tropes of Indolence and the Cultural Politics of Development in Lhasa, Tibet

Abstract Tibetans in Lhasa negotiate development, as a hegemonic project, through idioms animated by situated practices and historically sedimented memories. Two related idioms through which development is experienced are a pervasive trope of Tibetan indolence and one that describes Tibetans as being spoiled. A Gramscian analysis of contradictory consciousness is critical to understanding the trope of indolence, which is both a performative speech act and a reference to patterns of labor and time allocation. The trope is informed by contemporary state development discourse and national value-codings of “quality” under economic reform, as well as culturally, historically, and religiously constituted notions of proper work. These idioms tie together ambivalence about multiple aspects of life as transformed by development, including underemployment, urbanization, and chemically intensive agriculture. Though culturally specific, these idioms of development are not “merely cultural.” Instead, they are shaped by specific policies for economic development and political control in the Tibet Autonomous Region. These idioms, in turn, also shape possibilities for maneuver within the larger trajectory of reform and development. This analysis builds on the work of geographers, anthropologists, and others who have recently argued that conceptualizations of development as a monolithic and globally uniform discourse elide the cultural effects of development as well as the grounded practices through which it is enacted and contested.

Following the caterpillar fungus: nature, commodity chains, and the place of Tibet in China's uneven geographies

Following caterpillar fungus as it travels from the Tibetan Plateau to wealthy Chinese consumers, this article makes several interventions into geographical studies of commodity chains. First, it argues for an expansion beyond the usual call to connect the political economy of production with cultures of consumption; the cultural politics of production and political economies of consumption must also be considered. Second, it argues for bringing together political economy and more-than-human analytical approaches to commodity chains, showing how nature and the nonhuman play a key role in an assemblage that has allowed Tibetans to navigate livelihoods in a rapidly changing economy. This challenges a tendency to assume a universal figure of ‘the human’ in more-than-human geographies. Third, by connecting the erasure of Tibetans from representations of various natures used to sell caterpillar fungus with the broader politics of Tibetans within the Peoples Republic of China, we show that commodity fetishism can conceal not just labor relations, but also political struggles not reducible to class. Finally, we show that following a small fungus can shed light on the unevenness of Chinas capitalist development obscured in monolithic narratives of Chinas rise, demonstrating the value of expanding commodity chain studies beyond those that end with Western consumers.

Rural politics in contemporary China

We examine overarching themes in the contributions, including critiques of neo-liberalism, rural-urban linkages, the relevance of mixed methods and cross-disciplinary approaches, the need to engage social theory, and variation across space and time. At the same time, we provide an overview of rural Chinese politics and explain that the goal of the collection was to bring findings that have appeared in area studies or disciplinary outlets into conversation with peasant studies research. After discussing intellectual debates about the peasantry, everyday practices of governance, contentious politics, the mutual constitution of the rural and urban, and environmental politics, we conclude that work on the Chinese countryside needs ‘lumping’ (to discover unexpected similarities) and ‘splitting’ (to uncover patterns and forks in the road). Chinese rural politics is neither ‘turtles all the way down’ and baffling complexity, nor one master story that applies in all times and places. Instead we must continue to navigate the path between exoticizing China and treating its rural transformation as a tale many times told.

The politics of conservation in contemporary rural China

Placing conservation within a broad framework of agrarian and environmental politics, this review article argues that natural resource governance is fundamental to rural politics in China. Much of the environmental literature adopts a technocratic approach, ignoring the political nature of the redistribution of access to and control over natural resources, and of knowledge vis-à-vis degradation. Reading the managerial literature with and against the grain of political ecological studies, the essay reviews contemporary environmental issues including Payments for Ecosystem Services and other market-based approaches, the establishment of national parks and resettlement schemes justified through ecological rationales. The first section following the introduction focuses on two of the largest forest rehabilitation schemes in the world. Next, the paper reviews work on Chinas rapidly growing number of nature reserves, examining their role as enclosures and their entanglement with tourism income generation. This is followed by a discussion of research on the politics of rangeland degradation and property rights. The inclusion of pastoralism within the scope of rural politics is sometimes obscured by the fact that Chinas extensive rangelands coincide almost completely with its minority populations. The misrecognition of rural politics over resources and the environment as ethnic politics is addressed in the concluding section.

Coordinating Environmental Protection and Climate Change Adaptation Policy in Resource-Dependent Communities: A Case Study from the Tibetan Plateau

Resource-dependent communities are likely to be disproportionately affected by climate change. Yet, natural resource management policies continue to be developed and implemented without considering climate change adaptation. We highlight that this lack of coordination is potentially harmful to natural resources and resource-dependent communities with an example from the Tibetan Plateau, a region where climate is changing rapidly. Tibetan pastoralists inhabit rangelands that are the focus of recent development and management policies that promote fencing, sedentarization, individual rangeland use rights, and the elimination of grazing in some areas. These policies may have a negative effect on herders’ ability to adapt to climate change. China’s National Climate Change Programme lists controlling or eliminating grazing in some areas as key for adaptation to climate change, but experimental results indicate that grazing may buffer the rangelands from the negative effects of warming. These findings indicate that policies that support the well-developed strategies of resource-dependent communities for living in uncertain and variable environments can also enhance adaptation of these social and ecological systems to climate change. We conclude that management and environmental protection policies developed separately from climate change policy face increased failure potential and may decrease the ability of natural resources and the communities that depend upon them to successfully adapt to climate change.

Going West and Going Out: discourses, migrants, and models in Chinese development

Abstract In 1999 China announced the launching of the Open up the West campaign, sometimes called “Going West,” to help western China finally catch up to the much wealthier eastern, coastal areas after several decades of lagging behind. The same year, China also announced a “Going Out” strategy to encourage Chinese investment abroad. The 15 years since then have witnessed dramatic Chinese government investment in various development activities in western regions of China, as well as around the world. Though rarely considered together, we argue that there are significant parallels in development discourse, the centrality of physical infrastructure, the characteristics of Chinese labor migration and the nature of migrant-local relations, and the application of “models from elsewhere” in Going West and Going Out. Considering these parallels can help shed light on Chinese development discourse and practice, as China becomes increasingly important in the field of development once dominated by Western countries. Finally, we also consider direct connections and convergences between the two strategies in China’s neighboring countries of Asia and in the One Belt One Road initiative.

Ephemeral ‘communities’: spatiality and politics in rangeland interventions in Mongolia

In recent years, the number of community-based natural resource management projects for rangeland conservation and development has grown rapidly in Mongolia. Such projects seek to develop social capital through the formation of herder groups and pasture user groups, in order to enable the coordination of complex, collective tasks needed for sustainability. Through analysis of social networks, interviews and ethnographic data from two places where such projects have been implemented, Bayanjargalan, Dundgovi, and Tariat, Arkhangai, the paper demonstrates that the spatiality of pastoral social relations is much more extensive than assumed by these projects. Furthermore, rather than being neutral technical interventions, such projects are embedded in and proliferate politics. They often bolster the informal power of wealthy herders who gain more access to pasture, while at the same time leading to tensions between different levels of government and becoming objects of struggle between Mongolia’s two dominant political parties. For all of these reasons, these efforts have tended not to build trust, and the ‘communities’ they create, in the form of herder groups and pasture user groups, have tended to be ephemeral.