IN THE LAND OF THE EASTERN QUEENDOM: The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity on the Sino-Tibetan Border. Studies on Ethnic Groups in China. By Tenzin Jinba. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. xvi, 170 pp. (Illustrations, maps.) US$75.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-295-99306-5; US$30.00, paper, ISBN 978-0-295-99307-2.
MAPPING SHANGRILA: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands. Studies on Ethnic Groups in China. Edited by Emily T. Yeh and Chris Coggins. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. xv, 332 pp. (Figures.) US$75.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-295-99357-7; US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-295-99358-4.
For those not specialized in Tibetan affairs, Tibet is often identified primarily with the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of China and perhaps too with the Tibetan exile community in India. It is seldom recognized that more than half of ethnic Tibetans belong to the four provinces to the east of the TAR: Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan. The Tibetans of these regions have their own histories and cultural specificities, as well as peculiar challenges in establishing communal identities and negotiating their station in contemporary China. It is to the credit of the University of Washington Press’s Studies on Ethnic Groups in China series, under the general editorship of Stevan Harrell, that it has encouraged well-informed scholarship on the Sino-Tibetan borderland peoples, first in its publications of Åshild Kolås and Monika P. Thowsen’s On the Margins of Tibet: Cultural Survival on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier (2004) and Koen Wellens’s Religious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands: The Premi of Southwest China (2010). The two new titles reviewed here continue to advance our knowledge of current developments in communities on the margins of Chinese and Tibetan cultural worlds.
Both Tenzin Jinba’s monograph, In the Land of the Eastern Queendom, and Emily T. Yeh and Chris Coggins’s edited volume, Mapping Shangrila, may be said to concern centrally the phenomenon that Yeh and Coggins term “shangrilazation” (16). This designation was inspired by the 2002 rebranding of Zhongdian County in northern Yunnan as Shangrila, a toponym unknown in Tibetan and derived from James Hilton’s famed novel Lost Horizons, which described a never-never land hidden away somewhere in Tibet (20). Zhongdian’s new identity suggested that current reality might be configured so as to satisfy the yearnings of the imagination, the touristic imagination in particular. The promise of bringing tourist investment—above all from China’s burgeoning domestic tourism market—to the Sino-Tibetan borderlands is one of the leitmotifs in the two books under discussion.
The “eastern queendom” of Tenzin Jinba’s title refers to the fabled “eastern land of women” (Chinese, dongnüguo) mentioned in the annals of the Sui and Tang dynasties. Though legend has magnified this to be a land of amazons, less dramatic institutions privileging women or maternal lineages, as are current in some Tibetan and Himalayan societies, may well be in the background here. Whatever the explanation, a region that is often named as a probable location of the eastern land of women is Gyalmorong (literary Tibetan, rgyal mo rong; Chinese, jiarong), literally the “Valley of the Queens.” Tenzin Jinba is himself a native of Gyalmorong, but from a different community than that which he studies here. He is therefore enough of an insider to have unusual insights into the nuances of his subjects’ relations and affirmations—which, given the several linguistic registers in use (the Gyalmorong language, Amdo and Khampa Tibetan, Sichuan-dialect Chinese), present a considerable challenge to non-natives—and yet far enough removed to develop an etic perspective.
Gyalmorong, a cluster of counties mostly straddling the upper reaches of the Dadu River in northern Sichuan, has been closely associated with Tibet since the eighth century. Its dominant religious system was, and to some extent remains, the autochtonous Tibetan Bon religion, though Tibetan Buddhism is a strong presence as well. The language is peppered with Tibetan expressions, often in archaic forms, and, although current linguistic scholarship considers it to be a Qiangic language, local opinion, strongly supported by local scholars, insists that what is spoken is in fact ancient Tibetan (23). In some parts of Gyalmorong, versions of the Tibetan Amdo dialect are nevertheless also widely in use, and in Danba County, where Tenzin Jinba’s research was conducted, Khampa dialect too. This perhaps explains why Danba, uniquely among the Gyalmorong counties, was incorporated into Sichuan’s Ganzi prefecture, which is Khampa. Although the people of Gyalmorong were given their own ethnic designation immediately after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, in 1954 they were reclassified as zangzu, that is, Tibetan (21). Nevertheless, owing to differences of language and local custom, Tibetans often consider them alien (23). Identity is thus very much an issue in Gyalmorong, and Danba County in particular has responded by asserting itself to be the site of the famous “queendom.”
Tenzin Jinba’s study concerns the dynamics of this claim within Danba, where the identification of the county with the legend has opened up a variety of divisions and unanticipated consequences in the country itself. First, and most generally, was the transformation of the “queendom” into the “Land of Beauties,” which, of course, played very well in the Chinese tourist business. However, the exotic in this case soon morphed into the erotic and Danba found itself beset by numbers of Chinese men looking for sexual adventure. This eventuality had not been foreseen and was a profound affront to the dominant mores of the community (59–64).
Tenzin Jinba sets this episode in relation to pertinent aspects of gender construction in contemporary China, particularly with reference to ethnic minorities like the people of Danba (chapters 2–3). His account explores both the gender-based stereotypes that have emerged and in particular the manner in which these have played out in the discourses of the “queendom” elaborated in and around his main site of fieldwork, the Danba township of Suopo. For here a coterie of the local elite has sought to demonstrate that their township was not just within the queendom, but that it was its royal centre, the site of the ancient queens’ palace. Being of this lineage, they insist, the women of Suopo are particularly capable and wise, and the men particularly inclined to grant the women the honour and respect that they merit. This distinguishes the people of Suopo both from the Han and from other Tibetans, earning them, so it is argued, a unique dignity (67–71).
All of this has a (no doubt unintended) comedic dimension; for, as Tenzin Jinba suggests, there is no empirical basis for believing that gender relations in Suopo differ much from norms in other Danba communities, the local traditions of the queens seem rather tenuous, and the entire queendom issue—including the debates it provokes with Suopo’s neighbours—involves primarily the men, Suopo women being generally indifferent to it (65–67). What emerges is a portrait of a small and vulnerable community strategically maneuvering to win for itself what it hopes will be a profitable position in relation to the larger forces that surround it, while at the same time seeking to enhance its sense of rootedness and self-esteem (chapters 4–5). The ancient queendom figures here as the imaginal vehicle invoked to ensure the order of contemporary reality.
The intersection of imagination and reality informs the first part of Mapping Shangrila, as well. Entitled “Shangrilazation,” it includes three articles probing the constructions of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands in writing and popular culture. “Vital Margins” by Li-hua Ying explores the depiction of Sino-Tibetan frontier societies in contemporary fiction and poetry, both by Chinese and Sinophone Tibetan authors. In “Dreamworld, Shambala, Gannan,” Chris Vasantkumar examines the touristic vision of southwestern Gansu Province (Gannan) as “Little Tibet.” The trope of “miniaturization” (57–70) is of particular interest here, focusing on the representation of Labrang monastery and its culture in contemporary guidebooks produced in China. The final article in this section, Travis Klingberg’s “A Routine Discovery,” looks to the Yading Nature Reserve in western Sichuan and its varied representations beginning with early twentieth-century botanical explorers, for whom it was ungoverned wilderness, through to its current incorporation (and domestication) in the Greater Shangrila Ecotourism Zone.
The second part of the volume, “Constructing the Ecological State,” includes two informative contributions on wilderness conservation—“Making National Parks in Yunnan” by John Aloysius Zinda and “The Nature Conservancy in Shangrila” by Robert K. Mosely and Renée B. Mullen—and two articles on fungus: Michael J. Hathaway’s “Transnational Matsuke Governance” and Michelle Olsgard Stewart’s “Constructing and Deconstructing the Commons: Caterpillar Fungus Governance in Developing Yunnan.” While one might regret that topics such as endangered species preservation are not treated more fully in this section of the work, the one dealing most directly with conservation policy, the swelling importance of the matsuke mushroom and the caterpillar fungus in the rural economies of the regions studied is very adequately demonstrated, as are the distortions emerging from too narrow a focus on these commodities and from their over-exploitation.
Part 3, “Contested Landscapes,” is particularly attractive precisely because contestation, that inevitable marker of value, is at last brought to the fore. In “Animate Landscapes,” Chris Coggins, with Gesang Zeren, discusses the latter’s deployment in recent years of traditional beliefs regarding the spirits occupying the land to support the adoption of ecofriendly practices. Such efforts, however, involve an inevitable tension between traditional reverence to powers that are not beholden to human reason and scientific projects of environmental management that presume no non-rationalized agencies: “[A]nimate landscapes are, in ontological and cosmological terms, radically different from, and not always commensurable with, scientific conservation practices and interests.… Tibetan geopiety is not a panacea for sustainable ecological development” (213). Similar divisions are brought more sharply into focus in Charlene E. Makley’s “The Amoral Other,” which turns to the continuing practice of spirit-mediumship in Qinghai’s Rebkong district and the challenge this has presented to state-governed policies of development. In the final chapter, “The Rise and Fall of the Green Tibetan,” Emily T. Yeh takes up the cases of Tibetan environmentalists who have fallen on the wrong side of Chinese authority—and have been arrested and jailed for this impertinence—precisely while advocating policies and practices that the state seems otherwise to support. An immediate analogy that comes to the fore at the time of this writing (April 7, 2015) is the arrest of five Chinese feminists who appear to be advocating rights for women that China has otherwise broadly endorsed (Andrew Jacobs, “Taking Feminist Battle to China’s Streets, and Landing in Jail,” The New York Times, 5 April 2015.]
I note this parallel because it appears to me to touch on a vital point that has not been, to my mind, quite satisfactorily addressed in either of the books reviewed here. Both appear to speak with cautious optimism of the rise of “civil society” in China. Neither seems quite willing to acknowledge that genuine civil society is not only difficult to achieve, but is an impossibility in today’s China, that its activities are tolerated only so long as they appear not to disrupt the authority of the Party or state. Manifestations that suggest the rise of other sources of authority, even where they broadly accord with current policy, cannot be tolerated at all. Of course, quite a lot may fly under the radar of the dominant powers at any given time, particularly in remote districts. In the end, however, the monopolization of authority in China ensures that civil society will never be allowed to mature. If I am reading her correctly, Yeh indeed suggests that, in the wake of the Tibetan protests of 2008, something like this may now be the case in Tibetan regions. I would hold, however, that even without the events of 2008, this is inevitably the nature of power under China’s system of one-party rule. Something of this sort indeed seems to be entailed in the concluding “afterword” to the volume, contributed by Ralph Litzinger (279–286).
With the publication of these two works, we see that “Sino-Tibetan Borderland Studies” has in a sense come of age as a distinct area of inquiry. For reasons stated by Yeh and Coggins in their introduction (7–8), reasons that include the projection of these regions as an idealized counterpart to contemporary urban China, their central place in the working out of Chinese ethnicity policies, and the concrete role of both development and ecology within them in the formation of contemporary Chinese territorial definition, this is as it should be. The Sino-Tibetan frontiers are thus of considerable interest in their own right, while bringing an important range of broad issues facing China into close focus as well.
Matthew T. Kapstein
École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, France
pp. 426-430