CityReads│Soil, Plastic, and Concrete
Soil, Plastic, and Concrete：
Three Key Moment of Landscape Transformation in Tibet
Taming Tibet examines three key moments of Chinese territorialization of Tibet: the introduction of state farms and communes in the 1950s and 70s; market liberalization and Han Chinese migration in the 1980s and 1990s; and the intensive urbanization and rural housing construction in the 2000s
Emily T. Yeh, 2013. Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Source: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100581500
Picture source: http://www.economist.com/news/china/21604594-communist-party-deepens-tibets-integration-rest-country-taming-west
Why does the Tibetan landscape look the way it does today? In her book, Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development, Emily Ting Yeh, professor at the CU-Boulder Geography, examines three key phases of Chinese territorialization of Tibet: the introduction of state farms and communes in the 1950s and 70s; market liberalization and Han Chinese migration in the 1980s and 1990s; and the intensive urbanization and rural housing construction in the 2000s.
Through rich ethnographical materials, Yeh portrays the complexity and contradictions of Tibetan agency with regard to China’s state building and development pushes. Flawing both the pervasive narratives in the West about pure Tibetan victimization, as well as the PRC’s official discourse of happy and grateful Tibetans in the liberated post-slavery new Tibet, Yeh presents a rich and sober account of Tibetan’s involvement in the transformation and production of Tibet’s landscape and social-economic structure, as well as the cultural politics of how Tibetans negotiate their desires, interests, and values during the process.
Soil: 1950-1970s
Part One of the book looks at the introduction of socialist agriculture in the forms of state farms, and later communes, in the newly annexed Tibet. As key sites of territorialization during Maoist China, state farms were where Tibetan labor, particularly those from lower class backgrounds, were actively recruited by the Chinese state to cultivate land and produce grain and vegetables to feed the new Chinese administration and army. Through recounts by elderly Tibetans, Yeh tells the story of how young women from impoverished and landless families became subjects of socialist China through their labor, which was both emancipatory and emasculating.
Created out of the same piece of “wasteland full of bumps and hollows,” the July First and August First State Farms were key sites of state incorporation at a crucial juncture in Sino-Tibetan history. They encapsulated several different modes of state control: provision of nourishment for soldiers, establishing consent and participation of subaltern groups, the creation of new subjectivities, and the enrollment of nature in state formation.
First, the products of the farms not only fed and physically nourished the invading army, but also provided a diet of vegetables that was newly introduced to the Tibetan soil but familiar and comforting to the soldiers.
Second, the farms were very successful at recruiting young Tibetans from impoverished, landless families to work on them. Many of these Tibetans went on to become powerful cadres within the new government. Even those who did not do so experienced personal mobility that was simultaneously a process of incorporation into the new political structure. This was particularly true for Tibetan women. Gender played a crucial role in early PRC state territorialization in central Tibet. In 1950s Lhasa, the state farms offered young women from landless families both a way to think of themselves as oppressed through categories of class and gender, and a way to transcend those obstacles.
A third mode of control was enacted through the labor of these workers in producing the material landscape. Their “victory” over nature visibly displayed the power of the Chinese state. From the 1950s to the 1980s, labor for the production of a new socialist landscape was mobilized through spectacular state campaigns such as Learn from Dazhai that sought to reproduce the spatial and agricultural patterns of eastern China in the TAR. The labor of Tibetans recruited to transform the landscape was sedimented into their memories and subjectivities, whether nostalgia for their historic participation in constructing the country, or memories of endless toil.
Plastic: 1980-1990s
Part Two of the book focuses on the process of economic development in Tibet in the 1980s and 1990s when high socialism was replaced with decollectivization and the easing of movement of goods and people. Particularly the movement of Han Chinese into Tibet, mostly from Sichuan, has inevitably created economic dominance by the Han in the urban economy. As in the case of greenhouse vegetable production that Yeh studies, Han migrants have come to completely dominate the sector. The curious thing, however, is that local Tibetans are willingly to rent out their land to Han Chinese migrants rather than engaging in the more profitable greenhouse vegetable production themselves. Yeh argues that this phenomenon must be understood as overdetermined by “intertwined political economic and social political pressures, as well as by the co-constitution of social and spatial relations”. Property rights, spatial distribution of household plots, intravillage moral economy, gendering of vegetable production, together with the structural inequalities in education between the Han Chinese and Tibetans, have all in the end produced the further marginalization of Tibetans in the local economy.
The introduction of market reforms in the 1980s, which marked a second major landscape transformation and a new form of state territorialization. The vegetable fields created out of “wasteland” in the 1950s were enclosed in plastic, as Han migrant cultivators, rather than state campaigns, introduced and cultivated new types of vegetables.
Han migrants grew vegetables largely in greenhouses built on land subleased from Tibetan peasants in peri-urban villages. Much of the arable land around the edges of urban expansion was covered in plastic. In many villages, every single local household had subleased land to one or more Han migrant families for vegetable cultivation.
The origins of Han domination of the market lie in part in government efforts in the mid-1980s to develop Lhasa’s vegetable industry, which helped bring the earliest Han vegetable farmers to Lhasa. From there, networks of kinship and native place, enabled the accelerated flow of vegetable cultivators from other provinces, particularly Sichuan. In 2000, it reported a total of 158,570 Han in the entire Tibet Autonomous Region, of whom 76,581 were reported as residing in the Lhasa Chengguanqu. Across Lhasa Municipality, the population of residents living under the jurisdiction of city street offices (jiedao banshichu) was more than 30 percent Han.
In the TAR, Sichuanese migrants far outnumber migrants from other provinces. Lhasa is also known as ‘little Sichuan.’” Lhasa is experienced as “little Sichuan” not only because of the sheer number of Han migrants from Sichuan in Lhasa, but also because of their very visible domination of economic activities.
The naturalization of Han migrant presence in the TAR as agents of development works as a new form of territorialization. State discursive practice welcomes the migrants as bearers of the gift of development who bring needed skills to Tibetans, and through their higher “quality,” raise the overall standard of living and the GDP of the region.
Concrete: since 2000
The final part of the book turns to the fast-changing landscape of Tibet in the new millennium as a result of urbanization and housing project developments in the rural areas.
State authorities see urbanization as a shortcut to development and modernity. Officials and scholars recommend the acceleration of Tibet’s urbanization as both a tool and a sign of economic development that will close the gap between Tibet and the prosperous eastern regions.
Land expropriation, resettlement, and a rash of new house building driven by local governments’ capital accumulation are also producing Lhasa’s new urban landscape.
The changing appearance and form of the built landscape of both the rural and urban TAR territorializes through the logic of the gift. Yeh uses the Comfortable Housing in Lhasa as a case study to illustrate it. Government subsidies cover on average only 25–33 percent of the total cost of houses, the remainder must come from bank loans and farmers’ own savings or private loans. In many instances, villagers around Lhasa simultaneously express resentment, anxiety about financial indebtedness, and the desire to take the opportunity to acquire a subsidy, a free gift, from the state. But by entering that relationship, villagers become further bound to continue to recognize themselves as belonging to the Chinese nation-state and its territorial claims. Their performance of loyalty is not an option, but an obligation. It is the result of indebtedness engineering.
Summary
To answer the question of why the Tibetan landscape looks the way it does today, I have argued that the social relations of its production from the 1950s to the present, particularly the contradictory role of variously positioned Tibetans in the material transformation of the landscape, are easily obfuscated. I identified three specific moments in the trajectory of landscape production over the past half century.
First, in the early 1950s, the conquest of nature framed as separate from society and untouched by history offered impoverished Tibetan women a way to transcend social obstacles through their labor, simultaneously interpellating them as PRC citizens. Their experience and memories make clear that early state territorialization was a gendered, and indeed emasculating process.
Second, the production in the 1990s of the new peri-urban plastic landscape speaks to Han migration to Tibet, one of the most disputed issues of the Tibet Question.
The vegetable market itself did not spring into existence through the force of an invisible hand, but rather was deliberately created at first to feed Chinese soldiers and cadres, and later also Tibetans as vegetables became integrated into the local Tibetan diet. As part of this deliberate creation of a vegetable production industry, local officials also tried to foster Tibetan involvement, subsidizing greenhouses and telling Tibetans not to rent them out to migrants. These efforts failed, as the result of an overdetermined and mutually constitutive set of political-economic,cultural-political, and social-spatial forces that have allowed migrants to outcompete local Tibetans. The migrant farmers also do not act as vectors of development since the income they earn does not stay in the TAR: it is almost entirely sent home as remittances.
Third, among the many visible expenditures of state development money that Han migrants witness in the changing Tibetan landscape have been Lhasa’s rapid urbanization, and starting in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the gargantuan project of constructing Comfortable Houses across peri-urban and rural Tibet.
Middle-class Tibetans have been able to purchase new, spacious homes made desirable through representations bearing little resemblance to Tibet’s material and cultural landscapes. At the same time urban planning, deployed as a technical act of development, and accumulation by dispossession have resulted in land expropriation and displacement, as well as a profoundly disorienting rearrangement of the socio-spatial contours of everyday life for peri-urban farmers.
In both the production of the state effect and the visible changes of the material landscape, the gift of development is a spatial process, producing new forms of space and territory. For Tibetans in Lhasa, the gift of development has brought both access to more commodities and a growing sense of themselves as ra ma lug, “neither goat nor sheep,” no longer known, in a sense, to themselves.
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