Writing Tibet as Han Chinese sojourners: the discourses, practices and politics of place in an era of rapid development

Abstract

This paper engages with the debates on place, and develops an analysis of a corpus of writings on Tibet produced by Han Chinese writers, documenting their experiences of sojourning in Tibet. Recent literature in human geography has conceptualised place as a centre of meanings. Moreover, it has been recognised that place is implicated in the fashioning of the self. Following these theorisations, this article examines how the Han writers' senses of place for Tibet enable them to explore and fashion their identities, and build an alternative lifeworld to the allegedly alienated and rationalised life in the China Proper (neidi). This study puts forward its arguments in tandem with two theoretical perspectives. On the one hand, it suggests that place is a performance that coheres around constructed discourses and lived practices. Hence, this article analyses both the ways in which the Han writers' frame Tibet into a system of discourses and meanings, and how these discourses feed into routinised, lived practices at the level of the everyday life. On the other hand, this study also investigates how Tibet as place is situated in the tension between local particularity and the wide network of places that constitutes China's post-reform transformation. The writers' texts play out a sense of place being eroded and on the verge of being ruined. Notably, they negotiate the restless transformation of Tibet in profoundly ambiguous and contradictory ways.