The limits of poetically writing/righting environmental wrongs in Tibet

ABSTRACT In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), openly discussing human rights is problematic: an interest in what is sometimes officially referred to as ‘universal human values’ may be interpreted as a contamination by Western discourses that aim ultimately at undermining the authority of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), sole ruler of the PRC since its inception in 1949. Tibetans, who were forcibly and violently incorporated into the PRC in the 1950s, have an even harder time tackling that topic in public. Nevertheless, they have proved skillful over the last decades at resorting to their multi-centennial poetic tradition to discuss openly, although in a veiled manner, such contested topics as linguistic rights, religious freedom, and environment protection, among others. This article will offer a survey of the human rights-related topics that have kept surfacing in Tibetan-language poetry since the 1980s, and will show that poetry has been Tibetan literati’s most favoured tool to debate the undebatable for three decades.