Robert Barnett et al., "Conflicting Memories: Tibetan History Under Mao Retold : Essays and Primary Documents" (Brill, 2020)

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Welcome to the new books network. Hello everybody, and welcome back to new books in East Asian Studies, a podcast channel on the new books network. I am Tegano Dore, one of the hosts of the channel. Today, we are really honored to have three guests with us, Professor Robert Barnett, Professor Beno Weiner, and Professor Francois Hovin.

On the show to talk about their new edit volume, a really exciting book called Conflicting Memories, Tibetan History Under Mal Retold, published by Brill in 2020. Welcome to the show, everyone. Thanks so much. Great.

Thank you. I'm just going to quickly introduce our guest today and well, let them talk about themselves a little bit. So Professor Barnett is actually currently a professor, Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and an affiliate lecturer at King's College, London. He also founded and directed the Modern Tibetan Studies program at Columbia University in New York from 1999 to 2018.

And he's also the author and editor of a number of books on modern Tibet. And Professor Francois Hovin teaches Tibetan language and literature at the French National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations. She has been engaged in Tibetan studies for the last 25 years, so she's really an expert in the field, observing the evolution of Tibetan society under the political, economic, linguistic, and cultural domination of China. Her PhD was actually the first to explore contemporary Tibetan literature and its relevance for understanding of today's Tibetan society.

And lastly, Professor of Self-Introduction. Please say a few words about yourself and specifically how you became interested in Tibetan studies. So maybe we'll start with Professor Barnett first. Oh, thanks.

Well, it's great to be here. And I should say that my entry into Tibetan studies is a little bit unorthodox. I don't come from an academic background. I don't have academic training really, but I worked for many years in theater and circus and film.

And one year actually, I did you seven, I was performing in Hong Kong. And after I finished my shows there, I had some time free, so I traveled as a tourist through China and across Tibet on my way to India. And when I was in Tibet, I happened to stumble across what was really the first protest by Tibetans ever seen by foreigners. There were maybe 50 or 100 foreigners in Lhasa at that time.

So I just became an I when I studied at a event and later started writing about it. And when I later came out of Tibet, journalists and other people asked me to write more and gradually, I actually realized I was stunned really that nobody professional, their academics were writing about this. So I studied the project of my own with some colleagues, some friends, and we began our own project collecting information and researching into what was happening in Tibet. And that's greatly built up into the work that I've done since.

Thank you. That's really fascinating. I didn't know about your experience in circus. Thank you for sharing that with us.

And Professor Hovinn, would you like to share something about yourself? Yeah, hello. Thank you for inviting us to your very interesting program. And certainly not as an author of this as Robby's coming in across the Tibetan world.

So first I traveled to the Himalayas region after reading the Snow Leopard by Peter Macchasen. And I had no idea that was such a thing as Tibetan studies at that time. And when I returned to France, I started to learn Tibetan language and I wanted to study Buddhism. But then I discovered through my courses in Alco where I teach now and then I was a student under Heather Stoddard's supervision.

I discovered it was a highly literary world. And as it happens, I really like literature. So I focused more on language and literature. I was able to soon travel to Hassas, spend almost one school year at Tibet University and became really interested in the current political context under the PRC.

Then I kept studying and studying and learning language, running back and forth. And then gradually I just did a PhD and this is how I engaged in Tibetan studies. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you.

And Professor Weiner, please. Sure. Thank you. Again, great to be here.

I guess my story is not certainly not exciting as Robby's or maybe as interesting as France was. But both as an undergraduate and after getting my degree. So I actually went to the University of California, Santa Barbara where I think you're at. It's been a good amount of time traveling in China and Thomas of a lot in Western and Southern China.

And it really began to peak my interest in the remarkable ethnocultural diversity that exists in those regions. And it was something I was only vaguely aware of previously probably. So we're not just talking about Tibetans but a whole host of people. They're now considered to be minority nationalities or ethnic minorities by the state.

So we here's Mongols by Dai Zhuang, Dong, Quaid Muslims and many, many other people. And sort of budding historian or someone was trying to think historically, he got me thinking about how they came to be minorities in their own homelands essentially. And sort of what costs that happened at. And so when I decided to go to graduate school, I knew I wanted to work on border lands.

I knew I wanted to work on non-hond peoples. But frankly, I wasn't really thinking about working on Tibet or Tibetans. At the time I was more interested in Inner Mongolia. I was more interested in Xinjiang probably.

But fortunately, I guess I ended up at Columbia University where one of my first classes was being taught by Robbie, by Robbie Burnett who had just started Columbia's modern Tibetans studies program. And I guess I sort of ended up being one of the first students to sort of go through that, at least in part. And that program included language courses, included a study abroad program in Lhasa and many other resources and opportunities. So in some ways it really was Robbie that set me on the path that I sort of remained on today.

It's pretty cool actually, pretty excited about that. Wow, thank you. Thank you. You all have these really interesting connections between each other.

It's fascinating. I guess that also is the reason why it brought all of you together as the editors of this volume. And it's always fascinating to hear about our authors and those editors' background story coming into the field. So before we actually go into the book, tell us a little bit about how this book projects Conflict Team Memories came to be.

Sure. I think that was originally my idea. This was probably almost 10 years ago when we first started thinking about it. And I'd recently received my PhD from Columbia.

I was starting to head a job and was starting to revise my dissertation into a book. And I was thinking a lot about the sources that we rely on to talk about Tibet's recent past, especially the Maoist period. And I was fortunate, in my case, to have archival sources for my dissertation slash book, which to sort of rely on, but to fill in the story, you really overwhelmingly had to rely on secondary literature, produced mainly in China through the Chinese state publishing apparatuses and so forth. And I think that's probably one of the reasons that so relatively little amount has been done on Tibet and other non-hung areas during the Maoist period because of this hesitancy to use these types of sources, which are rightly considered to be, if not outright propagated, then at least to be telling a very problematic and state-generated historical narrative.

So probably in part because I wanted to validate for myself the use of some of this material. I was thinking a lot about what narratives these stories actually do tell, how and when and why, and sort of the narrative shifts where absences might lie and what all of this can tell us. So I think in thinking about this, I approached Robbie with some of these thoughts, who I know very much longer had had been asking some of these similar questions, probably maybe with different materials and maybe asking different questions in slightly different ways. And I believe he approached Francois's and we formed a panel for the International Association of Tibet Studies with the Mongol scholar, Urdin Bulug, and many of the authors of this book.

And so that's sort of the kernel of where the book came from. The book is really, it's not the proceedings from that conference, but it is where I think the, you know, it was the embryo of what we have today. Thank you. Yeah, and Professor Braddock, would you like to add something?

Yeah, I was going to pick up on Beno's mention of Urdin Bulug because he was a discussant for the original panel, but he was also, as he's really ICMS, the kind of godfather of intellectual thinking about ethnopolitics in China, he's really on the great figures writing about that. And he was very influential in the way we thought about the panel. Originally, we wanted the panel and we wanted the book to be a study of all the major minority areas in, in our area, so north-west Tibetans, Mongols, and the Turkic peoples in Xinjiang. We wanted all those revised histories to be part of this project.

And that's why we were looking to work with him and he gave us really important insights about how that question looked for MSR in a Mongolian, which is really different from the way it's seen from the Tibetan perspective, because in a Mongolian's we're making communist and socialist history before the communist party in China even existed. And it's very important distinction that they're not the younger brothers as Chinese like to sometimes present them. So we had that perspective with us, but we weren't able to include that in the book. We had to limit, we just found that in order to go into it this way, we had to limit what we could cope with, but I think it's very important to put on record that this is a small part of what needs to be a much larger project.

How do these three major inner-Asia areas now within China? How do they work with the histories they're given by the state? And how do they try to adjust those, you know, add marginal comments or change them? Yeah, thank you so much for bringing that into our attention.

Definitely, hopefully, you know, more edit volumes like this one would come out in the future. And so this book looks at changes and continuities in historical writings about Tibet under Mao and the Chinese Communist Party here on the CCP for short, produced after the death of Mao. And the introduction chapter gives us this overview of the history of Tibet CCP encounters in four different waves. Briefly, please introduce these four different waves for listeners who might not be very familiar with sign-on-tibetan relations in the 20th century.

Professor Barnard, would you like to take this question? Yeah, sure. Well, I looked at this as... I mean, what we looked at this question, the more interesting got in fact, we spent a lot of time discussing how to formulate it.

We knew that we wanted to look at the way a particular episode in the Chinese-Tibetan history is being revised, is being talked about or being not revised. And we were pretty clear that the formative point is the beginning when the Communists first encounter Tibetans. We could see that if you look at Communist history, Chinese state history, it's always always talking about the initial encounter, because that's what they celebrate as liberation or a kind of great epochal moment. So that was what we chose to look at.

But when we looked at that, what's the early moment? What is that encounter? It actually spreads itself into four different kinds of encounter, which depend on where you are and which Tibet, part of Tibet you are in and which class and where you're other than all. And those four waves are actually the first ones, much earlier than most people realize that Communist Party first encountered Tibetans in Eastern Tibetan areas, nor does Sichuan go on to Noah, they're called in Tibetan.

In 1935, 36th of Long March, when the stragglers from the Red Army were trying to escape from the Gwemir Dung, they went through Tibetan areas, and they report that in their own histories as being a kind of celebration of a welcome from the Tibetans. But in fact, at the time, it's quite clear that the opposite happened and there was serious fighting and serious conflict. So that's the first wave. 1949 is the second wave when the party takes over China, and then it sends the Army, the people's liberation army, to formally annex these Tibetan areas.

And that's quite important because that didn't involve a huge amount of fighting. Those armies came and they were very careful, they were very strongly instructed to be cautious and respectful of the culture. So most of that second wave is relatively positive impression for many people. But we then realized that most Tibetans in the countryside don't actually encounter a Chinese person, probably ever in history, let alone at that time until the mid-1950s, if they're in the countryside.

They probably wouldn't know much about China or Chinese people. So the second wave is when policy switches, as Beno described in his book about China, it's so important from being a kind of united front accommodationist approach to being a democratic reform approach when you impose radical forms. That happens around 1955, 1956 in the eastern Tibetan areas of 58 in Umdurba, North East areas in 59 in Musa. And so there you meet the encounter with the hard edge of communism, the radicalism, which is coercive.

And again, 1966 we could see that there's another kind of encounter when the culture of the nation comes, which is a communism, which doesn't want to just take a land and reassign it and destroy the other classes. It wants to destroy the culture, the traditional culture. So these were four different encounters. And what I think is important about them is that roughly speaking, they're a progression from a kind of really quite careful, culturally respectful, Communist Party to a more and more assertive, proactive, radical revolutionary party.

So those were the four waves that we found coming up in the encounters that we found Tibetans and Chinese talking about as their initial point of contact with the Communist Party. Thank you, Professor. And these four waves, this history of Tibet CCP encounters has actually been significantly rewritten in the Palsmao era in these official state-sanctioned texts. This is something that you remind us in the introduction chapter in the book.

However, as we will see in the Tibetan resources contained in this book, these historical revisions are also being contested. So bringing in the title of the book, conflicting memories into our consideration, how do official Chinese historiography and Tibetan historiographies differ from and conflict with one another? Maybe I should jump in again. Sure, please.

We'll add to this. I think it's very important to point a little distinction between conflicting memories and contesting memories, whether we tend to reach for often these days the quality of the contest, because actually the conflict here is much more subtle and nuanced between the official and the unofficial. When we look at Tibetan versus Chinese histories, at least in what one can find in print. And that's obviously because the effect of authoritarian control limits what people will say, but it's actually more than that.

So what we generally find, I'm just going to sort of start the conversation here that my Benno and Fonsweis will be able to go into much more subtle details. What we tend to find is that the Tibetan versions subtly change emphasis of the state version. If there are oral histories, that change of emphasis is much less subtle. It's much more obvious that an oral history here being something that is private, that is probably done anonymously.

There you do see a very, very remarkable, very noticeable shift of focus, a re-focalization of history. And that re-focalization is from the state to the person, or from the state to the culture or the religion. So the Tibetan historiographies, they don't stand up and say what an external nationalist or a binary view would say, this is wrong, this account is false, it wasn't a liberation. They don't go to that kind of issue.

They can't really dare to, probably. But also, I don't know that they're thinking about that. They're thinking about why is this story not about what I experienced. So roughly speaking, the first level of the conflicting memory is reinserting the Tibetan into the story.

It's not necessarily overthrowing the state version, the state narrative. It's not exactly a counter narrative, but it is a completely different narrative in which a Tibetan, and sometimes a Chinese, is an actual player as an individual that their experience starts to tell the history. But it doesn't come to the level that usually of directly contesting. It refocuses and re-enarrates something from a different perspective.

That's how I would roughly see it. And that makes it pretty different from what was happening in China, I think, in the in-land areas of China, where there's much more taking on the whole state narrative and contesting it. In these versions, although people may be thinking that, they don't say that in print, and they don't always say it openly, even in oral interviews. And Professor at Weiner, would you like to add something?

Sure, I just want to re-emphasize what Robbie was talking about, and when we think about Tibetan narratives versus Chinese narratives, that a lot of these, and this may be obvious, maybe it's not. A lot of these Tibetan narratives appear in Chinese sources, for lack of a better word. So this could be a biography or a short sort of memorial in Chinese, published by Chinese publishing house, and sort of written or orally expressed by Tibetan, in which they, again, they re-assert themselves in this narrative of the early. In this case, early 1950s quite often.

And sort of, as Robbie was saying, rather than saying that the Chinese state came and made us do something or helped us do something, they assert themselves into that narrative. So you see a lot of Tibetans talking about the work they did, for instance, in negotiating grassland disputes between Tibetan groups, or the importance of monastic leaders and institutions. So just to sort of reinforce that, you see these in subtle ways within the Chinese sources as well as so-called Tibetan sources, if that makes sense. Hi, thank you, thank you for adding that.

And I guess considering these translator sources containing this volume and their larger implications for the academic study of modern Tibet, Professor Habeini, if I can pick your ranks up a bit, what are some of the implications of these conflicting memories and historographies for Sino-Tibetan relations, but also for our fields of Tibetan cities and China cities? I will focus more on the Tibetan and China studies more than the Sino-Tibetan relations, but maybe my esteemed colleagues can add up on what I will be saying. So what I want to say is that to some extent, I guess one of our aims was to give visibility to sometimes private, hardly noticeable or irritable, and sometimes whispered accounts of the yet-to-be-written history of these immensely chromatic and violent years of clashing between two radically different world views and social systems. So I take the word to Whisper from Orlando Pige's study of private life in Stalin-Russia.

His book is called Whisperers, and I think it applies well to Maoist China to, and even more to, Maoist Tibet, because he claims that in Stalinist Russia everyone was, and to some extent was afraid of expressing intimate private thoughts and feelings in public. So it's the case for a number of Tibetans today, when they talk about the 50s. In so far as their narratives do not fit the mandatory state-led grand narrative, but, and as Beno has just said, more surprisingly we wanted to bring the readers attention to so far neglected, but publicly available state-sanctioned narratives that bring more nuance into how the Tibetan side and also the Chinese side have experienced and chosen to narrate the so-called liberation and the Maoist years. And another part of our aims was to bring together scholars who work on Chinese language and Tibetan language primary sources.

We find, at least I find, that specialists of contemporary China are usually not very concerned about what they perceive as very, very, very area, but which in fact is a crucial area in understanding, of course, the geographical limitations, but also political limitations and building other current PRC. So we hope, we were hoping in making room to these Chinese, sorry, we were hoping to make room in the Chinese studies sphere about the still vexed and very under-researched question of Tibet's takeover. Thank you. Thank you.

So let's talk a little bit about the wealth of translated primary materials contained in this volume a little bit. They're quite diverse too, so we have official documents from the governments, we have memoirs, we have histories, biographies, fiction, films, and also all kinds of oral narratives. So how were these sources selected and curated in this volume? So as the editors of the all volume, Professor Weiner, would you like to say something?

Sure, and my colleagues can jump in as I see fit. But I think we're all really proud of this aspect of the book. We're able to bring these documents, these sources in translation to wider audiences or to win audience for the first time in some cases. Because there isn't that many, as someone who teaches this period, both in Chinese history classes and Tibetan history classes, there isn't that many primary sources available for the post-1949 period for the Maoist period.

So we do include all these different types of sources, I think there's 15 of them in all. Each is important, I think, in its own right, but they're not to sort of pick at random, or because we feel like the particular story is that important in and of itself. But they're each examples of the sources or type of sources that we actually analyze in our chapters. So on the one hand, we wanted to make available primary sources in translation for use in the classroom or wherever else they might be used, but also we wanted to demonstrate how they might be used, how they might be usefully read, even those that are produced by the state, as Francois mentions, or that appear to be sort of religious hagiographies and might not be esoteric to two outside readers.

And I'll just add that piggybacking off of what Francois was saying, I think it's absolutely imperative that those of us who teach about China include sources and stories and time and energies and materials on what they might think was being peripheral regions, 120 million people in China today that are not classified as on Chinese. And the 60% of the land mass of the state itself acknowledges is historically non-Chinese regions, not ethically Chinese regions. Because the how ethnic minorities became ethnic minorities in a hominated nation state really is not a question of political, peripheral importance as I think at some time is sort of suggested by the absence of this conversation. But it's really a key question, one of the key questions among our Chinese history, as it's demonstrated, for instance by the crisis we see in Xinjiang today, it's also still one of the really unresolved consequences of empire and the transition to nation states, or hope really is that the book provides a tool for talking and thinking about these issues in the classroom and beyond.

Yes, thank you. I was going to ask you about a question about how you would imagine this book to be taught in the classroom. So thank you for answering that. And Professor Burnett, would you like to add something?

Yeah, you know, Beno has given warning to the field, you know, that not to think of the areas on the on the edges of the China, the land areas as being peripheral or insignificant. But I think that I want to make that warning in a way or that recommendation in terms of text. The kind of text we've included, in many cases, are texts that appear to be peripheral. They appear to be insignificant, almost meaningless to a casual reader.

For example, you know, read the newspaper in Larsa Everyday, Communist Party official organs. You don't really see anything that you would expect to be very meaningful if you're a casual reader. And that's true of a lot of these texts. You know, I put in scripts from films that are just looked like propaganda, really.

We put in accounts of biographies from retired Chinese officials. They look like propaganda themselves. But our book is really designed to say in the context of the colonial regime where access is restricted, almost impossible for outsiders and very limited, even for local people in terms of travel and movement and so on. You have to learn to read texts in a different way.

You have to read a text for minimal indications that may be hidden or maybe available to the informed reader to find out what is really going on in that text. And a lot of the essays that's been said, a lot of the papers are the chapters in our book are expectations of how to read those texts. I'll give maybe an example of the Chinese officials that to be Uncle Hornum talks about. Interesting.

It looks like a standard kind of praise for the party's actions in Tibetan years. But actually, he includes indications of conflict and difficulty on the use of violence, which are not admitted in the standard recitations of that history. So you wouldn't know that if you didn't know that history. And then if you look at some other texts we put in, I put in from the panchilama, the great Tibetan figures who were the proxies for China in the 1950s, the panchilama from Sanwangayal, the first Tibetan major communist party leader, and Napanawan Jimmy, who was governor of Tibet after the Dharma.

They all left texts and speeches, which very often appear to be complete endorsements of Chinese claims to Tibet. But if you look at them carefully, especially if you see internal texts, one of these is internal, you see them saying certain claims in the Chinese narrative are just not sustainable. They're just not correct. For example, one simple example is China claims that Tibet has been part of China.

It used to claim that since the 13th century. But now it's suddenly claiming it from 6th, 7th, etc. But the other shows clearly in his texts that it wasn't really part of China during the Ming dynasty, let alone earlier. So we can see these kind of small details much more than that, much finer than that.

Like the panchilama gives a speech talking about Mayan culture, the Maya people are saying how that civilization was just ready. He appears to be hinting that the culture of Chinese communism could actually be like other cultures that have disappeared, other civilizations that have gone. So there are many kind of coded things in that that we think are worth encouraging people to look at more carefully and to read with the kind of reading school you need to look at these kind of texts. Thank you.

Yeah, and Professor Hovend, would you like to add something? Yes, thank you. Just a small addition. Dr.

Lamakya published a few years back a study on contemporary Tibetan literature, which bears a title, which I think we can quote here. It's called the inescapable nation. I think whatever a lot of stuff that we get to read, at least in Tibetan, cannot get away from the question of what is Tibet in today's PRC? What is to be Tibetan?

They cannot avoid discussing it, talking about it without, sorry, but they have to do it in a way, as Robi says, that is discreet or subtle or quiet enough so that it does not attract attention. But we see it's an obsession or it's a recurring reflection. What is it to be? And how can we be Tibetan today?

What has happened to us since the 50s or even before? So the inescapability of what is Tibet and what it was and what is now shows in the texts. So this is why we came up with the wealth of translations, of different texts that came from very diverse background to depending on what our specialty was. So we had anthropologists, we have historians, we have specialists of religious studies, we have film specialists, and I think whenever we put our hands on a Tibetan text that reflects upon what it means to be Tibetan today in the PRC and of course when it deals with history, then we find as Robi said a wealth of material and we wanted to bring it to the attention of the readers.

And I wanted to jump in there and add a special pointer for one person who we worked with who most of us have never met, who was a Tibetan who caused himself, again Yuma, not his real name, who published online a remarkable collection of oral testimonies that he collected in Northeastern Tibet called living and dying in Northern Tibet. And we have taken I think four or five sections from his or remarkable histories that he did secretly with people that anonymously. And that's really our Tibetan inside Tibetan co-editor who we can't give a real name to and much later on the process I discovered actually that I know him quite well I didn't realize initially. But his work as a collector of oral narratives is a way, it's the kind of lynch pin, the base of the book because everything that's published officially as we've been describing has to be self-censored, restrained, restricted, cautious.

Or it's an early stage where people are just trying to recent narratives. But in the oral interviews that he does, you start to see really the clarity of the distance between the official narrative and the personal experience. People describing what he was like living in the culture revolution for years under intense suspicion and persecution. People describing actually not just communist attacks but attacks from the Tibetan government army in the 1930s which was so very aggressive, but didn't try to change the culture of those Tibetans of course.

So I think that oral history is the kind of counterpart to the published public, semi-public histories. And that's true not just to give me more but other, a secret oral interviews that have been done anonymously by a writer called Shanda Rinseung who I think went to prison afterwards. So I want to put that forward as that's kind of the core text where we can see that there really is a big difference between the Chinese and the Tibetan order, the state and the popular experience. Thank you, Professor.

That's a really important point to make. We do have these sources in the book and I personally feel really grateful for these anonymous contributors putting forth these really valuable sources that we probably won't be able to access otherwise. So thank you for bringing that in. And so going into the chapters of the book, let's do a kind of unconventional move by going to the end of the book a little bit first because when people think of Tibet, most would probably associate the place with Buddhism or the Dalai Lama, the kinds of voices that we often hear and think of in pop culture for example.

So let's maybe begin with the sifts and final chapter of the book for at first. This part of the book turns to religious elites, especially Tibetan Buddhist leaders and also how they remember the Mao decades in the post Mao era. So scholars like Nicole Wallach, Marya Turic and Jeffrey Barstow's chapter all focus on religious figures you had experienced in prison or forced labor during the Mao eras. And how do these individuals recall their lives in the Mao eras and how do these religious remembering stiffer from let's say secular ones.

So Professor Waben, would you like to take on this question? Yes, thank you. For some of the, so we have three articles dealing with how Buddhist clerics recall or recall their past or how their disciples recall the way these clerics or important cultural persons met with the state violence. So if we focus on the high lemmas, we have of course to remind readers and listeners that high lemmas were among the primary targets of the Maoist fury.

And as a consequence they suffered immensely for most of them. Some of them survived, it was not the case for all of them, but those who survived sometimes left autobiographies or their disciples left biographies. And they had to live inside the system during and after the wave of Maoism and the way they managed to recount these years is not by issuing, sorry, the recalling of violence and the conflicts. I mean avoiding the violence and the conflict or telling about them, but by making sense of them through a Buddhist, what I call Buddhist reading grid.

Buddhist worldview suffering is the inherent stuff, we can say of any existence. And these lemmas or their disciples claim that through such traumatic life events, these religious people were able to actually observe and perform an attitude towards suffering, which is absolutely typical of an accomplished Buddhist practitioner. So, entering for them, entering suffering, this is what we get through their reading, we understand through their reading, entering suffering, help them clean their negative karma and strengthen their practice of compassion and endurance. And maybe I can quote here what Nicole will write in her article, she says that these years of being confronted with state violence were opportunities for spiritual advancement.

And a similar tactic is at work in the narration of a life story of another Buddhist Lama from Kam, this is in the article by Mariah Turak, and she shows that his life and times throughout the Maoist years, at least the way it is recalled later in his life story is full of magic, secrecy, secrecy and mystical visions. And the third article by Jeff Barstow is the case of a Tibetan painter, a Tangled Seo-wan who assisted, in fact, he was a Buddhist, he was a Tangled painter, and he assisted in fact communist cadres during the Maoist years. And Jeff Barstow shows that his biographer has shaped his life narration also within the frame of a Buddhist grid. So, according to his disciple, Tangled Seo-wan's life and behavior during the Cultural Revolution is to be interpreted more subtly as having an ulterior motif, a Buddhist one, what Buddhist Tibetan Buddhist called a, using resorting to skillful means, which is typical of an advanced practitioner.

Saving Buddhism in Tibet was in fact what was at stake behind the apparent or, yeah, the apparent compliance with orders given by the communist authorities or by, you know, we could say collaborating, but I don't think it's a proper term with them. So, reading this through a Buddhism prism saves, of course, saves Talat Seo-wan's life in a way, showing that he's not the one whom outsiders might have thought he was. But on the other hand, it makes this life story, palatable also to communist authority because he did comply and this is not negated in the book. So, you see, this is how our contributors have shown how Tibetan writers or authors have been able to navigate and interpret, reinterpret, let's say, a complicated, often a difficult past through a Tibetan, and here in the specific case, what is where do you, where do you?

Yeah, thank you for going into details with the chapters in this part. And just to remind our listeners, we've actually just recorded recently a podcast episode on the Colbelux new book, Lineages of the Literary, where she goes into detail more of the literary writings of Tibetan Buddhist leaders in the Maori era, which I think many of our listeners will find interesting and helpful. So, thank you for that. And part one of the book goes into these official retellings and memories of Tibetan, quote unquote, liberation by the people's liberation army.

And Professor Barnett and Professor Weiner both have chapters in this section. First, maybe let's go to Professor Weiner's chapter, which examines a specific genre of state published official memories, known in Chinese as Wenxu Zilai, or literally translated as cultural and historical materials. And Alice Travers' chapter also deals with the genre of text. So, how did he serialize state-sanctions memory projects remember to bet, quote unquote, liberation?

Yeah, thanks. I'll try to be brief, but a little bit of sort of background is that, you know, sort of beginning in the early 1980s or so, accelerating really through the 1990s into the new millennia, but sort of running out of running its course by then was an incredible boom in writing and publishing in China about the recent past. This included all sorts of things like local gazetteers and party histories, regional histories, biographies, and autobiographies, such as the one that a horror woman pops about or that Robert described to be on the tour limit chapter a little bit, as well as these cultural and historical materials. And all of this was promoted by Deng Xiaoping's regime as part of its efforts to sort of reinforce its legitimacy, as well as the legitimacy of the party itself after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and they're infighting with their sort of rivals for party control.

Speaking specifically about Tibetan region, but probably it applies more generally as well. The job of writing many of these histories was often given to these united front figures from the 1950s that Robbie sort of mentioned before. These would be Han intellectuals and bureaucrats that were involved in the initial stages of China's control over Tibetan regions, as well as religious and secular leaders Tibetan, as well as other ethnic groups, from the pre-liberation period. And all of these people, both these groups were often toppled in 1958 or soon after in the on-doh region, at least, and earlier in the area of calm and later in central Tibet.

This type of publication was actually often sponsored by leading party or army figures of that generation of the liberation generation in 1950s. So in Qinghai, for instance, a man named Ma Wan Li is off behind them or in central Tibet, General Yin Phatang's hand can often be seen. And what they're doing in part is that they're rehabilitating their own individual and cohort legacies as founders of new China by championing this early 1950s United French approach to rule over non-Han areas which stress national unity and economic development really above all else, and it's promoted as a combinationist approach. And not coincidentally, this is also the goals of the post-Mao Reformers' regime.

So you have this sort of match one another, and you can talk about the past while also maybe talking a little about the present. So really a common narrative emerges about the correctness of the policies of accommodation and consensus building, maybe between the party and Tibetan elites in the 1950s through these type of publications. Now, Alison Travers and I both write about what she mentioned, as you mentioned, she about central Tibet and me for the Qinghai or the on-doh region. These are serialized state-directed anthologies of sorts, which began actually in 1959 when Join Li asked that personal experiences of the pre-1949 period be collected, essentially to show the people's struggle for liberation to that point, and the leadership of the party in making that happen.

This was halted during the Cultural Revolution and started up again in earnest afterwards. And then afterwards, the contents would include not just the 1949, but the early period of Chinese rule in these regions. These were meant, according to Premier Zhou and others, to reflect what the authors personally experienced, what they personally saw and what they personally heard. And in that sense, they were meant to be, I guess, more authentic than say an academic study.

I think they even referred to them at the time as living material of blood and flesh. They were in the art hardly independent productions, of course, they're overseen by the state as a way to tell certain stories and reinforce certain narratives. I think because of that serious scholars, both inside and outside China, until recently were hesitant to use them. But what else, and I argue in similar but slightly different ways, we argue for their importance, for the things that they do say, for the small, for instance, we argue that their serialized nature actually means that you can trace how the state's use of history changes over time to meet the needs of different regimes in different historical moments, such as the early reform period.

Their multi-authorship also means that they often have very nuanced and subtle challenges to the master narrative that can sometimes be detected within them, so that Robbie was talking about before. But what's really fascinating about the ventures of the out to me is that there is a massive silence in them. In the Qingai collection, they really never detailed the 1958 rebellion, the Great Leap Forward, or the Cultural Revolution. So essentially, they skip two decades, and they do it almost completely silently.

Maybe there'll be a brief sentence alluding to some mistakes committed under ultra leftist pressures, which is really code for arrest, its code for torture, sometimes for the killing of the protagonists. So these are stories that make a case for national unity, they make a case for integration, that it completely lie to the tremendous state violence and the personal experiences and the communal experiences that Tibetans in other communities face during this time. So you have this deafening silence within them, which I think is absolutely striking when you begin to read them. So yeah, I'll stop there.

It's probably more I could say. Thank you. Yeah, and these, when she's done out can be found also on regions outside of Tibet too, like for Inner Mongolia, I also have been working on with a few of them, Manchuria and so on and so forth. Absolutely.

Yeah, and Bianca Hoardmann's chapter turns to these unofficial memoirs. So how are these compared to the one she stood out? I guess I could take a quick stab at that. I mean, Robbie already talked about her chapter a little bit, but these autographies and these autographies, in some ways are part of the same sort of effort to reinstate the importance of the United Front and this early period of accommodation.

So in this case, Bianca writes about a man, she uses the autobography of a man named Wang Yoon, who was a member of the party work group that was sent into the Gulok region. So soon after 1949, Gulok is one of the most remote regions of Qingai, certainly from the state's perspective. Gulok people like to say that Gulok had never been conquered by an outside force until then. And the story that Wang tells on the surface is very much the party's master narrative.

The goal of people welcomed its side-out liberation because they freed the Gulok people from the exploitation and the violence of the previous warlord regime of Maubu Fung in Qingai. But what Bianca I think shows is that the Gulok leaders were both politically quite acute. They were wary of the CCP's overtures. They had long experience dealing with different factions, different groups of Tibetans as well as Chinese powers.

And if anything, for historical reasons they preferred to part of Sichuan rather than Qingai. And they only came to participate in the new government at the CCP's point of insistence. In other words, they had no choice. As I mentioned, there was much more condensation and violence than mass and narrative suggests.

So for example, if these autobographies can really be, I think, read in ways to locate new stories. Despite the fact that they, on the surface, they follow a relatively well-tread narrative that we've seen over and over again. Yeah, thank you for that. And speaking about on the topic of reading between the lines and reading strategies when it comes to these texts, part two of the book, Rereading the Past Stories, Told by Documents.

Here we have two chapters by Alex Raymond and Tron Searing that contemplate from the perspective of contemporary scholars, or how earlier historical documents about the Chinese Tibetan encounters can be or have been reread. So what are these documents under investigation here in the chapter and what are the rereading suggested by the two scholars? So Professor Barnett, would you like to take on this question? Sure.

Well, you know, when we were working through the book, it actually became clear, sort of stunningly clear, that nothing in the book was really about professional historians writing in China or into the book. And I think that's because professional historians, the official historians, people writing history books, can't say very much at all on the subject like Tibet. It's not like the Chinese and China where they might be able to find some space. If you're writing about Tibet or Shenzhen or Mongolia in Mongolia, your space for maneuver is almost completely fixed.

There are things that those professional historians do say, but the very small deviations from the mainstream line. For example, Don Kullob some trimmy very important figure in the 80s wrote a book in which he said that in 1959, what the Chinese called the rebellion of Tibetans in central Tibet against China, he said it was a middle strata event, whereas the official narrative said it was upper strata, aristocrats. So you do see some differences. And I've talked with people writing those books in Tibet, editors of them, who've described other tiny changes from the official narrative, but they're very small and very hard to spot without expertise or guidance.

So we don't really have chapters discussing that kind of formal historiography. So in this section we have outsiders, Alex Raimo, who works in 11, I'm training France, and a synologist, and Chug Sering, who's a Tibetan from Tibet who left and lives in now in Australia. They tell us really what a historiographer or a historian would do if they were able to look at early texts at primary documents without the restrictions that the state has if you're inside Tibet. And Alex Raimo does this very remarkable thing of looking at the actual documents that were released by the Communist Party internally really, or semi-intellectual documents, archival documents, describing the preparations for what we might call the annexation of Tibet in 1950, when the PLA had to move into central Tibet to take it over.

The narrative of that event is very fixed, very solid in the state version, which is the PLA once it had overcome the local Tibetan army in the first battle, did not advance, and would not have advanced, because it wanted to have a peaceful liberation waiting for the Tibetans to agree to terms for surrender. And that's how almost all historians everywhere have represented that history. Alex Raimo shows that if you look at the initial documents at the time, they show that the army, even though it was able to defeat the Tibetan army, the Chinese army had run out of food supplies, it didn't have equipment to move forward into Tibet, it would have died in the out of maybe thousands if they tried, they relied on Stalin sending planes to drop food and so on. Their reasons for not pushing into Tibet for a full-scale invasion were probably, he argues not to do with generosity or at least for peace.

It was more logistical limitations, they couldn't do it. Whether we take that, whether we all follow that view or not, it's a reminder that history and historical narratives are written by the people who make that history at the time. So he's showing that in the first weeks or days or months of those events already a narrative had developed, which becomes a state fixed narrative. So that's an important kind of interpretation that can't be done inside Tibet very easily, but he could show us how to do that outside.

And Chung Sari shows us another kind of use of a discussion, which is looking at the documents about Nāpon Nāwang Jigni, who I mentioned earlier was the one Tibetan aristocratic official who stayed in Tibet after the night and was made the proxy governor of Tibet. Chung Sari shows that the kind of common view in recent years in exile of him as a traitor, which was really promoted by that film, the Seven Years in Tibet film, it presented in a way that's really a very recent narrative. If you look back to the text of what Tibetans were saying about in both inside Tibet and outside Tibet in the 50s and in the 60s in one words, they were much more aware of the difficulties of his situation, the efforts he made to prevent the Chinese from destroying the culture, even though he had to accept the protocol. So Chung Sari shows a much more nuanced view of current opinions and current narratives about that particular Tibetan leader.

So this is what you can call a kind of principle historiography, historiography based on analyzing the sources might be on that right, but it's a free effort of inquiry, which we don't see people really being able to do very much inside Tibet, certainly not among professional historians. Thank you. Yes, these two chapters are really fascinating to read for historians and graduates who are interested in doing history about modern Tibet. Moving on, in part three, we have oral, remembering oral histories that sort of remember the encounters between Tibet and the CCP during the late 1950s and 1960s, a particularly violent era marked by the suppression of the Andor rebellion in 1958, for example, and the Cultural Revolution that lasted for 10 years.

So here, Dassaw Martinsen's chapter, for example, shows as a case of historical amnesia in the region specific of Gauteng, while other scholars like Charlene Macley and two Tibetan local contributors, transcription of an oral interview shows as a lot of really interesting, non-verbal things, like hesitation, repetitions, and silence. So in these oral histories about life under Mao, what kind of things were being spoken about and recalled, and also on the other hand, what kind of things are silenced and forgotten? Professor Waban, would you like to take on this one? Well, you're absolutely right.

The article, Charlene Macley's and the two groups article based upon the interview is a very original contribution to our volume and maybe to history making or history, historiography in general, because it uses linguistics to read finally through an interview, and as you say, show us how to decode, decipher, and focus on silences, repetitions, hesitations, which do require a fine deciphering or decoding. Here, I think they point maybe not so much, in that case, maybe not so much to things that cannot be told because there's a grand state narrative that prevents Tibetan voices from being heard and can be an experience from being shared, if it does not fit with a grand narrative. Here, in that specific case, it's more about hesitation, about confessing, personal participation and implication in the Maoist violence and the guilt that follows. Silence doesn't mean that this guilt is forgotten.

It just shows a basic, maybe human psychological phenomenon that it's hard to deal with this guilt. I think I will leave maybe the floor to my colleagues to talk about Dasha Mortensen's article. I'll talk about Dasha Mortensen's article, which is a really great contribution. I actually teach this article in my classes quite often because I think it really is something that's very digestible to students.

She shows a series of erasers, essentially, in the region that Tibetans know as Geltong in the far south east of Tibet in Yunnan Province. In particular, she shows the destruction of the Sonsang Monastery, the main monastery there, and she's using oral and written sources to describe the physical destruction of this monastery by local Tibetans and other members of the community during the Cultural Revolution, as well as attacks on religious figures, including the Abbot of the Monastery, I believe, and other markers of the Old Society during this very tumultuous, destructive moment. And then she shows how memory of that violence is also purposely obscured in the post-mail period by the state on one hand, but also within local Tibetan communities sometimes, because these local Tibetans have to deal with both the trauma of the violence itself that occurred, but also with the guilt of Tibetan participation in that violence, and something that is rarely openly discussed officially, but also not discussed with the Tibetan communities quite often. So something a little bit similar to what Francois was just referring to.

You get this double silence, essentially. The current silence when Geltong, or Zhongdian as it used to be known in Chinese, gets officially renamed or redubbed as Shangri-La, but the state, I think, around 2000, in a successful strategy. It seems to drive up tourism in the region. So Geltong or Shangri-La gets pitched as a harmonious, distant, but accessible Tibetan destination, I think she calls it.

And the monastery itself is rebuilt as a tourist destination, largely stripped of its previous religious functions for the community, as well as the living memory of what happened to it is also, if not forgotten, it's silenced and not allowed to be part of that portrait of this important institution. And then finally, there's a fourth erasure, I think, around 2014, when the old town itself gets destroyed by fire, and then gets rebuilt to serve essentially for haunterism as well. So she investigates several levels of historical erasure quite effectively, I think, using oral sources as well as written documents. Thank you.

And I think Geltong also plays a big part in that chapter, which is a fascinating perspective to explore. Professor Barnett? I was just going to add that, where we're talking there about the oral history or the oral remembering. I want to reinsert what we talked about earlier, work of Ukeonnima, this pseudonymous collector of oral histories and Shanda Rinsean, another local Tibetan who collected oral histories.

Those are the trauma accounts that we put into that section, those are primary documents, which in a way everybody should read. But as I said, they're very disturbing to read what these people went through in the 50s and 60s and 70s, and we see immediately from that, that these people, unlike the people that aren't Mortensen's talking about, these people in the other areas, they don't really have a notion of the Cultural Revolution as being 1966 to 76, the very convenient framing that was issued by the Chinese state to bracket the Cultural Revolution. Their experience of Cultural Revolution is really a continuum of massive cultural, social, personal violence from 1950s onwards to mid-late 70s. So those texts, I think, are very important, but they say they don't really tackle their claims of legitimacy.

They don't attack the Communist Party as such. They just described the experience of what Bennett described earlier, the alighted period, the aporia, the omitted asylum period that doesn't really appear in the state narrative. Thank you. Thank you for adding that.

Yes, again, these primary sources translated, expertly containing the volume are really, really great resources for students to get to know about this period a bit more. Turning to the topic of cultural productions during the Mao era, I guess, created in the post-Mao period, Professor Barnas Chapter turns to sources like films and television dramas, as well as unofficial memoirs. So how do these media sources narrate Tibet's initial encounters with the CCP, but also maybe more in general? Well, I'm very fascinated by pleasure, really.

Many of us are, and I'm really interested in historical narratives or any other kind of narratives that is packaged in the form of entertainment that's meant to be in trouble. And as I'm sure everyone knows now, the party in the propaganda bureau is very, very insistent now that films and dramas and other ways of passing on propaganda messages should be enjoyable, should be entertaining. And that's what we're seeing as they learn in the Chinese film industry and more and more from Hollywood and so on. So I was very interested to see what would happen to history if we looked at it there.

And I've been looking at Tibetan film for quite a long time, and I kind of realized when we're doing this project that, of course, I don't know what it is, 100 or 200 films about Tibet, or TV dramas about Tibet made in China in the last 50, 60, 70 years. Actually, half of them, almost exactly half, are about the initial encounter. They are celebrations, and they are all celebrations of the Communist Party arriving in a Tibetan area and liberating people who are being welcomed eventually. So I thought, well, that's interesting.

Let me see how those accounts have changed over the 70 years. They will basically tell exactly the same story, but how's that story changed? And I spent months watching these films and TV dramas. It was incredibly good fun, but it was incredibly hard to write about, because the more I looked at them, the less I could find had changed.

I mean, everything had changed on the surface. You've got these beautiful glossy TV shows about semi-laked kampo warriors fighting the Japanese, and Tibetans struggling with Christian missionaries and Tibetans fighting the British. Very, very glossy Hollywood type epics that were being made, especially in the 80s and 90s. But actually, the themes were almost exactly the same as the themes of films made in the Maoist era in the 60s, even in the 50s.

Very little had changed. It's still about the backwardness of the Tibetan, the awfulness of the society, the depravity of the aristocrats, and the benevolence of the party. Very, very old themes that we're familiar with from the Maoist films. But what had changed was, none of those themes really, what had changed was that they now get told through a language of affect.

They get told through a vehicle of sentiment that's subjectivized, so that the story takes you into the emotional life of a central character. And that central character is an individual, a different from other individuals. Whereas in the Maoist film, you don't really care about affect. It's subjective.

Reality isn't important. An individual isn't really important. An individual in a Maoist era film represents a collective category, the working class, the feudal oppressor, the iceberg. But in the modern films, after the death of Mao, in the 80s, in all words, they're individuals who have individual lives.

And we get taken into the love affairs. The key issue is the love affair between the Tibetan and Chinese. That's the key theme that keeps coming up. And we take it into their emotions.

But the actual narrative that is being told is almost unchanged from the 50s. And it's a very, very bizarre experience to watch film after film TV drama, TV drama, and say, what is the actual story they're telling me? What's the message? And to find that actually it hasn't really changed.

Because when you talk to the directors, of any of those, not all of them, but many of them, they feel they're telling something completely new and completely benevolent to Tibetans, because they're showing them as individuals with emotional lives. But actually, they're still showing them in the same framework as in the past. So that's really what my chapter is about. There are some Chinese writers writing the television that I've worked with actually in Tibet, who are very different.

But they're very, very small minority. And they don't get a big slice of cake in terms of what they can do or work with. So, I find it very sad actually writing that chapter. What it was fun to do is very sad to realize the themes are still basically the same.

But a backward people that needs to be shown welcoming and advanced people are already. Yeah, it's fascinating your chapter. And it kind of makes you think why these TV shows and movies coming out just keeps drilling that moment into people's memories, right? The public's memories, which is really fascinating.

And on another genre of cultural productions, literary retellings of history is sort of the theme of part four of the book. Here we have Professor Haben's chapter reminding us that literary writing has become an important form used by Tibetans to discuss painful historical episodes. And that the choice of fiction as a vehicle is more of a necessity than an option. I found this argument really, really fascinating.

And Zina the hearings chapter also discussed how the literary form was used to strategically discuss the past and to avoid political repercussions at the same time. So how has the genre of fiction been used by Tibetan authors to articulate the years under Mao? And what are the specific kind of literary strategies used here? Professor Haben, if I can get you to answer this one.

Yes, thank you. Well, from the very beginning of what we call modern or contemporary sorry Tibetan literature that began to appear in the early 1980s, even very late 1970s, cultural revolution was allowed to be tackled because it was an official national policy. So what we see is the Bard Dunbar by Togugel, one of the most important contemporary, actually the founder of contemporary Tibetan literature, who dedicates a whole short story to a Bard, a Gessar epic Bard who is murdered during the Cultural Revolution. And this is a very early mentioning because it appeared in 1979 in a newspaper, an officially sanctioned newspaper.

And mentioning cultural revolution within accepted boundaries doesn't seem to be a problem, but what I find out when I read these Tibetan short stories and novels that had to deal with the 50s at some point was that there was absolutely no mention of what Tibetans in Amdo refer to as the changing of times, which is 1958. What is in a maybe in Communist Party jargon, it's the rebellion, but we could call it an uprising from the Tibetan point of view, a massive massive in Amdo. And I think we have been talking about it quite a lot in this program. And Beno's book also is dedicated to this key moment turning point in the Tibetan history.

So what I noticed is that I found out that the first short story that did deal with this period was more than in the form of hints, was published in 1992, but that was still quite, I would call it sort of voché. And we can see that how difficult it was for Tibetans to mention 1958 in a more open way in fiction. But things changed over the years until it culminated with a publication of a full-length novel called Red Tempest, Runur by Seren de Droop, a famous Amdo-based IT-Batter writer, who in 2006 published the one novel about this period. But as funnily enough, you can say funnily, he does not mention one single date.

He doesn't even mention the year 1958 in his novel, but everybody knows what he refers to when he describes the events in his book and his novel. And even that state apparatus has understood because after some months the book was forbidden and all copies were seized. And Seren de Droop went into trouble for having published this book. So I described the content of the book and the process and the consequences as well as how difficult, you know, problematic historical times cannot be told for literature.

So that leads me to maybe one important point I think is that literature as a source of knowledge, in fact is often neglected by historians. Although we've seen, for instance, Martha Nussbaum talking about poetic justice, the importance of the literary when it comes to law and right studies. And more authors are saying maybe now our humanities are trying to show that studying literary texts closely in conjunction with more classical, historical, graphical material can help us refine our understanding of subjectivities at a given period of time. Of course literature cannot be used in isolation.

It has to be combined with other material, as I just said, and we have to be aware of its imitation, the United States, its work of art that is produced by any leads, most of the time in a specific frame, but with the same couldn't be said, we've seen that historiography is also produced in specific context. And maybe the point of my article is that this is even more true, the value of studying literature is even more true in the case of Tibet. Tibet is a highly literary culture, and the cultural environment today is highly restrained, and I call it heterogeneous, it's a Chinese frame political environment in which Tibetans have to maneuver. So being equipped with a long history of literature, literary writing, usually it's poetry, but they have taken fiction more recently.

Tibetans have developed literature as a favorite and possibly the most clearly allowed public expression of subjectivity that is tolerated to a certain extent, of course, by the Chinese state and authorities. They fund Chinese state and authorities, they do fund journals, novel publishing houses. So my suggestion by writing this article is here, or what I want to do, what I mean is there's a double message, so to speak first, I find out that in the case of painful and I would call it inconvenient memories. Literature can be a resource resource for us to gather knowledge of how educated Tibetans engage in aesthetic writing to discuss or reflect upon their present and their past as Tibetans in authoritarian China.

And I may refer you also to Sebastian Weg who has shown in an article how he used fiction to quote construct a claim to a form of historicity when it comes to studying the under-researched, under-studied, anti-rightist movement. He develops his study of this historical moment on the novel by Yang Xianghui, Chronicles of Jabiangu, which was published in the year 2000. This is true for almost all of the untillable Tibetan versions of recent history. It can be titled through fiction, although with a lot of caveat and precautions.

And to return to the book, I wanted to show so that in the Tibetan context literature is linked with what Marianne here, she has called post-memory. She uses this concept to describe how children of trauma survivors often make sense, represent and perpetuate the traumatic memories of the generation that preceded them through museum, arts, pictures, cartoons, novels and films, and use them to reflect upon themselves and to what it means to grow up as the son or children or the daughter of survivors. They don't resort to post-memory to make up for lack of witnessing because their parents have been able to be witnesses and to express their being as witnesses. But in the Tibetan case, literature I found is the only allowed medium that enables the sheer discussion about these traumatic events because historical research is not an option.

And people who did experience these traumatic years often didn't have a chance to explain or put it on the public sphere. As for Exynia, the hearing chapter, it deals with joys and sorrows of the Naxon boy. This is the name of the Notobiography by Naxon Nulo. It's a rare type of autobiography that was published in 2007.

It's published in Tibetan language in the PRC. Its author was born in 1948 and thus he was a key witness to the 1950s, the Chinese takeover, and more precisely the fateful 1950s, the year 1958, when as Tibetans in Amdosay times turned around. Exynia shows that Naxon Nulo, the author of this autobiography, has opted in a strategic way for a type of literary narration that is based upon or resourced to what she called Childlike Naipde. And she shows in the conclusion that this apparently innocuous mode of narration enabled the book to be not only published, but also that its literary format was able to grab the attention of many readers and enable its exceptional reception among young readers, who, for many of them, discovered 1958 through the book, through this choice of a literary rendering of a historical period.

So, the use of literature and fiction is maybe an under-tapped topic in Tibetan studies, and I think these two chapters possibly bring this delight. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, definitely these two chapters really show that we need to be paying more attention to literary productions.

So, lastly, how has historiography on Tibetan history under Mao changed since Xi Jinping came into power? This is a question that our listeners might be wondering about. I can give a stab at that. And I'm sure maybe Ravi and Francois's more insight into it than I, but for one, I think that the state's sort of foundational decision to identify itself as a multinational state, a Doming Zuguil-Jah, back in 1949, made of what becomes of 56 distinct nationalities, meant that, at least other than particularly repressive moments like the Cultural Revolution, the difference for the most part had to be celebrated on some level, even if it was done in carefully managed ways.

So, I guess I would argue that behind the colorful clothes of the dancing that we are all probably familiar with, it did provide some space for alternative notions about the past to be publicly aired, even if they were done so in the ways we've been describing and circumscribed ways through. And this includes things like education and local languages, publishing and local languages, nationalities, et cetera, which, again, are all state institutions, but they did provide some space, I think, for local expression, such as I think Francois suggested a little bit ago. Basically, what we've been seeing in recent years, however, with things like the so-called sonification of religion, the end of bilingual education, as they call it, and of course the horrific situation in Xinjiang, I can only imagine that in the new era of Xi Jinping's vision, I think it's being called, and has expressed notion of a nation of shared destiny, that minority identity in all its forms, even those that have been considered more benign, are more and more seen as dangerous to the state and dangers to the nation, making me think that the already limited space to publicly remember the past will only get smaller and probably come at higher personal cost for those that want to express it. But maybe my colleagues have had other thoughts.

Yeah, I think that's right. We are looking at a historic shift in China from the accommodationist rhetoric and some kind of practice towards the non-hand, towards the roughly speaking assimilationist trend. And it's very important for what we're discussing because it's not, I think when we talk like that, we still are liable to present to ourselves and to others the idea of kind of two monolithic bodies, you know, a Chinese or post Chinese kind of supporter of the Chinese. State narrative and Tibetan popularity that may be oppositional, but I think, I see that binary view is wrong.

There's lots of these things are shaded. There's many, many positions between those polar opposites. Outside these countries, we see everything probably in a polar way, right, one or the other, but it's probably not like that at all in reality for many people. Of course, some people will be totally opposed to the other side.

Certainly Chinese stick, you're totally opposed to anything coming from the Tibetan side, but the Tibetans and other Marx may have to find themselves spread across the whole range of possible positions. And that's something that we need to keep in mind all the time. When we talk about this, when we say that there's no, in the text, we're looking at radical actual judgment about the legitimacy of China's presence. They don't go to that issue explicitly, although we might guess something about that.

It doesn't just mean that people are frightened of saying that. It also starts to mean that we have to re-interrogate ourselves about our assumptions that a rewriting of the state history is also a desire to overthrow that state or desire to destroy its claim legitimacy. It will be in many, many cases. There's no question that many Tibetan writers are in jail.

At the moment, one of course, I've got so just given a 10-year sentence for obvious reasons for writing about certain culture and many others. So there are people who are heavily punished for even hinting at that. But there will be many people whose positions we don't really know who will be in the mid-place in the mid-range, where they think, well, you know, maybe it's a good thing about the Chinese modernizing answer, but terrible, they've done to our culture, for example. So I think the reason I mention that is because what Beno described about this historic shift back towards the simulationist approach, which was pretty prominent in the late Qing, in fact, very prominent in the late Qing, and the Tibetan areas.

And it's going to produce a generation of Tibetans who don't know anything about Tibetan history. And we see that in August 4th, ruling from the Ministry of Education in China, all preschool education from last year has to be carried out in good or well in Chinese. So we're going to see children in Tibet, other areas who are going to be educated in China, not just educated in that language at preschool level, and a huge percentage of them go to preschool. We've seen videos, also famous Tibetan intellectual, between she's released videos of kindergarten in Lhasa, where they are having to perform reenactments of the Red Army arriving in Tibet in the 50s, whatever.

And they're ingesting that they're being fed this history from a very early age. We don't know what effect that it's going to have, but it's a very significant element that we have to be very well. And I want to mention one other thing, which is, look at the difference between the Chinese changes in Chinese history writing and changes in Tibetan history writing. From a China perspective, they look a bit similar, this trauma phase that we described with the Tibetan oral histories.

And Sebastian Vayik was really leading, think about changes in Chinese historiography. As said, there are three phases, trauma, then nostalgia, then critical inquiry and public debate. We don't have critical inquiry and public debate openly in Tibet, of course. We don't really have nostalgia very much, I've seen some signs of it when I did in Lhasa, but not very prominently.

But it's not a case of Tibet being behind China and following the same pattern. I think we have to frame it quite differently. In China, the framing and Sebastian Vayik makes this very clear, is in authoritarian societies, your space for rewriting history is very limited, but there are ways to do it. But in a colonial authoritarian society, an area under an authoritarian state, which is actually basically a colonial type of administration, your options are quite different.

Because you have your own history and you don't really have access to that history. So it's a very complicated situation. I don't think we can quite measure it against the Chinese situation. They're really very different creatures.

And one hand Chinese people trying to find space to talk about their parts, but in the Tibetan case and the other non-hand people. These are occupied, I don't know, which were to use colonized peoples whose whole history is at stake, whether they have a history or not, is at stake. It's a much more perilous problem. And it's going to take a long time for people to be able to find a way to recover that without being punished or before it all gets lost as the assimilationist wave gathers momentum.

Thank you. Thank you. This is a really, really important point that you're making. Thank you for bringing that to our attention.

I really appreciate your mentioning of the authoritarian state versus the colonial state. We really need to think about how we should reframe our conversations and studies on these borderland regions of the PRC. Professor Haldman, would you like to add something? Yes, I wanted to add yet another dimension.

I also appreciate the qualification of the situation as a colonial authoritarian situation. I think maybe what prevents us from having a clear idea, maybe of what, of course, lack of access to the field, prevents us from having clear ideas and restraints, self-restraint, when we discuss with Tibetans on the field makes it often complicated to get a clear idea of what's going on. Usually, I find the parallel with the ex-Soviet Union quite interesting to think of Tibet, because my focus is Tibet, within the whole of the PRC. I like to think what happened in the Czech Republic, what happened in Poland and how did intellectuals, what was the dynamism or the situation there?

But this has its limits, not only because the Czech Republic was a country, which is not the case in a PRC overall frame, but I think the other very important dimension that we should keep in mind and that may contribute to the eraser erasing of this past from collective memory, so to speak, among Tibetans through state surveillance and control over language education, is also because we see a very affluent society emerging. And the economical factor is important. China is becoming the second world country. And to a certain extent, of course, Tibetans are in the PRC and affluent societies emerging too.

And contrary to what was happening in the Soviet Union, although I'm not a specialist, but economy was not exactly flourishing in the 1970s anywhere in the Soviet Union, we can see that the trap of martyrialism or the triumph of consumerism may also contribute to Tibetans and PRC cities in general, including Tibetans, not to dare or not even to think of questioning, finding hard to question the overall narrative because after all life in terms of material comfort is much more enjoyable now that it was maybe 20 or 30 years back, we can see it in everyday life. So I think it adds to the complexity of the situation and possibly the risk that eraser of memory and history may be quicker or easier than we could have considered or contemplated or imagined. Thank you for adding that. And this volume will be a great place to start.

For example, in the classroom, to arch students to think about these different discussions and framing our conversations about modern Tibet in a different way. So thank you so much all for creating such an important and significant contribution to different fields, right? The field of the question, closing questions for you. What is something that you're working on right now, your current project, if you can share a little bit with us, and also what is one new book that you would recommend to our listeners?

Maybe we'll start with Professor Barnett. I'm working with colleagues across Europe actually on trying to develop AI and machine learning to make it much easier for us to read Chinese official documents. And the reason I'm doing that is because none of us can really go to Tibet anymore or Xinjiang to do research. Archives are basically closed anyway.

And what we get out of those countries, those areas is Chinese propaganda, really official text which are very, very heavily edited, very obscure and what they reveal. But I believe that like China watches in the past, or a revolution in the past, very skilled people can notice important hints or changes or shift of a particular keyword or arrangement of photographs or something. That can be very significant. And I think we can train AI to help us identify those important shifts.

And there's a lot of ways of doing that. So that's really what I'm working on. It's a form of open source analysis looking at text and seeing whether we can get happy or funding to do it to get funding to help us to identify which of the thousands of propaganda texts coming out each day. On the web or on which are containing actual substantive information that we also understand what's happening.

And I should say we've already had quite spectacular results in just using machine learning, just using our own eyes, some colleagues. We've identified these villages that China has built across between these border inside northern batons. It doesn't say that they're in batons, so they're in China. So that's a really major development in the whole way we should think about China's foreign policy.

We're also working on the same type of setting certain areas in these neighboring small countries. And we're already also working on material showing about how none's been expelled from major. And there is an eastern debate about how they're being monitored in central Tibet and other areas. So that's what I'm working on in terms of new books.

Well actually, the one thing I recommend is Jeremy Barmey's ongoing work on his website ChinaHeritage.net. And he was a very important figure in first thinking about Tibet and Tibet literature in the 18th's possible courts. But he's someone who looks at contemporary Chinese politics through the lens of the past. And the past can be a very distant past can be dynastic or it can be grown and done or other communists.

This is a really important way, say historians way of bringing light to look at what we see now. I want to think, see what it's out is there's nothing really aberration without Xi Jinping. You know, the press likes to say this is huge break, but it doesn't. Just like a simulation, this is not a break with the past.

This is a cyclical return. This is a continuation of a communist momentum or another an ancient one. So I always recommend him. I want to put in a plug for another book, very quickly it's not a new one.

The book that's most informative for me was the Raj Korte, the book written by Paul Scott. I think in the 70s it's just extraordinary kind of the colossal tragedy of the British colonies in India. I think that book is really important for us to try to understand colonialism. And that may be really helpful in the case we were talking about here.

Thank you. Wow, fascinating, fascinating. Thank you. And Professor Hoppe, would you like to go next?

Sorry, yes. My current project is focusing on the French-based ex- They're quite well shared wish to maintain Tibetan language and culture in foreign context and the expectations on the French state hard for them to integrate in French society. So that's a long term project. In terms of reading, I'd like to mention the Yu Sha Yuan's book called To the End of Revolution, The Chinese Communist Party in Tibet, 1949, published in 2020 at Columbia University Press.

For those who know me, they will be surprised to hear that I really appreciate his claimed and assumed, sorry, very acclaimed, sinocentered perspective, which I think adds a lot of value to the book he uses previously researched material to give us an account of how the Communist Party from Mao to Gensheoping and other more local leaders decided and sometimes hesitated or were forced to or made app hazard decisions or on the contrary planned well in advance. The takeover of Tibet and I find his approach extremely interesting and fresh and a big proof of, I think, of independent thinking. I really liked his book and I would have liked to mention two books in Tibetan that I've just discovered these amemoirs or autobiographies of two witnesses of the fateful 1958 year in Ando. One is published by in the Ram Salab and the author is Damcho Pilsang.

He was born in Golok in 1946, so he was too young to be jailed in 1958, but he was not too young to undergo starvation, during the Great Forward, just followed 58 in Ando. And he was very keen witness on the moment that we have little material about as we've been discussing. He escaped in 1993 and then he's lived in India since then and he published his autobiography very recently, It's in Tibetan. And then there's another book which I have actually not been able to get hold of yet, but I've met his author when I was in Kathmandu recently, Ando Tundrup, who is another witness to 58 in 59, in fact.

He was born in 1933, 1933 in Ando, and he has a very interesting life. He was first as a young man, he was a very young man, as a teenager, as you say, he was a soldier from the Kuomintang and then enjoyed the CCP in Ando and worked in Golok as a translator. But in March 1959, he defected and joined the dilemma and the dilemma's brother in India and became the top general, although the title was not general, He was a special field officer for the special frontier force, which is the Tibetan platoon in Indian Army that was created in 1962 by Niro, right, after the brief Sino in general war. So this man has an extraordinary destiny, and I believe his book is going to be extremely interesting.

It was published, I think, in November 21. So I'm looking forward to reading it. Thank you. Thank you for these wonderful recommendations.

And Professor Weiner? Sure. I'm finishing up an article on Hui Muslims, actually, and rebellion in the Northwest China in the 1950s. It was a series of massive, of larger villages, I mean, I'm massive in 1949 and 1953 that haven't really been researched much.

So I'm running about that and how they were treated differently than Ando Tibetans during that period. And I'm also working on a larger project, the one that looked at the creation of sort of the Northwest through processes of state territorialization and minoritization that would stretch from the late chain through at least into the 1950s, So there's sort of the two things I'm working on presently. As far as reads go, I would certainly recommend the work by Darren Byler on Xinjiang and many other authors on Xinjiang, but I'll highlight him. I'm a short sort of primer in the camps.

I think it's something that everyone should read. It's a new book called Terra Capitalism, which I haven't read yet, which it just came out recently, but it's very, very important. And then just getting back to what my colleagues were saying, and friends of ours, Haudai and these two Tibetan writers who wrote about the 1958 Ando Rebellion. That's Anu Lo's book, which Xinjiang, the Haring writes about in our edit volume.

I'm not sure if it was clear or not. It's been translated into English as my Tibetan childhood and published by Duke University Press. I think Robby actually wrote the introduction and I think was the editor, or one of the editors at least. It's just a harrowing account.

I really recommend everybody read it. There's no way you can read that book and walk away, not understanding the tremendous amount of trauma that exists in these regions among many Tibetan people individually generational as a community. And I think that helps us understand the difficulties that China has had since then, incorporating these peoples and places into the modern nation state in the way that Chinese leaders had imagined. Thank you.

Thank you. These are all really important works. Hopefully our listeners will go and pick up a copy and explore further. So thank you so much, everyone, for again, for taking the time to join us on the show and share your expertise and your passion about this project, which is really, really a privilege for us.

So thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you very much. Thank you.