This study is Warren Smith's latest installment in his growing opus examining the historical vicissitudes of modern Tibetan history and Sino-Tibetan relations. Smith is an eminent independent researcher now working at the Tibetan service of Radio Free Asia. Here, he mobilizes an array of primary and secondary media sources to produce the first book-length analysis in English of the unprecedented, widespread unrest that broke out among Tibetans in the People's Republic of China (PRC) during that country's tumultuous Olympic year (2008–2009).
The book is organized in five (too) long main chapters, four of which lay out key events in rough chronological order, framed by a short introduction and a concluding chapter of analysis: “One State, Two Nations.” Though it is redundant and overly long in places, the book provides an invaluable compendium of data on what Smith convincingly argues was a watershed moment not just for Sino-Tibetan relations, but also for China's relationship with the rest of the world.
As such, Smith's book carries forward arguments on the nature of Tibetan nationalism and shifting PRC state policies toward Tibet that he developed in his previous work. Despite his effort to present an objective account of the Tibetan unrest, aimed most directly at countering the ubiquitous Chinese state propaganda, Smith's book is a very familiar polemic in long-standing debates among Tibet watchers about the political status of Tibet and the grounds of national state sovereignty. In this, Smith has emerged in recent years as perhaps the primary counter to that other ascendant force in English-language modern Tibetan history: Melvyn Goldstein. Smith's focus on the almost primordial (and therefore legitimately sovereign) nature of Tibetan nationalism based in shared language, religion, and culture across the plateau counters Goldstein's political economic approach, which privileges Tibetan class conflict and interests in economic development over culture. Smith's approach, familiar from pro-Tibet activism that appeals to international law, denies any grounds for Chinese state claims to Tibet, while Goldstein's approach, developed through research in Tibet with Tibetan and Chinese collaborators, accepts PRC sovereignty over Tibet as legitimate.
Yet in this book, Smith encounters the dilemma now facing all longtime Tibet watchers: how to understand and position oneself vis-à-vis the state of emergency in the rapidly changing, late reform-era PRC. In the four main chapters, Smith provides readers with an admirably comprehensive review of the events, players, and discourses of the Tibetan unrest, relying primarily on Chinese state mainstream media, but also on independent Tibetan bloggers and information gathered by Tibetan organizations in exile. Smith clearly lays out the radically altered geopolitical situation, framed in the PRC's massive Olympic campaign, that raised the stakes of the Tibet issue to unprecedented national and global prominence: the military crackdown and “Patriotic Education” campaigns across the plateau that recalled the violence and repression of the late 1950s “Democratic Reforms”; the state media's intensified vilification of the Dalai Lama as primary instigator; the unprecedented popular force of patriotic Chinese netizens; and the new international reach of PRC diplomacy bolstered by the global economic rise of China. Tibetans across the plateau now find themselves targeted as Tibetans, regardless of their social position or professed loyalty to the state.
If this is indeed Tibet's “last stand,” then has a line in the sand been drawn for Tibet watchers? For example, a few months after the spring 2008 unrest, the well-known exiled Tibetan writer Jamyang Norbu wrote a piece called “Barefoot Experts” (published in the blog Shadow Tibet, June 10, 2008, http://www.jamyangnorbu.com/blog/2008/06/10/barefoot-experts/), in which he excoriated scholars who would complicate analysis of the unrest as primarily a nationalist movement seeking Tibetan independence, accusing them of pro-China sympathies or of doing more harm than good. In this book, Smith navigates this tension to position himself as a Tibet supporter by marshaling the modernist rhetoric of truth and objectivity, and by peopling his account with monolithic agents (“Tibet,” “China,” “The Chinese”) engaged in a fundamental fight over national sovereignty. This comes across in his use of language (i.e., “China” means either central Chinese Communist Party leaders or all citizens; “Tibetans” often appears unqualified by region or social position) and in his sourcing techniques (footnotes are only sporadic, some exile Tibetan claims are represented as facts, and for Chinese views, he relies exclusively on the most party-line national or provincial level media or the most inflamed of netizen comments).
Ultimately, Smith comes across as knowing much more about the Tibetan situation than that of the Chinese. The Tibetan government and community in exile, for example, though it only appears in a final section, emerges as much more complex and conflicted than the PRC state (pp. 211–34). And the Chinese state, despite some caveats, ends up conflated with its “willfully ignorant” and naive citizenry (pp. 5, 140, 157), a powerful yet illegitimate nation because it is not based in Western democratic practice (pp. 6, 61, 264).
The ironic and unfortunate consequence of this is that Smith's account ends up on shared ground with PRC state leaders, those central policy makers who sought to use the Olympic campaign to shore up flagging Chinese Communist Party legitimacy across the PRC (not just in the ethnic west). We are left with an impression of the PRC state that would make those opinion makers proud: a massive, monolithic, and all-powerful nation-state against which resistance is ultimately futile. Yet we have nothing in this account to grasp the actual cultural and historical complexity and epistemic murk of Sino-Tibetan relations that are part and parcel of the PRC state violence that fundamentally shaped them. Most importantly, the focus on nationalism as a primary cause obscures the multilayered, inter- and intra-ethnic inequalities produced by state capitalist development in Tibetan regions (Smith mentions this arguably crucial context only in a brief final section, pp. 251–59). To really get at the causes and consequences of the 2008 Tibetan unrest, their historical precedents as well as their unprecedented nature, we need to squarely face not the line in the sand, but the discomfiting gray areas it seeks to erase.
