Large-scale protests across Tibetan-inhabited parts of the PRC in 2008 and then in the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in 2009 led to a thorough reconsideration of the PRC's policies on ethnic and religious minorities among the scholar-official elites of the Chinese Communist Party. The primary lesson drawn from the violence was that the PRC's Soviet-inspired affirmative action policies for minorities (minzu) had not only failed to produce populations who supported the CCP but also failed to generate loyalty to China. In the subsequent years, a “second-generation” minzu policy cocktail was distilled from the scholarly dismay at the tattered results of nation-building in the borderlands and the darker “strike-hard” and “stability maintenance” infrastructure of the late Hu-Wen period. Under Xi Jinping, the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) and the Minority Affairs Commission have been shifted to the United Front, removing the last facades of Reform-era civilian-technocratic administration and centralizing borderlands policy-making in the upper echelons of the CCP Central Committee.

As has been well-documented by several recent studies,Footnote ¹ the second-generation minzu policies are designed to break down barriers between ethnic groups, promote assimilation and identification as “Chinese” (中华民族 Zhonghua minzu), and constrain and suppress the remaining spaces where quiet, domestic, and often quite psychological forms of resistance had sustained ethnic pride and religious faith. Driven by (but also driving) technological innovation in computational surveillance, the PRC's second-generation minzu policies now manifest as a grid of cameras, scanners, and checkpoints, involuntary reeducation centers and prisons, new restrictions on films, music, books, poetry, and other publications in minority languages, further limitations on the public use of minority languages and minority-language education, and finally (but not exhaustively) restrictions on religious activities under the banner of the “Chinafication” (中國化 Zhongguohua) of religion—a policy that has been applied, remarkably, not only to Tibetan Buddhism, Islam, and various strands of Christianity, but also Buddhism and Daoism. The most terrifying current manifestation of second-generation minzu policies is in present-day Xinjiang, where the Chinese political elite's enduring prejudices against peasants, minorities, Muslims, and the “Northwest” in general, have all intersected and metastasized into a system of so-called, “Political Reeducation Centers.” Shadowing the oasis communities of Xinjiang, these anti-oases are now home to an estimated one million inmates who have indefinitely disappeared “to study,” but who in fact most often labor on behalf of state-owned enterprises (or state-favored enterprises) and face various forms of corporal punishment and humiliation.

To be specific, the current treatment of Xinjiang's Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Hui, and other historically Muslim minorities is PRC minzu policy version 2.2. Minzu policy version 2.1 was first developed and tested in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) under the supervision of Chen Quanguo who served as TAR Party Secretary from August 2011 to August 2016. After being transferred to the post of party secretary of the XUAR, Chen Quanguo implemented modified but similar policies, in particular his signature grid-policing system that entailed invasive inspections of minority citizens at regular intervals of time and space. When I traveled in the TAR in the spring of 2016, I found the system shocking and demeaning. It was hard to imagine a more extreme version. Yet in hindsight, Tibetan residents of the TAR were fortunate that the “educational” components of Chen's policies were integrated (involuntarily for the most part) into work unit-based seminars and/or class-sessions in monasteries and nunneries and never expanded into an effort to cycle the majority of adult Tibetans through prison-like camps.

The history of the CCP's efforts to control ethnicity and religion in Tibet is thus doubly important: it helps us understand the lived experiences of both Tibetans and historically Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang. John Power's The Buddha Party: How the People's Republic of China Works to Define and Control Tibetan Buddhism, is valuable in this respect as it sheds some light the CCP's views of religion and how it has tried to impose those views on Tibetan Buddhists. Powers's ability to tell this story, however, is compromised by his sources, which are limited to a narrow selection of PRC publications, websites linked to advocacy about Tibet and human rights, and a handful of interviews, and his methodology, which did not include fieldwork in China or investigation of the institutions and individuals within the PRC who deliberate and deliver minzu and religious affairs policies.

Powers's primary interests lie in the ideological sphere: What is the PRC's narrative on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism? Why is it so uniformly accepted by Chinese citizens of the PRC? Why do Tibetan citizens of the PRC seem to uniformly reject the CCP's arguments? Over the course of five chapters, Powers introduces the reader to the Publicity Department of the CCP's Central Committee (Zhonggong zhongyang xuanchuanbu), SARA, and the Buddhist Association—state-run organizations that produce, in his view, a unitary and highly disciplined narrative about Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. According to Powers, the primary organizing principles of the CCP's Tibet narrative derive from its Marxist roots: Tibetan history unfolds in materialist terms, unavoidably shaped by contradictions between classes and evolving along lines dictated by Lewis Henry Morgan's theories of sociocultural evolution. Under the terms of this model, the Han Chinese have not only the right but the obligation to guide the Tibetans towards secular, “scientific” modernity.

The book begins with a helpful account of the 2008 protests in Lhasa and other parts of the Tibetan plateau. Powers argues that the protests came as a shock to CCP officials stationed in Tibet and the minzu-affairs policy-making apparatus—they had come to believe the core tenets of their propaganda: weren't the Tibetans grateful for their liberation from feudalism? In the aftermath of the protests, the PRC added some new elements to its propaganda message (the “Dalai clique,” foreigners, and a small number of churlish Tibetans were to blame) but largely doubled down on the same ideological arguments and strategies of control that it had been employing since the early 1990s. In chapter two, Powers describes what he considers the primary impetus for the 2008 protests: the revival of so-called “Patriotic Education” campaigns in 1994. The book breaks new ground in this chapter through its use of an internal-circulation manual for Patriotic Education instructors and interviews with Tibetans in exile to provide a glimpse of what it felt like to experience what CCP authorities called Tibet's “Second Cultural Revolution” (58). In this chapter, as well as in chapter four, “Tibetology with Chinese Characteristics,” we learn that Tibetans, including highly educated monks, were expected to subscribe to Party positions that vilified the Dalai Lama and portrayed Tibetan Buddhism as a distorted strand of Indian Buddhism that could at best only be provisionally rectified by careful supervision by CCP authorities. Patriotic Education materials teach that religion is “a phenomenon of history” (64, 132) that must be replaced by a “scientific worldview”—the only legitimate outlook of an “advanced person” (67). For those unable to get with the materialist program, the CCP has attempted to edit and cultivate a state-centered form of Buddhism. Patriotic Education materials, for instance, reduce Tibetan Buddhism to a secular ethical system, stripping out the goal of liberation from cyclical existence, the Bodhisattva path, and the larger pantheon of deities and ritual practices. Powers describes how the CCP attempted to patch together a series of Party-approved religious texts that create a “Patriotic Buddha” in the early 2010s (161–69). Vindictively implemented, punitively structured, and largely tone-deaf to the concerns of Tibetan Buddhists, Patriotic Education, Powers argues, not only failed to meet its objectives but turned people against the state who otherwise might have been apolitical or even favorably disposed to it (79, 87).

Chapters three, four, and five are largely devoted to summarizing and critiquing the CCP's narrative of Tibetan history. In particular, Powers focuses on the historical incidents, encounters, and institutions that the PRC believes are essential to its sovereign claims in Tibet. Topics covered here include the Tibetan empire and its relationship to the Tang dynasty (141–47, 177–79), the marriage of the Tang princess Wencheng to the Tibetan emperor Songtsen Gampo (147–51), and the status of Tibet during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties (179–92). Chapter three describes the PRC's revival of the Golden Urn lottery in the 1990s and its overall attempts to create a system for identifying, educating, and monitoring reincarnate lamas so that they will be loyal and patriotic tools of the Party. Powers provides a useful overview of how contemporary Chinese and Tibetans view reincarnation and the coming crisis over the reincarnation of the 14^th Dalai Lama. I would add to his account the observation that the promulgation of formal laws about reincarnation in 2007 can be interpreted not only as an attempt by the state to control reincarnation—they were also implicitly a begrudged recognition by the CCP that reincarnation was here to stay and had to be acknowledged as an important social institution. For reasons I'll address below, Powers' account of the historical origins of the Golden Urn does not sufficiently explain its meanings and purposes in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Powers mistakenly states here that the identification of the eleventh Panchen Lama took place in Beijing (121)—it took place in Lhasa.

Throughout the book, Powers seeks to speak truth to the distortions of the PRC's narratives about Tibetan Buddhism and history. According to Powers, the Chinese version of Tibet and Tibetan history is a “free-floating fantasy” (158). Powers's refutations of various mischaracterizations of key concepts within Tibetan Buddhism are authoritative. For example, Powers provides careful explanations of how Chinese propaganda materials contain mistaken notions of the “soul” and reincarnation (92–93), misinterpret Buddhist deities as “creator” gods (p. 73), or otherwise inappropriately use ideas from Chinese Buddhism to interpret Tibetan Buddhism. However, his desire to emphatically rebut Chinese claims of sovereignty in the Qing periods leads him into a reductive portrayal of Qing–Tibetan relations (176). Powers is correct when he points out that the Qing state did not exercise many of the powers that modern states—including the PRC—associate with “sovereignty,” such as collecting taxes or asserting a monopoly over minting currency. And it is important to recognize that many of the features of Qing rule that contemporary PRC scholars highlight as evidence of sovereign claims such as the issuance of patents and titles, or the use of particular rituals such as the Golden Urn were in eighteenth and nineteenth-century practice far less significant than PRC scholars would have us believe. Yet Powers's analysis suffers from the same flaw as that which he criticizes: he continues to employ twenty-first-century standards and expectations of territorial, Westphalian sovereignty to the non-modern period. As a result, his analysis tells us almost nothing about the ways in which contemporaneous Tibetans, Chinese, or Qing officials understood each other and their political relationships and how they perceived these relationships to have changed across time. Moreover, his scattered accounts of the Qing period are so plagued with factual mistakes, errors in chronology, and lack of knowledge of the archival record that, far from correcting the historical record, he further garbles it.

The Qing state established a presence in Lhasa in the 1720s after Qing military forces, together with regional Mongol and Tibetan allies defeated a Junghar Mongol army that had occupied the city together with their local Tibetan allies for two years. Powers writes incorrectly that Qing forces drove out the Mongol Lhazang Khan and that it was the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–1796) who ordered the establishment of a “protectorate” (98, 186, 189). Lhazang was in fact a Qing ally and it was Qianlong's grandfather, the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722) who ordered troops to Lhasa to avenge Lhazang Khan's death (1717) and install a new Dalai Lama. It was the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1722–1735) who, after some hesitation, laid the groundwork for a more permanent Qing presence in Tibet, establishing a garrison and regularizing the dispatch of imperial representatives (the “ambans”) to reside in Lhasa. Powers also mistakenly describes a debate over protocol for identifying reincarnations between the Fifth Dalai Lama's minister Sanggyé Gyatso and the Qianlong emperor (187)—this could not have taken place because Qianlong had not yet been born. Powers furthermore implies that there is debate between Chinese and Tibetan sources over whether the Seventh Dalai Lama was identified using the Golden Urn. This is also nonsense because the Seventh Dalai Lama was enthroned seventy-two years before Qianlong invented the Golden Urn ritual in 1792. Powers makes no mention of the ways in which Qing authorities in Lhasa, elsewhere in Tibet, and Beijing were instrumental in repeated modifications of the Tibetan administration in the 1720s, 1751, and again in 1792–1793. The basic structure of the top executive bodies of the Tibetan government from 1751 through 1959—a council of four ministers, the Dalai Lama, and regent—was the product of mutually negotiated accords. The lineages of hereditary regents, especially the Tatsak, Démo, and Tsemonling lamas, were also closely tied to Qing rulers and had often spent decades in Beijing prior to their service in Lhasa. Although arguing with counterfactuals is generally problematic, in this case it is safe to say that had the Qing not helped to design and then provide military guarantees to this system, the independent Tibetan government that emerged in 1913 would have looked fundamentally different—if it would have existed at all. In other words, Qing sovereignty was not mutually exclusive with Tibetan (or Geluk) sovereignty.

It is for this reason that Tibetan authorities including the Fifth Dalai Lama used the seals and titles granted to them by Qing emperors and cited imperial authority in issuing their own commands. Powers, misinterpreting the scholarship of Peter Schwieger, argues that the Great Fifth saw his rule as absolute and did not accept Qing “overlordship” (185). Schwieger is in fact pointing out the opposite: the Dalai Lama understood that imperial patronage provided a useful additional guarantee and sanction for the exercise of his own already well-established governing powers within his domain and even elsewhere in Inner Asia.Footnote ² After the establishment of a permanent office for Qing representative officers in Lhasa in 1728, the question of Qing sovereignty become more complicated. Qing and Tibetan elites both had a variety of views—some overlapping, some contradictory—about just what the “presence” of Qing officials in Tibet signified. As I have discussed in detail elsewhere,Footnote ³ there was even considerable debate about when Qing “sovereignty” had commenced. In the 1790s, for instance, the Qianlong emperor and some of his closest advisors argued that real decision-making power (toose in Manchu) had only been attained in the last couple years, as the ambans had asserted a new prerogative to serve as equals to the Dalai Lama and Panchen lama in the supervision of the Tibetan administration and had also taken oversight of indigenous traditions of divination and oracular governance. Other Qing officials pushed the sovereign claim further back to 1751, 1720, or even the 1630s! Qing sources, therefore, imply a sense of sovereignty as graded and layered, stretching from expectations of the loose acknowledgements of the emperor's status as “emperor” (and/or the “Manjuśri Lord” and “khan”) to the untrammeled exercise of imperial authority in both temporal and spiritual domains. Tibetan sources, for their part, reveal a similar diversity of opinions and elocutions, with some dating imperial supremacy to the seventeenth century, while others claim that Tibet fell under the “hand of China” only in the 1750s.

Powers argues that Qing influence in Tibet was short-lived, although he can't agree with himself on exactly when it declined: either the late eighteenth century (189) or the late nineteenth (186). He argues that Qing rule was largely symbolic, amounting to nothing more than a series of titles and seals dispatched from the capital that were “increasingly ignored by the Tibetans” (190). As proof, Powers argues that the archives published by the PRC “lack supporting documents from the Tibetan side” (190). In other words, the Tibetans did not write thank-you letters or otherwise acknowledge the Qing claims. For Powers, the natural next question then becomes why the Tibetans didn't proclaim independence earlier. The answer, apparently, is that the Tibetans were just too polite. Quoting the British officer Hugh Richardson, Powers argues that the national “characteristic” of the Tibetans is to make “professions of simplicity or ignorance” (191). Here, Powers lays bare the genealogy of his assumptions. Richardson, like colonial “excellencies” elsewhere in the British empire, vastly over-estimated the resentments of the natives against their traditional rulers. The degree to which Richardson's claims about Tibetan distaste for “Chinese” rule aligned with the interests of the British state should give us pause, and at the very least we should be wary about pushing them back into the era before modern Tibetan and Chinese nationalism.

With regards to the Golden Urn, the use of this ritual in some searches but not others in the 19^th century did not reflect some sort of epic conflict between Tibetan national sentiments and the powers of the Qing or “Chinese” state. No official of the Tibetan government ever repudiated the use of the urn on national grounds. Instead, once Tibetan elites had integrated the ritual into indigenous practices and provided it a Buddhist theology, it functioned as an expression of the common concern both the Geluk and the Qing had for identifying authentic and credible rebirths.

Having set aside anachronistic assumptions about Tibetan nationalism, the explanation for Tibetan “complacency” is not difficult to derive: under the Qing pax manjurica, the elites of the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism not only had seen their control over Tibet's human, fiscal, commercial, and natural resources consolidated and protected, but had also expanded their reach across Inner Asia. By 1900, the Geluk school was a vast, loosely centralized, multi-ethnic enterprise shadowing the Qing state from Manchuria to Xinjiang. Only radical failure or radical change within the operations and ideologies of the Qing state would force Tibetan elites to recalibrate their relationship. The Qing state met both of these conditions when it first failed to stem the British invasion in 1904 and then when Qing officials began publicly devising plans for the transformation of Tibet into a Chinese province in 1906.

As for evidence of the influence of Qing officials on Tibetan affairs and for the influence of Tibetans on Qing affairs, there is no shortage. The perception that the Qing maintained little more than a ritual presence in Tibet has largely been the product of the fact that until recently few non-PRC Tibetologists have been able to engage in archival work with Manchu and Chinese-language sources. The archives of palace memorials held in the Palace Museum Taipei and the First Historical Archives (FHA) in Beijing, as well as the FHA archive of the Grand Council's palace memorial file copies in Manchu and Chinese, all contain numerous accounts of matters that would have been resolved differently had Tibet not been a part of the Qing empire and had Qing authorities in limited yet significant numbers not been stationed around the plateau. Ishihama Yumiko and Peter Schwieger were among the first to demonstrate the significance of these documents, followed more recently by Ling-Wei Kung, me, and several other scholars.Footnote ⁴ Amidst the Grand Council palace memorial file copies, for instance, are reports and letters from Tibetan officials acknowledging receipt of titles and gifts and contributing advice to matters of policy. In 2017 the TAR archives finally released an eight-volume set of 1,516 documents from the Qing period, consisting of 555 Tibetan-language documents and 961 bilingual Tibetan-Chinese documents. Although overwhelmingly drawn from materials originally held by the office of the ambans and therefore predisposed to throw a disproportionate amount of light on Qing official activities, these documents reveal a deeper degree of engagement between the ambans and Tibetan authorities (particularly the regents) then previously seen. For example, in the Daoguang period (1820–1850) the ambans made a greater effort to become involved in local criminal cases, particularly overseeing the investigation of capital crimes and robberies.Footnote ⁵

Powers has a hard time describing the mutually constitutive facets of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sovereign claims, not only because he employs anachronistic expectations of sovereignty, but also because he does not appreciate the degree to which modern PRC historians and polemicists impose a nationalist, Chinese narrative on the Qing state. Simply put, they argue that the Qing was just a particular manifestation of the Chinese nation. Even when employing the term “Zhongguo” for their empire, Qing authorities did not think of it as a “Chinese” endeavor, at least not in the same way that the CCP does. The state did not act in the interest of Chinese “citizens” nor did Qing control over Tibet connote any degree of sovereignty by the Chinese people. Only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would Chinese state authorities and patriotic intellectuals begin to think of the merging of the Han and Tibetans into a single people as a good thing. Powers's discussion of the contemporary Chinese state and its claims to control Tibetan Buddhism overlooks the central component of this ideology: the Zhonghua minzu paradigm. The CCP claims a right to possess Tibet and enforce the secularization of Tibetan Buddhism not only because it possesses a progressive, scientific Marxist outlook, but because Tibetans and Han are all Zhonghua minzu, i.e. “Chinese.” The invention of this new national category in the early twentieth-century has enabled Chinese nationalists ever since (including the CCP) to argue that the conquests of Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet are not acts of violence or oppression by one race or nation against another, but rather the reunification of a single people.

Readers interested in a more thorough and historicized account of sovereignty and relations between China and Tibet in the non-modern period should turn to Timothy Brook, Michael van Walt van Praag, and Miek Boltjes, the editors of Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). Readers interested in understanding how the PRC administers Tibetan Buddhism as opposed to simply how it talks about it will also have to look elsewhere. The book does not investigate the mechanics of how different individuals and institutions within the PRC policy-making system(s) deliberate and implement ethnic and religious affairs policies. Powers seems to assume that Tibet policy flows inexorably from the “Party” and its central propaganda department. This is not in fact the case. Institutions like the China Tibetology Research Center, the Central University for Minzu, provincial and regional level minzu universities, academies of social sciences at the national and local levels, and many other state and party organs play important roles in shaping the application of state policies. None of these institutions are discussed in any depth in this book. Powers similarly ignores the provincial and regional branches of the Buddhist Association, National People's Political Consultative Congress, local museums, bookstores, and even private charitable organizations that all help implement state policy. All of these organizations and bureaucracies, however, can serve as intermediary bodies that deflect, mitigate, or otherwise derail CCP policies and objectives. For example, Powers cites the establishment of the Chinese Academy of Tibetan Language For Advanced Buddhist Studies in Beijing in 1987 as a straight-forward case of the PRC creating a site for the indoctrination of high-ranking reincarnate lamas. In practice, however, the academy also became a place that facilitated networking and ultimately the promotion of the monks’ own charitable, religious, and cultural agendas.

It was largely because so many “state institutions” like the Buddhist Associations became coopted by local Tibetan Buddhist elites, or because other minzu cadres saw these institutions as vehicles for realizing (disingenuous) state promises of ethnic autonomy and religious freedom, that Xi Jinping has sought to either eliminate or re-centralize them under CCP United Front authority.

Powers is correct to assert that the PRC's “Patriotic Education Campaign” failed because its content was fundamentally offensive to most Tibetans. However, Patriotic Education also failed because up through 2008 and well into the early 2010s, the CCP's control of both the Tibetan religious landscape—the vast, sprawling web of monasteries, retreats, hermitages, and study centers—and its own religious/minority affairs organs was relatively weak. The state certainly had the ability to “strike hard” against specific individuals, communities, and religious institutions, but its resources were limited. Cadres were not particularly motivated to deliver their lessons and even the monastic “Democratic Management Committees” were as likely to obfuscate on behalf of local interests than they were to operate on behalf of the CCP. In 2010, for instance, I happened to visit Jakhyung monastery in Qinghai on the same day that a Politburo delegation arrived. To my surprise, after the motorcade of cadres left, the leaders of the management committee chose to relax by tuning in their illegal and jerry-rigged satellite dishes to news broadcasts from Deutsche Welle and Amdo-language programming streaming from India. Powers is certainly correct to point out that Tibetans viewed most of the official narrative as “shit lies.” But he vastly overstates the ability of the PRC to control monasteries via organizations such as the Democratic Management Committees prior to 2012 (69).

Powers states that after the mid-1990s monasteries could not host monks under age eighteen and were not allowed to collect financial support from laypeople (59). On the basis of my own extensive travels in Amdo and Kham on a nearly yearly basis since 2000, neither of these assertions are true. On the contrary, up through 2013 children continued to receive monastic educations and monasteries throughout these regions continued to grow in physical size and splendor, as donations from laypeople (including Han Chinese) flooded in to support reconstruction. Powers's generalizations about the situation in the TAR and neighboring Tibetan regions do not sufficiently take into account variations in time and place. He also too readily dismisses Robert Barnett's observation that many middle class Tibetans have mixed feelings if not some support for the PRC (61). The ambiguity of PRC goals for much of the 1990s and 2000s, and the inability or unwillingness of the PRC to enforce radical assimilatory policies before 2012 left many Tibetans, especially in Gansu, Sichuan, and Qinghai willing to work for and with the state in limited ways.

His account also misses key events such as SARA's issuance of a new regulations for monastic governance in 2010 and the subsequent imposition of a new, comprehensive surveillance system of police precincts, video cameras, and intensive registration of activities and visitors at all Tibetan Buddhist religious sites in Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai (installed between 2012 and 2014). (This policy also attempted to remove all the illegal satellite dishes.) For studies that illuminate the actual practice of PRC minzu and religious affairs policies and are attentive to not only the interface between local and national agendas but also the economic contexts of these policies, readers will want to look at the scholarship of Matthew Erie, Andrew Fischer, Charlene Makley, Benno Wiener, and Emily Yeh.Footnote ⁶

Finally, Powers's study does not accurately describe the thing that is the primary concern of his book: the PRC's Tibet-related propaganda industry. The impression left by The Buddha Party is that PRC publications do nothing more than paint a dystopian vision of premodern Tibet as a benighted land inhabited by garroted slaves yearning desperately for a Chinese princess to rescue them from the misrule of the “Dalai clique.” The PRC's information industry, however, is not a “monolithic regime” (10). All PRC official Tibetology is shaped by the dictates of state propaganda and the Zhonghua minzu paradigm, but to greater and lesser degrees. Powers steers deftly past this nuance and fails to observe how individuals working within the constraints of this system have often been able to produce original scholarship as well as preserve and sustain Tibetan culture. One has only to pick up a volume of Xizang Dang'an to find high-quality, archive-driven Tibetology that is largely free from Marxist assumptions. Since the 1980s, the publishing house of the China Tibetology Research Center has dedicated considerable financial resources to the re-publication of hundreds of premodern Tibetan texts—biographies, religious works, collected works, etc. Ethnic Chinese scholars as well, including Chen Qingying, who comes under sustained attack throughout Powers's book, have produced erudite translations of premodern religious and historical texts, largely, if not entirely, free from the assumptions of Marxist historiography and the Zhonghua minzu paradigm.Footnote ⁷ While it is important to note that even the most well-meaning of PRC Tibetologists are participating in an academic enterprise that helps legitimate the oppression of the country's religious and ethnic minorities, Powers's criticisms of these scholars is belittling and insensitive to the risks that many of them have taken. He evidently knows very little about these scholars. For instance, he (fairly) criticizes Wang Lixiong's highly prejudiced and romanticized depiction of Tibetan Buddhist faith in a 2002 article. But he doesn't note that subsequently, and in concert with his wife, the prominent Tibetan dissident Woeser, Wang Lixiong has become one of the harshest and most courageous Chinese-language critics of PRC policies and historical narratives living within the PRC.Footnote ⁸ At points, Powers's critique edges towards the notion that the Chinese language as a whole is incapable of accurately describing Tibetan Buddhist ideas. He criticizes the use of Chinese words like “lingtong 灵通” and “huofo 活佛” and their clumsy English-language translations (“soul boy” and “living Buddha,” respectively) without noting that Chinese scholars often explain their use of these terms with rigorous exegetical attention to the original Tibetan concepts. He implicitly argues that only foreign Tibetologists and Tibetans can accurately write about Tibet.

In short, this book meets neither of its two main objectives. It does not provide an adequate overview of how the PRC “defines” Tibet, nor does it provide a comprehensive account of how the CCP has “controlled” the day-to-day practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Scholars inside China “define” Tibet in multiple and contradictory ways. As a pastiche drawn from overseas human rights website reports, interviews with exiles, English-language translations of propaganda materials provided by the Chinese government, and what appear from his own account to have been a handful of short visits to Tibetan regions of the PRC, The Buddha Party is unable to provide a sustained analysis of the institutions and individuals who work to either implement or disrupt state policy (or attempt to do both simultaneously). Powers's lack of attention to the nuances of time and place, to the internal debates among policy-makers, officials, cadres, and Tibetan Buddhist elites within the context of the PRCs Tibetan-Buddhist related institutions, and to the salience of the Zhonghua minzu paradigm leaves him unable to offer an explanation for why religious and minority affairs policies have shifted so dramatically under Xi Jinping. The deeper history of why in both Tibet and Xinjiang CCP officials like Chen Quanguo have been willing and able to implement draconian new policies designed to not just manage but eradicate difference among the Chinese/Zhonghua peoples awaits further study.