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Disempowered Development of Tibet in China: A Study in the Economics of Marginalization
By: Andrew Martin Fischer
Disempowered Development of Tibet in China


 
Our Price: $49.99
Author: Andrew Martin Fischer
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780739134382
Publication Date: 2014


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Product Code: 9780739134382
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Description
 
Since the central government of China started major campaigns for
western development in the mid-1990s, the economies of the Tibetan areas
in Western China have grown rapidly and living standards have improved.
However, grievances and protests have also intensified, as dramatically
evidenced by the protests that spread across most Tibetan areas in
spring 2008 and by the more recent wave of self-immolation protests that
started in 2011. This book offers a detailed and careful exploration of
this synergy between development and conflict in Tibet from the
mid-1990s onwards, when rapid economic growth has occurred in tandem
with a particularly assimilationist approach of integrating Tibet into
China. Fischer argues that the intensified economic integration of Tibet
into regional and national development strategies on these
assimilationist terms, within a context of continued political
disempowerment, and through the massive channeling of subsidies through
Han Chinese dominated entities based outside the Tibetan areas, has
accentuated various dynamics of subordination and marginalization faced
by Tibetans of all social strata. Whether or not these dynamics are
intended to be discriminatory, they effectively accentuate the
discriminatory, assimilationist and disempowering characteristics of
development, even while producing considerable improvements in the
material consumption of local Tibetans. In particular, strong cultural,
linguistic and political biases intensify ethnically-exclusionary
dynamics among middle and upper strata of the Tibetan labor force, which
is problematic considering the rapid shift of Tibetans out of
agriculture and towards the highly subsidy-dependent sectors of the
economy, especially in urban areas. The combination of these
disempowering dynamics with the sheer speed of dislocating and
disembedding social change provides important insights into recent
tensions given that it has accentuated insecurity while restricting the
ability of Tibetan communities to adapt in autonomous and
self-determined ways. The study represents one of the only macro-level
and systemic analyses of its kind in the scholarship on Tibet, based on
accessible economic analysis and extensive interdisciplinary fieldwork.
It also carries much interest for those interested in China and in the
interactions between development, inequality, exclusion and conflict
more generally.

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