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Tibet Policy Journal Vol. VII No. 2 2020 The Tibet Policy Institute Published by: Tibet Policy Institute Central Tibetan Administration Dharamshala - 176215 H.P. INDIA Website: http://www.tibetpolicy.net Editor: Tenzin Desal Contact: [email protected] Assistant Editor: Tenzin Tsultrim Typesetting and Circulation: Ngawang Choekyi First Edition : December 2020 No. of copies : 2000 Cover Image: TPI Archive ISSN No. 2394-2983 Printed by Sarah Printing & Publications Preface Preface It remains to be seen whether the readers are convinced if all articles contained in this edition make a cohesive and coherent sense to deserve the label of a special volume. Nevertheless, it is a modest attempt on our part to bring Tibet into a sharper focus and to foreground Tibet in a year that would be remembered, above all for disruptions caused by the pandemic. Even from our perch in Dharamshala, events around the world appear to be happening at an accelerated pace. Although the pandemic has compelled nations in most part of the world to curtail movements of people, it still had little bearing on events that continue to hit the bedrocks of global order. One such event is the border standoff between India and China in Ladakh. Debates surrounding this unfortunate event led to further interrogation and it took a little scratching of the surface to reveal the relevance of Tibet. It was under such circumstances, a phrase from Dawa Norbu’s academic paper Centrality of the Marginality regained a regenerated vitality. We felt it worthwhile to revisit his ideas and his academic pursuit to recentre Tibet. It is with this objective that we wanted to tease his ideas further, update new data and formulate new conceptual understanding. When the initial idea was put on the table, it was decided that the volume could be titled Recentering the Margins. In other words, to understand the resilience of the periphery. With these ideas in head, we approached my colleague, Tenzin Lhadon la to distil these ideas and to draft a concept note. With a concept note in hand, I shot a series of mails to a number of Tibetan scholars to contribute to this volume. The response was very positive, but eventually quite a few dropped-out owing to their prior commitments. Those who managed to put together a paper and submitted it to me by the tail-end of the year are here in print. I Tibet Policy Journal Vol. VII No. 2 2020 I would like to leave a corrective note to an assertion I made in a preface to the preceding issue of this journal. Where I have sort of said that Tibet in Anthropocene is undergoing “geological, climactic, social, cultural and political transformation.” In this, I have cluttered different scales of time, which is what Dipesh Chakrabarty has described as “time-knot.” This is to confuse the scales of time in terms of planetary and human history. Over the years, we hope we have made steady strides in improving the quality of this journal. It was felt that it would be beneficial for the final drafts submitted to me to undergo a discussion with peers, proverbial holding feet to the fire. Hence, all the papers published here went through a double-blind peer review process. I remain grateful to all the anonymous reviewers for carefully considering the paper given for review and reverting back with thoughtful comments. I hope you all will continue to associate with our institute in future. When all the papers were put together in a folder, a colleague of mine suggested that Recentering Tibet as the title for this special volume sounded too reified and academic. It wasn’t until the last minute that the immediacy to come up with a title and let’s say, de-verbose the title became an urgent necessity. I have finally settled onForegrounding Tibet. Be that as it may, I hope it conveys the objectives of our collective exercise which we envisioned during the initial phase of this project. After a brief hiatus, Dr Tenzin Tsultrim la resumed his work at our office. His enthusiasm upon his return is marked by an instance when he managed to write an entire opinion piece with all the hyperlinks attached through his mobile phone. His assistance and humour during the editing process is immensely appreciated. It would be remiss not to acknowledge my colleague, Ngawang Choekyi la for her diligent typesetting of the papers included here. On top of her previous engagements, she managed to carefully fit the documents and provided a tangible form that rests in your hand as you read this. Thank You! And also, I would to thank our current Director of the Tibet Policy Institute, Tenzin Lekshay la for his patient oversight during the course of this project. II Preface I would like to end this short preface with an appeal. This is to encourage you and your peers to contribute to the next issue of the journal. Please do get in touch with me for submissions through email addressed to the editor. Tenzin Desal Dharamshala, 2020 III Tibet Policy Journal Vol. VII No. 2 2020 IV CONTENTS CONTENTS Shadowing Networks: Note Towards Reconfiguration of Tibetan Institutions in Exile and Archipelagic Diaspora ...............................1 Tenzin Desal The Discursive Art of China’s Colonialism: Reconfiguring Tibetan and State Identities .........................................................................................29 Dawa Lokyitsang Centering Tibetan Female Buddhist Practitioners in China’s Women Empowerment Discourse in Tibet .......................................................51 Tashi Choedon Tibet: Securing the Security, Soft Power and the Source of Water for India and Asia. .........................................................................................77 Tenzin Tsultrim Revisiting China’s Strategic Perceptions Toward Tibet and the Himalayas .................................................................................................97 Tsewang Dorji V Tibet Policy Journal Vol. VII No. 2 2020 Recentring the Margins: Analysing the Contributions of Exiled Tibetans to Indian Politics, Culture, Education, Economy and Security........115 Darig Thokmay The Tibet Question in the EU-China Relations: Real or Myth?......147 Tenzin Lhadon China and its Forum on Work in Tibet: An Analysis with Special Emphasis on the Seventh Work Forum ..............................................166 Tenzin Tseten The Post-Colonial Remembering: Tibet in India-China Conflict ....194 Jigme Yeshe Lama VI Tenzin Desal Shadowing Networks: Note Towards Reconfiguration of Tibetan Institutions in Exile and Archipelagic Diaspora 1 Tenzin Desal (Tibet Policy Institute) Abstract Do the state-society relations comprehensively explain the dynamics of revival of Buddhism in Tibet? Does the framing of this question change in an authoritarian and colonial context? In addressing these questions, an opposite conclusion could be reached where existing sociological assumptions on Civil Society which Alexis de Tocqueville greatly admired in the United States could be turned on its head in China. For instance, Civil Society could be put to service in the Art of Political Control in China (Mattingly 2019). However, the revival of Buddhism in Tibet after the Cultural Revolution in Tibet cannot be comprehensively explained by the dynamics of the state-society relations. Even in an authoritarian and colonized context as is the case in Tibet, where the presence of state is palpable in everyday lives, politics and religion. This paper offers a conceptual framework for diaspora studies by examining a practice amongst refugee and diaspora community where the stateless and refugee population exerts its agency by shadowing of preexisting nodes and networks. The success of the process of shadowing network is contingent on geographical and temporal proximity to the state and network it shadows. Through primary sources available in Tibetan on monastic institutions in India and diaspora and more recent ethnographic studies carried out in Tibet, it examines the role of shadowing networks in the revival of Buddhism and monastic institutions in post-Mao Tibet. It concludes by urging future Tibetan diaspora studies to think in archipelagic terms. 1. During the course of writing this paper, I became aware that this exercise would have benefited from a field visit and there lies the limitation of this paper. But this I have tried to remedy by relying on recent ethnographic studies in Tibet. My extended field visit to Sera Jey School, where I served as a part-time teacher in 2010 for over eight months has also informed this study. I also wanted to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments. 1 Tibet Policy Journal Vol. VII No. 2 2020 Keywords:Tibet, Shadowing Networks, Temporality, Monastic Institutions, Archipelagic Diaspora Introduction Scholars continue to grapple with the understanding of refugeehood and statelessness. Hannah Arendt’s clarity in theorizing is an important scholarly intervention that opened up new line of academic enquiry. Her works continue to raise questions on the challenges faced by refugees and the conceptual understanding of refugeehood and statelessness(Bradley 2014). Civil war in Syria and the European “refugee crisis” has turned certain scholars to Arendt to reflect on a contemporary crisis (Mahrdt 2017; Hirsch & Bell 2017). Hannah Arendt’s oeuvre on the subject was developed under the shadow of rise of totalitarianism and draws our attention to the plight of refugees. She offers historical analysis of European nation states, forced migration, refugeehood and statelessness.2 Arendt’s work challenges the dichotomous conclusion of other scholars, and instead viewed refugeehood and statelessness as two sides of the same coin (Bradley 2014, 102). As Giorgio Agamben illustrates on Arendt’s fifth chapter of the book on Imperialism dedicated to the refugees: This formulation-which inextricably links the fates of the rights of man and the modern national state, such that the end of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former-should be taken seriously. The paradox here is that precisely the figure that should have incarnated the rights of man par excellence, the refugee, constitutes instead the radical crisis of this concept(Agamben 2013, 116).

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