Intersecting Nations, Diverging Discourses: The Fraught Encounter of Chinese and Tibetan Literatures in the Modern Era Christopher Peacock Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2020 © 2020 Christopher Peacock All Rights Reserved Abstract Intersecting Nations, Diverging Discourses: The Fraught Encounter of Chinese and Tibetan Literatures in the Modern Era Christopher Peacock This is a two-pronged study of how the Chinese and Tibetan literary traditions have become intertwined in the modern era. Setting out from the contention that the study of minority literatures in China must be fundamentally multilingual in its approach, this dissertation investigates how Tibetans were written into Chinese literature, and how Tibetans themselves adopted and adapted Chinese literary discourses to their own ends. It begins with Lu Xun and the formative literary conceptions of nation in the late Qing and Republican periods – a time when the Tibetan subject was fundamentally absent from modern Chinese literature – and then moves to the 1980s, when Tibet and Tibetans belatedly, and contentiously, became valid subject matter for Han Chinese writers. The second aspect of the project situates modern Tibetan-language literature, which arose from the 1980s onwards, within the literary and intellectual context of modern China. I read Döndrup Gyel, modern Tibetan literature’s “father figure,” as working within unmistakably Lu Xun-ian paradigms, I consider the contradictions that arose when Tsering Döndrup’s short story “Ralo” was interpreted as a Tibetan equivalent of “The True Story of Ah Q,” and I analyze the rise of a “Tibetan May Fourth Movement” in the 2000s, which I argue presented a selective reading of modern China’s intellectual history. Throughout, I focus on the intersections and divergences at play and examine the ways in which these texts navigate complex and conflicting discourses of nationalism, statism, and colonialism. The conclusions of this research point us toward significant theoretical reconceptualizations of literary practices in the People’s Republic of China, which now include not only a vast body of Chinese- language writing on minority peoples, but also numerous minority-language literatures and distinct “national” literary traditions. Table of Contents List of Illustrations ......................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Nation, State, and Ethnicity at the Dawn of Modern Chinese Literature .................... 20 1.1 Liang Qichao, National Character, and the Multi-Ethnic State ............................................ 22 1.2 Zhang Taiyan’s Han Nation-State ........................................................................................ 28 1.3 Lu Xun and Zhang Taiyan .................................................................................................... 37 1.4 Lu Xun and Zou Rong .......................................................................................................... 48 1.5 Nation and State in Lu Xun’s Writing .................................................................................. 52 1.6 Lu Xun’s Writing on Non-Han Ethnicities .......................................................................... 61 1.7 The Literary/Political Divide ................................................................................................ 66 1.8 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 72 Chapter 2: Döndrup Gyel and the Origins of Tibetan Literary Nationalism in Modern China .... 75 2.1 Awakening the Slumbering Nation ...................................................................................... 77 2.2 A Nation in Decline .............................................................................................................. 82 2.3 Youth, Innovation, and Progress .......................................................................................... 91 2.4 Nation as History and Race .................................................................................................. 99 2.5 From Individual Pride to National Pride ............................................................................ 107 2.6 Döndrup Gyel in Beijing .................................................................................................... 112 2.7 Chinese Nation, Tibetan Nation, Chinese State ................................................................. 119 2.8 Canonizing Tibetan Nationalism ........................................................................................ 126 i 2.9 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 130 Chapter 3: Writing Tibetans into China: Internal Orientalism and Literary State-Building in the Work of Ma Jian .......................................................................................................................... 134 3.1 The Culture of “Drifting” and Ma Jian’s Travel to Tibet ................................................... 142 3.2 Ethnic Marking and Literary State-Building ...................................................................... 146 3.3 Internal Orientalism and Literature about Tibet ................................................................. 153 3.4 Reconciling the Other with the Self ................................................................................... 165 3.5 Tibetan Literatures in Modern China ................................................................................. 175 3.6 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 186 Chapter 4: Ralo, Ah Q, and the Problem of Tibetan National Character .................................... 188 4.1 Ralo, Ah Q, and the Tibetan National Character ................................................................ 192 4.2 The Origins of Tibetan National Character ........................................................................ 198 4.3 Rewriting National Character ............................................................................................. 208 4.4 Ralo the Proletarian ............................................................................................................ 215 4.5 Rewriting the Nation(s) ...................................................................................................... 225 4.6 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 231 Chapter 5: Zhokdung and the Tibetan May Fourth Movement ................................................... 233 5.1 The Tibetan Essay .............................................................................................................. 235 5.2 Döndrup Gyel, Nationalism, and Individualism ................................................................. 239 5.3 Buddhism and Tradition ..................................................................................................... 246 5.4 Backwardness and Civilizational Ranking ......................................................................... 261 5.5 Science and Democracy ..................................................................................................... 266 5.6 Translation and the Role of the Intellectual ....................................................................... 271 ii 5.7 “The Saffron Revolution” and the End of the Essay Movement ........................................ 282 5.8 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 295 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 298 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 305 iii List of Illustrations P. 92 • Figure 1: The first page of “Waterfall of Youth,” from its original publication in Light Rain in 1983 P. 199 • Figure 2: Illustration of Ralo from the story’s original publication in Light Rain (Tshe ring don grub 1991). P. 200 • Figure 3: Illustration of Ralo from the story’s original publication in Light Rain (Tshe ring don grub 1991). • Figure 4: Woodcut rendition of Ah Q by Zhao Yannian (Zhao 2010). P. 201 • Figure 5: Ink drawing of Ah Q by Fan Zeng (Lu Xun 2017). iv Introduction The phenomenon of modern literary writing on the subject of Tibet is multi-faceted. When we discuss some notion of “Tibetan” literature, we might be talking about, among other things, writing in the Tibetan language from within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or from exile, writing by Tibetans in and outside of China in any language (such as Chinese or English), or writing by non-Tibetans on the subject of Tibet (in several languages). This dissertation concerns itself with two of these, both in the context of modern China: Tibetan-language literature by Tibetans and Chinese-language literature about