Forthcoming events

(This talk takes place in the Community Hall at St Anne's - see below)

The study of China's policies in Tibet has changed significantly over the last 40 years or more. In the 1980s, the key markers of China's presence there were guns and bullets, and even tanks; now the state is more likely to be associated with motorways, airports, tower blocks, tourist displays, and the nightly performance of circle dances. Just as democracies can come to resemble authoritarian states, as is now so evident, so has the Chinese project in Tibet gradually developed ways to look less like an autocracy and thus to counter domestic and foreign criticisms. This talk looks briefly at these changes, and asks whether new methods of control may have increased in effectiveness even while they are less evident. It is based partly on observations from visits to Tibet as a tourist in the mid-1980s, on experiences while running programmes at Tibet University in the early 2000s, on interviews with escapees before the sealing of the borders in 2008, and more recently on team-based study of Chinese documents and media reports.  

The speaker: Robert Barnett works on nationality issues in China, focusing on modern Tibetan history, politics, and culture. He is a Professor, Research Associate and Senior Research Fellow at SOAS, University of London, and an Affiliate Lecturer at the Lau China Institute, Kings College, London. From 1999 to 2018 he taught at Columbia University in New York, where he founded and directed the Modern Tibetan Studies Program. He has also taught at Princeton, INALCO (Paris), Tibet University (Lhasa) and IACER (Kathmandu). He is a frequent commentator for the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, the New York Times, The Wall St Journal, South China Morning Post, and other media. His writing includes studies of Tibetan politics, religious regulations, social management, women politicians, cinema, television, and contemporary exorcism rituals, as well as of China border issues with Bhutan. Recent books, book-length reports and edited volumes include Forceful Diplomacy (Turquoise Roof, 2024), Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the Cultural Revolution (with Tsering Woeser, Nebraska, 2020), Conflicting Memories – Tibetan History under Mao Retold (with Benno Weiner and Françoise Robin, Brill, 2020), Tibetan Modernities: Notes from the Field on Cultural and Social Change (with Ronald Schwartz, Brill, 2008), and Lhasa: Streets With Memories (Columbia, 2006).