Forthcoming events

My parents ‘escaped’ from Hong Kong into China in 1942 months after Hong Kong fell to the Japanese. The Sino-Japanese war broke out formally in 1937, but fighting began in 1932 when the Japanese annexed Manchuria. The war had affected both their families in a greivous way. Her father resigned from his job as compradore of the Nippon Yusan Kaisha Line in 1932, leading to considerable financial hardship for the family. His brother died in Shanghai in 1937 in an undercover operation to attack a Japanese warship.

Briefly, their travels in China consisted of a voyage to Guangzhouwan, a trek over land to Guilin and a frantic evacuation to Kunming when Guilin was taken by the Japanese in 1944. In Guilin, father taught chemistry at the Guangxi Normal University while mother worked for a ‘British intelligence organisation’. In Kunming father was recruited into Force 136, as the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was called in the Far East. My sister, their first child, was born in Kunming. 

Neither of my parents spoke much about their wartime experiences. In a biography that my mother wrote on her 100th birthday in 2012, there were just 4½ pages on WW2. These set me off on a quest to fill in the gaps. The results of my research are presented in my talk.

About Me

Born in Hong Kong after the war, Philip came to England to continue his schooling when he was fifteen. After some years at the universities of Oxford (BA), Warwick (PhD) and Kent at Canterbury (postdoctoral fellow), he was eventually employed as a physicist with Schlumberger, the oilfield services company. Initially based in London, he spent some years at the company’s research centre in the United States before moving to its engineering centre in France, where for twenty-four years, the family stayed and the three children grew up. Since retirement in 2012, he lives in East Sussex and spends his time learning about the lives of men of science. He leads a science group and a play reading group in his local u3a.

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).