A Tibetan Revolutionary

A Tibetan Revolutionary
Author: Melvyn C. Goldstein
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2004-06-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0520240898

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The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier

The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier
Author: Benno Weiner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2020-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501749412

In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, Benno Weiner provides the first in-depth study of an ethnic minority region during the first decade of the People's Republic of China: the Amdo region in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Employing previously inaccessible local archives as well as other rare primary sources, he demonstrates that the Communist Party's goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state-building but also nation-building. Such an objective required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community. As Weiner shows, however, early efforts to gradually and organically transform a vast multiethnic empire into a singular nation-state lost out to a revolutionary impatience, demanding more immediate paths to national integration and socialist transformation. This led in 1958 to communization, then to large-scale rebellion and its brutal pacification. Rather than joining voluntarily, Amdo was integrated through the widespread, often indiscriminate use of violence, a violence that lingers in the living memory of Amdo Tibetans and others.

On the Cultural Revolution in Tibet

On the Cultural Revolution in Tibet
Author: Melvyn C. Goldstein
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2010-10-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520267907

This resource revisits the Nyemo incident, which has long been romanticised as the epitome of Tibetan nationalist resistance against China. The authors show that far from being a spontaneous battle for independence, this event was actually part of a struggle between rival revolutionary groups and was not ethnically based.

To the End of Revolution

To the End of Revolution
Author: Xiaoyuan Liu
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 718
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231551274

The status of Tibet is one of the most controversial and complex issues in the history of modern China. In To the End of Revolution, Xiaoyuan Liu draws on unprecedented access to the archives of the Chinese Communist Party to offer a groundbreaking account of Beijing’s evolving Tibet policy during the critical first decade of the People’s Republic. Liu details Beijing’s overarching strategy toward Tibet, the last frontier for the Communist revolution to reach. He analyzes how China’s new leaders drew on Qing and Nationalist legacies as they attempted to resolve a problem inherited from their predecessors. Despite acknowledging that religion, ethnicity, and geography made Tibet distinct, Beijing nevertheless forged ahead, zealously implementing socialist revolution while vigilantly guarding against real and perceived enemies. Seeking to wait out local opposition before choosing to ruthlessly crush Tibetan resistance in the late 1950s, Beijing eventually incorporated Tibet into its sociopolitical system. The international and domestic ramifications, however, are felt to this day. Liu offers new insight into the Chinese Communist Party’s relations with the Dalai Lama, ethnic revolts across the vast Tibetan plateau, and the suppression of the Lhasa Rebellion in 1959. Placing Beijing’s approach to Tibet in the contexts of the Communist Party’s treatment of ethnic minorities and China’s broader domestic and foreign policies in the early Cold War, To the End of Revolution is the most detailed account to date of Chinese thinking and acting on Tibet during the 1950s.

Forbidden Memory

Forbidden Memory
Author: Tsering Woeser
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 576
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1640122907

When Red Guards arrived in Tibet in 1966, intent on creating a classless society, they unleashed a decade of revolutionary violence, political rallies, and factional warfare marked by the ransacking of temples, the destruction of religious artifacts, the burning of books, and the public humiliation of Tibet's remaining lamas and scholars. Within Tibet, discussion of those events has long been banned, and no visual records of this history were known to have survived. In Forbidden Memory the leading Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser presents three hundred previously unseen photographs taken by her father, then an officer in the People's Liberation Army, that show for the first time the frenzy and violence of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. Found only after his death, Woeser's annotations and reflections on the photographs, edited and introduced by the Tibet historian Robert Barnett, are based on scores of interviews she conducted privately in Tibet with survivors. Her book explores the motives and thinking of those who participated in the extraordinary rituals of public degradation and destruction that took place, carried out by Tibetans as much as Chinese on the former leaders of their culture. Heartbreaking and revelatory, Forbidden Memory offers a personal, literary discussion of the nature of memory, violence, and responsibility, while giving insight into the condition of a people whose violently truncated history they are still unable to discuss today. Access the glossary.

Surviving the Dragon

Surviving the Dragon
Author: Arjia Rinpoche
Publisher: Rodale Books
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2010-03-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1605291625

On a peaceful summer day in 1952, ten monks on horseback arrived at a traditional nomad tent in northeastern Tibet where they offered the parents of a precocious toddler their white handloomed scarves and congratulations for having given birth to a holy child—and future spiritual leader. Surviving the Dragon is the remarkable life story of Arjia Rinpoche, who was ordained as a reincarnate lama at the age of two and fled Tibet 46 years later. In his gripping memoir, Rinpoche relates the story of having been abandoned in his monastery as a young boy after witnessing the torture and arrest of his monastery family. In the years to come, Rinpoche survived under harsh Chinese rule, as he was forced into hard labor and endured continual public humiliation as part of Mao's Communist "reeducation." By turns moving, suspenseful, historical, and spiritual, Rinpoche's unique experiences provide a rare window into a tumultuous period of Chinese history and offer readers an uncommon glimpse inside a Buddhist monastery in Tibet.

Medicine and Memory in Tibet

Medicine and Memory in Tibet
Author: Theresia Hofer
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 029574300X

Only fifty years ago, Tibetan medicine, now seen in China as a vibrant aspect of Tibetan culture, was considered a feudal vestige to be eliminated through government-led social transformation. Medicine and Memory in Tibet examines medical revivalism on the geographic and sociopolitical margins both of China and of Tibet�s medical establishment in Lhasa, exploring the work of medical practitioners, or amchi, and of Medical Houses in the west-central region of Tsang. Due to difficult research access and the power of state institutions in the writing of history, the perspectives of more marginal amchi have been absent from most accounts of Tibetan medicine. Theresia Hofer breaks new ground both theoretically and ethnographically, in ways that would be impossible in today�s more restrictive political climate that severely limits access for researchers. She illuminates how medical practitioners safeguarded their professional heritage through great adversity and personal hardship.

Conflicting Memories

Conflicting Memories
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 711
Release: 2020-09-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004433244

Conflicting Memories is a study of historical rewriting about Tibetans' encounter with the Chinese state during the Maoist era. Combining case studies with translated documents, it traces how that experience has been reimagined by Chinese and Tibetan authors and artists since the late 1970s.

Inner Revolution

Inner Revolution
Author: Robert A. F. Thurman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1999-02-04
Genre: Buddhism
ISBN: 9780712670562

"Inner Revolution addresses both the history and the practical contemporary uses of Buddhism. With originality and enormous scholarship, Robert Thurman reveals the principles of the movement to celebrate individual happiness, which the Buddha initiated some 2,500 years ago, and shows how to continue it. He spreads the Buddha's message that everyone has the opportunity to become fully, completely happy and he finds hope and fascinating lessons in Tibetan Buddhism, as well as a viable way to change the world."