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EMILY T. YEH
from wasteland to wetland?
NATURE AND NATION
IN CHINA'S TIBET
ABSTRACT
The environmental history of Lhasa's Lhalu wetland reveals problems with competing ecological nationalist narratives of the Chinese state and Tibetan exiles. Both deny Tibetans the possibility of being historical agents vis-à-vis nature. The article traces a series of environmental projects enacted on the wetland from the 1950s to the present. Each one, enacted to secure the unstable edges of state sovereignty, ironically paved the way for the next. Certain aspects must be excluded from both ecological nationalist narratives and political ecological analyses because they do not conform to the linear, homogenous times and spaces required by narratives of the nation and universalized "nature." Disrupting these teleologies creates space for a fuller spectrum of accounts, memories, and practices of nature.
| ON MARCH 10, 2003, the forty-fourth anniversary of the failed 1959 uprising in Tibet, the People's Republic of China's (PRC) State Council released a White Paper titled Ecological Improvement and Environmental Protection in Tibet. It was a response to a series of claims about the Tibetan environment made by exiled Tibetans and their international supporters, that: "Prior to the Chinese occupation, Tibet was ecologically stable and environmental conservation was an essential component of daily life. Guided by Buddhist beliefs in the interdependence of both living and nonliving elements of the earth, Tibetans lived in harmony with nature." However, "with the invasion of Tibet, the nature-friendly way of life for the Tibetan people was trampled upon by a materialist Chinese ideology. The invasion was followed by wide-spread environmental destruction."1 |
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Such representations, which emerged in the mid-1980s, are today both globally familiar and an indispensable element of the transnational Tibet Movement's appeal.2 The visibility and success of these claims engendered the response articulated by the Chinese White Paper, which accused "the Dalai clique and international anti-Chinese forces" of only pretending to care about the environment and spreading rumors about environmental destruction in order to "prepare public opinion for their political aim of restoring the backward feudal serfdom in Tibet and splitting the Chinese nation." According to this narrative, before the 1950s, "It was absolutely impossible to discuss the objective law of the ecological environment in Tibet." It was only after the "peaceful liberation" of Tibetans from their feudal overlords by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) that Tibetans were able to "achieve a qualitative leap from the centuries-old passive adaptation to natural conditions to remaking nature on their own initiative."3 Prior to that, Tibetans had been mired in a static state of "passive adaptation" to their objective "natural conditions," unable to become subjects of the historical transformation of external nature necessary (in this view) to the achievement of modernity. |
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The White Paper goes on to describe the impressive amounts of money that the Chinese government has poured into protecting the Tibetan environment. Nature reserves, in particular, are celebrated as one of the best ways to carry forward a trajectory of environmental progress begun in the 1950s. Since the 1980s, more than seventy reserves have been established in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) alone, accounting for one-third of its total land area, and almost one-third of the area of all nature reserves in China.4 China Tibet Information Center's website asks rhetorically, "how to keep the all but primeval ecology of Tibet intact?" and answers, "Nature reserve is the logical modern choice, the chief way out for Tibetan environmental protection."5 |
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