【國際書介📖】The Violence of Liberation - Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China (Patreon)

The Violence of Liberation is an extremely serious and innovative first-hand ethnographic account of the social history of Labrang, which is situated in China’s Gansu Province and considered by exiled Tibetans as part of their “Greater Tibetan Region.” As the sub-title of the book indicates, exploring “gender and Tibetan Buddhist revival in the post-Mao China” is the author’s central theme. Without directly getting into the sensitive political debate between Beijing and Dharamsala, Marley offers an alternative angle from which to study Sino-Tibetan relations: the trans-local gender perspective. Socialized in the official discourse that credits the regime change or “liberation” of Tibet in 1951 as a progressive attempt to liberate the suppressed Tibetans, men and women, most mainland Chinese readers might have difficulty embracing the author’s view that “for most Tibetan men and women in Labrang, socialist transformation was thus not only a forced secularization of their lives; it was also a fundamentally emasculating process” (27). 

Yet such observation is not ungrounded. Marley spent more than fifteen years gathering primary sources from the region during her numerous fieldtrips and the anthropological approach that she applies to study the topic is fundamentally lacking among her Chinese colleagues, no matter whether the topic is taboo or not. This contribution is instrumentally important to inter-disciplinary audiences, including those not specializing in gender politics like this reader.

As an international relations scholar, this reader is particularly impressed by the inclusion of certain constructivist elements in the author’s account. How linguistics and discourses transformed Sino-Tibetan relations is an aspect which receives minimal focus in the discipline, and is also one of the least understood aspects among the lay community. Indeed, in response to the recent upheavals in Tibet, most official commentaries—which merely highlight the contribution made by the party-state to the Tibetans—can be classified as an intentional attempt at continuously emasculating Tibetan tradition and prowess. Recognition of the ignorance in comprehending this angle may pave the way for the party-state to handle future Tibetan unrest.

Drawing a parallel between the above observation and the constructivist approach to the study of the beginning and end of the Cold War—by means of remapping the emasculating attempts by Moscow in handling its ethnic minorities and satellite states, as well as the same attempts by the West to demonize the image of the Soviet system via the human rights movements—could project very insightful forecasts on Sino-Tibetan relations. Yet neither Beijing nor Dharamsala seem to have paid sufficient attention to this. As a result, the local front in Sino-Tibetan relations is continuously being neglected and the international study of Sino-Tibetan relations is continuously being dominated by the emphasis on high politics. This book serves as a timely wake-up call in the hope of redressing the trend.

Yet, in the final analysis, juxtaposing what the author calls the “Father State” with an “emasculated” Tibetan society might not be universally valid or convincing. According to Marley, the younger Tibetan monks’ “efforts to participate in heroic masculine violence defending Tibetan fatherlands were deferred to occasions on which the threat of emasculation was immediately present and personified for them in the form of wives, Tibetan peers, or young Hui merchants” (283). 

Despite the curb on the spread of related news in China, open protests by monks against the party-state or social system have indeed not been lacking in recent decades. But many of them were not reported. After all, as Marley acknowledges, her participatory fieldwork is inevitably constrained by her status as an outsider. Speaking about sources collection, she seems to have focused less on pro-establishment individuals, many of whom do not see any exclusive relationship between the existence of the “Father State,” transformed by the Chinese Communist Party, and the “pre-emasculated” traditional Tibetan society. Since the reform era, an increasing number of the traditional elite in Tibet have been re-incorporated into the ruling class of the “Father State” and many, if not all, of their privileges—with the notable exception of the decision-making political power—have been re-established by institutional as well as informal means. How these people subtly regained their masculinity via the same power base from the state machine is a topic that is worth further investigation. 

Nonetheless, this book will become a new instrumental reference to be consulted by future researchers of Tibet studies. Their horizons will have been substantially broadened by the meticulous and insightful work of the author.