R Madhumitha reviews The Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine

R Madhumitha

Grant, Andrew. The Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine. Cornell University Press, 2022, pp. 222, ISBN: 13: 9781501764097

Introduction

In the Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine, political geographer Andrew Grant challenges the notion that urban Tibetans have lost their culture to the forces of urbanisation. Grant uses ideas from urban studies and political geography supported by an extensive ethnographic study of local Tibetans to create an authentic, vivid portrait of Xining, the capital city of Qinghai Province. The central motif of the Concrete Plateau is that state-led urbanisation in Xining and other cities in China is undergirded by the notion of preserving and recreating the Chinese ‘civilisation’, which results in a distinct cityscape and governance. However, Tibetans are able to find ways to perform resistance to this while seemingly assimilating with their urban environment, escaping the radar of municipal authorities.

Xining is one of the most demographically diverse places on the Tibetan plateau – home to Han Chinese, Tibetans, and Muslims alike. Xining’s large Tibetan population, markets, businesses, various toponyms, and history give the city a distinctly Tibetan character. The market of Xining is his case study, a bustling site of continuous movement of goods and people. In Concrete Plateau, Grant pushes our understanding of the lived experience of the city, showcasing how Tibetans respond to the process of urbanisation in Xining. The author’s experience of Xining and his conversations with locals are woven in seamlessly with theories of urbanization, including Henri Lefebvre, making Concrete Plateau one of the most compelling academic writing on the urban experience of Tibet.

Grant outlines the subtle forms of resistance at the heart of the Xining. Using information about government rhetoric and top-down governance in Xining, the book is able to present a view of how the state operates in urban Tibet while highlighting that Tibetans are able to contend with the state and its narratives in ways that may not immediately meet the eye.

A Civilising Machine in Tibet

The Chinese civilising machine is the conceptual base of Grant’s analysis, which breaks down the core-periphery distinction in China and brings about a new urban form. According to Stevan Harrell, a civilising process is defined as ‘an interaction of people in which the civilising centre interacts with other groups in terms of a kind of inequality.’ (Harrell, 2011, p.3)  He identifies that there have been three civilising projects in China – the Communist Project, Confucian and Western (Harrell, 2011). In this book, Grant identifies the process of urbanisation as being carried about by a civilising state in Tibet. This allows Tibetans to relate to the city and people in more complex ways than we may conceptualise. The speed and complexity of these changing relations mark a distinction between urbanisation in China and other states. In the 21st century, the landscape of the Tibetan Plateau changed dramatically with another wave of urbanisation. Within this process, Xining occupies a unique position in the Chinese governance model. Propagated as a model for progress and ethnic unity, the city is developed in line with national urban models that display the developmental progress of the nation, its happiness and civility.  ‘Civilized’ urban behaviour is valourized while rural and ethnic spaces are othered, arising as a significant source of discrimination within the city (Grant, 2018). Since Qinghai is not an autonomous region, this limits the scope for ethnic expression specifically for the large Tibetan population here. This resulted in significant differences in the governance of urban space, increased competition, and new forms of power asymmetry that are well-captured in the book.

In Xining, urbanisation seeks to create a civilised model of urbanity of national importance, thereby assimilating and transforming Tibetans.

The notion of civilisation and the desire to control and transform the city are coded into its legal structure, governance and the built environment. In Tibet, creating a glorious Sinocentric past that dominates the built environment of the city is essential for the assimilation of the Tibetans and reinforcing China’s claim over Tibet. There are two broad paths through which the state creates a collective Sinocentric memory of Xining. First, official records and memorialisation of infrastructure establish the historical dominance of a Sinocentric past, propagating it through official narratives. Despite being ruled by various rulers, the city is produced as continuously connected to the Chinese heritage in its infrastructure, made possible by discursive power held by Chinese authors, urban authorities and developers in the region. Second, these official narratives deploy myths and mythical characters in the cityscape. For instance, representations of the Queen Mother of the West, who is significant to Han mythology, and the Tang Princess Wencheng, who was forced to leave China to the ‘bleak landscape’ of Tibet, are memorialised in various parts of the city, contributing to a collective memory of the Sinocentric past.

Despite contending with a state-led process that marginalizes ethnic expression, Tibetans articulate a unique regional modernity that is distinctly delineated from the Chinese dream.

While embracing the values of entrepreneurship and upward mobility, Tibetans are able to avoid being subsumed into the Chinese Dream by substituting national collectivity with Tibetans – making a life for themselves was a personal dream, and not necessarily related to support of the nation. Women especially articulated the disjuncture between national priorities and development for Tibetan communities. In this context, Tibetans engage with subaltern memory-making to assemble memories of the Tibetan town. However, the risk of surveillance and repression with municipal authorities makes it a high-stakes situation for Tibetans. Thus, subverting Chinese dominance of the cityscape is a delicate balancing act between retaining their safety and productive participation in the city.

Locating Tibet in the City

For Tibetans in the town, Xining’s promise of resources and livelihoods makes it an attractive place to live. The growing middle class in China and Tibet creates a class of people who can seek economic success while remaining politically docile. Being a marginalised ethnicity, the Tibetan middle class face specific challenges in the city. Although a lot of Tibetans felt that the overall push for making Xining a ‘civilised city’ had considerable benefits like cleanliness and accessibility, they also commented that on-the-ground governance restricted their bodily autonomy. For instance, the overemphasis on curbing spitting and jaywalking suggested that the campaign’s emphasis was superficial and rapid and may not result in lasting change. This preoccupation with appearance translates into government rhetoric as well – urban authorities have stated that citizens can use the appearance of spaces to distinguish between urban order and ethnic and rural disorder. Urban spaces would be modern, clean, and well-organized while rural locations were dirty and underdeveloped, needing the assistance of the Chinese state to modernise.

In the section ‘Uncivilized City’, Grant brings out how notions of civilisation spill into the interactions between Tibetans and the Han, where the Han often feel that certain Tibetan practices do not belong in the city. This fixes Tibetans and other non-Hans imaginatively in the underdeveloped parts of the city, which are financially and socially devalued.  This is reflected in how cultures are coded as good, clean, dirty, or bad, and the anxiety of this perception surfaces in the interactions between the author and local Tibetans. Grant also acknowledges that the binaries of ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ exist in the imaginaries of the Tibetan and Muslim communities alike, each community regarding the other as dirty and unclean.

Grant brings out subtle aspects of the lived experience of the city and the dilemmas and confusion that Tibetans face in enjoying the fruits of urban life.

Tibetans are wary of the bodily impacts of a consumerist urban life and associate Xining and other cities with a declining morality.

This is particularly corroborated in literary descriptions of Lhasa, depicted as having ‘disappeared in concrete’, ‘foul odours’, and ‘noise’. One local Tibetan resident wonders if urban comforts are superficial like the spectacle of the city: ‘empty on the inside but fancy on the outside.’ At this juncture, Buddhism becomes a relevant tool for promoting a Tibetan urbanism that emphasises Buddhist ethics and cleanliness, rejecting the elements of modernisation that resulted in moral decay. The homeland and the countryside are depicted as spaces where morality, good behaviour, the Tibetan language and religion can be taught to the children, juxtaposed with the “reckless” behaviour found in Xining. Grant also argues that Tibetanness is connected to particular places like the rural home that are used as repositories of culture, spaces where the Tibetan habitus can be reinforced to preserve the cultural distinctiveness of urban Tibetans. 

The affective experience of the built environment plays a vital role in making the city Tibetan – recorded prayers from monks, inscriptions and graffiti on the walls, Buddhist prayer wheels, and animals. Housing communities significantly shape the living experience of Tibetans, and doors, hallways, and common walls are decorated with particular Tibetan motifs like protective deities and images of Lamas. Social rhythms like celebrations and ceremonies also shape the experience of the city. However, not all of these are displays of active resistance to the state but interventions to the Han environment that improve their living experience.

Conclusion

Grant’s Concrete Plateau demonstrates how urbanisation in the Tibetan Plateau exerts Han dominance through its governance structure, the built environment, and the social landscape. Grant’s conception of the ‘civilising machine’ is useful for understanding Chinese urbanisation in the eastern part of the Tibetan Plateau and in other parts of China. Grant grounds his ethnography in theoretical constructs of ‘place-making’ and ‘the right to the city.’ While he engages with the rhetoric of the Chinese state and the discursive power of planners, developers and the built environment, confrontations between the citizens and state are touched upon only briefly and can be expanded in future research. In a similar vein, understanding the Han perception of urbanisation in Tibet, the official rhetoric regarding the history and heritage of the location and Tibetan placemaking activities could reveal how much the Han are able to critically engage with state machinery.

Despite being set in Xining, the reader can glimpse the relationship of the locals with the countryside and homeland, and it may be a point of interest to explore how Tibetans in the country perceive this aspect of circular migration. Xining is a highly relevant case study as it is one of the most ethnically diverse parts of Tibet. The model of the Chinese civilising machine and the minority response to it could be explored with Muslims in China as well. Overall, the major success of the book is in linking civilisational rhetoric with the process of urbanisation on the ground, while explicitly focusing on how the Tibetans have developed a subtle politics that resists the hegemony and assimilatory policies of the state while making the city more liveable.

Bibliography

Grant, Andrew. “Hyperbuilding the civilized city: ethnicity and marginalization in Eastern Tibet.” Critical Asian Studies 50, no. 4 (2018): 537-555.

Harrell, Stevan. Cultural encounters on China’s ethnic frontiers. University of Washington Press, 2011.

Yeh, Emily T., and Charlene Makley. “Urbanization, education, and the politics of space on the Tibetan Plateau.” Critical Asian Studies 51, no. 1 (2019): 1-11.

R Madhumitha

R Madhumitha is a Research Officer at Chennai Centre for China Studies.