Geopolitics at microscale

The title and subtitle of Andrew Grant's book, The Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine, just as his useful coinage of ‘civilizing machine’, offer a powerful snapshot of the urban transformations that have been taking place across China over the last couple of decades. As various anthropological studies have shown, minority areas, described as poor, uncivilized, and backward (luohou), have been violently and consistently razed to the ground and reimagined in ways consistent with ‘modern’ Han standards. While the book duly acknowledges these dynamics, the title evokes a sense of brutal, inexorable, and monolithic force against which Tibetans are placed in a position of resistance. A reader unfamiliar with the book may thus anticipate accounts of a stark confrontation between the urbanizing machine of central China and the remoteness (and authenticity) of local Tibetan culture. While this is indeed part of the narrative Andrew Grant weaves, the book's positionality is far more sophisticated and complex.

The first challenge to this dichotomous positioning is the fact that administratively Xining is not part of China's autonomous Tibetan region. While it boasts a large Tibetan presence and is largely perceived as Tibetan by its Tibetan residents, it does not benefit from the level of cultural autonomy – such as it may be – of Tibet proper. Xining is also the home of other ethnic groups, such as the Hui, a Chinese-speaking Muslim minority (minzu), whose own positionality vis-à-vis the Han majority does not dovetail with the Tibetan minority's. The social and political dynamics around this diverse ethnic landscape thus require careful unpacking, something Grant's book does extremely well.

Complicating the narrative further is the misalignment between levels of urbanization and ethnicity. The Concrete Plateau provides here an excellent analysis of how Tibetans navigate the rapidly urbanizing city of Xining against a backdrop of Han imaginaries of modernity and development. Grant shows that Tibetans are active actors in the creation and redefinition of the city through engagement with, and cooptation of, a state-led urban development along a vision of Chinese material and spiritual civilization – what he terms the ‘Chinese civilizing machine’. Rather than passive subalterns, then, Tibetans in Xining are actively involved in the process of urbanization, within the existing constraints of an authoritarian regime.

The urban environment, the book shows, stands in opposition to the rural environment with which Tibetans have traditionally been associated. The Han living in Xining show a clear preference for residential areas and arrangements from which Tibetans (and other minorities) are absent. For them, Tibetan cultural practices, the smell of their food, the way they dress, their perceived lack of hygiene, jar with ideals of an urban modernity projected by architectural forms and reinforced by disciplinary practices discouraging jaywalking, littering, etc. In Inner Mongolia, where I have previously carried out fieldwork, the Mongolian minority is similarly imagined as ranking lower than the Han on the scale of modernity on account of their food, cultural practices, and lack of literacy and fluency in Chinese. In Xining, like in Inner Mongolia, non-Han minorities eager to join the middle classes are both aware of these stereotypes and active participants in discriminatory narratives. Grant's Tibetan interlocutors would thus, almost universally, draw attention to cultural practices of the Muslim community which they would describe as dirty – thereby claiming for themselves a higher place on the Chinese cultural hierarchy. Meanwhile Muslim interlocutors would draw, in turn, attention to ‘dirty’ practices specific to Tibetans.

While this cultural hierarchy typically places the Han at the apex, this positioning is not always stable. As Grant recounts, here again echoing my own experience in Inner Mongolia, some Tibetans criticize the Han as being in fact dirtier than them, while voicing critiques about a Chinese modernity that exists only at the surface. This latter point also resonates with some of the comments I heard during a different ethnographic research project at the Russia-China border (On the Edge, 2021). The residents of the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk, across the river from the newly-built city of Heihe, would look at the Chinese skyscrapers and bright lights and see them as a fake façade, barely concealing dirt roads and rustic houses. While Heihe was a small rural settlement a couple of decades ago, it has grown into a sizeable town with global aspirations. In the eyes of its Russian neighbors however, these transformations are purely cosmetic. This Russian reluctance to acknowledge the genuine economic growth of Heihe stems, partly, from uneasiness at the prospect of an overturning of cultural hierarchies in terms of modernity and ‘progress’, but it also speaks to the force of established stereotypes in molding perceptions of otherness. Irrespective of the details of actual encounters, entrenched cultural assumptions tend to prevail and act as interpretive framework.

A complex positioning emerges also clearly in the relationship Tibetans in Xining have with the countryside. On the one hand associated with backwardness and dirt, rural environments are at the same time a touchstone of authenticity, a place where urban Tibetans sometimes send their children to ensure they learn to speak Tibetan and acquire Tibetan values. This is also something I had the opportunity to observe, this time during an earlier piece of research in Mongolia. There too, while rural newcomers to the city were generally seen as dirty and uncouth, these negative assessments coexisted and intersected with positive evaluations of the countryside. My friends and interlocutors would, like urban Tibetans, regularly go and spend time in the countryside, to shed the foreign influences of the city and reconnect with their cultural roots – even if, as Grant writes, it was sometimes ‘difficult to match the reality of rural life with perceptions of it’ (120).

In the coding of modernity and backwardness specific to my research on Mongolia, whereby the Chinese were seen as backward, the West as modern, and Mongolians somewhere in between, I regularly found that my own presence in the field had ripple effects. The anti-Chinese narratives I heard from Mongolians were not delivered in the void, they had a specific audience in mind. In pointing out to me the backwardness of the Chinese, Mongolians sought to position themselves as culturally adjacent to me, and by extension to the West. In my conversations with them I was routinely hailed as interlocutor, my opinion as a Western man eagerly sought as a ‘confirmation’ that Mongolians were indeed ‘Eurasian’ and not ‘Asian’ – that is closer to the West and its assumed modernity. One of the conclusions of my book (Sinophobia, 2015) was thus that anti-Chinese speech, expressed in either Mongolian or English – never in Chinese – was in fact not directed at the Chinese but at a putative Western audience. In other words, it represented less an expression of hate speech than staked a claim to a particular place on a global cultural spectrum. It was essentially a Mongolia-specific narrative trafficking in tropes and stereotypes with a global circulation. In a similar vein, Grant makes the fascinating observation that Chinese ideals of modernity span an incredible range of behaviors, from sidewalk hygiene to international diplomacy (9).

What we could term ‘geopolitics at microscale’ is something that looms large in the book's narrative as Grant weaves in important insights about his own positionality in the field as a white Western man, and about the strategies he had to employ to navigate Chinese authorities’ restrictions and expectations in order to carry out his fieldwork. As an American, Grant stood as a representative of a particular brand of modernity that the Tibetan, Hui, and to a large extent, Han communities all aspire to. The author recounts conversations with interlocutors about the contrast of Chinese ‘civilizational standards’ with those of the United States for example (85), and his status as outsider clearly gave his interlocutors permission to voice opinions about other groups residing in Xining's fraught linguistic and cultural environment. As I was reading the book I wondered to what extent these different groups specifically sought to position themselves in terms of modernity and ‘civilizational’ degree in their conversations with the author. Was there also a sense that Tibetan and Muslim held alternative values that departed from the Chinese notions of wenming or suzhi that frame imaginaries of urban progress? Further, the fact that Grant speaks both Chinese and Tibetan provided him with a unique vantage point and allowed him to engage culturally with both groups. I would have loved to hear more about the dynamics of linguistic usage in the course of the research, about code-switching practices, and about the perceptions of his interlocutors. Given the lower-ranking status of Tibetan for the Chinese majority, and the fact that most Chinese do not try to learn minzu languages, what were the reactions usually encountered when Grant spoke Tibetan?

My last comment on this fantastic piece of ethnographic research also concerns the Han majority. Grant does an excellent job showing how Tibetans have been able to plug ‘their own ethical and social capacities’ into it (20), mobilizing urban resources ‘to create material, imaginative, and affective places’ (149). But one of the consequences of the conflation of the ‘civilizing machine’ and Han ideals of modernity is that Han views tend to be flattened and we don’t get a sense of the divergences within them. I am curious whether Han perspectives were largely homogeneous, or whether this was the unfortunate, but unavoidable, consequence of a study focusing on Tibetan subjectivities.