Navigating macro and micro across urban assemblages

I am grateful to the contributors to this forum for the careful consideration and astute analysis they have brought to bear on my book. I would also like to thank Galen Murton for organizing the forum. Monograph writers are continuously tempted to expand their arguments in multiple directions. In writing Concrete Plateau, I faced dilemmas about whether to frame my empirics in terms of urban or political studies, to compare Xining with other cities in China or with others elsewhere in the world, and how to frame such comparisons. In the end, I did a little bit of all these things. Hopefully, the decision generated more promise than peril.

Concrete Plateau emerged from an impulse to understand the circumstances of Tibetans who were migrating to Xining City, the largest municipality on the Tibetan Plateau – a city that is closer in proximity, as well as size, to Chinese cities like Lanzhou than to Lhasa. Xining struck me as a growing city that was increasingly becoming important for Tibetans. Increasing numbers of Tibetans were living in the city for labor, to educate their children, to access amenities like health care, or to enjoy reliably warm rooms during their retirement years. My interviews and participant observation touched upon all these subjects, and I learned a great deal about how Tibetans came to live in the city, how they kept up their relations with their home places in surrounding grasslands and farming valleys, and the people, values, and more-than-human presences that sustained them across these spaces.

One finding of my fieldwork was that Xining's urban development was shaped by its relative location on the economic and politico-cultural periphery of contemporary China. These peripheries are the product of Sinocentric efforts to place Xining and much of China's Western Region into a position of developmental backwardness that has demanded its economic and social reconstruction. There was also a dominant historiography, monumentalized in the city, that framed inland Chinese historical figures as bringing civilization, developmental progress, pacification, and stability to Plateau peoples over thousands of years. Yet another sort of civilizing process was being realized in the opening years of Xi Jinping's tenure as General Secretary. Xining's mayor Zhang Xiaorong sought to reimagine the city as a ‘Plateau Landscape Garden City’ that would distinguish the city's world-class urban development. To do this, the indigenous populations of the Plateau were reduced to swatches of color in the city's urban redesign, displacing their central role as key regional nationalities in the political aesthetics of Chinese Communist Party rule.

It was at this juncture of economic and political projects that my inquiry into the changing social worlds of Tibetans also became a study of agency in urban processes. Urban Tibetans exhibited a critical sense of the social and political realities of China's state-led urban project: they sought to revalue Sinocentric judgments and to create a Tibetan urbanism in which they belonged and were equal participants. Memories and unofficial histories of the city, sensorially rich materials and presences that co-traveled on circular migrations, the opening of small businesses on the 10th floor of high-rises: these all became ways that Tibetans assembled the city for their own purposes. Rather than finding a story of total political and cultural loss in the face of Chinese urban expansion, I was struck by how urban Tibetans were making the city their own amid an urban project that seemed calibrated to assimilate them.

Micropolitics and macropolitics

In their responses, Franck Billé and June Wang point out tensions between macropolitics and micropolitics in relation to geopolitics and placemaking. In Billé's (2015; Billé and Humphrey, 2021) writings on Mongolia, China, and Russia, he has shown how the changing dynamics of urban development and border areas influence imaginings of the ‘other’ that is present just across the border, as well as threateningly proximate, even within one's own body and community. This propinquity of the other has a strong influence on everyday fears and anxieties, especially when asymmetries are vast, or when long-standing hierarchies seem to be inverting. Billé (this issue) notes this with regards to Mongolians assuring him of their Eurasianness, which for them connoted a higher level of development. I found similar dynamics to be a large concern as exemplified in the Chinese term hanhua, or ‘turning Han’. The book shows how these concerns aren’t simply about fears of assimilation in the context of nation-building. They occur – largely because of the preponderance of culturalist discourse in China – in an idiom of civilization. State-led urbanization has taken on a decidedly colonial cast in the contemporary period, a characterization I don’t shy away from making: I concur with Max Woodward's (this issue) characterization of urban growth as ‘a form of imperial expansion’. What gives urbanization its geopolitical character is not simply that politics is occurring over space, but that urbanization in these borderlands seeks to fundamentally reorganize space by tethering peripheral pasts, presents, and futures to the economic core and political center of a Chinese nation-cum-civilization.

June Wang (this issue) proposes analyzing urban territories as effectuated and atomized. This approach helps us see the complex interplay between urban spaces as top-down processes of coding and control that are challenged by everyday practices of realization as well as refusal or resistance. Wang emphasizes the role of bodies moving among the city in these processes, reminding me of the debt owed to Michel deCerteau (1984) in these discussions. She rightly points out, as projects become more articulated as they are carried out, that even bottom-up challenges can introduce a ‘royal science’ that orders spaces. As urban Tibetans assemble their own alternative urban project, in other words, they also introduce a rigidity that may itself be challenged or overturned. In my writings on urban territory in the city, I endeavored not only to show how urban development agendas, but also Tibetan intellectuals and a formal Tibetan social organization could ‘constitute its own hierarchies (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 20)’, by introducing its own map for becoming in the city. I was also mindful to emphasize Tibetans’ channeling and careful negotiation of what Yao and Wang (2019) have called the interface of effectuated territories. Moreover, I wanted to be careful about using terminology like ‘royal science’ or ‘nomad science’ in my ethnographic writing; I felt – and feel – that such terms chance infelicitous characterizations of the knowledge systems and practices of my research subjects.

Max Woodworth (this issue) scrutinizes how I qualify agency in a Chinese city. My book primarily focuses on Tibetans’ efforts to maximize their advantages in a rapidly growing city that constrains their political expression through the rules of urban territory as well as national anxieties about separatist politics. What he finds overlooked are processes of urban accumulation, a line of research that Woodworth (2017) has effectively introduced to studies of urbanization in China's Western Region. Xining's recent urban expansion has consumed the farmland of predominantly Han and Muslim communities. Most greenfield urban accumulation has occurred at their expense, rather than those of the Tibetans featured in my book. While my study does engage with how Tibetan migrants converted Plateau resources into the capital to purchase urban housing or engage in the urban informal economy, more attention to how urban accumulation affected their home areas would have enriched the study. The recent downturn in the Chinese real estate market is certainly affecting urban Tibetans in Xining. Those who hoped to gain security from the housing market may now suffer as their investments lose value. Going forward, this topic must be a part of studies of urban Tibetans.

Identities, positionality, and agency

Does my concept of the civilizing machine treat the Han as a monolithic group? Does it merge the PRC and the Han people into one? One of my main motivations to write the book was to take seriously the geopolitical refashioning of Chineseness that has occurred over the last several decades in China. This has included the elevation of a particular vision of Chinese identity that has hallowed out much of the content of the 56 nationalities framework, politically diluting ethnic boundaries. Today, PRC leadership emphasizes a form of Zhonghua minzu that prioritizes a version of (Han) Chinese civilization (Leibold, 2019). To establish the civilizing machine as the lived and felt political reality for Tibetans, I emphasized an ‘ideal Hanness’ that is described by historian Thomas Mullaney (2012: 3) as a ‘powerful and hegemonic neutrality’ that is in practice hierarchically dominant to other ethnicities. While I risked neglecting the perspectives and positions of those who identify or are identified as Han Chinese (who certainly can’t represent this idealized vision), I was focused on how Tibetans’ anxious engagement with an urban environment coded with a Hanness which, like whiteness in the United States, shaped a range of social encounters and microspaces. Wang (this issue) also interrogates my characterization of this ideal (Han) Chinese civilizational project in relation to the state: what of the prosaicness and flexibility of those that embody this ideal in their official capacities? I did meet Tibetans who negotiated compromises with municipal representatives in terms of housing construction and social events, but we must also attend to the political dimensions of this case study: the 2008 uprisings across the Tibetan Plateau, self-immolations, creeping controls on religion and education, etc. State officials, whether Han or not, were cautious about permitting anything that could become a political problem for their superiors (and therefore themselves). While there was wiggle room, there were also real limits on what could be accomplished.

As Wang (this issue) reminds us, Tibetans are diverse people, both outside of and within urban areas. To ascribe the social outcomes I witnessed among these regional migrants to their being Tibetan rests on a double movement: an elevation and standardization of Tibetanness as a subordinate but constitutionally protected category of the Chinese state, and the ever-becoming articulation of an increasingly urban Tibetan identity among those who are classified as and/or identify as Tibetan. One of the most fascinating findings of my research, which I highlight in Chapter 4, was the way that Tibetan notions of culture and civilization came to challenge the alleged dominance of Chinese urbanization. The salience of the urban in everyday life thus also included the use of the urban as a cipher through which many aspects of cultural and social politics could be interpreted. Therefore, music videos, poetry, historical sites, Buddhist practice, toponymy, and more all came to be part of the politics of the urban, creating opportunities for large numbers of intellectuals and artists, using Tibetan language varieties, to speak to a growing population of urban Tibetans looking for ways to understand and make sense of their experiences across the many milieux of the Concrete Plateau. The Tibetan Ziling they created is itself also an articulation of this effort: a smooth space finding its striations. Other identities and histories could certainly be invoked to supplement or even overturn the hierarchies of this urban mapping.

Finally, I thank Billé (this issue) for his probing comments on positionality in ethnographic research. I found time and again that the dilemmas of urbanization loomed large in the minds of my research subjects, and often more than I expected. This somewhat assuaged my concern that I could be inviting simplified statements of political identity structured by the categories and questions of this foreign social scientist. Language posed its own challenges as we moved between Chinese, Tibetan, and English, as well as different understandings of the terms we discussed. Code-switching yielded its own insights. Baorong, a Chinese term for tolerance and inclusivity, brought home for me the social stakes of the ‘civilized city’ (Ch. wenming chengshi). The term emerged as a key theme as Tibetans pointed out experiences of intolerance that revealed the hypocrisy of the urban development project. Tibetans speaking Chinese sometimes employed the Tibetan term rakor, which carries connotations of the agropastoral domus, to describe their urban gated communities. This helped highlight how spaces of rural locales translated into the city, realizing the topological collapse of urban and rural space.

Thank you again for the opportunity to engage in this dialog. I deeply appreciated the discerning insights of the contributors.