Taming the Tibetan landscape: Chinese development and the transformation of agriculture

This dissertation examines a particular trajectory of state incorporation and landscape change in Lhasa, capital of China's Tibet Autonomous Region. Since the implementation of national economic reforms, thousands of Han Chinese farmers have migrated to Lhasa to rent land from peri-urban Tibetan villagers for greenhouse vegetable cultivation, an activity from which they earn considerable profit. Tibetan farmers do not engage in this potentially lucrative form of agriculture, explaining their nonparticipation as a result of their own "laziness." To understand why Tibetans are less able to take advantages of economic reform than are Han migrants, and why Tibetans invoke a trope of indolence, I examine state strategies to incorporate Tibet, contradictory consciousness, and local idioms through which Tibetans experience development.; The dissertation presents greenhouse vegetable farming as one of three sites of encounter between the different environmental imaginaries of the Chinese state, Han migrants, and Tibetan farmers. Two other sites of encounter are urbanization and high-input "scientific" grain agriculture. The Tibetan idiom of "being spoiled" ties together Tibetan experiences of development in these three sites. Taken together, the analysis of greenhouse farming, urbanization, and high-input grain agriculture tells a larger story about the inscription of state hegemony on the material landscape, or what I call the "taming" of the Tibetan landscape.; During the collective period, the state created communes, urban cooperatives, and state farms in Tibet. Each had its own distinct forms of agricultural organization, but all were similar in that the state mobilized Tibetans to transform the landscape through their own labor. With economic reform, collective Tibetan labor has been replaced by market forces, particularly as embodied by Han migrant farmers. Despite these different agents and forms of landscape transformation, both periods are part of a larger process in which Lhasa is being transformed from a regional center into a national frontier. Spatial peripheralization is mutually constitutive of the increasing marginalization of Tibetans in economic activities, often seemingly through their own agency. I show how these contradictory practices "make sense" through a Gramscian understanding of hegemony.