Taming Tibet

Yeh examines how Chinese development projects in Tibet served to consolidate state space and power.

Emily T. Yeh is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

This is an important and authoritative analysis of contemporary socio-economics and politics in Tibet and does require some understanding of the academic discipline involved. However, the technical jargon is offset to a great extent by the numerous first-hand accounts of the author's time in and around Lhasa, which are invariably insightful, often entertaining, and help to bring a touch of light relief to what is essentially a dark and sombre subject.

Timothy Thurston:

In her masterful new book, Taming Tibet, Emily Yeh discusses the gift of development in modern Lhasa in a critical fashion, providing an excellent and informative examination of Chinese development projects over the last sixty plus years.... It will be of use to scholars from a variety of fields including ethnicity in China, development studies, and geography, and is also a welcome addition to the Tibetological field.

Julia Chuang:

In Taming Tibet, Emily Yeh offers a new twist to current paradigms of Chinese development, presenting a trove of new evidence from China's politically unstable western periphery. Drawing on 16 months of intensive fieldwork undertaken between 2000 and 2009, Yeh traces the devastating effects of China's recent state-subsidized and state-led land development campaign in Lhasa and its peri-urban regions.... Yeh's fieldwork, coming during a period of rapid transformation in China's land regime, provides a valuable counterpoint to a development literature that has focused for decades on China's coastal regions to the neglect of its hinterland.

Tsering Wangdu Shakya, Canada Research Chair in Religion and Contemporary Society in Asia, University of British Columbia, author of The Dragon in the Land of Snows:

Emily T. Yeh's Taming Tibet is one of the best analyses of the contemporary socioeconomics and politics of development of Tibet. The book is based on powerful ethnographic details and strong theoretical analysis and situates the current sociopolitical milieu within the context of the larger issues of the state's goal of 'development' and local subjectivity in transforming the Tibetan landscape. Yeh shows that the issue is not a simple dichotomy between state action and local resistance. The 'gift of development' produces an asymmetrical relationship between donor and recipient: the Chinese state's desire to make an imprint on the territory while at the same time creating 'internal others' and 'objects of suspicion.' Taming Tibet should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding contemporary Tibet and China's relations with periphery regions.

Charlene E. Makley, Reed College, author of The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China:

Taming Tibet is a highly original book; no one else is capable of doing the kind of research and analysis that Emily T. Yeh has done among Tibetans in the People's Republic of China. She incorporates an unprecedentedly wide regional and comparative scope of experience, even as the book focuses on the Lhasa valley. This is a timely book, and increasingly so with Tibet's rising geopolitical importance and the recent protests and military crackdown.