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Taking document analysis as its method, this paper examines the Tibetans' response to the Chinese state nationalism. Due to the fear of political secession, the Chinese government has stayed silent about the Tibetans' right to self‐determination and subjected regional ethnic autonomy to the centralised political system. The Chinese authorities continue to dismiss the Tibetans' nationalist struggles as an imported foreign design and warn the international community not to sympathise with the Dalai Lama and his supporters. Amidst an adverse national and international political environment, the Tibetans have managed to sustain their nationalist wishes and obtain substantive international attention. Taking this background into account, this paper explores how the Tibetans have succeeded to resist China's state nationalism and position themselves as a champion of inclusion, justice, and minority rights. It argues that the Tibetans recognise the Chinese government's fear of secession and utilise that fear to forward their nationalist aspirations. The Tibetans shift their demand from independence to autonomy and highlight their own desire for recognition as a distinct community within the Chinese state. This strategy has helped them to claim that they are against the violations of autonomy but not against the Chinese state's territorial norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hosting the 2008 Beijing Olympics brought about a boost of national pride among the Chinese public. However, Chinese national pride was hurt as soon as the international torch relay of the Beijing Olympics received considerable protests in London and Paris against Beijing's policies on Tibet and human rights. After the chaos of the torch relay in Paris, ordinary Chinese used the internet to vent their nationalist anger and disseminate information of how the Beijing Olympic torch relay was sabotaged by pro-Tibet protestors, as oppose to the official media discourse in which the Paris leg was largely constructed as harmonious and peaceful. Based on a discourse analysis of media texts collected from the People's Daily and Tianya Forum, this paper interrogates how both official and online popular media respectively shape Chinese nationalist discourses through representations and discussions of the Paris leg of torch relay. The paper also attempts to discuss the changing power relations between state and popular players in the context of online political communication in China, and critically discusses the extent to which the rise of online popular nationalism can challenge the role of the Chinese state in the production and construction of nationalist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the theory of social construction of reality deriving from the writings of Max Weber, Alfred Schutz, Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger to explain the origin of national identity and hence the emergence of a nation. It argues that social construction of national reality originates from everyday life experience taken for granted during the process of socialization. Individuals make sense out of the external world. Experiences taken for granted become actor's stock of knowledge. A common scheme of knowledge shared by the community serves to differentiate in-group (nationals) and out-group (foreigners). Collective consciousness thus defines national identity and hence a nation. Unless people (both in-group and out-group) interact with and learn from each other, different stocks of knowledge taken for granted will create political tension. This theory will be applied to understand the tensions in Tibet and along the Taiwan Strait. The paper further argues that Taiwan can hardly separate from mainland China in the future, while strong Tibetan consciousness continues to defy against powerful Chineseness, resulting in endless upheavals in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Putting into context the sentiment expressed by Tibetans on both sides of the Himalayas that true Tibet is located elsewhere, this essay focuses on an under-commented-upon consequence of Tibetan trans-Himalayan mobilities since 1959: the creation of two incommensurable modes of nationalism. One of these is territorial, the other embodied in the form of the Dalai Lama himself. The result of this dual nationalism has not been mutual compatibility and an increase in potential modes of Tibetan belonging, but mutual interference and a broadened scope for unbelonging. As such, the dispersed spatiality of community it enacts is reminiscent not so much of the romantic, organic unity of Herderian modes of (methodological) nationalism as it is of Heine's experiences of manifold unbelonging and contemporary German-Jewish articulations of a ‘portable homeland’. Ultimately, to reckon with such originary unbelonging, theories of diaspora and mobility must treat concepts of both home and mobility as mixtures of stability and instability, movement and stasis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses political conditions as of October 2012 in Tibet, which has been controlled by China's Communist Party since 1950, with a focus on Tibetans' national identity and loyalty to their leader, the Dalai Lama, head of the Tibetan branch of Buddhism. Topics include efforts by China to transform Tibet into a communist nation through permanent military occupation; the cessation of the Sino-Tibetan Dialogue meetings; and Chinese policies which have provoked Tibetan resistance, demonstrations, and public self-immolations. U.S. foreign policy toward the self-determination movement in Tibet is discussed, along with the Dalai Lama's plans for his succession.

The recent debates within and beyond Marxism around empire and imperialism focus on deterritorialization, but fail to see non-Western states as anything other than collaborators or victims. Highlighting the importance of center-periphery relations within the territorially bounded political space of the nation-state, this paper puts forward a new concept of the Postcolonial Informal Empire (PIE) to characterize the emerging powers of China and India. The greatest paradox of PIEs is that a postcolonial impulse—to critically appropriate Western ideas and technologies such as sovereignty, nationalism, and the free market to build the multinational state and combine it with an affirmation of stories of historical greatness and long existing, pre-Westernized, civilizational-national cultures—enables the political entities to consolidate and discipline their borderlands and reduce diverse inhabiting peoples to culturally different but politically subservient subjects. It is predominantly a nationalist politics, and not economic calculability or financial interests, that shapes PIEs’ center-borderlands relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study uses critical discourse analysis to explore the role journalism plays in the discursive formation of nationalism in an event of global visibility that lay outside the daily news making routine-the coverage of the Beijing Olympics global torch relay by newspapers in China. Taking Fairclough's analysis framework, at the text level, I noted the construction of 'we' and 'they' identities in the representations of the supportive and antagonist people involved in events in the torch host cities. At the discourse level, I investigated the major strategies used by the journalists in the construction of nationalism beyond the borders of China, including meaning substitution discourses and multiple articulations of voices, reinforcing a unitary meaning of collective belonging to a nation. At the social practice level, this study looked at how nationwide attention and the global relevance of this event, with its particular connection to the controversy over Tibet, led to structural constraints and self-censorship of journalism practices in the construction of three levels of 'oneness' to understand Chinese nationalism-one China, one Chinese nation, and one world under China's leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the Tibet question through the looking glass of Taiwan, by considering four dimensions of comparative dynamics between the two cases of Taiwan and the Tibetan government-in-exile (TGIE) in relation to China: territorial, economic, ethnic and cultural. Of the four, the paper argues, Taiwan has high convergence with China in the economic, ethnic and cultural dimensions, and managed divergence in the territorial dimension. The TGIE, on the other hand, has high divergence with China in all four dimensions: territorial dispute, economic incongruence, ethnic estrangement, and cultural gulf. Further, the TGIE is ideologically and sentimentally charged by this divergence and thrives by exploiting it. It therefore should have few incentives to see the lessons of Taiwan applied in resolving the Tibet question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2008, Tibet erupted in the biggest challenge to Chinese rule since 1959. While Beijing and Dharamsala engaged in their familiar battle of representations, pundits speculated on the causes of the uprising, ranging from conspiracy theories to informed policy analysis. Applying the framework of the insecurity dilemma, this article argues that Tibetan identity insecurity on account of the post-1989 hard-line Chinese policies was the chief cause of the uprising. Largely peaceful protests and occasionally violent riots in Tibet have been integral to Tibetan efforts to mitigate their societal insecurities provoked by Chinese migration, 'assimilationist' policies and 'cultural imperialism'. However, Tibetan protests and riots heighten Chinese insecurities and harden Beijing's policies both inside Tibet and towards the Dalai Lama. This paper reveals the dynamic cycle of hard-line Chinese policies provoking Tibetan uprisings; the resulting hardening in Chinese policies feeds back into Tibetan insecurities and protests. The 2008 uprising was the most recent cycle in the long-running saga of the Sino-Tibetan insecurity dilemma. The article warns that unless the Tibetans and the Chinese find a way to break out of the insecurity dilemma, Tibet could explode into another frenzy of violence and counter-violence in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination into the history of Japanese cultural-political thought towards Tibet in the 20th-century. Details are given focusing on the depiction of Tibet in Japanese literature of the period. Accounts are then given noting how Japanese conceptions of Tibet are highly interconnected with and influenced by the island nation's Buddhist tradition, nationalistic ideology, and the paradigm of modernity. Sources are taken from monastic writings, travel literature, and scholastic treatises from throughout the 20th-century.

This article uses cosmopolitanism as a theoretical basis for the investigation and analysis of the global corporate and state media's normative roles in human rights and democracy. Through the case studies of CNN and Xinhua's reportage of the Tibetan protests in 2008, the article observes patterns of ideological coalescence between western capitalist hegemony and the big western media conglomerates such as CNN. It argues that, as a good global corporate citizen, CNN undoubtedly made contributions in exposing human rights abuses in Tibet, but also unwittingly worked to advance the interests of a manipulative and unjust neoliberal international order that uses human rights as a political tool. This is demonstrated not only through CNN's selective articulation of human rights, but also the worrying coincidence between its ideological construction of the Tibet story and the rebuke of China's human rights record by the western governments and other western institutions. While Xinhua provided an alternative discourse to that of human rights, it was observed that whereas nationalism arguably protects China's revolutionary legacy and its modernization project, the discourse was also largely authoritarian and acted in contradiction to some of the constitutionally entrenched civil and political liberties of minorities while also raising cynicism about the Chinese government's commitment to international human rights laws that it ratified and acceded to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the theory and characteristics of surging Chinese cyber-nationalism which is fuelled by antagonism toward Western media's coverage of the Tibet riots. It is also fuelled by the media's coverage of widespread, anti-China protests staged by pro-Tibet activists and China-bashers during the Olympic torch relay in 2008. It is pointed out that cyber-nationalism had an enormous influence upon the Chinese government and its foreign policy decisions. A huge gulf developed between Chinese netizens and the Western media in their understanding of human rights and Tibet issues. Chinese netizens, who seemed to have lost their confidence in the mainstream Western media which is represented by the CNN and BBC, began to align with the Chinese government in an asymmetric media battle. They used cyber space to express their views, voice their concerns, disseminate information, and mobilize and rally the support of millions of Chinese nationals. This was to fight against the Western media's bias, prejudice, and misrepresentation, to protect and safeguard their national sovereignty, pride and territorial integrity, and to shore up China's position over the Tibet issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Chinese nationalism primarily represents Han nationalism and ignores ethnic minority sub-nationalisms and identities in the larger cause of the state's unity and integrity. The Chinese state calls for submerging of all minority identities within the predominant Han identity, for promoting national cohesion and nationalism, effectively precluding the possibility of the assertion of Tibetan nationalism and autonomy. Because of the suppression of Tibetans in China, a large number of them have fled and settled in India and elsewhere. The Tibetan movement for safeguarding their identity, culture and political space has grievously suffered as a result of Chinese nationalism and China's Tibet policy. The fate of Tibetan nationalism is, to a large extent, tied to the dynamics of the Sino-Indian relations and the course of the internal Tibetan politics and that of its relationship with the community in exile in the post-Dalai Lama era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central element of the narrative circulated by the Tibet Movement has been that China has carried out genocide and practised colonialism in Tibet. These notions are, for the most part, uncritically accepted by politicians and the media, especially in the West. This essay challenges such characterizations as inept and as obstacles to resolving the Tibet Question. It looks at whether convincing empirical evidence of physical and cultural genocide in Tibet exists, in light of the most common understanding of such practices as rooted in efforts to destroy a people and its culture. The essay also considers what the contours of colonialism have been in light of its principal modern experience, that of European, US and Japanese colonization, and determines whether the Tibet case fits these characteristics. The essay concludes that a critique of China's policies and practices in Tibet would be best served by focusing on actual problems experienced by Tibetans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the focus is on various embodied and embedded narratives shaping Tibetan identity today, especially among the diasporic Tibetans living in South Asia. It is argued that it is not only Westerners who have exoticised Tibet and the Tibetans; the Tibetan diaspora too have invested heavily in such (neo)orientalist representation strategies for their own tactical purposes. The first part of the article is devoted to the conceptual issues involved, including the question of identity, nationalism and diaspora. The second part deals with various dynamics and factors shaping the discourse of 'Tibetanness' in the diaspora community. The third part concludes with observations that challenge assumptions about a single discourse of Tibetanness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the recent unrest in Tibet and Tibetan grievances against the Chinese government. Martial law in March 1989; Controversies over tourism and the status of the Tibetan language; Resentment against the Han Chinese; Discontent with limited religious freedom; Lamaist Buddhist demonstrations for Tibetan independence; Negotiations with the Dalai Lama; Death of the Panchen Lama; Militant Tibetans.