Emily T. Yeh, Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2013, 324 pages, $26.95 paperback. ISBN 9780801478321.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its prominent international status, good anthropological work on contemporary Tibet is shockingly lacking.  Rarely can one find work grounded in long-term field research in Tibet that is theoretically informed, empirically rich, and politically nuanced.  Emily Yeh’s Taming Tibet is one such achievement.  As a political geographer, Yeh traces People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) state and nation building projects in Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) during the past six decades, focusing on the Chinese state’s territorialisation of Tibet’s landscape and people, and the consequent changes in state/society and interethnic relations.

Without dwelling on incessant disputes about the historical relations between Tibet and China, Yeh instead examines three key phases of Chinese territorialisation of Tibet: the introduction of state farms and communes in the 1950s and 60s; market liberalization and Han Chinese migration in the 1990s; and the intensive urbanization and rural housing construction in the 2000s.  Through rich ethnographical materials, Yeh portrays the complexity and contradictions of Tibetan agency with regard to China’s state building and development pushes.  Flawing both the pervasive narratives in the West about pure Tibetan victimization, as well as the PRC’s official discourse of happy and grateful Tibetans in the liberated post-slavery new Tibet, Yeh presents a rich and sober account of Tibetan’s involvement in the transformation and production of Tibet’s landscape and social-economic structure, as well as the cultural politics of how Tibetans negotiate their desires, interests, and values during the process (page 9).

Part One of the book looks at the introduction of socialist agriculture in the forms of state farms, and later communes, in the newly annexed Tibet.  As key sites of territorialisation during Maoist China, state farms were where Tibetan labour, particularly those from lower class backgrounds, were actively recruited by the Chinese state to cultivate land and produce grain and vegetables to feed the new Chinese administration and army.  Through recounts by elderly Tibetans, Yeh tells the story of how young women from impoverished and landless families became subjects of socialist China through their labour, which was both emancipatory and emasculating.  In fact, this part of the book is the most interesting in that it touches on a topic during a period of modern Tibetan history whose narrative is mostly invisible in the Tibetan exile (page 83).  The exile Tibetan nationalist discourse where only the imagined Tibetan nation matters, in Yeh’s words, “fails to account for the fraught intersections of nationalism and race with class and especially gender … [because] the establishment of [Chinese] state power and the process of state territorialization began with elements of consent forged in part through the promise of gender mobility” (page 84). Indeed, this is a controversial period of history when the agency of Tibetans’ participation in becoming subjects of the Chinese state is contested.  Later on during the Cultural Revolution, Tibetan red guards were culprits of Tibet’s cultural destruction, the history of which, till this day, still has not been satisfactorily explained.  Even though Yeh does not specifically address the Cultural Revolution in the book, her account of the state farms and communes in the 1950s and 60s offers a glimpse of how and why later developments in the Tibetan society would unfold.

Part Two of the book focuses on the process of economic development in Tibet in the 1990s when high socialism was replaced with decollectivization and the easing of movement of goods and people.  Particularly the movement of Han Chinese into Tibet, mostly from Sichuan, has inevitably created economic dominance by the Han in the urban economy.  As in the case of greenhouse vegetable production that Yeh studies, Han migrants have come to completely dominate the sector.  The curious thing, however, is that local Tibetans are willingly to rent out their land to Han Chinese migrants rather than engaging in the more profitable greenhouse vegetable production themselves.  Yeh argues that this phenomenon must be understood as overdetermined by “intertwined political economic and social political pressures, as well as by the co-constitution of social and spatial relations” (page 159).  Property rights, spatial distribution of household plots, intravillage moral economy, gendering of vegetable production, together with the structural inequalities in education between the Han Chinese and Tibetans, have all in the end produced the further marginalization of Tibetans in the local economy.

The final part of the book turns to the fast-changing landscape of Tibet in the new millennium as a result of urbanization and housing project developments in the rural areas. In the case of luxury houses for the Tibetan middle class in Lhasa, Yeh interrogates the representations of the urbanized Tibet that have little to do with Tibet’s material or cultural landscapes. Here though I think Yeh probably over-interprets her material. Throughout China, real estate development advertisements often tend to use overly western images as representations of modernity.  The fact that commercial residential districts in Lhasa utilize images of green oases and eco-living, perhaps reflects a much broader ‘homogenizing’ phenomenon of globalization, rather than the Chinese state’s effort to ‘erase’ the Tibetan’s cultural landscape.

Overall, this is a very rich book with a tremendous amount of information about contemporary Tibet, which is a laudable achievement.  Yeh’s presentation, although critical of the Chinese state practices, overall maintains academic neutrality and nuances.  On a topic that can be overly sensational, Yeh’s Taming of Tibet is a must read for people who are interested in Tibet’s uneasy relations with China.