The Withering of Tibetan Nationalism/Ecological Socialism in Practice
About this Event
TCAS Lecture:
The Withering of Tibetan Nationalism/Ecological Socialism in Practice: A Study of Collective Pastoral Economy in Tibet’s Ga Tsho Community
Speakers: Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong
Date and time: Wednesday 16 September 2026, 5 p.m.- 6.30 p.m.
Venue: TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin
Barry Sautman: Tibetan émigré nationalism has mainly revolved around the Dalai Lama’s personage, but he is now in his 90s. Many Tibetan émigrés have migrated to the distant West from South Asia, where remaining émigré communities have a low birthrate and few recent additions from Tibet. Rapid development and an enlarged Communist Party have likely strengthened Chinese national identity among Tibetans. Meanwhile, Western state patrons of Tibetan émigrés now use many non-Tibet-related issues to contain China and only nominally endorse even higher autonomy for Tibet. The decline of nationalism in China’s ethnic Tibetan areas has a counterpart in the withering of Tibetan émigré nationalism. The longstanding urgings of émigré groups for Tibet to be recognized as an occupied country that is not legitimately part of China have proved unavailing. They now wage unevidenced campaigns on marginal issues, such as Tibetan boarding schools as an instrument of “genocide,” indicating that émigré nationalism, like nationalism inside Tibet, is receding.
Yan Hairong: Contrary to the "tragedy of the commons" thesis, empirical studies and some Chinese government reports indicate that privatized pasture use rights—implemented through the Household Responsibility Contract System—have exacerbated grassland degradation in market-driven contexts. This paper examines Tibet’s Ga Tsho pastoral collective, demonstrating how communal ownership and cooperative management not only avert ecological overexploitation but also systematically integrate production with environmental stewardship. Furthermore, comparative analysis reveals that the collective model enhances both total productive capacity and per capita income relative to the household-based pastoralism. The talk will also situate the Ga Tsho case in the emerging local initiatives to shore up the commons management in different parts of China.
Barry Sautman, professor emeritus in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. A political scientist and lawyer, he has worked on ethnic policies and politics in China, including ethnic regional autonomy. He has a particular research interest about Xinjiang Ughur Autonomous Region and Tibet Autonomous Region and has published numerous articles and monographs. His most recent book is Telling Tall Tales: “Uyghur Genocide” as a Political Stratagem (Brill 2026). In recent two decades, he has also co-authored with Yan Hairong on China-Africa links , including research on China/Africa political economy and interactions between Chinese and Africans, having published in Chinese China in Africa: Discourses and Reality (中国在非洲：话语与现实).
YAN Hairong, Professor at Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences and Department of Sociology and honorary professor of the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her earlier research focused on rural-to-urban migrant domestic workers in China. In recent decade, she has become concerned with food sovereignty and agrarian change in China and has conducted field research in rural Xinjiang and rural Tibet. She publishes in the Journal of Peasant Studies and the Journal of Agrarian Change and contributes to the food sovereignty network in China. In 2024 she and her teammates published (in Chinese) 乡村纪事：新型集体经济为什么行 （Documenting the countryside: Why New Rural Collective Economies Can Work）. For the past two decades, she has collaborated with Barry Sautman on China-Africa links and has co-authored East Mountain Tiger, West Mountain Tiger: China, Africa, the West and “Colonialism”.
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