Divergent Discourses: Processes of Narrative Construction in Tibet, 1955-62

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The Divergent Discourses project is an international, collaborative UK-German research study of a conflict that began in the high Himalayas in the 1950s and led to nearly two decades of armed conflict. That conflict continues today in the form of disputes over ideas and narratives between the Chinese government and the exile Tibetan community, together with recurrent unrest and protests within Tibet and protracted border tensions between China and its neighbours. Not long after Chairman Mao sent Chinese troops to annexe Tibet in 1950, the Dalai Lama, the traditional ruler of Tibet, fled with some 80,000 Tibetans to India. In response, Chinese officials produced millions of words in newsprint, historical tracts, propaganda leaflets and books to justify their claim to Tibet and condemn the old regime. From India, exile Tibetans produced refugee accounts, testimonies, memoirs, and histories of Tibet to counter China's claims. Materials of this kind, which are in large part polemical, are not often treated as major sources for historians. But the development of digital humanities and computational research techniques means that they can now be mined in numerous ways to extract details about events, individuals and ideas that would otherwise be little noticed in the texts within which they are buried. With these new research tools, innumerable pieces of data and information can be brought together from multiple sources, revealing new information and offering new insights into the history of the time. These innovative tools allow close study of the two competing discourses that emerged in the 1950s, each with their own account of Tibetan history, identity, and traditions. The divergence between these accounts has since shaped China's policies in Tibet, its tense relations with India, its strained relations with the US and the West, its response to recurrent protests by Tibetans within Tibet, and the six-decades-long failure of the exile and Chinese leaderships to reach a settlement. The project, which will be led jointly by an expert in modern Tibetan literature in Leipzig and a modern Tibetan historian working with a historical linguist in London, will collect almost entirely overlooked documents from libraries in Leipzig, Berlin, Oxford, Prague and elsewhere, including propaganda materials and newspapers from the 1950s. By adapting existing software tools, the project will develop computational tools that will make it possible for the first time for modern Tibetan texts to be compiled into a digital corpus of historical materials, where they can be annotated and cross-referenced to allow sophisticated searches and study. The three-year project will lead to publications with new insights about the events that led to the split between the Chinese and Tibetan governments in the 1950s, about the arguments and narratives that they produced, and about the ways in which this cleavage changed subsequent events. The project will also create a website with examples of typical documents from the period with English translations, a database of events and names extracted from the documents, and online access to the texts and data collected by the project.