Journey to the High West: The Politics of Trekking to Tibet in Contemporary Chinese Society

2022年，西藏自治区几乎所有的交通都被迫停止。与此同时，尽管在中国近三年的严格封锁期间，媒体对中国在西藏严格的COVID-19限制和人口流动进行了异常严格的审查，但包括从中国内陆到西藏的徒步旅行者在内的游客流量在传统媒体和社交媒体上都保持了很高的存在。这一背景构成了建议的博士研究项目的关注点。在中国，这种徒步旅行是一种长期存在且越来越为人所知的旅游形式，但很少受到学术界的关注。几十年来，成千上万的旅行者花了几个月的时间从中国内陆徒步前往西藏（通常从四川出发），而不顾近1500英里的旅程，穿越中国学术界所知的“藏夷走廊”（藏夷Zoulang）的复杂地形，更不用说可观的经济成本。那么问题来了：在当代中国社会，西藏的意义是什么？中国的国家权力在民族和周边地区形成这种动机的过程中扮演了什么角色？在中国主张的民族“多元统一”与偶尔出现的民族间和国际摩擦和紧张关系之间的对抗中，跋涉流动将如何影响国家建设？尽管政府严格审查各种形式的中国媒体对西藏的宗教和神话的描述，但徒步旅行者在分享他们遇到金刚乘佛教和西藏神话的经历方面却享有特殊的自由。奇怪的是，媒体对徒步旅行的关注被当局忽视了，尤其是在新冠疫情期间，这显然违背了中国倡导不动的零新冠政策。西藏在中国一直是一个政治敏感话题，这种表现又如何解释呢？这个案例揭示了中国与整个世界（包括将西藏视为全球关注的个人和团体）互动的模式是什么？本提案将这些徒步旅行实践的问题与先前关于旅游、边境过境、媒体研究以及中国和西藏研究的研究联系起来，其方法和理论框架主要植根于中国人类学，设想对中国和西藏进行全面的调查。

In 2022, almost all mobility was forced to be suspended all over Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). At the same time, flows of tourists, including trekkers from inland China to Tibet, remained consistent with a high presence in both traditional and social media despite exceptionally heavy media censorship on China's strict COVID-19 restrictions in Tibet and population movement during China's almost three-year strict lockdown period. This context frames the concerns of the proposed PhD research project.Such trekking flows are a long-lasting and increasingly known tourism form in China, which has received little scholarly attention. For decades, thousands of travellers have spent months trekking to Tibet from inland China (usually departing from Sichuan) regardless of the nearly 1,500-mile journey with complex terrain crossing the 'Tibetan-Yi Corridor' (Zang-Yi Zoulang) known in Chinese academia, let alone the considerable financial cost. Questions could then be raised here: what are the meanings of Tibet that motivate trekkers in contemporary Chinese society? What role does China's state power play in forming such motivation at the ethnic and peripheral territory? How will trek flows impact state building in the confrontation between China's assertion of ethnically 'pluralistic unity' and occasionally interethnic and international frictions and tension?Despite the government's heavy censorship of religious and mythological representation of Tibet in all forms of Chinese media, trekkers somehow enjoy exceptional freedom in sharing their experience encountering Vajrayana Buddhist and Tibet myths. It is strange to see the media presence of trekking overlooked by the authority, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it obviously went against China's zero-Covid policy advocating immobility. How could such representation be explained with the fact that Tibet is always a politically sensitive topic in China? How should the local Tibetans be positioned in all such images against a broader context of the transnational political movement which campaigns for Tibet's true autonomy? What does this case reveal about the pattern of China's interactions with the world at large (including people and groups who see Tibet as a global concern)?This proposal connects these issues of trekking practices to previous research on tourism, border crossing, media study, and Chinese and Tibetan studies, with methods and theoretical frameworks primarily rooted in the anthropology of China, envisioning a holistic investigation into China and Tibet.