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

2022年，西藏自治区(TAR)几乎所有的流动都被迫暂停。与此同时，尽管媒体对中国在西藏的严格新冠肺炎限制以及中国近三年的严格封锁期间的人口流动进行了格外严格的审查，但包括从内地到西藏的徒步旅行者在内的游客潮，仍然与传统媒体和社交媒体上的高比例保持一致。这种徒步旅行是中国一种持续时间很长、越来越为人所知的旅游形式，但学术界对此关注甚少。几十年来，数以千计的游客花了几个月的时间从内陆的中国(通常从四川出发)来到西藏，尽管行程近1,500英里，穿越中国学术界所知的西藏-彝族走廊(藏夷走廊)，更不用说巨大的经济成本了。然后，人们可能会在这里提出问题：在当代中国社会，西藏激励徒步旅行者的意义是什么？中国的国家权力在民族地区和周边地区形成这种动机中起到了什么作用？在中国关于民族多元统一的主张与偶尔出现的民族间和国际摩擦与紧张的对峙中，徒步旅行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上关于西藏的宗教和神话表现，徒步旅行者不知何故在分享他们接触金刚乘佛教和西藏神话的经历时享有特殊的自由。奇怪的是，徒步旅行被当局忽视了媒体的存在，特别是在新冠肺炎大流行期间，这显然违反了中国倡导不动的零寒政策。在中国看来，西藏一直是一个政治敏感话题，这样的表述如何解释呢？在争取西藏真正自治的跨国政治运动的更广泛背景下，当地藏人在所有这些形象中应该如何定位？这一案例揭示了中国与整个世界(包括将西藏视为全球关注的人和团体)的互动模式。这一建议将这些徒步旅行实践问题与以往的旅游、边境、媒体研究、汉语藏学研究联系起来，以主要植根于中国人类学的方法和理论框架，设想对中国和西藏进行全面调查。

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.