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

• Applicant: Dr. Franz Xaver Erhard
• Subject Area: Asian Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 508232945

The Divergent Discourses project is a collaborative UK-German research study of a conflict 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 within Tibet and protracted border tensions between China and its neighbours. Not long after Mao Zedong 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, primarily polemical, are not often treated as significant sources for historians. But developments in digital humanities and computational research techniques now allow them to be mined in numerous ways to extract details about events, individuals and ideas that would otherwise be little noticed in these sources. With these new research tools, innumerable pieces of information will be brought together from multiple sources, revealing new information and offering new insights into the history of the time.These innovative tools allow the close study of the two competing discourses that emerged in the 1950s, each with their 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, and the six-decades-long failure of the exile and Chinese leaderships to reach a settlement.The project, 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 largely overlooked documents from libraries in Germany, the UK, 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, annotate and cross-referenced them to allow sophisticated searches and study.The three-year project will lead to new insights about the events that led to the split between the Chinese and Tibetan governments in the 1950s, the arguments and narratives they produced, and how 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.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Ireland, United Kingdom
• Partner Organisation: Arts and Humanities Research Council
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Robert Barnett; Professor Dr. Nathan W. Hill