Chinese Settler Colonialism: Empire and Life in the Tibetan Borderlands

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

Carole McGranahan

Published:

2025

Publisher:

Routledge

What does Chinese settler colonialism look like? More precisely, what does Chinese communist settler colonialism look like? In this essay, I consider contemporary Chinese empire in Tibet as a structure of both dispossession and domination, including the loss of state sovereignty. As in situations of empire elsewhere, Tibetan responses to colonization range from consent to new hegemonic politics to outright refusal of them. Given structural limits for cultural and political expression in China, consent, resistance, and refusal necessarily coexist. While this may be true for peoples throughout the People’s Republic of China, the burden of empire places additional forms of oppression on Tibetans. Identifying these forms of oppression as imperial, rather than simply those of a multi‐ethnic state, enables a historical precision commensurate with peoples’ experiences of empire under socialism.

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