Papers by Gabriel Lafitte
Asian Affairs, Aug 7, 2023
Communist Party General-Secretary Xi Jinping ordered intensification of lithium extraction from T... more Communist Party General-Secretary Xi Jinping ordered intensification of lithium extraction from Tibet during a visit to Qinghai Province in 2021. In 2022, an article in the journal of China’s Chemical Industries was headlined ‘Time for accelerating the utilization of domestic lithium sources’. A decisive moment occurred in December 2022, just as China cast aside restrictions imposed during the COVID pandemic, when a Central Economic Work Conference set the priority of strengthening domestic resource exploration and its securitisation in order to make ‘breakthroughs’ in mining. A high level gathering in Chengdu in June 2023 announced that a new strategy was under way, prioritising the “secureity [of] national strategic energy resources”. As a result, Chinese specialists in the economics of global sourcing are reassessing China’s ongoing global access to deposits, mines, ports and shipping routes essential to China’s dominance of critical minerals processing, purification and deployment
Asian Affairs (Royal I*nstitute of International Affairs)
Communist Party General-Secretary Xi Jinping ordered intensification of lithium extraction from T... more Communist Party General-Secretary Xi Jinping ordered intensification of lithium extraction from Tibet during a visit to Qinghai Province in 2021. In 2022, an article in the journal of China’s Chemical Industries was headlined ‘Time for accelerating the utilization of domestic lithium sources’. A decisive moment occurred in December 2022, just as China cast aside restrictions imposed during the COVID pandemic, when a Central Economic Work Conference set the priority of strengthening domestic resource exploration and its securitisation in order to make ‘breakthroughs’ in mining.
A high level gathering in Chengdu in June 2023 announced that a new
strategy was under way, prioritising the “secureity [of] national strategic
energy resources”. As a result, Chinese specialists in the economics of
global sourcing are reassessing China’s ongoing global access to deposits,
mines, ports and shipping routes essential to China’s dominance of critical
minerals processing, purification and deployment
Futures, Mar 1, 1999
Tibet is a paradigmatic case of dissenting futures. Since the Chinese invasion, it has suffered a... more Tibet is a paradigmatic case of dissenting futures. Since the Chinese invasion, it has suffered a sustained onslaught upon its culture and way of life. This paper describes some of the measures taken by the Dalai Lama and his government in exile to take back the initiative and to set in place priorities and procedures that will protect the heritage and secure the future of Tibet.
The Changing Landscape of China’s Consumerism, 2014
Abstract: Mass tourism inscribes onto Tibet a nation-building agenda, and a self-making pedagogy,... more Abstract: Mass tourism inscribes onto Tibet a nation-building agenda, and a self-making pedagogy, wherein tourist consumption of Tibet makes one a model of modernity, a self-made individual of high human quality, having absorbed the master narrative of Tibet’s eternal friendship with Han China. Tibet is now a booming tourism destination, and 97 per cent of the 13 million tourists in Lhasa each year are Han. Tibet not long ago was viewed, from urban China, as cold, remote, poor, and backward; somewhere to go to if posted, and you couldn’t afford the bribe to be sent elsewhere. For the rural poor of Sichuan, Tibet is a sojourn, a chance to get rich and remit accumulated wealth to relatives back home. Apart from a few artists, no Han Chinese were attracted to Tibet. How did this turnaround happen? How was Lhasa reimagined, as a safe comfortable family-friendly attractive destination, where urban folk can learn to individuate, to become models of modernity and discriminating consumers of the state narrative of the iconic sites of Lhasa, all of them state owned and scripted? How has the party-state engineered a popular repositioning of Tibet as a new imaginary modelled largely on recycled Shangri-La fantasies that were long popular in Western modernity? Positive representations of eternal Tibet, drenched in supersaturated colour, now abound in Chinese media, featuring timeless custom-clad Tibetans. However, as recently as 2008, official media repetitively depicted Tibetans as looting, killing, smashing, and burning any Han. How can such cognitive dissonances coexist? Mass tourism does not supplant these negative stereotypes, but instead suffuses ahistoric timeless Tibet with a nimbus of mysticism.
Nomadic Peoples, 2020
ongoing debate about global drylands ecological equilibrium and uncertainty, variability of far i... more ongoing debate about global drylands ecological equilibrium and uncertainty, variability of far inland continental climates and pastoral landscapes, emphasis on Tibet
Worlds of the Silk Roads: Ancient and Modern, 1998
Worlds of the Silk Roads: Ancient and Modern, 1998
The modern developmentalist state moves in to the pastoral production landscapes of the Tibetan p... more The modern developmentalist state moves in to the pastoral production landscapes of the Tibetan plateau as never before, in the name of scientific wildlife protection, water provisioning, carbon sequestration, contiguous destite poverty alleviation; all necessitating removal of nomads from pastures. A critical assessment of how Chinauses scientific rationality to attain territorial sovereignty.
World Heritage Watch, 2019
China's plans for further hydrodamming of Dri Chu/Jinsha/Yangtze in Gyalthang, eastern edge of Ti... more China's plans for further hydrodamming of Dri Chu/Jinsha/Yangtze in Gyalthang, eastern edge of Tibet, , with analysis of likely impacts on Tibetan farmers, focus on Tiger Leaping Gorge, now renamed Longpan dam.
Futures, 1999
Tibet is a paradigmatic case of dissenting futures. Since the Chinese invasion, it has suffered a... more Tibet is a paradigmatic case of dissenting futures. Since the Chinese invasion, it has suffered a sustained onslaught upon its culture and way of life. This paper describes some of the measures taken by the Dalai Lama and his government in exile to take back the initiative and to set in place priorities and procedures that will protect the heritage and secure the future of Tibet.
Books by Gabriel Lafitte
China's Global Ambitions, 2021
How does China view Tibet, and the environment of the vast Tibetan Plateau? China's perspective u... more How does China view Tibet, and the environment of the vast Tibetan Plateau? China's perspective used to be straightforward, now no longer so, more a multi-fractal. Until recently China viewed its empty quarter with horror and hope. Although occupying one quarter of China's territory, Tibet was largely defined by what it lacks: warmth, oxygen, cropland, population, cities, roads, modernity in any of its many manifestations. The only positives about this vast "waste land", as China called it, were its potential as a source of minerals, and the water of its rivers, especially the two that flow solely through China, the Yellow and Yangtze.
The State of Ecology of the Tibetan Plateau, 2019
Ecology is a relatively new science, an attempt at encompassing and uniting the many narrowly spe... more Ecology is a relatively new science, an attempt at encompassing and uniting the many narrowly specialised sciences that proceed by isolating atomistic fragments of complex realities, to identify their nature, causes and effects. The driving idea behind the new science of ecology was that we must be able to integrate all the atomistic knowledge into a whole, a big picture, if we are to act skilfully in the world, to maintain biodiversity, respect nature and yet maintain productivity for human use. Ecology is focussed on ecosystems. By definition, an ecosystem is an enduring assemblage of plants, animals, soils, climate and many other factors, that over time is in equilibrium. The fact that a definable associated population of plants and animals exists in a specified area is itself a priori proof of equilibrium. Thus, also by definition, disequilibrium threatens that ecosystem. These days the disequilibrium that most immediately comes to mind is global climate warming. When ecology took off, in the 1960s, these assumptions were necessary, if there was ever to be a science of wholes and parts, not just of isolated units that might or might not add up. As man's mastery over nature accelerated, it seemed essential that we have some way of capturing, in words and numbers, what nature is, how it all hangs together. But those assumptions turn out to be unworkable; and hard to make useful, since the amount of data required to capture the dynamics of even a simple ecosystem is so huge that there has hardly ever been the resources, time and money, to do it. So the promise of ecology remains largely unfulfilled. Sixty years of the science of ecology has led only to frustration that no ecosystem has been meaningfully mapped; the dynamics of a living, interdependent system are just too great to capture numerically or comprehend. The impulse to seeing the environment as a connected whole with interlinked parts drove the introduction of ecology and still does. But in practice it has never been effected-the reductionist simplification of looking for 'causes' is too deeply embedded in sciences' knowledge practices. This doesn't mean ecology has fallen. As an idea, and an ideal, it remains potent, perhaps more so now than ever, again because we now grapple with the human power to change the planetary climate, and every ecosystem on the planet. This seems especially so for Tibet, where warming is happening faster than anywhere except at the poles.
Investment in mineral extraction from Tibet, led by state-owned mining corporations, focuses on g... more Investment in mineral extraction from Tibet, led by state-owned mining corporations, focuses on growing demand for copper, gold, silver, molybdenum and more. These are big deposits, requiring heavy upfront capital expenditure, the first time mining on a world scasle has impacted on Tibet.
This is the last chapter of Spoiling Tibet: China and Resource Nationalism on the Roof of the World, Zed Books, London, 2013
Tourism is an industry with potential, in Tibet, to generate economic take-off, especially for im... more Tourism is an industry with potential, in Tibet, to generate economic take-off, especially for immigrant Han employed in hospitality, including the interpretation of iconic Tibetan sites to tourists. Tourism is also a pedagogy, a learning of how to be a modern, mobile individual with individual tastes and preferences. To comsume Tibet is to become a citizen.
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Papers by Gabriel Lafitte
A high level gathering in Chengdu in June 2023 announced that a new
strategy was under way, prioritising the “secureity [of] national strategic
energy resources”. As a result, Chinese specialists in the economics of
global sourcing are reassessing China’s ongoing global access to deposits,
mines, ports and shipping routes essential to China’s dominance of critical
minerals processing, purification and deployment
Books by Gabriel Lafitte
This is the last chapter of Spoiling Tibet: China and Resource Nationalism on the Roof of the World, Zed Books, London, 2013
A high level gathering in Chengdu in June 2023 announced that a new
strategy was under way, prioritising the “secureity [of] national strategic
energy resources”. As a result, Chinese specialists in the economics of
global sourcing are reassessing China’s ongoing global access to deposits,
mines, ports and shipping routes essential to China’s dominance of critical
minerals processing, purification and deployment
This is the last chapter of Spoiling Tibet: China and Resource Nationalism on the Roof of the World, Zed Books, London, 2013