Thirty years ago, in his introduction to Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, Steven Harrell wrote of the need for scholars of “the civilizing centers of the East” to “begin making our voices heard in the growing scholarly community discussing civilizing projects generally;” adding that “it would be ironic if a community dedicated to deconstructing the ethnocentric formulations behind its own colonialism ended up excluding colonialisms of other centers” (1994:36).1 Writing some thirty years later, Shu-mei Shih dug into the roots of this enduring myopia: “China has been an empire in the modern sense since the mid-eighteenth century, when it conquered vast lands north and west of “China proper.” This history has been largely hidden from view because of two unacknowledged obsessions: the fetishization of Western empires over other empires and the prevailing discourse of Chinese victimhood at the hands of Western empires” (Shih 2011:709; see also Vickers 2020). Tibetan poet, writer, and activist Tsering Woeser also commented on this phenomenon, citing Chinese scholars who use postcolonialism and its critiques of orientalism to vehemently criticize the Western orientalist Shangri-La mystification of Tibet, blaming the increasing prevalence of exactly the same tropes in China on Western influence, and avoiding questioning the longstanding Chinese demonization of Tibet (2011).2 The potential for postcolonial discourse to be used in such ways was explored over three decades ago by Aijaz Ahmad in a critical essay on Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism (1991).3 While Ahmad lauds Said’s “anti-colonial passion,” he critiques the “monolithic, virtually manichean vision” of Orientalism as a discourse (1991:138) and elucidates how “refusal to engage with the actual history of the non-West […] serves, for Said and for Colonial Discourse Analysis generally, a cultural nationalist purpose in a very paradoxical way” (ibid.:148).

Ethnomusicology has followed the dominant stream of critique of Western colonialism and it would (I hope) be inconceivable for an ethnomusicology program to not entail a focus on Western articulations of race, colonialism, power, and positionality (which is not to say that the discipline is free of racism or its colonial legacies). Yet this has blinded criticality to the colonialism and supremacy of nations beyond “the West” in the kinds of ways analyzed by Ahmad, Shih, Woeser, and others. To take a recent example, Alexander Cannon’s book, while richly researched, adopts a framework that analyses creativity in Vietnamese music as being suppressed by a colonialism and imperialism that is solely Western (2022). This ignores the rival Cold War empires that Vietnam became caught up in as the twentieth century proceeded. Indeed, there is just a footnote informing us that it is Mao’s 1940s thinking on art and culture (itself shaped by that of the Soviet Union), which provided the roots for Vietnam’s rigid top-down post-1975 cultural policy of narrowly-defined national music and performing arts troupes (Cannon 2022:149–53 and 241). The longer history of Chinese dominance in the area and on its music, which is key to the Daoist ideas of spontaneity that Cannon identifies as core to creativity, is similarly not discussed in terms of empire (Cannon 2022:57–65). The binarism with which ethnomusicology has focused on musics of the world versus Western classical music has had similar consequences. While achieving real success in countering European cultural supremacy in Western universities, it has contributed to the canonization of hegemonic national musics and the supporting of dominant identities of the “non-West.” The performance basis of ethnomusicology further entwines with this canonization of national traditions as many more ethnomusicologists are trained in and able to teach these styles than the musics of colonized, minority, oppressed or even just regional groups within these countries.

A truly global conception of colonialism is, however, beginning to gain traction in the Western academy, including in ethnomusicology. Chinese rule in the Tibetan regions (which make up 25% of the landmass of the PRC) and those of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia (which together constitute roughly a further 25%) is now more frequently discussed as settler colonialism. This is supported by scholars from and research on such regions, and also the rise of the study of global Indigeneity.4 The particularly dire situation in Xinjiang in recent years, with the incarceration of 10% or more of the Uyghur population, has also been a spur. Indeed, it was at the suggestion of the scholar of Xinjiang, Rachel Harris, that the panel Decolonizing Chinese Minority/Indigenous Music was included within the 2022 symposium Decolonizing East Asia in Music Research and Pedagogy from which this special issue emerged.5 The intense securitization, repression of minorities, and shrinking freedom of expression in other nation-states, including Turkey and India, has similarly triggered new waves of critical scholarship and given greater prominence to little-known colonial histories and oppressed groups.6 Such developments as these encourage academics to deal with their own positionality in multiplicitous terms rather than just the binaries of Western colonialism and race.7

A deeper understanding is also gradually growing of how the unitary positions of victimhood vis-à-vis unitary “others” (whether internal or external) that are used in nationalisms across the world are inherently narcissistic (Cichocka and Cislak 2020; Federico et. al. 2022). For many years, progressive activists and academics have in various ways called for a politics in which identity is not “foundational” (which is not to say it should not have a role), but instead, “alliance, coalition and solidarity,” to quote Judith Butler on the topic.8 I would also like to posit that the key tenet of Mahayana Tibetan Buddhism – compassion – be utilized. Compassion is essential in giving space and voice to the many people in the world who are colonized and minoritized, many of whom are facing drastic forms of assimilation and erasure and have virtually no representation in the academy. It is also an opposing force to narcissism, binarism, and entrenched conflicts and positions of nationalism and identity politics (including on the left). It is something that can help forge an acceptance of people as simultaneously members of social groups who are victims of oppression, perpetrators of oppression, and a myriad of other uneven and layered configurations of identity, groupness, and power. This in turn opens knowledge production to a far more realistic and just conception of human history.

I write this article on Chinese colonialism in Tibet with such a non-binary and compassionate politics in mind. Over the first two sections, I lay out, at the level of music, the basic historical processes of colonial rule in the Tibetan regions under China’s control. I offer glimpses of indigenous Tibetan musical lifeworlds and how these were transformed into minority ones through a cultural as well as military annexation of Tibetan lands. In the third section, focusing on pop music, I explore how Tibetans negotiate and counter the colonial thinning and diminution of culture in both confrontational and non-confrontational ways. I then turn to Tsewang Norbu, a Tibetan pop musician who self-immolated in political protest, probing the ways in which the colonial space suffocates, even for those who achieve marked success within it. Lastly, I address the immense stifling and restricting of research on Tibetan music and Tibet more generally given the degree to which China is authoritarian as well as colonial. I conclude by looking at what can be done to decolonize intellectual spaces relating to Tibetans and their music, and those of other still-colonized and minoritized peoples. While I respect the critiques of trivializing the term ‘decolonization’ through metaphorical uses, in a situation such as that of the Tibetan ancestral lands under Chinese rule, where wholesale assimilation is so intensive and so current and with the broader myopia regarding “non-Western” colonialism, this is an urgent project.9

It is of course inconceivable that in the foreseeable future, China will make the lands of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians or other minorities within the PRC self-governing entities, or, in the case of the Tibetan indigenous lands, grant the meaningful autonomy called for by the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan exile establishment. In fact, even the autonomy enshrined within the constitution of the PRC and the 1984 Law on Regional Ethnic Autonomy (instituted only in fragile and uneven forms) has been forcefully eroded since Xi Jinping came to power in 2014. It is not just that the state has focused so intently on propagating textbook colonial representations of minorities rather than working to sensitize the majority population towards a genuine understanding of them and their complex histories, but that now even this “permitted difference” (Schein 2000) is being superseded by a drive to simply assimilate and construct a one-China culture that is Han Chinese (Anderson and Byler 2019; Leibold 2019; Topgyal 2024). The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that governs the PRC has the power to find a solution but instead, responds to protests against repression with more repression, and yet more propaganda. Such protests are blamed formulaically on “the Dalai clique” and foreign powers, and those who participate are deemed to be ungrateful for the beneficence of China (Yeh 2013a), or enemies of the motherland, and may be subject to vigilante retaliation, arrest, or imprisonment.

Nevertheless, amidst the present escalation of repression and erasure to a level routinely referred to as “Cultural Revolution 2.0,” there are possibilities for the awakening of a decolonial consciousness regarding Tibetans and other minoritized ethnic groups of China. There is widespread anger and cynicism amidst ordinary middle-class Han Chinese at the surveillance and control by the state at levels previously experienced only by minoritized groups, and similarly, at the reneging of the “one country two-systems” policy in Hong Kong and the violent crushing of protests.10 Large numbers of Chinese people have left China, “run away,” as it is termed. The dysfunction of an authoritarian government that allows no critical voices also came sharply into view with the protracted COVID lockdowns. There is, in addition, a small but rising discomfort against the treatment of minoritized peoples expressed, albeit cautiously, by China-centric scholars and intellectuals (e.g. Sun 2020). There are certainly Chinese people who do not want what is happening to be China’s legacy, or would not if they were better informed. One of the earliest to equate the situation in Tibet with (Western) colonialism was a Chinese government official, Hu Yaobang, in a speech made in Tibet in 1980 that criticized the devastation wrought by CCP policies, which he had seen with his own eyes. This heralded the post-Cultural Revolution opening-up in Tibet, though Hu Yaobang was later criticized (see Shakya 1999:382).

At present, as assimilation and cultural and religious repression are again being pursued at fever pitch, I have witnessed real curiosity and openness as well as empathy and understanding for minorities amongst ordinary Chinese people who have left China that I had not seen before. I have also seen an ability to discuss Chinese colonialism rather than to deny or dismiss it as “China bashing” or Cold War rhetoric, repeating the old tropes of victimhood at the hands of the West and a “settler move to innocence” (Tuck & Yang 2012). My aim in this article is to nurture this nascent decolonial consciousness, curiosity, and compassion within the work we do in the academy by bringing to light Tibetan social and cultural realities and perspectives in and through music, as much as I can given the severely restrictive research environment.

Glimpses of indigenous Tibetan musical lifeworlds prior to China’s annexation

Following the fall of the Tibetan empire in CE 842, the history of the myriad political formations of ethnographic Tibet (an area spanning Tibetan areas of the PRC; Bhutan; and parts of India, Nepal and Pakistan) has been extremely complex. A range of state formations existed that were governed by a variety of religious and lay rulers, in addition to effectively self-governing groups of pastoralists and agriculturalists. Even the largest of the states to emerge – that ruled by the Dalai Lamas from 1642 – was not highly centralized, with, rather, layered and uneven sovereignty. Smaller states, such as those that constituted the eastern Tibetan region known as Kham, also had many “subordinate centers of power” (Samuel 1993:83).11 Although there were at times formal relationships of allegiance to other states, this did not, however, constitute direct rule or sovereignty in the modern sense.12 Goldstein summarizes the situation of the state of Tibet ruled by the Dalai Lamas in his pathbreaking history:

(T)here can be no question regarding the subordination of Tibet to Manchu-ruled China following the chaotic era of the 6^th and 7^th Dalai Lamas in the first decades of the eighteenth century. However, as the Ch’ing dynasty weakened, so did its role in Tibetan affairs. By the mid-nineteenth century, if not earlier, Manchu Chinese influence was miniscule. […] Chinese influence in the Lhasa government via the Manchu commissioners (ambans) was also marginal and, for example, the selection of the 13^th Dalai Lama was made without recourse to the lottery system instituted by the Manchu emperor in 1793 (1989:44).

Under the rule of the 13^th Dalai Lama, this state moved towards a modern, centralized form, and “unquestionably controlled its own internal and external affairs during the period from 1913 to 1951 and repeatedly attempted to secure recognition and validation of its de facto autonomy/independence,” ultimately failing to do so (ibid.:815).13

While the lack of centralized or unified authority and the vast expanses of territory alone meant that it is not possible to talk of a unitary “Tibetan society,” it can be said that a “continuous social field” of Tibetan societies existed (Samuel 1993:586, see note 1).14 While not homogenous, Tibetan societies across greater Tibet shared a broad cultural consistency. Most obviously, this included Tibetan Buddhism and the Bönpo religion, the sacred landscape and deities of the indigenous Tibetan religion, the written language and most of the spoken dialects. In musical culture, too, there are overarching forms of coherence and commonality including: the centrality of dance, with much (but not all) songs danced and all dances sung; vast repertoires of songs and dance-songs with richly poetic texts; the pre-eminence of singing, some extremely virtuosic, and often unaccompanied, or in the case of dance-songs, accompanied just with foot stamping or one kind of instrument; clear, projecting vocal timbres, the inflection of instrumental styles by dance movements and rhythms, and voice and instruments combined in heterophony; “filler” vocables such as so ya la (སོ་ཡ་ལ།) inserted in songs, or in the case of dance-songs, lyrics that indicate dance moves such as chig nyi sum (གཅིག་གཉིས་གསུམ་ “one two three”) or yas kor and yon kor (གཡོན་སྐོར་ / གཡས་སྐོར་ “circle to the right/left”); dance-songs structured at least in part by antiphonal groups of men and women; and a gracefully grounded dance style with arm gestures that circle in or out from the body in a myriad ways and do not usually go above the shoulders and steps that are not generally acrobatic.15

We can also trace in specific historical terms how such a continuous field has been shaped at the level of Tibetan musical culture via a crisscross of migrations associated with Buddhism (the major vector of power). This contrasts with the centralized mapping of a modern state that is imposed increasingly intensely today, drawing Tibetans into China (Morcom 2011). During fieldwork in Tibet from 2003 to 2007, I learned how dances of Labrang and surrounding areas of Amdo had come from Ba-lithang in Kham in 1920 when a high lama (the 5^th Jamyang Zhepa) arrived from there as a small boy with an entourage to take up his seat at Labrang monastery (Morcom 2011). Over a longer history, the iconically Amdo genre of modern songs, dunglen (རྡུང་ལེང་), originated from the lute traditions of Labrang monastery. The Tibetan lute, dranyen (སྒྲ་སྙན་), is not native to Amdo, and is known as the “Ngari dranyen” there, specifying its origin in the far west of Tibet. It is said to have arrived in Labrang monastery with another high lama and his entourage (the 3^rd Gungthang Rinpoche, b.1762), who came from Ngari. Similarly, what is today enshrined as dodro (རྡོ་བྲོ་ ), the dance of Kandze, an important county in Kham, has an unmistakable resemblance in its music and steps to the dranyen dances of the Lhasa and Shigatse areas. As I heard, the 9^th Panchen Lama, who died in 1937 in the northwestern part of Kham, Jyekundo, was accompanied by people from Shigatse (the location of his monastic seat, Tashi Lhunpo). After his death, they passed through Kandze and some settled there. There are comparable trajectories that brought Lhasa’s iconic Tibetan opera to parts of Kham and Amdo (Henrion Dourcy 2001; Morcom 2011), or gar (གར་), the repertoire from Ladakh performed in Lhasa for the Dalai Lamas (Trewin 1995). I have no doubt that many, many more interconnected lines of musical traditions would be found if more research were possible.

Oral sung poetry, abundant in regions across Greater Tibet, embodies deeper cultural patterns which evidence not just the existence of a distinct (though not uniform) autochthonous Tibetan culture, but an unmistakably indigenous one. While the “environmental stewardship and ecological wisdom” of Tibetans gained from living and working on their ancestral lands gives them a strong resemblance to other Indigenous groups across the world, the term was little used by Tibetans (Yeh 2007:71). It was too weak for the demands of the Tibet movement outside Tibet, which sought full nationhood and independence from China. Within Tibet, the official term minzu (“nationality”) set the parameters for debate, with China’s anachronistic assertion of always having been a multicultural country denying the existence of Indigenous people (Yeh 2007).16 This is changing, and scholars from Tibet and other minoritized peoples of China are claiming an Indigenous position.17

A widespread feature of indigenous oral poetry from across the vast Greater Tibetan region is the use of parallel stanzas, something found in the earliest-known Tibetan poetry in the Dunhuang manuscripts which date from the fifth to eleventh centuries (Sorensen 1990:12–3). These parallel stanzas delineate in more or less complete ways the sacred, spatial, and human structures of an indigenous cosmos or lifeworld. An example of an eight-stanza dance-song collected in the early twentieth century in South Tibet by the Italian scholar Giuseppe Tucci begins with the three jewels of Buddhism (Buddha, Dharma and Sangha), then subsequent stanzas substitute protector deities (pre-Buddhist deities, most notably mountains), the Buddhist teacher (lama), the local secular ruler (the minister), and humans (Tucci 1966[1949]:95–6). Through such parallelism, Tibetan songs also integrate sacred and secular forms of authority and human society with land and animals, both mythical and real and wild and domestic; some songs span just the sky or mountain tops down to the earth, with their animal and human inhabitants. These songs thereby manifest ten drel (རྟེན་འབྲེལ་) or “interdependent connection” and auspiciousness (Morcom 2015). Moreover, the poetry is frequently embellished with similes or hyperbolizing terms (to use Zla ba sgrol ma’s word [2012]) for people, animals, homes, or aspects of the landscape. In abundant sung and danced poetry, therefore, the lifeworld of ordinary Tibetans is lived and experienced as magnificent, rich, and vast. A house-building song from Kham, sung by men as they ram earth to make walls, shows the grandeur and indigenous interconnection of humans with the natural, sacred, mythical, and worked environment:

The rammers resembling southern dragons built a wall, resembling the blue sky.

The rammers resembling white-chested eagles built a wall, resembling a white rocky mountain.

The rammers resembling khu lo birds built a wall, resembling a young juniper tree.

The rammers resembling golden fish built a wall, resembling a river.

The rammers resembling snow lions built a wall, resembling a glacier.

The rammers resembling brown-faced wild yaks built a wall, resembling a brown rocky mountain.

The rammers resembling fierce tigers built a wall, resembling a forest.

(Zla ba sgrol ma 2012:209)

The transformation of indigenous arts into minority arts: the Chinese state performing arts troupes

While China and Tibet saw an ebb and flow of power relations for well over a millennium of documented history, this was not direct rule or day-to-day imposition of cultural and societal norms, but rather tributary allegiance to overlords. China and Tibet were, as Tsering Shakya describes, “analogous to two overlapping circles;” this changed only as Western powers became involved in Asia and “the traditional Confucian-dominated polity” gave way to “a more occidental type of political system which produced a Republican China and the growth of Chinese nationalism” (1999:xxiii). Shakya continues, “The new leaders of China sought to intrude into Tibet and transform the traditional relationship into a far more encompassing one between a central government and a local government” (ibid.:xxiii). In 1950–51, the People’s Liberation Army annexed “Tibet” (which I now use to refer to all the Tibetan indigenous areas of the PRC for the sake of brevity). In the initial years following the founding of the PRC, the CCP wooed traditional Tibetan elites and engaged in careful diplomacy in addition to divide-and-rule tactics and military attacks (Shakya 1999; McGranahan 2010; Weiner 2020). In 1955, however, in Kham and Amdo, a definitive rift opened up with the forced implementation of reforms, including collectivization (which led to famine) and land redistribution (which would bring an end to monasteries, the central point of Tibetan society). A full-scale revolt started in Kham and spread to all Tibetan areas. In 1959, there was a massive uprising in Lhasa and the Dalai Lama fled to India followed by some 80,000 Tibetans. The Khampa revolt itself continued into a guerilla war lasting until 1974, gaining support from the CIA as an anti-communist front (Shakya 1999; McGranahan 2010). Rather than ruling through consent, as historian Dawa Norbu puts it, “the fact is Beijing has ruled Tibet by sheer force” (1997:xiv).

The military annexation was followed by a cultural one, a process to transform Tibetans into a minority nationality and an “integral part” of China. Music and dance, with their effectiveness in performing new identities into being (Turino 1999) were a key part of this. A centralized system of professional song and dance troupes modified the performing arts of all officially recognized minorities, subsuming them into the same overarching Chinese national style, itself modelled on Soviet socialist realism (Rees 2000). This involves ballet as the basis of dance training, fundamentally changing and erasing the character of the Tibetan indigenous dance style. Light, floaty, silky, brightly-colored costumes, as opposed to heavy (not entirely uniform) Tibetan clothes or costumes made of woolen fabrics in earthy colors and brocades, further enhance this. Voices are often (though not always) similarly trained beyond recognition to adopt a sinicized and/or bel canto sound, and Tibetan instruments are used within orchestras of Western and Chinese instruments if at all. Within this deep rescripting of style and identity, ethnic difference appears only in shallow reifications and stereotypical tropes. For Tibetans, these include khatak (ཁ་བཏགས་ white ceremonial scarfs), yak, so ya la vocables in songs, and excessively long sleeves in the costumes of the performing troupes, an exaggeration of a feature of the traditional clothing of some regions. The focus is on the spectacle of costumes and dance formations rather than the poetry and the rich meanings of sacred places and people and Tibetan lifeworlds. The wholesale professionalization by these troupes of music and dance that had been performed mostly by ordinary nomads and farmers itself also represents a change. With Tibetan performing arts, this moreover enshrined instrumental music and singing as separate specialisms, unravelling the organic whole of Tibetan dance-songs where vocal phrasing and emphasis interlock with body movements, foot stamping, and instrumental styles (when there are instruments). Instead, dancers who do not sing perform with floaty balletic movements to mostly pre-recorded music, sometimes just instrumental music.18

The modified performing arts subordinate and re-orient Tibetans to be centripetally connected to China, just one standardized minority spoke in the wheel, extracting them from their own cosmos where they embody auspiciousness and an interdependent cosmos of Indigenous and Buddhist deities, the natural environment, and mythical, wild, and domestic animals.19 Instead of a lifeworld that descends from the sky and the tops of local or distant protector mountains down to the forests, lakes, nomadic pastures and ground of the villages where people work and gather, Tibetans are figuratively or explicitly turned towards Beijing, or, in the old revolutionary songs, to Mao.20 Rather than the deeply-rooted social, religious and political meanings of traditional repertoire, modified songs and dances in state propaganda serve as infantilizing metonyms for the putative joy and gratitude of Tibetans and other minorities within China. These diminutive representations are still propagated intensively in China, and Chinese citizens, and indeed Tibetans themselves, absorb them.

In addition to propagation, the role of state troupes in recasting Tibetans as a Chinese minority through the performing arts has taken place via censorship. This was particularly extreme during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when ultimately, only revolutionary songs and eight model operas were permitted throughout the whole of China, and there was extreme suppression of minority cultures.21 In the period of rehabilitation and opening-up that followed, censorship was reserved for explicit challenges to the state, and traditional performing arts and other customs began to be revived with the efforts of religious leaders and ordinary Tibetans. Some lower-level state troupes peopled by local Tibetans, notably at county level, have played a role in sustaining traditions and creating new ones on Tibetan terms, and people continue to try to protect traditional culture. Tibetans working in state offices have also managed to work in some ways towards modernity on Tibetan terms as I describe below with pop music. However, there is no overarching support of traditional Tibetan performing arts. Thus, while traditional Chinese music is developed and flourishes with institutions and funding, for minorities there are only the sinicized versions. The ballet training for dancers and sinicized or bel canto vocal training for singers itself is tantamount to a death sentence for the continuity of genuine traditional Tibetan performing arts, though perceived as an improvement on backward minority culture in the Chinese colonial framework.

Since around 2000, new threats to traditional performing arts have come in the form of the breakneck transformation of rural life through state-sponsored economic development, the fencing of pastures, the settlement of nomads, the increasing penetration of mass media, and more recently, the rapid undermining of Tibetan language via the closure of local schools, the ending of mother-tongue education, and the sending of even very young children to Chinese-language boarding schools, some far away from Tibet. While the crude, blanket censorship of the socialist period is over, the climate for Tibetan civil society in terms of culture and religion is actively repressive, although political dissent and attempts to protect or assert cultural identity continue. At the same time, the state’s style of dance has become embedded in contemporary Tibetan culture, including popular culture that is not produced directly by the state. This is very apparent in pop gorshey (སྒོར་གཞས་ “circle [dance-]songs”), an immense craze amongst ordinary Tibetans in Tibet and the Tibetan diaspora.22 As I argue elsewhere (Morcom 2007), in the post-Maoist period where society has been transformed by market reforms and migration to urban centers and new forms of mobility are possible for some, the professional training, gloss, and coded modernity and development of the state troupes has become appealing, as traditional Tibetan performing arts are cast in terms of backwardness. Even counter-nationalism and protest inevitably incorporate much of the structures and aesthetics of the modernity China imposed on Tibet, as we see with popular music, which emerges as a complex political zone. This is a familiar story of the internalizing of colonial discourse and norms by those subject to its rule.23

Numerous Tibetans find the professional dance or music training China offers to be fulfilling and gain employment through it. But the point is that the Chinese occupation has denied the possibility for a widely-instituted modernity on Tibetan terms across the board – whether rapidly, or slowly, and with disagreements among modernizers and traditionalists alike and Tibetans of different regions, and the inevitable problems faced by linguistic and religious minorities that are common to all nations. Therefore, rather than innovation-minded Tibetans being able to seek collaborations with Chinese performers (or those of other countries or ethnicities), the intensely sinicizing state troupes have been the blanket option for remunerated, professional, modern performing arts, ultimately coalescing with popular culture. In an independent or truly autonomous Tibet, Tibetan culture would not be situated as backwards or subordinated through such a towering, sinicizing modernity, but would have its own institutions. An article on the language protests in Amdo in 2010 and Tibetan education articulates this well:

(I)n Tibet as in most other minority regions, no truly local leadership has been built up and no modern social space emerged that could have fostered local culture and economy and hence provided jobs and entire social sectors that are genuinely Tibetan and which would take place in the Tibetan language. Instead of autonomous and locally-rooted development, a culture of dependence has emerged that makes the mastering of the economically, politically and ethnically dominant idiom the basis for the success of almost any activity (apart from the remnants of the traditional religious ones) (TibetInfoNet 2010).

Cultural assertion, pride, protest, and political complexity in Tibetan pop music

In contrast to traditional performing arts, Tibetan pop music is flourishing and constitutes a prominent dimension of Tibetan contemporary cultural pride and expression as well as resistance to colonial rule. Two main streams emerged initially in the 1980s: from Amdo, dunglen (“to play and sing”), songs sung to the accompaniment of the dranyen (Tibetan lute) or mandolin; and from Lhasa, songs sung with synthesized orchestral accompaniment in the style of the Taiwanese star Teresa Teng. Both these continue to evolve, particularly dunglen (though more with rural Tibetans), and newer styles have emerged, notably, gorshey from the early 2000s (Morcom 2007), and more recently, hip-hop (Buer 2019). Both dunglen and the Lhasa style emerged from state institutions and illustrate what was possible in the post-Cultural Revolution phase when there was far more space for cultural expression (Henrion-Dourcy 2005; Morcom 2007; 2008). In the post-Mao period, Tibetan cultural cadres in government offices were able to nurture authentically Tibetan forms of modern literature, poetry, popular music and comedy. Crucially, this generation of workers was immersed in Tibetan society (notably, in the life of rural areas where the majority of Tibetans lived), as well as having received a modern education, including high levels of Tibetan literacy (Thurston 2017). Unlike the state-created modified Tibetan performing arts that locate Tibet peripherally as a minority of China, Tibetan pop music centers Tibet in its own world.

Tibetan pop music is widely recognized as a powerful medium of Tibetan assertion or even protest. The songs of the famous Lhasa singer Dadon, for example, use the sentimentality of Teresa Teng’s style for profound expressions of Tibetan identity and emotion, and dunglen articulates similar feelings though a grassroots Tibetan style that is close to traditional music.24 However, it is Tibetan-centric in a different manner to traditional oral poetry. Rather than embedding Tibetans within the hierarchically-aligned expanses of the traditional cosmos, pop songs typically position the singer as looking out onto and praising the magnificent Tibetan land and its culture, which is described in richly primordial terms and imbued with Buddhist concepts and imagery.25 This is a modern and nationalist (though not necessarily separatist) vision of land and culture (Morcom 2015). Dunglen songs are more deeply and consistently embedded in rural life, using traditional oral poetry or aspects of it more frequently than found in pop songs. However, their perspective is still generally modern and nationalist, even if they incorporate expressions of indigenous relationships to the land.

The intensity, richness, and pride in the vision of Tibet expressed in dunglen and pop music is remarkable, and the lyrics of some songs are borderline in terms of political permissibility, such as praising the three traditional provinces of Tibet – Kham, Amdo and U-Tsang – which are not recognized by China. Metaphor is also used widely to express sentiments that are off-limits (Morcom 2004; Henrion Dourcy 2005; Jabb 2015). Additionally, there is a prolific sector of dunglen and pop songs that are eulogies to lamas, many produced by monasteries. These are direct expressions of religious devotion, including visuals of lamas, monasteries, and crowds of Tibetans coming to revere and listen to them (Gayley 2016). The state would never produce such music itself, not only because it is atheist but because religion is the seat of power in old Tibet and the most strongly unifying force of Tibetans. There are also songs that overtly protest and denounce Chinese rule or call for the return of the Dalai Lama, and singers of such songs are arrested and punished.26

Pop music is a lens onto Tibetan desires, centered within their own world in multiple ways. It became even more Tibet-focused around 2005 when singers started to sing only or predominantly in Tibetan. From the 1990s, many Tibetan singers had been singing in Chinese, enabling them to tap into the Chinese language market, though some only sang in Tibetan (dunglen was always only sung in Tibetan). In an even more dramatic expression of Tibetan loyalty over economic interests, in 2006, Tibetans across the plateau started to burn large pyres of costly and illegally-smuggled fur pelts that adorned their clothes and signified wealth and prestige after the Dalai Lama spoke strongly against this practice (TibetInfoNet 2006; Yeh 2013b). In 2008, there was a massive uprising against Chinese occupation, which was crushed, and from 2009, a wave of self-immolations began, with the last, the 160^th, in May 2022 (Shakya 2012). After the uprising, the assertion of Indigenous culture and language also consolidated into a movement across the plateau to speak “the pure father tongue” (pha skad tsang ma, ཕ་སྐད་གཙང་མ་), wear Tibetan clothes and support Tibetan businesses. Pop gorshey has been central to this, even though the style is heavily influenced by that of the state troupes.

In a time of extraordinary collective pain and repression, it is not hard to understand why Tibetans love songs that embody profound pride in being Tibetan and showcase the beauty and richness of their land and culture, or why the angrier hip-hop songs appeal. However, it is surprising that they have been able to flourish. In fact, Tibetan pop music and dunglen have been performed in government-sponsored festivals and televised programs to celebrate Tibetan New Year and other occasions. Tibetan music is widely propagated on state media.27 There are many possible reasons for this apparent paradox. Pride in Tibetan culture does not contravene the basic structures of Chinese multiculturalism, though it does increase space within it, and with the rolling back of this policy under Xi Jinping, these songs are subversive. While the more recent hip-hop-influenced corpus exhibits some shifts, Tibetan pop songs have largely shown the Tibetan land looking pristine, Tibetans looking well-to-do and singing and dancing (one of the favorite ways minorities are depicted by the state), and Tibetan culture and language as flourishing, and moreover, they have incorporated aspects of the state troupe style in costumes and background dancers.28 The same is the case for (pop) gorshey. Outright protest music videos have very different aesthetics to the glossy brochure-style vision of Tibet of mainstream pop and many circulated in the years following 2008 (see Morcom [forthcoming]). Notably, in comparison to pop music, Tibetan language and religion face drastic restrictions. New education policies in particular will have a catastrophic impact on Tibetan language and culture.29 This will in turn affect pop music, as will the transformation of rural life. Indeed, it is the waves of Tibetans whose voices and musicality have developed in villages and nomadic pastures that have done so much to shape Tibetan pop music and dunglen into such rich and distinctive genres. In another generation or two, there may be little of this basis left.

Tsewang Norbu (1996–2022)

On 25 February 2022, the Tibetan pop star Tsewang Norbu self-immolated in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa and died around a week later from his injuries.30 He was a celebrity, and far from the image the state likes to project of political disaffection lying in socio-economic marginality or as fomented by the Dalai Lama or Western powers. Tsewang Norbu was dazzlingly talented, able to sing in Tibetan, Chinese and English, and played guitar and piano too. He could sing an array of styles ranging from the virtuosic unaccompanied songs of the high nomadic plains of Nagchu where he was from, to R&B, Mandopop, and Elton John covers. He was an incredibly captivating performer, alive with energy, talent, and great vistas of emotional expression. He had participated in numerous national singing competitions, gaining high praise from judges and audiences and was one of Tibet’s most loved young singers, also popular amongst Chinese listeners. His father was a composer in a government troupe, and his mother rocketed to fame in 2002 after winning a national contest with a pop version of a traditional song from Nagchu and she went on to become a singer in the national-level Song and Dance Troupe of the General Political Department of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Norbu would have grown up middle-class, able to study piano and guitar. It seems he was, musically speaking, immersed in the best of everything that a Tibetan in the PRC could have – an eroded but still-existing Tibetan tradition, and the training of contemporary institutions and styles – and seemed to creatively revel in this.

It is not possible to understand Norbu’s exact reasons for self-immolating. The government maintains his internet presence in a heavily censored form that gives the illusion that he never self-immolated. Those close to him could not possibly speak or write about what happened. That it was a political protest is clear, however. He was the 156^th since 2009 and chose to self-immolate in front of the Potala Palace, the winter home of the Dalai Lamas, a symbol of Tibet and of the exiled 14^th Dalai Lama, whose absence is one of the deepest sources of hurt, sorrow and anger amongst Tibetans. There were also clues in Tsewang Norbu’s music that he was a patriotic Tibetan and he sang a number of songs asserting Tibetan culture and identity. The song Tsampa (རྩམ་པ། “roasted barley”), in particular, praises tsampa to the degree that goes beyond an iconically traditional Tibetan food, and is suggestive of a metonym for the Dalai Lama:

The color of the snow mountain is the same as yours

The color of the white khata is the same as yours

The hearts of all Tibetans are like yours

You can be named among the health foods

Your nature is not to harm others

Your heart is full of love and compassion31

In the video of this song, there is a shot of Tsewang Norbu walking down a narrow lane in Lhasa with two monks coming towards him, to whom he bows reverentially as they pass. Their yellow hats (distinctive of the Gelukpa sect, to which the Dalai Lama belongs), are slung over their shoulders on top of their maroon robes. It is also noted that in the televised 2021 Voice of China competition, when he performed the song “Returning home” live, in the final climax lines of the song, he sang: “The heaven of my dreams […], my beloved homeland Tibet,” rather than “my beloved homeland Nagchu,” making it a more political statement.32 The melody is apparently a traditional Tibetan song (and he begins with acapella traditional nomadic singing), but he sings it in an R&B vocal style imbued with emotion. It is also notable that he sang around half the song in Tibetan and wore simple Tibetan clothes to perform. There were stark political faultlines in Tsewang Norbu’s family. His mother performed for the most explicitly political and prestigious of the state troupes and is rumored to have denounced the Dalai Lama,33 while her brother, Tsewang Norbu’s uncle Lodoe Gyatso, was one of Tibet’s longest serving political prisoners. As High Peaks Pure Earth report, “Having already served a 21-year sentence, Lodoe Gyatso staged a political protest in front of the Potala Palace in 2018 for which he was sentenced to 18 years while his wife Gakyi was also sentenced to two years for helping to film the protest.”34 In further tragedy, Tsewang Norbu’s father committed suicide some months after his son’s self-immolation, reportedly following harassment by the police.35

While there are no firm details available explaining Norbu’s decision to self-immolate, it can be said that even without an independent Tibet, in another China that was less authoritarian and where Tibet had genuine autonomy or even the autonomy promised in China’s laws, things could have played out differently. For a start, rather than being riven by imprisonment and political protest by suicide, Tsewang Norbu’s family might have been one that argued heatedly about politics and had fallings out at times. His mother’s decision to join the prestigious PLA troupe would not have been politically contentious to Tibetans, or not to such a high degree. Tsewang Norbu’s choice to name “Tibet” rather than just his hometown (phayul, ཕ་ཡུལ་) “Nagchu” as the object of his love in the competition would not have been, albeit subtly, loaded and potentially risky. With his evident curiosity and talent in global styles of pop music, he might have travelled to other countries in Asia or the U.S. as well as working with Chinese performers, and overseas travel would not have been beset with the problems of getting a passport or political scrutiny and risk that it is for a Tibetan. Tibet’s own traditional heritage and modernity, rather than being something Tibetans sometimes have to make immense sacrifices for, would have been bolstered and nurtured by an array of Tibetophone institutions. Tsewang Norbu would surely have been involved in these, perhaps disapproved of by traditionalists. His decision to start his Voice of China 2021 performance with traditional Tibetan singing, then sing an R&B-inflected Tibetan tune (also half in Tibetan), was at least a factor in him not progressing, judging from comments in Chinese on YouTube that criticized his mentor for sabotaging his chances by having him sing ethnic music rather than just (Chinese) soul.36 He lost his round by a large margin to a Cantopop singer. At best, his kinds of songs will always be niche in China, given majority taste and all its prejudices against minorities that are so clear from the YouTube comments. Also, while singing in Tibetan did nothing to impress Chinese listeners, singing in Chinese would have displeased many Tibetan listeners. In short, the extremity and megalomania of Chinese colonialism has not only entrenched the Tibet-China relationship in impossible conflict, but set the very idea of Tibetan modernity as a contradiction. This intensifies increasingly with the all-out assimilation policies of Xi Jinping’s China.

A sculpture in Machu town of galloping horses speaks potently of this situation. It is titled in Chinese, with the English translation below: “The Home of Chinese Horse Racing” (Figure 1). Machu lies squarely in the indigenous Tibetan lands, a place with extremely beautiful grasslands where horsemanship is honed as a part of Tibetan nomadic life and culture. Yet this Tibetan horseracing is now “Chinese,” and there is no Tibetan script to be seen. When I visited Tibet in the mid-2000s, I always noted the way that public signage showed the Chinese writing many times larger than the Tibetan. Now, it is less and less common to have any Tibetan writing at all; Tibetanness is, increasingly, simply erased.

The challenges of doing research on Tibet and Tibetan music

The intense securitization of Tibet entails “viewing everything Tibet and Tibetan as an actual or potential threat to the security of China and the Communist Party” (Topgyal 2024), a situation which makes any truly critical research impossible, particularly by Tibetan scholars, who are mistrusted and scrutinized and hence run the highest risks of endangering themselves or their families. In addition, the severe undermining of Tibetan language teaching through the enforced closure of local schools and sending children to large boarding schools means that there will be far fewer Tibetans in future who have a high level of literacy in Tibetan, or even proficiency in the spoken language.37 This will reduce the academic study of any aspect of Tibetan language and culture. Tibetan studies in China is also being directly attacked as a part of the current drive to assimilate and erase the idea of distinct minority cultures with departments or centers being closed and faculty subsumed into other programs.38

Those with the greatest freedom to research the music and culture of minorities are Han Chinese, and there is a lot of research undertaken, certainly proportional to population size (though not to size of ancestral lands). However, the nature and quality of the research is affected not only by securitization and limited academic freedom, but also by the pervasive “civilizing” supremacy of Chinese colonialism. While there are many PRC Chinese with a genuine though still paternalistic affection and interest in minority culture, it is extremely rare for scholars to learn Tibetan or other minority languages, even if they work in these areas for decades. There is no sense that there is anything wrong with this methodologically or ethically. I recently heard of a Chinese graduate student in a Western university working on a minority group who saw no need to learn their language, viewing communication in Chinese as perfectly adequate.39 In China, extractive practices such as folk song collection, the use of minority music to inspire Han Chinese creativity, or “research” on minority songs that consists of translating them into Chinese have also been a norm.40

For scholars from outside of China, although questions of positionality and power will always remain, methods are certainly better. However, basic access is a longstanding problem. Fieldwork in Tibet only began to be possible in the early 1980s but is not easy to arrange and, needless to say, involves a lot of “supervision,” and for the researcher, fear of endangering informants and self-censorship. In recent years, access has tightened again and more and more foreign scholars working on Tibet (and similarly, Xinjiang, and even China “proper”) are blacklisted. I have not been able to go to Tibet since 2007, and it is impossible to explore the many themes of this article with current ethnography. There have also been real challenges for foreigners in doing immersive research equipped with language skills amongst minoritized peoples of China. In many cases, there were or still are no effective language-learning materials or language courses, and it was not possible for foreigners to stay with locals for many years, and even if possible now, would be inadvisable in terms of safety. Nevertheless, many of the first generation of foreign, diaspora or non-mainland Chinese scholars to study minority musics did learn the local languages to a high degree of proficiency in addition to Chinese.41 With the importance and abundance of Buddhist scriptures and other literature in Tibetan, good grammars and dictionaries for Tibetan have existed for decades. However, it is only relatively recently that such resources have been available for colloquial as opposed to classical or Buddhist-focused Tibetan, a legacy of the orientalist origins of Tibetan studies and the mystification of Tibet as a place of esoteric spirituality.42 I was only able to study classical written Tibetan at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the early 1990s, for example, much to my frustration. In contrast, I followed an excellent Hindi course there in reading, writing and speaking.

These questions of access have longer-term repercussions for Tibetan studies and the case is the same for other such securitized parts of the world. It takes a profound commitment for someone to want to risk their PhD and the time spent on language learning to focus on a place where fieldwork is heavily restricted or, ultimately, impossible, and there are funding implications too. Furthermore, what are a scholar’s prospects in the job market if their focus is a minority people, that too in an inaccessible (though vast) region such as Tibet? Scholars interested in Tibet who cannot go there may pivot to a focus on exile Tibetan communities, who number 130,000, or the connected Himalayan and mostly Tibetan Buddhist groups in India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Pakistan, though these areas, too, are remote, sensitive, and in some cases very expensive to travel to. Other options are research from online or textual sources, though these are limiting for those in ethnographically-focused disciplines.

Being a scholar of Tibet or exile Tibet, or other such minorities, is a marginal position in terms of career progression in other ways. Compare how widely cited the top historians who write on China proper or India are to those who write on Tibet, for example). To mitigate this requires real standing in theory (the anthropologist Sherry Ortner, whose primary research was on the Sherpa in Nepal, is an example of this), or the ability to maintain a parallel or related expertise in either a majority region or topic (China, India, Buddhist studies, etc.), which has been the case with my own career. In addition, area studies in Western universities are mostly split along old colonial demarcations, which marginalizes Tibetan and ethnographically Tibetan areas.43

The marginality of the study of Tibet and comparable peoples and places in the academic world goes deeper still. Postcolonial studies and the study of colonialism was established by colonial and former colonial subjects of European colonies who used their European educations to critique colonialism and institutionalize this critique in the Western academy. Such a phenomenon is currently inconceivable in China or amongst other still- or recently-colonized or stateless peoples of the world due to colonialism itself and the securitization, marginality, and poverty that uphold or ensue from it, and furthermore, the low levels of access to education in Western languages. It is, therefore, no coincidence that the study of Western colonialism dominates international academia, and the numbers of, for example, Armenian, Baluch, Hazara, Kashmiri, Kazakh, Kurdish, Mongol, Roma, Tibetan, Uyghur, Naga, etc. scholars are very small or tiny.

In terms of ethnomusicology, I would add that the widespread norm for scholars to also be performers and have aptitude in Western notation creates further obstacles. It is not common for a Tibetan from Tibet to be steeped in unmodified Tibetan traditional music and also be well-educated because education increasingly takes Tibetans away from rural communities. Similarly, it is extremely unlikely for a Tibetan refugee from India or Nepal to be steeped in music and have an excellent academic education and to have learned Western notation. The only Tibetan trained in ethnomusicology I know of is Ngawang Choephel, who grew up in India and did a Masters in Ethnomusicology in the U.S.. He was imprisoned in Tibet while doing fieldwork there in 1995 and given an 18-year sentence. He was released in 2002 after an intensive campaign. He did not follow ethnomusicology further.

Decolonizing Tibetan music

The idea that colonialism is a Western phenomenon was never an accurate reflection of the world, but rather, a legacy of Western colonialism itself, and the insularity of the anti-Western colonial movement within the Western academy. Today’s colonized peoples are subsumed into nation-states and there is a total denial of these forms of settler colonialism beyond the West. It is for this reason that I would reject the term “internal colonialism” for groups such as Tibetans as it reinforces this denial. While historical empires such as that of Tibet, the Mongols or the Manchus functioned differently from nation-states in terms of sovereignty, today’s nation-states should not be thought of as fundamentally different entities. As Anthony Marx states, “Most nation-states, or what became nation-states, are, like most empires, the result of conquest and colonization. The later ideology of nationalism of course disguises this unpalatable fact, just as it exhibits amnesia about many other aspects of the violent origins of nations” (2003:29–32, quoted in 2010:125).

As Ahmad argued back in 1991, knowledge of the complexities and interconnectedness of histories and peoples is essential to avoid ricocheting from the violent binaries of Western empire to those of contemporary nation-states. All these lines of power impact the Western academy at different levels, with scholars critical or invested and advantaged or disadvantaged to varying and not always conscious degrees. If we are serious about the critical study of power and position, we must think in a truly decentered and global manner. In terms of ethnomusicology, a greater focus on history is important. A basic way to engender a more inclusively decolonizing mindset is also to teach “world music” or the music of particular regions or countries in ways that center people who have been marginalized or minoritized through colonialism or other kinds of majoritarianism. Meaningful and respectful teaching, study, and research on China needs to center race and colonialism as much as it does for America. These should not be niche areas of interest. Similarly, it is important to present ensembles of silk and bamboo music, Peking opera, Hindustani music or gamelan in their specific social and political histories rather than letting them equate to national identities. I would add that even when researching and teaching about a group who have suffered such profound minoritization and colonization as Tibetans, it is important to not frame them as a unitary block. There are always relative lines of power, which in the case of Tibet include rural-urban status, class and education levels, and majority and minority groups. It is possible to discuss such matters with sensitivity to the immense assimilatory pressure that Tibetans as a whole are subject to under the PRC.44

There are many more practical decolonial basics for the study of Tibetan music, or equivalently for other indigenous peoples of China and minoritized groups elsewhere, for example: employing material by scholars with expertise gained from deep and ethical engagement with Tibetan informants and sources and viewing sources approved by the colonizers with care; the foregrounding of the voices of Tibetans; mentoring and hiring of new generations of Tibetan scholars and also scholars of Tibet; understanding the severe restrictions on their research; persistence in researching and writing about Tibet and Tibetan music despite obstacles and limitations, because if research is not carried out, these topics cannot be taught and students will not read and learn about them, deepening the erasure; compulsory language learning for ethnographers for reasons of method and respect; inclusion of the Tibetan script for Tibetan terms; and use of the Wylie system or a phonetic method to transliterate Tibetan in the Roman script rather than Mandarin pinyin, which is based on the closest approximation Chinese native speakers can come up with by trying to write down Tibetan sounds in Chinese characters and is intensely sinicizing. Work involving basic cultural documentation and archiving, and the collaboration and support of community groups is also urgent given the rate of cultural erasure taking place currently. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s compendium of decolonizing methodologies for research that is “more respectful, ethical, sympathetic and useful” (2012[1999]:9) is a storehouse of such practical approaches as these.

I would end by reiterating the potential (not just hope) for change regarding Chinese colonialism. In 2009, Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya wrote:

It seems that asking some Chinese intellectuals – be they Communist Party officials, liberal democrats or dissident writers – to think about Tibet in an objective and reasonable manner is like asking an ant to lift an elephant; it is beyond their capabilities and vision. Their perception is impaired by racial prejudice and their imagination clouded by the convictions and certainties of all colonial masters (2009:91).

While Shakya’s statement still stands for the most part, the numbers of PRC Chinese intellectuals and ordinary people are growing who are genuinely curious about Tibet, who can engage reasonably on the topic, who are comfortable with being critical of their country even on such sensitive subjects (and indeed, want to be so), and who want a different China. This is something we can encourage through our research, writing, and teaching, all of which represent significant forms of agency.

In a sharp critique of Chinese colonialism, Janet Upton describes the 1995 Tibet-inspired album Sister Drum (Ajiegu) by the Chinese singer Zhu Zheqin, who uses the faux-Tibetan name “Dadawa” and dons a faux-Tibetan nun robe in the cover photo and publicity. This exoticized musical fantasy of Tibet was immensely successful in China and Asia and only met with outcry when it was released in the West where Tibet groups protested (Upton 2002). Upton’s chapter does not just critique, however; it also has the wisdom and compassion to articulate other possibilities. She notes how the album’s positive (yet insensitive) engagement with Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism actually marked a difference from the previous sole focus on backwardness, and how the follow-up album Voices from the Sky (1997) showed a distinctly more respectful and less-superficial engagement, perhaps as a result of the furor Sister Drum met with in the West (Upton 2002). The engagement of large numbers of Chinese with Tibetan Buddhism can also be seen in a comparable light (Smyer Yü 2011). China is still in a phase of high colonialism, and the rate and intensity of culture loss and assimilation for Tibetans and other minorities is currently extreme. But this does not have to always be so. Scholars can work on multiple levels in and through the academy with rigor, integrity, and compassion to envision and build a future where these groups will not have suffered the same levels of loss and impoverishment that the indigenous peoples of the west have by the end of the next few decades.

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