Is Minority Unrest China’s Achilles Heel? The Case of Tibet – Melvyn C. Goldstein
Date: Tue. April 20th, 2010, 4:30 pm-6:00 pmMelvyn C. Goldstein
Is Minority Unrest China’s Achilles Heel? The Case of Tibet
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
China’s rapid rise to economic and military superpower status belies certain internal flaws that have serious ramifications for China’s future stability. One of the most serious of these is the increasing militant unrest in China’s vast Western Regions where Uighur and Kazakh Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists are increasingly alienated, angry and bitter about Chinese policies in their homelands. This lecture will discuss China’s ethnic problem by focusing on Tibet, the most internationally prominent area of unrest. It will examine the core issues in the dispute, the role of the U.S; and the likelihood that Beijing’s current strategy for placating Tibetans will succeed.
Melvyn Goldstein is the John Reynolds Harkness Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Center for Research on Tibet at Case Western Reserve University. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Tibet (Tibet Autonomous Region of China) on a range of topics including nomadic pastoralism, modern Tibetan history, monasticism, and socio-economic change in rural Tibet. Dr. Goldstein’s current projects include: a large Tibetan Oral History WebArchive that will be permanently housed and maintained by the Library of Congress, Volume Three of his History of Modern Tibet series, and a longitudinal study of change in farming and nomadic parts of rural Tibet.