Tibetans' Narration of Chinese Ethnic Discrimination after 2014 Terror Attacks
A presentation by Andrew Grant
Thursday, January 28, 201611:00 AM - 1:00 PM
11372 Bunche Hall
This paper examines discussions of danger and discrimination in Xining City, the capital of China’s Qinghai Province, after a number of violent attacks in public places across China in 2014. In the wake of these attacks, social media posts went viral among Xining City’s Tibetans. Tibetans narrated instances of friction with local governments and Han people as continuations in a pattern of ethnic discrimination and attempts to render them immobile. Tibetans asserted their grievances within the discourse of national unity, or minzu tuanjie. This occurred against a backdrop of official explanations that implicated religious extremism, terrorism, and trans-border online communication in efforts to agitate ethno-territorial splittism. Despite this, Xining Tibetans’ online and offline discussions reveal that ethnicity has become the prominent modality in which these events are being experienced. I argue that this is an outcome encouraged by the intersection of the urban, as a social milieu and security space, and social media, which provided material for narration.