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Acknowledgments As a child I dreamed of visiting Tibet, a mysterious land with a unique landscape, culture, and religion. Only when I started teaching at Peking University in 1987 did that dream become a reality. I was involved in a cooperative research project supported by the Institute of Sociology and Anthropology at Peking University and the China Tibetology Research Center. Therefore, I particularly thank two founders of these two institutes, Professor Fei Xiaotong and Professor Dorje Tseden, for their full support of this project. They are both senior scholars with great knowledge and wisdom, and personally experienced the dramatic historical changes in China in the twentieth century. I thank them not only for their support of this project, but also for their advice and guidance in understanding the social transition in China and Tibet. The core part of the survey data in this book is from the 1988 questionnaire survey in the Tibet Autonomous Region. The third person I must thank for supporting this survey was Mr. Wu Jinghua, who served as Party Secretary of the TAR at that time. Without his assistance and arrangement, the project could not have been completed successfully. I am also grateful to my friend Tanzen Lhundup for his help and cooperation for 23 years, since he became my assistant in the 1988 survey. As a native Tibetan, his language capacity, knowledge of Tibetan culture and history, as well as his social networks in local institutions and academic circles in Tibet, provided the valuable help that I could not obtain otherwise. He studied at Peking University during 1997–2001 for his doctoral degree, and was the key leader in our 2005 and 2008 temporary migration surveys in the TAR. I will not mention the names of all my friends and students who participated in the 1988, 2005, and 2008 surveys in the TAR, or the local Tibetans who responded to our surveys, but I must emphasize that the surveys could not have been done without their participation and contribution, which I greatly appreciate. A number of prominent scholars have offered many insightful suggestions to improve and publish this manuscript in English. They include Dr. Mary O’Hara Devereaux, Director of the Institute for the Future; Professor Mark Selden at Cornell University; Professor Tom Grunfeld at Empire State College of the State University of New York, who has known me for about 27 years; and Professor James Lee at the University of Michigan who provided many insightful suggestions. I am deeply grateful to all of them. I am also much indebted to Professor Melvyn Goldstein, whom I first met at Case Western Reserve University in 1991. His publications are a most valuable resource on the history of Tibet. After he realized that I was working on this book in English, he encouraged me to publish it and later very generously wrote a Foreword. Finally, I express my thanks to Professor Gerard Postiglione at the University of Hong Kong, who contacted Hong Kong University Press and provided his support for publication. In the process of peer review, I learned a lot from the questions and comments of the reviewer who is very knowledgeable in Tibetan studies. I am grateful to Dr. Colin Day and Mr. Michael Duckworth at Hong Kong University Press who had this project approved for publication. Since my mother tongue is not English, the manuscript needed heavy editing work. Mr. Dennis Cheung, the managing editor of Hong Kong University Press, devoted several months to editing this manuscript. Without his contribution, the manuscript would not have become the book that now appears. Some information in this book, such as official statistics and exclusive survey data, has not been systematically introduced and analyzed before. Hopefully that will make the book a useful supplement to other publications in Tibetan studies. xviii Acknowledgments ...

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