Population and Society in Contemporary Tibet

Foreword

Foreword As China began to open its doors to the West in the early 1980s, the United States and China began a formal bilateral program of academic and educational exchange. Professor Rong Ma and I were among the early beneficiaries of this new opportunity. I was able to start anthropological field research in Tibet (the Tibet Autonomous Region of China) and Rong Ma was able to begin M.A. and Ph.D. studies in Sociology and Population at Brown University. Dr. Ma completed his Ph.D. and returned to Beijing in 1987, joining the faculty at Peking University. Since then, Professor Ma has become the preeminent social scientist studying ethnic minorities, particularly Tibetans, in China. Not only has he trained many young Han and Minority nationality scholars in his role as Professor in Peking University’s Department of Sociology and Institute of Sociology and Anthropology, but he has organized and implemented the most important sociological surveys on life in Tibet. Dr. Ma understood that a major cause of the wildly opposing representations of Tibet was a glaring dearth of in depth, accurate, scientific data about the lives of Tibetans following China’s extraordinary modernization under Deng Xiaoping. After his return to Beijing, therefore, he immediately set out to fill this gap by planning and carrying out a large-scale quantitative research survey on the social, economic and demographic situation in Tibet. That project, which started in 1988, focused on a large representative sample of over 1,300 households from the three main political, economic and population centers in the TAR — Lhasa, Shigatse and Lhoka prefectures. The data from this and subsequent fieldwork-based projects cover a range of important topics such as income, migration, fertility, mortality, education, age structure, population growth and so forth, and form the basis of Population and Society in Contemporary Tibet. Professor Ma’s monograph also integrates other important quantitative data from Chinese government sources such as censuses and local and prefectural records. It is the first sociological/demographic monograph on Tibet by a major Chinese scholar using the best international methods of data collection and analysis. The field of Modern Tibetan Studies has for years sorely needed a monograph that would pull together the voluminous quantitative data extant in China on Tibetan society and population, and now, as a result of Professor Ma’s research, the wait is over. This monograph, for the first time, will provide Western students and scholars access to a corpus of data heretofore not available. Population and Society in Contemporary Tibet, therefore, is a most welcome addition to the growing scientific literature on Tibet and a new window into a vast corpus of Chinese data and academic analysis on Tibet. Melvyn Goldstein Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A. xvi Foreword ...