The Divergent Discourses project is an international, collaborative UK-German research study of a conflict that began in the high Himalayas in the 1950s and led to nearly two decades of armed conflict. That conflict continues today in the form of disputes over ideas and narratives between the Chinese government and the exile Tibetan community, together with recurrent unrest and protests within Tibet and protracted border tensions between China and its neighbours.

After the People’s Liberation Army annexed Tibet in 1950, the Dalai Lama, the traditional ruler of Tibet, fled with some 80,000 Tibetans to India. In response, Chinese officials produced millions of words in newsprint, historical tracts, propaganda leaflets and books to justify their claim to Tibet. From India, exiled Tibetans produced newspapers refugee accounts, testimonies, memoirs, and histories of Tibet to counter China’s claims.

By developing and adapting computational tools, Divergent Discourses will study the two competing discourses that emerged in the 1950s, each with their own account of Tibetan history, identity, and traditions.

 

DIVERGE, using the set of methodologies known as digital philology, will identify systematically the narrative—agents, places, events, institutions and their relations—out of which the discourses of liberation, conquest, or resistance in the 1950s, compare the processes of selection and erasure carried out by each side, trace the early re-assemblages of these narratives, and show the determinative roles these discourses played at the time and in subsequent history.

The source documents will consist of propaganda texts, memoirs and newspapers produced in the Tibetan language both by the Chinese government and by supporters of the former Tibetan government shortly after its reconstitution in exile in India in 1959. The texts will date from 1955, when socialist reforms imposed by the PRC first triggered armed resistance by Tibetans against the Chinese forces, until 1962, when the Tibetan “rebellion” was finally suppressed (Li 2018), at least within the borders of the PRC. These “semi-primary” materials, although often propagandistic, are the only known contemporary accounts of the historical period in any quantity. The material consists of two main categories.

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