Left to their own devices: Radio, radiomen and radio stations in the making of Tibet’s modern political landscape

Abstract

This article illuminates a correlation between Tibet’s national identity and technological peripheralization through three intertwined tales involving Chinese, British and Tibetan radio stations in Lhasa between 1934 and 1950. Instead of a political backwater, Tibet was crucial to the competition between an expansionist British Empire and a growingly nationalistic Republic of China in the Himalayas throughout the first half of the twentieth century. As Britain and China monopolized the radio to substantiate their respective political ambitions, Tibet was compelled to adopt an image of geographical remoteness and technological underdevelopment. Upon breaking the foreign monopoly, the Tibetan government managed to appropriate this image for the propagation of its definitions of Tibetan state and national identities. Both the radio and the lack thereof in Tibet, therefore, became key to the Chinese, British and Tibetan governments’ efforts in furthering their respective portrayals of the Tibetan state and nation, as well as Tibet’s position in relation to its neighbours and the rest of the world. In addition to illustrating the interaction of power and technology in the creation of peripheral regions and competing identities, the history of radio in Tibet also reveals the essential roles played by the individuals who oversaw the radio’s daily operations in such processes. Refusing to remain mere extensions of the state that they represented or the machine that they operated, these agents and technicians actively pursued their individual objectives, sometimes against the interests of their employers, shaping Tibet’s modern political landscape in unexpected yet significant ways