Writing Tibetan history: The discourses of feudalism and serfdom in Chinese and Western historiography

In this paper I critique the discourses of feudalism and serfdom in Chinese and Western historiography. I argue that feudalism as an object of cultural discourse is used by the Chinese government as a pejorative expression to subordinate Tibetans vis-a-vis the (imagined) Han majority and to deflate the historical foundations of those ideas and institutions deemed by the Chinese nation-state to be seditious, i.e., threatening to state authority. This unique status of feudalism in Chinese discourse is seen clearly in China's assertion that a feudal-serf system defined the political, social, and economic structures of Tibet before 1951, as well as in China's portrayal of superstitious thinking, patriarchal clanism, and Tibetan Buddhism as "feudal." Moreover, I argue that Melvyn Goldstein's definition of "serf" is, at best, an excessively broad and jural definition and unnecessarily clouds our understanding of the socio-economic structure of traditional Tibet.