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The Buddha Party: How the People's Republic of China Works to Define and Control Tibetan Buddhism By John Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. xiv + 370 pp. £28.49.

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The Buddha Party: How the People's Republic of China Works to Define and Control Tibetan Buddhism By John Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. xiv + 370 pp. £28.49.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2019

Max Oidtmann*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University Qatar
*
*Corresponding author. Email: mo570@georgetown.edu

Abstract

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Type
Book Review
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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References

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2 Schwieger, Peter, The Dalai Lama and the Emperor of China: A Political History of the Tibetan Institution of Reincarnation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 64Google Scholar.

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5 Xizang zizhiqu lishidang'anguan eds, Qingdai Xizang defang dang'an wenxian xuanbian (Beijing: Zhongguo Zangxue, 2017), vol 4Google Scholar.

6 Erie, Matthew, China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fischer, Andrew Martin, State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet (Copenhagen: NIAS, 2005)Google Scholar, and author, same, The Disempowered Development of Tibet in China (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014)Google Scholar; Makley, Charlene E., The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist revival in post-Mao China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Benno Ryan Weiner, “The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier: State Building, National Integration and Socialist Transformation, Zeku (Tsekhok) County, 1953–1958,” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012); Yeh, Emily T., “Blazing Pelts and Burning Passions: Nationalism, Cultural Politics, and Spectacular Decommodification in Tibet,” Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 2 (May 2013), 319–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 On p. 110 of The Buddha Party, Powers accuses Chen of making a variety of historical mistakes including claiming that the Thirteenth Dalai Lama was identified using the Golden Urn and that Manchu officials attended the enthronement of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. My examination of both the Chinese and English language versions of Chen's book did not find either of these factual errors.

8 See for instance, Qingying, Chen, Huofo zhuanshi: Yuanqi, fazhang, lishi dingzhi (Beijing: Zhongguo Zangxue, 2014)Google Scholar.