IN TIBETAN, the word for satire is zurza (ཟུར་ཟ་), which literally means “eating from the sides”. It is an art of indirection, inversion and wit. In Satirical Tibet: The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo, the scholar Timothy Thurston shows how Tibetan artists have mastered this art, using humour and satire not just to entertain but to deliver one of the most sustained and remarkably inventive forms of cultural resistance under the rule of the Chinese state.
This is a book that challenges us to rethink what resistance even looks like. Under Chinese authoritarian rule, open political protest carries severe consequences for Tibetans. Many writers and intellectuals have been imprisoned for their work. But a comedian who makes an audience howl with laughter, a rapper who captures the anxiety of a generation in their mother tongue, a sketch performer who exposes cultural complacency through a well-timed joke – these are harder to silence. Thurston argues that they are doing something just as significant as the writers and thinkers, where satire is the act of defiance and laughter is the message. While his research focuses primarily on the northeastern Tibetan region of Amdo, Thurston demonstrates that zurza runs deep in Tibetan oral and literary culture.
FOLLOWING THE DEATH of Mao Zedong, the founding leader of the People’s Republic of China, in 1976, the country began to emerge from the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution – a decade of intense Communist ideological campaigns that sharply curtailed artistic and intellectual expression. In the 1980s, as the Chinese state moved away from Maoist orthodoxy, cultural policy gradually loosened, allowing a cautious reopening of public expression. In Amdo, this translated into a boom in cultural production, with comedy and satirical performance at the heart of it.
One of Thurston’s most compelling arguments is that zurza is best understood through its formal transformations and the media it has travelled through – as the forms it took, and the audiences it reached, shifted dramatically with each new medium.