Food and Assimilation: Rice at Chinese Boarding Schools in Eastern Tibet during World War II

This paper examines how rice supply networks influenced Chinese education in eastern Tibet during World War 2. In the early 1940s, new roads and policies enabled the Chinese state to acquire large quantities of rice directly from lowland farms and convey it to the Sino-Tibetan borderland city of Dartsedo, where much of the rice was distributed to students and teachers at boarding schools. These schools endeavored to assimilate indigenous and settler children into the Chinese ethnic nation through a curriculum that emphasized Chinese language and civics. But local successes in education were soon stymied by a national fiscal crisis that deteriorated as the war with Japan gave way to renewed civil war between Nationalists and Communists. Dartsedo experienced these wars primarily through fiscal crisis and interruptions to its grain supply. Drawing on a deep archive of unpublished Chinese documents, I show that the wartime fiscal crisis largely derailed Chinese school-building in eastern Tibet by threatening its food security.