Paths, Waterfalls, and Awakenings: Döndrup Gyel and the Development of Tibetan Nationalist Discourse in Modern China
Christopher Peacock
Issue Section Research
Keywords literature, modern, dondrup gyel, may fourth, china
Abstract
This article presents a reading of Döndrup Gyel, modern Tibet’s most prominent writer, from the perspective of his nationalist discourse and its connections to Chinese modernism. Beginning with his last “testament” and moving on to his renowned works “The Narrow Path” and “Waterfall of Youth,” I examine how he envisaged a benighted and stagnant Tibet and set out to “awaken the consciousness” of his fellow Tibetans through a progressive literature. While also taking into account the extensive critical literature in Tibetan that has grown up around Döndrup Gyel, I argue that the specifics of this self-critical nationalist discourse put him into conversation with China’s May Fourth modernists, and Lu Xun in particular. Döndrup Gyel spent his for-mative years in Beijing during the post-Cultural Revolution renaissance, a time when intellectuals had once again taken up the baton of humanist “enlightenment” and a wave of new translations were driving debates about the future of the Chinese nation. It was against this background that Döndrup Gyel produced his lit-erary writing, and it was a body of work that shared the idiosyncratic nationalism of May Fourth literature by stressing national crisis, iconoclastic cultural self-examination, and radical progressivism.
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Christopher Peacock
Published 2026-06-01
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