MEDIA AND PRINTING IN TIBET SINCE 1950 A PRELIMINARY SURVEY OF TIBETAN LANGUAGE JOURNALS AND MAGAZINES

Abstract

Journals and magazines are a relatively new phenomenon in Tibet. Leaving aside the developments in Tibetan communities outside the PR China, Tibetan media and printing have only emerged after the integration of Tibet in the PRC. Over the past decades over 100 periodicals appeared across the Tibetan plateau. While initially introduced as mouthpieces of the Communist Party, today a broad variety of publications exist — from the official Party journals to independently funded poetry magazines. The present article summarizes the history and development of Tibetan publishing and printing and presents a list of Tibetan language journals and magazines published since the early 1980s, classifying them into three categories regarding their status: official, internal, unofficial or samizdat.