Each entry in Decoding CCP begins with the term or phrase in English, Chinese and Tibetan. Each deploys, wherever possible, China’s official translation since China makes much effort to translate its slogans into English, Tibetan and many other languages and maintains lists of officially approved terminologies. This is the core methodology that makes Decoding CCP unique. Those official versions are the party-state performing itself, declaiming as true the perspective of the performer. It is the position of “speaking from”, which linguistics theorists call epideixis. Implicit in this speaking position is not only the right to be heard, but also accepted and believed, as tools in China’s efforts to expand discourse power. Only after listing China’s epideictic stance in three languages does each Decoding CCP entry move on from “speaking from” to “speaking to”– from epideixis to apodeixis. To speak to puts us in the position of hearers, reactive to CCP’s speaking position. How hearers hear the performative declamations of the party-state’s legislative voice is key. Neither Tibetans nor the wider world dismisses China’s propaganda as nonsense. It requires careful consideration, not kneejerk opposition. So Decoding CCP takes care not to propose counter-propaganda to China’s official propaganda. The transition from epideixis to apodeixis takes the user on a journey to see through official eyes and then through the eyes of those most targeted by CCP formulations, especially the recalcitrant ethnicities who stubbornly remain themselves and refuse to assimilate. This is a journey worth taking. It reveals multiple viewpoints and leaves users to make up their own minds as to what conclusions to draw. We can cross rivers of uncertainty and arrive with greater insight by looking both ways. This is the Tibetan tradition of worldmaking and remaking. It is how Tibetans, thrown into exile, found their feet in very different worlds. It is how the 97 per cent of global Tibetans who remain in Tibet roll with China’s new world order yet keep their feet.

BuddhaNexus is a text-matching database with visualization capabilities that draws its data from Buddhist literary corpora in Pāli, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese. It allows users to conduct intralingual searches (e.g. searching among texts in Chinese only) of individual volumes for textual matches across the collection in question. Additionally, users are also able to produce Sankey visualizations of connections within different collections in the same language, which offers an intertextual view across collections, sections within collections, and within single texts.

International Dunhuang Project (IDP) is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.