The ****trait of a Brutal "Olympic Host" -- Beijing's claims of an
"unwavering stand" in sup****t of Tibet are groundless
International Herald Tribune
Beijing's claims of an "unwavering stand" in sup****t of Tibet are
groundless
By Howard W. French
Thursday, March 20, 2008
XINING, China: Count the ways that China has sought to bring Tibet to
heel since the People's Liberation Army rolled into the country in 1950,
brutally ending a phase of nominal independence.
It has tried decapitation. No, heads didn't roll, but one of the heads
of Tibetan Buddhism has disappeared. Here, I speak of Gendun Choekyi
Nyima, a 6-year-old boy who was apprehended by Beijing after the Dalai
Lama named him Panchen Lama, the second holiest figure in Tibetan
Buddhism, in 1995. Nyima, ostensibly one of the world's youngest
political prisoners, has not been seen or heard from since.
It has tried cartographic dismemberment, gerrymandering western China to
place heavily Tibetan areas under non-Tibetan jurisdictions. That is why
when protests broke out in Lhasa last week, they were followed quickly
by sympathetic demonstrations by Tibetans here in Qinghai Province, and
in Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan.
It has tried ethnic drowning, flooding Tibetans with officially
encouraged westward migration of members of China's Han majority, who
may already outnumber Tibetans in Lhasa and control both the political
administration and every meaningful sector of the economy.
It has attempted suffocation, as well: not literally smothering
Tibetans, but rather rewriting the region's history to take out every
politically inconvenient or embarrassing fact. Such ambitious management
of history is hard and never-ending work, which partially explains why
Chinese news accounts of recent events have been so one-sided, and in
the end, believable only to people who have been raised within the
intellectual garden zealously roped off and tended by the Chinese state.
As I prepared to leave home for work Thursday, I overheard via the
Internet an interview with China's ambassador to Canada, Lu Shumin, who
likened China's use of heavily armed police and military forces to put
down protests in Tibetan areas to the responses of the authorities in
the United States and France when there are civil disturbances. "This is
normal," he said, striving for a reassuring line. Others have spoken of
China's "utmost restraint" and pledges to avoid lethal force.
What, then, was I to make of the pictures that greeted me in the foreign
press that showed Tibetans gathered around the corpses of several of
their brethren slain near a monastery in Sichuan Province the other day?
Many Tibetans think of Chinese as faithless, but the people who govern
China believe firmly in one thing, the irresistible power of the state.
Under Mao Zedong, under the guise of Marxism, this ideology was
unleashed on man and on nature alike, the first of which Mao repeatedly
sought to remake, and the second, to tame.
A war on religion soon followed in the 1960s, with marauding youths and
troops sma****ng temples and burning relics all over China, but nowhere
more fiercely than in Tibet, which suffered more than most places during
the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.
But while most of China has suc***bed to official teaching that religion
is superstition, replacing spiritual pursuits with the quest for money
and personal advancement, the events of the last week or so suggest
strongly that in the Tibetan world, dialectical materialism has met its
match in the Tibetan's people's attachment to their own culture, to
their identity and to their beliefs.
Tibetan anger, and the willingness to die for a cause, is more than a
routine minority grievance, such as one sometimes sees in civil
disturbances in the West. It is about survival as a people with cultural
and religious integrity in the face of state-sponsored migration and
Chinese-style modernization.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao may have thought he addressed this in saying
that China "not only has the ability to maintain stability in Tibet and
normal social order, but also will continue to sup****t Tibet's economic
and social development, to raise the life standards of all ethnic groups
in Tibet, and to protect Tibetan culture, ecology and the environment.
This is an unwavering stand."
To Tibetans, it is a stand with no ground to sup****t it. All along
China's northern periphery, once strong local cultures are being
supplanted or just plain wiped out. Kerry Brown, in his book "Struggling
Giant: China in the 21st Century," writes this about Inner Mongolia,
which has already been largely homogenized:
"Dressing up in colorful clothes, dancing exaggerated dances, eating
mutton and drinking white spirit are all O.K. But musing about just what
the historical claims of the current Chinese state on Inner Mongolia
are, or writing more trenchant articles in Chinese about the gradual
annexation of the region are good ways to be rewarded with unwanted
police attention and very probably lengthy prison sentences."
For many people here, hearing a foreigner air such thoughts is ample
proof of anti-Chinese-ness. This is a kind of us-versus-them paranoia
stoked by the same state that works so hard to manage history, assuring
widespread ignorance of many vital facts.
The view here, encouraged from above, is that China is bringing
development to Tibet, for which Tibetans should be grateful. There are
many problems with this, starting with the fact that few indigenous
people want progress "given" to them. For one thing, that's because they
don't see themselves as inferior, as such patronage would require. For
another, it's because they know of the many strings attached and of the
slippery road to losing one's soul.
One would think that Chinese, of all people, would understand this,
having been offered the "gift" of modernization by Imperial Japan under
its erstwhile Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. One even finds
eerie echoes of Japan's Manchukuo with its bogus Emperor Puyi in China's
attempts to pick religious leaders on Tibetan's behalf.
It's not for foreigners to say what should happen between Tibet and
China, but it's hard to imagine a happy ending for either party until
such charades are called off.
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