At war with the utopia of modernity
Tibetans' rage is directed not at communist rule, but the consumerist
threat to their traditions and sacred lands
Pankaj Mishra
The Guardian,
Saturday March 22 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/22/tibet.china1
Last week many western commentators scrambling to interpret the
protests in Lhasa found that they did not need to work especially
hard. Surely the Tibetans are the latest of many brave peoples to
rebel against communist totalitarianism? The rhetorical templates of
the cold war are still close at hand, shaping western discussions of
Islam or Asia. Dusting off the hoary oppositions between the free and
unfree worlds, the Wall Street Journal declared that religious freedom
was the main issue. "On the streets of Lhasa, China has again had a
vivid demonstration of the power of conscience to move people to
action against a soulless, and brittle, state."
This is stirring stuff. Never mind that the rioters in Lhasa were
attacking Han Chinese immigrants rather than the Chinese state, or
that the Chinese authorities have been relatively restrained so far,
one cautious step behind middle-class public opinion - which I sensed
in China last week to be overwhelmingly against the Tibetan ethnic
minority.
As for religious freedom, the Tibetans have had more of it in recent
years than at any time since the cultural revolution. Eager to draw
tourists to Tibet, Chinese authorities have helped to rebuild many of
the monasteries destroyed by Red Guards in the 1960s and 70s, turning
them into Disneylands of Buddhism. Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism have
even inspired a counterculture among Chinese jaded by their new
affluence.
Indeed, Tibet's economy has surpassed China's average growth rate,
helped by generous subsidies from Beijing and more than a million
tourists a year. The vast rural hinterland shows few signs of this
growth, but Lhasa, with its shopping malls, glass-and-steel office
buildings, massage parlours and hair saloons, resembles a Chinese
provincial city on the make. Beijing hopes that the new rail link to
Lhasa, which makes possible the cheap extraction of Tibet's uranium
and copper, will bring about kuayue**** fazhan ("leapfrog development")
- economic, social and cultural.
Tibet has been enlisted into what is the biggest and swiftest
modernisation in history: China's development on the model of consumer
capitalism, which has been cheer-led by the Wall Street Journal and
other western financial media that found in China the cor****ate holy
grail of low-priced goods and high profits. Tibetans - whose biggest
problem, according to Rupert Murdoch, is believing that the Dalai Lama
"is the son of God" - have the chance to be on the right side of
history; they could discard their superstitions and embrace, like
Murdoch, China's brave new world. So why do they want independence?
How is it that, as the Economist put it, "years of rapid economic
growth, which China had hoped would dampen separatist demands, have
achieved the opposite"?
For one, the Chinese failed to consult Tibetans about the kind of
economic growth they wanted. In this sense, at least, Tibetans are not
much more politically impotent than the hundreds of millions of
hapless Chinese uprooted by China's Faustian pact with consumer
capitalism. The Tibetans share their frustration with farmers and
tribal peoples in the Indian states of West Bengal and Orissa, who,
though apparently inhabiting the world's largest democracy, confront a
murderous axis of politicians, businessmen, and militias determined to
corral their ancestral lands into a global network of profit.
However, Tibet's ordeal has been in the making for some time. Before
the railway line speeded up Han Chinese immigration, China's floating
population of migrant workers, criminals, carpetbaggers and
prostitutes conspicuously dominated Tibetan cities such as Lhasa,
Gyantse and ****gatse. Half of Lhasa's population is Han Chinese, who
own most of the city's shops and businesses.
Chinese-style development, which heavily favours urban areas over
rural ones, could only exacerbate economic inequality and threaten
traditions, such as nomadic lifestyles. Not surprisingly, Deng
Xiaoping's post-Tiananmen gamble - that people intoxicated with
prosperity will not demand political change - failed in Tibet. Like
predominantly rural ethnic minorities elsewhere, Tibetans lack the
temperament or training needed for a fervent belief in the utopia of
modernity - a consumer lifestyle in urban centres - promised by China.
Far from losing his aura during his long exile, the Dalai Lama has
come to symbolise more urgently than ever to Tibetans their cherished
and threatened identity. It has also become clear to Tibetans that
they pay a high price for other people's enhanced lifestyles. Global
warming has caused the glaciers of the Tibetan plateau, which regulate
the water supply to the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Thanlwin,
Yangtze and Yellow rivers, to melt at an alarming rate, threatening
the livelihoods of hundreds of millions in Asia.
Woeser, a Tibetan poet and essayist, told me that not even the
cultural revolution undermined Tibet as much as the feckless
modernisation of recent years. The rail link to Lhasa has further
deepened the Tibetan sense of siege. No Tibetan I met last year in
Lhasa had any doubt that the railway was devised by and for the Han
Chinese, thousands of whom had already begun to pour into the city
every day, monopolising jobs and causing severe inflation.
In the past two decades, new railways have economically integrated
China's remote provinces of Qinghai and Xinjiang, making them
available for large-scale resettlement by the surplus population.
China, its leaders insist, will rise "peacefully"; and they may be
right in so far as China refrains from the invasions and occupations
that Japan resorted to in its attempt to modernise and catch up with
western imperial powers. But it is not hard to see that China has
employed in Xinjiang and now Tibet some of the same means of internal
colonialism that the US used during its own westward expansion.
Propelled by an insatiable global thirst for consumer markets and
natural resources, China has done little to allay the fear that
Tibetans could soon resemble the Native Americans langui****ng in
reservations - reduced, in the words of the Tibetan novelist Jamyang
Norbu, to a "sort of broken third-rate people", who in some years from
now will be reduced to "begging from tourists".
The most surprising thing about the eruption of Tibetan rage is that
it didn't occur sooner. Televised images of Tibetans assaulting Han
Chinese immigrants now stoke a middle-class nationalism in the rich
cities on the Chinese coast. Well-off Chinese sup****ting harsh
suppression of the "ingrate" Tibetans echo the middle-class media
commentators in Delhi and Mumbai who egg on the police to "crush"
those daring to resist their dispossession. But then cor****ate
globalisation has rarely been more successful in inculcating a culture
of greed and brutality among its most educated beneficiaries. Western
commentators may continue to tilt at the straw man of communism in
China. Tibetans, however, seem to have sensed that they confront a
capitalist modernity more destructive of tradition, and more
ruthlessly exploitative of the sacred land they walk on, than any
adversary they have known in their tormented history.
ยท Pankaj Mishra is the author of Temptations of the West: How to Be
Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond
kannauj@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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