The Tibetans: Struggle to Survive, India
The question of Tibet is complicated by the myths and uncertainties that
surround its perception by us. None outsiders can dispel those difficulties at
a single stroke, and even Tibetans themselves must from time to time find it
hard to separate the perceived from the experienced realities of their
condition: they too suffer from the lack of layered, unemotive information
necessary to better explicate this complex issue.
To some extent it could be said that the question of Tibet's political
status is itself part of the debris. An entire literature has emerged that
recites facts about Tibet as proof that the country was or was not independent
at the time of its invasion by Chinese troops just under fifty four years ago,
while relatively little has been written about the basic elements of life in
Tibet—the condition of the people who live there, the texture of their
political and social aspirations, and the intellectual and cultural makeup of
their society as it adapts to the stresses and complications of modernity. This
essay is part of an attempt to offer information about the condition of life in
Tibet, as well as about our concerns and conceptions of that country.
One reason for turning to the society and the people who comprise it instead
of focusing on the vexed subject of Tibetan independence is that it may in fact
be impossible ever to give a definitive answer, in legal or historical terms,
to the question of Tibet's political status. Supporters of each side in the
dispute typically offer only the evidence that advances their case and ignore
that which opposes it. The Chinese, on the one hand, claim that Tibetan leaders
made their country a formal part of China in the thirteenth century, while the
Tibetans argue that their leaders' historic links to China were merely those of
religious teachers to their lay patrons. In fact the question of independence
is even more complicated than the polemical accounts suggest, because the
fundamental questions underpinning these discussions are rarely broached: who
are the Tibetan people? And what are Tibet's boundaries?
Ethnographically speaking Tibetans are less homogeneous than one is led to
believe. The Khampas from the east speak several dialects that are more or less
unintelligible to the Amdowas from the northeast, and together the two ethnic
subgroups outnumber Tibetans from the central and western regions. It is those
central Tibetans who speak variants of the Lhasa dialect with which most
Western students of Tibetan are familiar, but their dialect is initially
incomprehensible to the two million or more Tibetans from Kham or Amdo.
These subgroups within the main Tibetan language family are clearly all
Tibetan—they share common physical traits, a culture, and a written language
which distinguishes them from others—but it is not so clear what defines them
as a unified people. It is often argued, for example, that they can all be
called Tibetans because of their shared commitment to the Tibetan form of
Buddhism, but in fact Buddhism is a relatively recent faith among Tibetans:
although it dates back as a firmly established nationwide religion to
approximately the eleventh century, Tibetans consider their history to have
begun over a thousand years earlier. And there are significant communities
within Tibet, such as the Lhasa Muslims or the Bonpo, who are not Buddhist but
who are certainly Tibetan. Neither can we define Tibetans in terms of a
distinctive lifestyle: the claim that Tibetans are a nation of monks and nomads
conceals the facts that many rural Tibetans have always been settled farmers,
that only 2 percent of the population are now monks or nuns, and that nearly 20
percent these days live in towns. The people we call Tibetans are more diverse
than is sometimes suggested and the forces that bind them more complex than we
might think.
This is not to say that Tibetans do not have a common sense of identity as a
single nationality—the Chinese, for example, are more fractured by regional
disparities in language and history than the Tibetans—but it does suggest that
this identity is not so much a provable fact of history as a situation that
Tibetans have created through their determination to be considered as a single
people. This determination has been heightened by the Chinese claims to their
territory. To some extent, therefore, the unity of Tibetans as a nationality is
in part a political rather than a scientific fact, steeled by the arrival of a
common enemy and the attack of a supremacist ideology.
Changes in the way the Tibetans view themselves have led to considerable
inconsistency in defining other aspects of the situation, in particular the
question of where Tibet's borders begin and end. There is no doubt about
central Tibet, the heartlands around Lhasa ruled by the Dalai Lamas since the
seventeenth century. But eastern Tibet had for generations been composed of a
complex of principalities of differing constitutionality and with equivocal
loyalties, sometimes offering allegiance to Lhasa, sometimes to China, and
sometimes to neither. Amdo, formerly regarded as the northeastern area of Tibet
and now mostly subsumed within the Chinese province of Qinghai, had not had any
sight of Lhasa rule for some two hundred years before the Chinese invaded Lhasa
in 1951. When the Chinese Communists wrested control of Qinghai from the
Chinese warlord Ma Pufang in 1949, the Lhasa government made no intervention
and did not claim that this area was part of Tibet, as it now does. In Kham,
however, the area that lies to the south of Amdo and which is now part of
Sichuan province, Lhasa had fought frequent wars with Chinese armies in the
early decades of this century and, in fact, had briefly gained title to part of
that area by conquering the local Chinese—but still Lhasa did not protest when
the Communist armies took over that area. The figures, much quoted by exiled
Tibetans and westerners, that there are now 7.5 million Chinese in Tibet have
been arrived at by including large areas and cities, such as Xining, which had
not for centuries been part of political Tibet. Such uncertainty about the
borders of Tibet further complicates the dispute over its political status.
There is general acceptance that Tibet was in some sense part of the Chinese
Empire in the thirteenth century and again in the eighteenth century, when
Chinese armies were sent to protect Tibet from internal conflict and to repel
invasion by the Gurkhas of Nepal and when Chinese "Ambans" or
imperial commissioners were stationed in Lhasa. But it is argued by many
supporters of the Tibetan case that the Chinese Empire at that time was either
a Mongol (in Chinese, Yuan) empire or a Manchu (Qing) one, and that the Chinese
republicans who took over Beijing in 1911 did not inherit all the rights and
respects that were due to their Manchu predecessors. It is a powerful argument
in terms of Asian political traditions, but generally the international system
accepts the transfer of rights between dynasties.
However one resolves this debate, it is clear that, if it is once admitted
that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (for example) the Chinese
emperors had a significant right to participate in Tibetan affairs, the claim
to a full and total independence by Tibetans is not at all as definite as it is
sometimes presented. Those facts that can be asserted with some confidence
give, accordingly, a more complex impression. Firstly, the Chinese (or their
Mongol and Manchu rulers) definitely believed themselves, rightly or wrongly,
to be for considerable lengths of time in some way overlords of Tibet.
Secondly, however, it is certain that these rulers and their citizens did not
view their Tibetan territory as identical in status to their Chinese provinces,
which were handled by a different government office from that which dealt with
Tibet and Mongolia. Thirdly, it is clear that until this century, at which time
the British began actively to encourage a sense of separation in Lhasa, the
Tibetans, as was natural in the traditional political culture of the time, did
little to disabuse the emperors of their belief in their sovereignty over
Tibet. Fourthly, it is not disputed even by the Chinese that after 1912, when
all Chinese officials and residents in Lhasa were expelled by the Tibetan
government following the collapse of the Qing dynasty, Lhasa thenceforth
exercised full control of all its own affairs, internal and external, until the
Chinese army invaded its eastern borders thirty-eight years later.
This last argument is persuasive to many people, especially because the
Thirteenth Dalai Lama, in a 1912 treaty with Mongolia of which the original is
lost, reportedly declared Tibet to be independent. Still, it is not as
conclusive as it might appear, since large parts of China were also in effect
autonomous during the first half of this century— Qinghai, for example, more or
less governed itself under Ma Pufang during the same period. But this could be
seen as a consequence of the weakness of the then Chinese government, beset by
Japanese invasion and wracked by civil war; it was not necessarily a proof in
itself of separate political status. Ma Pufang apparently did not see himself
or his realm as historically or culturally distinct from other political
entities within China.
In the final analysis lawyers and historians may not be able to come to a
conclusive answer on this question. They may concede that the nature of Tibet's
status before 1912 was not of a kind that can be exactly expressed by
twentieth-century notions of statehood: it was not the same as a province of
China, but, except when China was too weak to exercise central control, it did
not define itself in modern terms as an independent state. The Tibetans like to
express this by saying that there was a chö-yon or protector-patron
relationship between the two governments before 1912, meaning that Tibetans
offered spiritual guidance to emperors in return for political protection.
This, however, seems more a description of a personal relationship between
leaders than a resolution of the question of statehood.
There is, however, one negative argument that powerfully supports the
Tibetan view: no one seems so far to have found any document in which the
Tibetan people or their government explicitly recognized Chinese sovereignty
before the invasion of 1950. The importance of this argument lies not in its
role in the legal debate, but in what it indicates in terms of the political
realities on the ground. Chief among these is the question as to how Tibetans
perceived and perceive themselves. The fact is that most Tibetans seem to have
experienced themselves and their land as distinct from China. Few in central
Tibet had seen any Chinese before the invasion and almost none of the Chinese there
now have lived in Tibet for more than fifty years. Although Chinese armies
traveled to Tibet four times in the eighteenth century, they were probably
regarded by Tibetans as allies assisting the Tibetan government to repel
threats of invasion or insurrection, not as overlords. If Tibet was at any
recent time part of China, this affiliation seems to have been for the most
part a traditional construct that has no exact equivalent in our time, or an
abstruse diplomatic technicality arranged among the elite that seemingly was
never communicated to the Tibetan people.
Certainly there were few signs of Chinese influence, let alone rule, in
Tibet. All the major indicators of culture and society were entirely different
from those of their Chinese neighbors—the coinage, postage, language, dress,
food, and taxation of Tibet were all distinctively Tibetan, and before the
Chinese invasion Tibet had developed all the political and social institutions,
from an army to a civil service, that a country needs to function as a separate
entity. It is these simple, experienced realities rather than any legal
considerations that are of political significance, because it is largely to
them, and to religious beliefs, that we must attribute the decision of hundreds
of thousands of Tibetans in the 1950s and 1960s to face death in defense of
their perception of Tibet as a separate country. It is in this context that we
should view China's current campaign within Tibet to oblige all Tibetans to
undergo "patriotic education," a program that requires everyone to
attend lectures or to sign a statement saying that Tibet has been part of China
since the thirteenth century. The campaign suggests that what matters to
Beijing is not expert adjudication so much as popular consent: the Chinese authorities
also see the Tibet issue as shaped not by the decisions of lawyers and leaders
but by the views and beliefs of ordinary Tibetans.
Strangely, few people, and fewer Tibetans, have chosen to argue that, given
the distinct status that the Chinese emperors accorded to Tibet compared to
their provinces, Tibet must at best have been something like a colony. If this
argument was pursued—and it is hard to contest—the present situation could be
described as one of colonial occupation. It is one of the mysteries (some
people might say tragedies) of the Tibetan case that its leaders in exile and
their advisers have sought to show that Tibet has a right to absolute
statehood, perhaps gambling to attract Western support, rather than to seek its
people's right to decolonization, an option that might have gained them wider
support in the developing world.
But these are in essence questions of strategy and definition, matters that
are decided by political elites. At the fundamental, everyday level at which
most of us operate, the reality is that, as far as we can tell, the majority of
Tibetans do not accept their current masters as legitimate rulers. It is
difficult otherwise to explain the thousands of Tibetans who since 1950 have
taken part in revolt, in the guerrilla war, or in civil protests, who have been
to prison or have been executed for holding such views, or who have fled as
refugees. The numbers involved in these actions are too great to be discounted
as all members or beneficiaries of the political elite whose power and wealth
was jeopardized by the Chinese advance to Lhasa. Indeed, it was the Tibetan
aristocracy who were among the first to cooperate with the Chinese in 1950,
attracted by offers of wealth and status: the Uprising of 1959 seems to have been
more a popular movement than an agitation by dispossessed nobles. Whether we
take a political or a humanitarian view of the Tibet problem, it is probably
this general perception among Tibetans of foreign occupation that is the
decisive factor in assessing their situation.
This is not to say that other questions, with all their difficulties of
resolution, can be discarded as mere academic abstractions—we need to grasp
them in their full complexity in order to equip ourselves with at least the
rudiments of intelligent discussion. But most debate in the West on Tibet
focuses either on seeking a politician's Holy Grail—the pure fact that will
somehow prove that Tibet is or is not part of China—or assumes that somehow the
moral force of Western opinion will lead to political change in Tibet and
China. But from a political point of view the answer to such issues is
relatively simple: reality and "truth" are largely decided by
political determination and muscle, not by legal arguments or moral rectitude.
The history of struggles for decolonization in this century suggests that if
the Tibetan people living in these areas choose to assert their collective
identity as a people and to exercise the political will to sustain it, even the
Chinese might find it hard to stand in their way.
Since the invasion, China's policies towards the Tibetans can perhaps best
be described as a mix of brutality and concession. There were "hard"
periods about which there can be little dispute, periods during which even the
Chinese authorities now acknowledge that "serious errors" were made.
But it is also important to recognize that these years of uncontested brutality
were interwoven with periods during which few if any atrocities occurred. There
is a tendency towards simplification in our perception of Communist regimes,
which are often assumed to maintain power through force; in reality, gifts and
promises are equally effective and as often used. But the complexity of Chinese
rule emerges not so much from recognizing that China uses carrots as well as
sticks to encourage subservience as from allowing that some of their
concessions are genuinely well-intentioned. Like many colonial rulers, a
significant proportion of the Chinese Communists sent to run Tibet after 1950
acted for largely altruistic reasons and believed they were offering to their
new fellow-subjects practical and spiritual improvement in their lives. It is
this anomaly that leads us into a bizarre hall of mirrors where Chinese
officials appear simultaneously to be intent on assisting, seducing, or
brutalizing their subjects.
There have been three hard periods, twenty years in total, during which
Tibetans have suffered from the extremism of ultraleftist dogma in China; it is
because of these periods that allegations of genocide or ethnocide have been
made. The first such period was sparked by the Tibetan Uprising of 1959 and
lasted until about 1962. During these years thousands of Tibetans were
executed, imprisoned, or starved to death in prison camps. So far no officials
have publicly acknowledged these atrocities, but we know that they took place
and that the punishment was largely random because of a secret report written
in 1962 by the Panchen Lama (appointed by Mao as the leader of Tibet) which was
smuggled out to the West in 1996. This period also included (particularly in
Kham and Amdo) the artificially induced famines that resulted from the policies
of the Great Leap Forward, an attempt by Beijing to make the production of
steel take precedence over agriculture and to set up communes overnight
throughout China. In 1981, the Chinese leadership finally conceded that the
Great Leap, which some writers now estimate led to thirty million deaths, had
been a "serious mistake." A report by Beijing's Economic System
Research Institute found that 900,000 people died during this period in Qinghai
province alone (where a quarter of the population were Tibetan), probably from
starvation. Tibetan nomads were particularly affected because the plan for the
communes required that all flocks be brought together in one place: the animals
died en masse once they had exhausted all the available pasture. The plan did
not allow them to be moved.
The second "hard" period was the Cultural Revolution defined by
the Chinese as lasting from 1966 to 1976, although in Tibet it continued in
effect until 1979. During these years, Mao Zedong set off a frenzied drive
throughout Chinese territory to eradicate the "four olds": old
thoughts, old culture, old customs, old traditions. For the non-Chinese peoples
the campaign included an attempt to eradicate their culture and their
distinctive identity as a people, since ultraleftist ideologists declared at
that time that distinctions between nationalities and any form of religious
belief were the results of the class system. The consequences for Chinese
people, let alone for Tibetans, Mongolians, and other nationalities under
Chinese rule, were terrible: they were forced to dress like Chinese, to profess
atheism, to destroy temples, to burn books, and to condemn, humiliate, and
sometimes even kill the teachers, writers, thinkers, and elders in their
communities.
The period from 1987 to 1990 is still too recent for us to assess. During
much of this third dark era, Lhasa was under martial law and at least one hundred
people are believed to have been shot dead by police for taking part in
demonstrations. Some three thousand Tibetans are estimated to have been
imprisoned for joining protests during this period and a large proportion of
them appear to have been tortured, often in brutal ways. It was a period of
explicit repression by the security forces (in particular the People's Armed
Police, a paramilitary body) and attracted international publicity, for the
simple reason that it was the only one of the "hard" periods of
Chinese rule to have been witnessed by foreigners. China had begun to open
Tibet to tourism in 1981, so that in 1987 alone, the last year of that
"open" experiment, there were forty-seven thousand foreign tourists
in Tibet.
This period came to an end in May 1990, when civilian rule was to be
reestablished in Lhasa after thirteen months of martial law. Unnoticed by the
Western press, Chinese authorities announced that the security policy in Tibet
was henceforth to shift from "passive" to "active" policing.
This meant, in the obscure code used by Chinese politicians, that the practice
of shooting demonstrators and of mass torture and detention would be replaced
by more cautious and more restrained forms of control.
If we set aside these three "hard" periods, we are left with some
twenty-seven years that cannot easily be categorized as periods of atrocity.
The Chinese took over eastern Tibetan areas in 1949, those not under the rule
of Lhasa, crossing into central Tibet a year later. Their army arrived in Lhasa
in October 1951, by which time the Tibetan government had formally surrendered.
But it was not until the Tibetan Uprising of 1959 that the Chinese authorities
took over day-to-day running of the Tibetan government in Lhasa. In central
Tibet those nine years from 1951 to 1959 saw no great difference for ordinary
Tibetans between preinvasion and postinvasion Tibet, except that the Chinese
introduced modern commodities, built some schools and nurseries, constructed
small power stations, showed propaganda films, offered scholarships in Beijing,
and spread new fashions.
If we find it hard to imagine how an invading army and a triumphant
colonizer could behave in such a restrained way in its new acquisition, we have
only to look at Hong Kong today: there also we can see a conscientious effort
to avoid any visible sign of change in daily life, despite the fundamental
change in status and governance that has taken place. In Tibet, too, the
initial policies were in many ways driven by the same concerns. The Chinese,
once they had gained a legally valid recognition of their claim to sovereignty,
were extremely careful to leave the apparatus of traditional government in
place, with the Dalai Lama at its head. But in actuality, the Dalai Lama and
his ministers were powerless. There was a party committee for Tibet run by
Chinese generals that decided what the Tibetan government could and could not
do; however, except in cases of emergencies, its instructions were most likely
communicated in untraceable ways through indirect channels, and would probably
have been described as "advice." The Tibetan leaders would have felt
themselves to have had no choice but to follow such advice, since their army
was largely disbanded. But the new dispensation meant that on the surface Tibetans
remained in charge; in Delhi, for example, Nehru believed that the Chinese
really had achieved a peaceful transition and in 1956 persuaded the Dalai Lama,
then seeking exile in India, to continue his alliance with Beijing.
The strategy of winning over potential enemies by offering concessions, such
as allowing the traditional elite to retain the semblance of authority, has its
own term in the vocabulary of Chinese Communism: it is called "United
Front work" and there is even an agency in the highest ranks of the party,
the United Front Work Department, whose sole task is to implement such
concessions. In Tibet in 1950, traditional leaders had the option of very high
office within the new Chinese system if they agreed to cooperate with their new
rulers, as well as the perks of high office—chauffeur-driven cars, ceremonial
privileges, luxurious accommodation, and high salaries. Today, for example, the
Chinese authorities are said to be offering the Dalai Lama the post of vice
president, once he accepts that Tibet is part of China.
Describing these swings in Chinese policy from left to right, or from
suppression to co-option, is a relatively simplistic analysis and does not
fully reflect the complexity of Chinese politics. The Chinese, not unlike
Western colonizers who believed that they were involved in a "civilizing
mission" to bring Christianity and advanced culture to backward peoples,
were part of an ideologically driven movement that had a self-appointed mission
to liberate the poor and oppressed. During their softer phases the Chinese
accordingly made much more of an effort than the European colonizers to bring
practical improvements to their newly acquired territories, and in Tibet as in
China those improvements were often to the benefit of the lower levels of
society. China's invasion did, in part, lead to the ending of debt and serfdom,
to the land reforms of 1959, and to the reform of the quasi-feudal system in
Tibet.
The policies of the final "soft" period, initiated in the early
1980s, were in many ways similar to those of the 1950s. In May 1980, Hu
Yaobang, then general secretary of the party, announced that Chinese cadres
were to be withdrawn from the Tibet Autonomous Region and Tibetans allowed to
take over their roles in the administration. At the same time there was to be a
tax amnesty for the farmers and nomads; religion and Tibetan culture were to be
allowed to flourish; and investment was to be poured into the area to help in
education, infrastructure, and development. It was broadly welcomed by Tibetans
in Tibet, who seized upon the opportunity to acquire a high level of modern
education and to take up positions as cadres in the administration. While
thousands of young men and women chose to rejoin monasteries and nunneries,
others became teachers in schools or colleges, or worked as writers or
academics. These two areas of activity—religious vocation and Tibetan language
activities—emerged as of paramount significance during this sudden phase of
cultural rediscovery. Over fifteen hundred monasteries were rebuilt, mostly by
local Tibetans with their own funds, allowing the community to reestablish its
links to its heritage as it had been in 1959. But at the same time writers,
scholars, and administrators cooperated to produce with extraordinary rapidity
a significant corpus of literature in Tibetan, including creative writing as
well as academic, scientific, and religious studies. This emergence of a
Tibetan literature was unique, not because (as the Chinese from time to time
have claimed) there had been no previous literature in Tibet but because for
the first time Tibetans were producing a Tibetan culture that was at the same
time both distinctive and modern.
During that period, particularly in the eastern areas of ethnographic Tibet
that are now subsumed within the provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, and Gansu, the
opportunities offered by the concessional state were taken full advantage of by
the coalition of reemergent Tibetan intellectuals, led by the Panchen Lama, and
Chinese liberals, led by Hu Yaobang. This produced what one might call a new
Tibetan intelligentsia—one could almost say, a Tibetan middle class. It was
created with great speed, its members showed robustness and confidence, and
they were, unlike most previous groups of educated Tibetans, fluent in Chinese
and well equipped to deal with the modern world. In addition, they held
positions within the administrative and cultural apparatus governing Tibet.
It is therefore perhaps not surprising that some sections of the Chinese
Communist Party became nervous about the growing signs of confidence among
Tibetans in the mid-1980s. In 1987, when the Dalai Lama began a campaign to
seek political support in the West, the propaganda units in Tibet were ordered
to publish a series of statements condemning him in language that had not been
heard since the beginning of the decade. That decision led to the
pro-independence demonstrations of 1987, and more or less marked the end of the
last phase of concessional government in Tibet.
The situation in Tibet today requires a different understanding: it is
neither a period of evident brutality nor of concession. The shoot-to-kill
policy of the late 1980s has been dropped, and the number of political
prisoners is (as far as we know) around seven hundred rather than three
thousand. Far more Tibetans than ever before are allowed passports so they can
travel abroad, and in 1992 the authorities announced a relaxation of tariffs
and taxes on people setting up businesses in Tibet. The economy in the Tibet
Autonomous Region has since grown by more than 10 percent each year, according
to official government statistics, faster than the rate in China as a whole,
and far above the world average. By the end of 1997, there had been almost no
reported pro-independence demonstrations in Tibet for over twelve months, in
contrast to the two hundred or more that had taken place during the previous
nine years. Yet despite such indications of political calm, Tibetans currently
living in Tibet say that the situation is worse than it has been since at any
time since 1980, when the opening up to the outside world was first announced.
How then are we to understand the apparently concessional stage that Tibet is
now in?
To answer this question we have to adjust the set of concepts and
presumptions that we bring to it. Generally we equate repression with certain
visible incidents, such as political arrests, detention of demonstrators, or
military patrols. But such signs may be typical only in the early phases of
military occupations. If, for example, we were to imagine how France or Denmark
might have looked to a casual tourist today had the Nazis never been defeated,
we can be reasonably sure that it would not have remained as it was in 1945:
there would be no need, one can imagine, for men to be patrolling in jackboots
or for sentries with machine guns to be placed at each corner. Even during the
war much of France was, as we know, run by French collaborators with a civilian
police force, so there was little day-to-day sign of its military masters. Some
fifty years after the onset of an occupation we would not expect much need for
visible controls, since the opportunities for heroic resistance would mostly
have been exhausted, and the activists probably long since eliminated or cowed.
Indeed, what is striking about Tibet is that the Chinese still found it
necessary until 1990 to use unsubtle methods of control, and that five decades
after occupation the Chinese have not yet depleted the Tibetans' reservoirs of
resistance.
Political arrests continue to take place in Tibet, armed police can still be
seen in the streets whenever there is a possibility of unrest, and there are
continued reports of brutal incidents in outlying areas—in December 1997, for
example, a Tibetan monk escaped to Kathmandu after surviving ten days of
torture in Ngari, in the far west of Tibet, where soldiers had suspected him of
planning to flee the country. But in general the indicators of the political
atmosphere should be sought not in visible incidents of abuse but in the signs
of systemic, policy-led strategies of control—in such things as the identities
and affiliations of policy makers, the language of administration, the degree
of participation in the political process by people outside the elite or the
administration, the breadth of cultural expression, and the syllabi of school
and college history courses.
If we look at the first factor, the policy makers, we find that 66 percent
of all regional-level officials in the Tibet Autonomous Region are, by one
estimate, Chinese. Yet, according to government statistics, only 3 percent of
the population is Chinese. Similarly, the percentage of Chinese students in
technical education in the region is around 40 percent. No figures exist for
ethnic participation in the economy, but it can be reasonably assumed that most
capital investment and profit extraction is not in the hands of Tibetans.
These are the signs of a political structure that is organized toward the
preservation of power and influence within the orbit of a subcommunity: the
Chinese. In the "soft" period of the early 1980s this structure of
minority dominance had been eroded by Tibetans who had taken advantage of the
new concessions to launch their own cultural activity and to acquire positions
in the administration. Chinese policy makers militated against this and related
developments, warning about risks to the maintenance of the power of the party,
so that by 1987 they had engineered, through the campaign against bourgeois
pollution, the fall of Hu Yaobang, and, two years later, the crushing of the
1989 student revolt in Tiananmen Square held in Hu's memory. In China some of
those reforms have been recouped, but Tibet is a different story: what we are
witnessing in Tibet today is the dismantling, piece by piece, of the
concessional regime initiated by Hu some twenty years ago, and the
reconsolidation of power in the hands of the Chinese oligarchy. The sudden
death of the Tenth Panchen Lama in 1989, the last great religious leader still
living within Tibet, removed the final remaining obstacle to revisionism.
The dismantling of concessions has been a gradual process. Its most obvious
manifestation was the security operation of the late 1980s, which originally
took the form of what the Chinese call "passive" policing, which
meant mass arrests and street executions. This was followed in 1990 by a shift
to a lower police profile, keeping troops in barracks, using video technology
for surveillance, a growing role for the State Security Bureau, and a major increase
in the funds allocated to establishing an informer network. These changes may
have appeared as a form of moderation, but they were driven by a need for
efficiency: we know that in 1990 a document was circulated among high-level
cadres in Lhasa pointing out that the widespread torture of prisoners was
counterproductive because it increased popular determination to fight the
authorities. By mid-1993 the replacement of crude repression by more subtle and
efficient methods had reaped its rewards: during that summer the majority of
underground resistance cells in Lhasa were penetrated by State Security, and
soon after most of their members were imprisoned or forced to flee.
By this time the authorities had already shifted their attention to a second
front in their effort to reverse the liberal reforms of the early 1980s: the
economy. Lhasa and the surrounding areas were to be opened up to
entrepreneurial activity as a "special economic zone," under the
banner of what was then being called Chinese market socialism. Thus Tibet
became a frontier zone filled with pioneering entrepreneurs from areas such as
Sichuan and Zhejiang, who began by mending bicycles in the street and who now
run small shops, restaurants, and businesses in the towns of Tibet. And, although
this "special economic zone" was never put into practice as such, it
conveyed a simple message within China: a lot of money could be made in Lhasa
very fast.
This radical change in the urban economy of Tibet did not come about
unaided. In April 1992 every government office located on a main street was
ordered to convert its street frontage to a row of small, garage-type shops;
most of these were taken up by Chinese migrants, to the discomfort of Tibetans
who perhaps saw the prospect of their newly revived culture slipping away under
a wave of cheap modernism from which many of them did not even stand to profit.
Later that year orders were passed removing any checkpoints on Tibet's
intraprovincial borders: there were to be no restrictions on Chinese migrants
into the region. By about 1995 the leadership decided that it should also offer
economic incentives to the Tibetans and another policy emerged: large loans
from the state banks became available at generous levels of interest to a
number of Tibetan businessmen. The result has been the creation of a new
appetite for wealth among urban Tibetans and a dramatic increase in the class
of rich Tibetan entrepreneurs with home video systems, new houses, and
all-terrain vehicles. At the same time there was a huge investment by the state
(and by foreign states) in equipping Tibet with advanced telecommunications.
As far as one can tell from abroad, economic development has led to a surge
in small businesses—usually karaoke bars and nightclubs, many of which are
short-lived and in which much of the trade is prostitution—and has been
sustaine by the reinvestment of the cheap loans on the money market in Hong
Kong. The current urban boom, with its fragile economic base, could in theory
lead to a more stable development of the economy but is as likely to collapse
once the state finds it can no longer afford to bankroll the loans. In the
meantime a new plutocracy is emerging that is distanced from the majority of
its fellow Tibetans, whose opportunities for trade and employment are unlikely
to increase until, as the authorities promise, infrastructural development is
sufficiently advanced to entice major investors. Even then Tibetans might find
themselves without increased opportunities for labor, let alone profit, because
Chinese workers are likely to be brought in to work on the oil wells and copper
mines planned for Tibet.
If policy in Tibet were still focused on the development of this dynamic, if
dubious, economy, it could be argued that the objective of the current regime
was a well-intentioned, if misguided, effort to improve the economy and social
wealth. But in fact, the economic liberalism of market socialism was really
being used by the hard-liners in 1992 as a mechanism to encourage migration to
Tibet—a demographic device to facilitate control. And in July 1997, it was made
clear that this economic reformism also included a more unorthodox political
agenda. China's main representative in Tibet, the party secretary Chen Kuiyuan,
made a speech in which he announced that Buddhism was "foreign" and
not part of Tibetan culture. It was not that he was wrong in absolute terms—as
we have seen, Buddhism arrived in Tibet only a thousand years or so ago. But
the statement was clearly intended not as an academic observation but as a
provocative criticism of the notion of Tibetan culture, the sustaining of which
the Dalai Lama and many other leading Tibetans throughout the previous ten
years had already declared to be their fundamental and overriding concern.
In November of 1997, Chen went on to identify a new form of enemy within
Tibetan society, "the hidden reactionary." As examples he referred to
unnamed individuals among the few great Tibetan intellectuals remaining in the
universities and among the educated Tibetans who had secured relatively senior
positions in the administration during the reform period of the early 1980s.
These two announcements can be taken as the signal that China had opened its
third front in the battle to regain control of Tibet: an attack on Tibetan culture.
The police work of the early 1990s and the economic drive of the mid-1990s were
now to give way to an attempt to redefine Tibetan culture.
It became clear that the unusual aggression discernible in China's religious
policy in Tibet since 1995 has been part of a larger offensive. The banning of
the public display of photographs of the Dalai Lama and the constant press
attacks on him were a sign that he was now to be regarded as a religious fraud
as well as a political outcast; this was a significant change in policy,
because throughout the 1980s he had been attacked only in his political
capacity. The campaign in 1995 against the child he had recognized as the
reincarnation of the Panchen Lama was the most strident part of this wider
cultural offensive; by obliging hundreds of Tibetan officials, scholars, lamas,
and intellectuals to declare public support for the state's right to appoint
the new incarnation, the authorities were persuading them to renounce any
claims to the promises offered by the 1980s era.
In 1996, another major campaign, this time the drive to bring
"patriotic education" to the monks and nuns in Tibet, extended the
attack beyond the senior officials and lamas to the lowest levels of the
monasteries and nunneries: each was to be visited by a gongzuo dui, or
"work team" of party cadres who would hold daily sessions for three
months on the correct view of religion, law, history, and the Dalai Lama. Each
person was required to give a formal declaration of loyalty by signing a statement
denouncing the Dalai Lama and recognizing Tibet as part of China. That effort
is still continuing in monasteries and nunneries across central Tibet, and by
October 1997 had begun in the great monastic universities of Amdo as well. In
March 1998, the program was extended to schools and to the "citizens"
of Tibet, so that in the foreseeable future, all Tibetans will eventually be
required to declare their allegiance to the new regime.
The third, cultural, front goes beyond the strategies of policing dissent or
of economic buy-offs: both are relatively straightforward mechanisms to
suppress dissent. The cultural attack appears to be aimed at the long-term
elimination of ideas that could in the future lead to dissent, as well as at
the dismantling of the concessions offered in the reform era. It has, however,
an unfortunate resonance: in language and conception it is reminiscent of the
thinking of the Cultural Revolution, perhaps the most brutal of the hard
periods in Chinese Communist history. At the same time it also has an aspect
that did not arise during the Cultural Revolution: the fear of assimilation
from the immigration of Chinese attracted to the region by economic incentives.
This apprehension is fueled by frequent rumors of plans to send settlers in
large numbers, as the Chinese did in earlier times in Manchuria, Mongolia, and
Xinjiang. Indeed, retired Chinese soldiers based in the region have, since at
least 1994, been officially encouraged to settle in Tibet. In fact, many of the
new arrivals in Tibet are temporary, staying for a few years rather than
residing permanently, and they are almost entirely confined to towns and
cities. Their impact, however, is significant.
The "new Tibetans" are entrepreneurs, usually Chinese or Hui
(Chinese Muslim), who play a prominent role in the emerging private sector of
the economy, now the leading edge of China's development strategy. They not
only dominate economic life but have also introduced a powerful new culture
that has made rapid inroads into Tibetan life, especially in the towns. Its
detractors say this alien culture is Chinese, and it is certainly true that
Chinese language, art, customs, and ideas are replacing their Tibetan
equivalents in many areas. But it is also true that much of the new imported
lifestyle is not Chinese, but rather part of modern, global commercialism:
discotheques, pop music, Michael Jackson cassettes, Adidas trainers, video
recorders, a stock exchange, motorbikes, mobile phones, satellite television,
and E-mail, not to mention heroin and AIDS. The onslaught that Tibetans face
now with the easing of barriers to trade and travel is as much Western in
origin as it is Chinese; they are confronted with many of the same choices that
Nepal, Bhutan, India, and other developing nations faced as traditional
societies forced to come to terms with the rough assault of modernity.
But Tibetans confront these developments with severe handicaps: except at
the purely subjective level all the choices they now face—whether to regulate
the inflow of modernity; what compensatory steps to take in terms of education
or training; whether to adapt or to abandon Tibetan language, arts, and customs
in the face of the new demands; whether to control or to encourage outside
investment; whether to give preference to local, indigenous traders and
initiatives—are made by their Chinese rulers on their behalf. And the signs are
that the Chinese leadership in Tibet is deliberately making choices, such as
encouraging the growth of prostitution and refusing to regulate immigration,
that will stunt or destroy the nascent attempts of Tibetan culture, so
successful in the early 1980s, to adapt itself to modernity. Thus we find that
in the last two years Tibetan parents in Lhasa have started encouraging their
children to study the Chinese language, because few if any jobs will be open to
those children if they graduate proficient only in Tibetan. As if to emphasise
the point, the University of Tibet has already closed admission to its Tibetan
department.
What we are seeing is a strange, perhaps unique, hybrid, different from
previous left-right swings in Chinese politics. Tibet today is a cauldron in
which an experiment is taking place, where politicians attempt to achieve the
intentions of totalitarians while pursuing the actions of economic reformers.
The economic liberalism of market socialism was used by the hard-liners in 1992
as a mechanism to encourage migration to Tibet. The indicators of this
political composite—what some Chinese refer to as "hard on the inside,
soft on the outside"—are not visible to the casual observer. There are no
tanks on the streets or machine gun posts on the rooftops, as there were at the
beginning of this decade; there are tourist hotels, computer shops, public
phone booths, and all the other signs of affluence and luxury familiar to us
from our own societies. Even the growing presence of an underclass, of
unemployed Tibetans, is to us a sign of normal social disparity. If we saw a
political education session in a monastery or a school, it would not look untoward
to us as visitors. But in fact these are the images and the indicators of what
Tibet is today—an experiment in achieving targeted repression and cultural
restrictions within a context of economic relaxation.
It can be argued that the perception of the Tibet issue has been confused or
misrepresented by the form that popular sympathy in some Western countries has
taken on the Tibet question. In the English-speaking world that interest
culminated with the Hollywood films released in the late 1990s—Jean-Jacques
Annaud's Seven Years in Tibet and Martin Scorsese's Kundun, to name the best
known; it had previously been symbolized in the media by the involvement of
American film stars like Richard Gere and Harrison Ford in support of the
Tibetans. The surge of media and public interest reflected by those films
(which attempted to express the exiled Tibetans' view of the conflict) took it
for granted that there is a serious basis to the aspirations of the Tibetan
nationalists and to the continuance of the Sino-Tibetan conflict. Such
well-meaning support is influential in shaping the popular assessment of the
Tibetan question; but it is also something of a chimera. In the long term there
is a risk that support for the Tibetans of this kind could potentially do
damage to the cause it espouses.
There are a number of aspects of Western coverage of the issue to date which
give rise to concern. One of these is that the recent increase in media
coverage gives the impression that there is popular support for the issue in
the West, which in turn implies that Western governments support the issue;
this is not necessarily the case. The Tibet issue in the West is a classic
example of one of those legislature-executive struggles that figure frequently
in the history of Western-style democracies: Tibet represents one set of
interests to legislators and another set of interests to foreign policy
decision makers. The implications of this disjuncture have not always been
fully explored and have led to some apparently unnoticed consequences. While
parliaments and congresses have been pulling in one direction, the executive
branches (and the business interests to which they are much closer) have pulled
in another, and the Tibetans have ended up with a small burst of publicity and
occasionally a parliamentary statement that has no legal standing.
The U.S. Congress, for example, declared Tibet in 1991 to be an independent
country under military occupation, but the resolution has no legal significance
and has apparently been ignored by lawyers and policy makers. In any case, what
appears to matter now to the Chinese authorities is the position taken by
governments in their implementation of foreign policy. This was not always the
case: until about 1994, Beijing was in the habit of reacting quite strongly to
parliamentary statements, apparently out of the belief that they must reflect,
as in China, the views of their corresponding government, or that they might
have some impact in shaping those views; a number of Tibetan political prisoners
were released or saved from execution during that period, as a result of
outside pressure as expressed by foreign parliaments and pressure groups.
Experience has changed that misconception, however, and Beijing, which recently
set up a research unit to study the anomalous ways of the U.S. Congress, now
knows that the two units in the Western system can be treated quite separately,
especially where peripheral or sentimental issues are involved. The
eighteen-year sentence given in 1996, in defiance of congressional appeals, to
Tibetan exile Ngawang Choephel, a graduate student from Middlebury College who
was arrested for traveling in Tibet with a video camera, was presumably
intended to make that clear.
Unless the Tibet issue is able to generate support more substantial than
popular sympathy and media glamorization, statements by legislatures are not in
themselves any longer of much concern to the leadership in Beijing, whose
business is with governments and investors. It can of course be argued that in
the past popular support has led to more significant institutional backing, and
finally to government or financial action, but such a progression appears to
happen because of a number of factors besides the extent of popular support.
South Africa and Palestine, for example, became major issues, but they were of
undisputed strategic significance, involved protracted military and terrorist
struggles, had highly organized and sophisticated indigenous political parties
representing them outside, as well as very large and active resistance
movements inside the countries. None of these conditions, probably not even the
last, apply at the moment in the Tibetan case.
A second weakness with the coverage of Tibet in the West is that the popular
support it invokes is in fact more localized than it appears. After his escape
from Tibet in 1995, the famous human rights activist Gendun Rinchen, who three
years earlier had been voted Tibet's top tour guide, said that 80 percent of
the tourists he escorted had little or no idea that there was any political
problem in Tibet—and they were the ones interested enough in Tibet to pay to
visit it. The Tibet question has remained corralled and specialized, a
situation that is changed little by media coverage.
The miscalculation of the extent or significance of Western support is
unfortunate, because it has communicated to Tibetans inside Tibet a false
impression of international support; this has arguably encouraged them to stage
demonstrations and protests in Tibet that courted publicity at great personal
cost but that perhaps brought little concrete result. More importantly, it has
contributed to the mood of disillusionment and frustration that now appears to
be current among Tibetans who, perhaps thinking that Western support was substantive
rather than marginal, expected improvements as a result of outside pressure but
received few. Instead they have been left to find out that in the long run
outside pressure has led to the increased sophistication of control that they
now face in Tibet.
Perhaps more damaging has been the political message that Western support
has communicated to the Chinese people and to those in other developing
countries. The fact that foreign interest in the issue is mainly confined to
westerners—and that the character of Western rhetoric about the issue is often
polemical and anti-Chinese in tone, or self-evidently misinformed—has given the
impression that Tibet is a Western preoccupation in part overstated to bolster
the interests of the Western bloc. The unfortunate history of the Tibet issue,
used by the Western powers, and by the United States in particular, in the
1950s and 1960s as part of their cold war strategy to destabilize China, has
fueled the perception that criticism of Beijing's role in Tibet is a device
raised by westerners to attack China in particular and developing countries in
general. This has enabled Beijing to rally support from the developing world
and led to the collapse of the last nine attempts at the United Nations to
criticize China's human rights practices.
Another difficulty with the general presentation of the Tibetan case in the
West is that the wrong elements have been condensed: the exciting things to
westerners about Tibet are its exoticism and its mysticism, the colorfulness of
its religion, the irrepressible charm of the Dalai Lama, the mystique of the
mountains, and so on. Yet in terms of politics these factors are incidental—
Kuwait, for example, was not given support against invasion because of the
charm of its sheikhs. What should have been condensed in discussions of Tibet,
if those involved in creating the images wished to see a political outcome, are
the same issues that we consider when dealing with other disputes over
colonization or occupation—who holds power, who is not given access to power,
what are the political demands and program of the people involved, how close
are the representatives of the various groupings to the people they represent,
and so on.
The trivialization of the Tibet issue has led a number of presumptions to
accumulate that may need to be reconsidered if Western discussion of Tibet is
to appear meaningful. For example, the perception of the Dalai Lama as supreme
pontiff of Tibetan Buddhism is a recent phenomenon, reported to be an arrangement
that other religious schools reached in the 1960s partly to simplify their
relations with foreigners. The role of pacifism in Tibet has been overstated:
it is true Tibetans have in general chosen to follow the advice of their leader
not to take up arms, but this is also a recent phenomenon and not a condition
of their culture. Until 1974, thousands of Tibetans took part in a fierce
guerrilla war with the Chinese, which for a period was funded by the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency. The clergy who destroyed the attempts of the
Tibetan government and the previous Dalai Lama to enlarge and modernize the
Tibetan army in the 1920s (and who thus destroyed any chance of Tibet ever
resisting incorporation into China) were not motivated in the slightest by
objections to violence, but by the fear that modernization might, by increasing
links with the un-Buddhist British, lead to the diminution of the monasteries'
power; indeed there were several insurgencies against the previous Dalai Lama
or his regents this century led by monks in defense of that belief.
Today some ten thousand Tibetans are members of India's military forces,
soldiers with a special aptitude for high-altitude warfare, posing a threat
that China views with some seriousness. Neither is the level of political
violence among Tibetans as low as some Western reports would suggest: at least
seven bombs exploded in Tibet between 1995 and 1997, one of them laid by a
monk, and a significant number of individual Tibetans are known to be actively
seeking the taking up of arms; hundreds of Chinese soldiers and police have
been beaten during demonstrations in Tibet, and at least one killed in cold
blood, probably several more. Within the exile community itself there is a
continuing streak of political intolerance, especially towards those who have
made the slightest perceived criticism of the Dalai Lama, who risk beatings or
threats of assassination. Neither is religion by any means above conflict: at
least two of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism are at present wracked by
disputes; both cases have led to murders or threats of murder.
The mythologized depiction of Tibetans as inherently religious and pacifist
is attractive, but it is also reductionist. It implies that they are passive,
and that their decisions are the result of tradition not choice, and it
suggests that they are neither part of the modern secular world nor suited to
the competitiveness of contemporary political decision making. The political
presentation of Tibet has similarly tended to focus on the suffering
experienced by Tibetans under Chinese occupation. Sometimes this is presented
as a general phenomenon, such as by citing the total number of those believed
to have been killed, and at other times an individual case is described, such as
that of a nun or monk who has been imprisoned and tortured. None of these
references are invalid (although the figures used are often inaccurate), but
because there is often an absence of harder analysis, they have the effect of
portraying Tibetans as victims who need to be helped, rather than as agents of
political change who might be supported.
It is in this area, the role of human rights in the Tibet issue, where
another disjuncture between sympathy and political action can be seen. Media,
parliamentary, and governmental statements have tended to focus on the question
of how individuals in Tibet are treated by the current regime. But in the hard
world of international politics, human rights issues are of little relevance to
the process of political decision making. Although statements on human rights
issues are frequently made by governments of all hues, their policies are
unlikely to be significantly influenced by them—not least because almost every
country has condoned human rights abuses of one kind or another within its own
borders.
Governmental statements about human rights in Tibet or China are thus
usually bargaining chips to create leverage for issues higher up the agenda or
smoke screens designed to impress the domestic constituency while at the same
time causing minimum anxiety to Beijing. A sophisticated regime like China
could, if it wished, have resolved overnight most human rights criticisms by
foreign governments by offering to appoint a commission of inquiry, arresting a
few police chiefs for torture, or inviting UN officials to visit model prisons;
that it has not done so, and that it has only recently started to respond at
all to human rights criticisms, is because, among other reasons, it is in its
interest, and in the interests of the Western powers as well, to keep public
discussion and confrontation focused on such essentially marginal areas, thus
avoiding issues of potentially irreversible conflict. The Tibetan activists
inside Tibet have rarely (until recently) incorporated the issue of human
rights in their protests or slogans—the language of human rights is largely a
facet of exile rhetoric and Western simplification of the issue. Inside Tibet,
the demands raised in wall posters have focused more on independence: rightly
or wrongly, that has been to them the central issue.
No one can have been clearer about this than the Chinese leaders themselves:
they have endlessly repeated the remark, usually unnoticed, that sovereignty is
the main issue. When the Tibetan demonstrations in 1987 triggered a flurry of
foreign criticism of China's human rights practices, the Chinese acted as if
all allegations were veiled attacks on their territorial claims and demanded
from each critical government assurances that its criticisms applied only to human
rights practices and did not affect its acceptance that Tibet was part of
China. In almost all cases the Western governments, apart from Britain, gave
the required assurances to Beijing.
Thus, although China appears in the last ten years to have been battered in
the Western media for its role in Tibet, in terms of the declared aspirations
of its political leaders, in terms of power politics, and in terms of
historical significance, it has emerged from those years of apparently
stringent diplomatic attack with a wealth of political gains. Few if any
countries apart from India and Nepal had specifically declared that Tibet was
part of China before 1987; now most have been asked to do so and have complied.
Tibet's claim to separate or at least ambiguous status was at least in part
supported by the fact that few countries had specifically described it
otherwise; that situation was reversed at the same time as Western criticisms
of China were being popularly presented as assisting the Tibetans' situation.
In other words, it can be argued that support from the West, which was anyway
limited, may have damaged the political prospects of the Tibetan issue as much
as it helped them.
If we have to generalize, therefore, it can be said that the Western
perception of the Tibetan question has been burdened with a romantic
inheritance, oversimplified information, and a blurred political presentation.
It is because of such characteristics of the Western approach to Tibet, and its
sometimes unfortunate consequences, that we need to seek another, more
disciplined and more layered, view. That there is some resistance to this in
Western discussion of the Tibet question may be due to its associations with
Tibetan Buddhism, which many westerners see as antithetical to pragmatism or
political thought; they have tended to invest in the religious aspects of the
Tibetan situation, often as a conscious antidote to Western rationalism. The
effects of this on the Tibetans have been quite concrete: since the exile of
the Tibetans to India forty years ago, for example, large amounts of money and
energy have been expended on the preservation of Tibetan culture outside of
Tibet. A more pragmatic approach would have invested in encouraging that
culture to develop rather than to remain static, equipping it in its encounter
with modernity instead of helping it to become a museum exhibit. As the
controversial American Tibetologist Melvyn Goldstein pointed out in 1990,
Western funds have financed the production of much abstruse religious
literature in Tibetan but not the writing by exiles of novels, stories, plays,
or poems, so that (until the founding of the Amnyemachen Institute's
translation project in India in 1992) there has been little other than advanced
metaphysics for an exiled lay Tibetan to read in his or her own language. While
there are thousands of Tibetan monks in exile who have received higher
education in religious studies, few Tibetans in the exile community have been
trained in technology or sciences. Among Western scholars of Tibet, too, the
study of modern Tibet has been seriously considered only in the last eight
years or so: the bulk of Tibetology was and still is focussed on classical
studies. Even the contemporary study of Tibet or the writing of a modern,
secular literature in Tibetan can scarcely be found anywhere outside China or
Tibet itself.
The limitations of the general Western efforts to date do not mean that the
Tibetan pursuit of national identity is trivial or doomed. Political change is
not dictated by logical certainties, as the Soviet experience has indicated,
and there is certainly nothing trivial about the Tibet experience, nor any
reason why its quantitative insignificance should preclude it from having
disproportionate regional impact. For example, in 1987, when Steve Lehman and I
met by chance in a Lhasa backstreet during a wholly unexpected demonstration,
the Tibet question was nowhere on the Chinese, let alone the international,
agenda. If the Chinese government had not chosen to conceal the details of that
protest, to deny that they had shot a number of Tibetans dead when we and other
tourists had seen it, or to close the country off from foreign journalists ever
since, the Tibetan issue might not have received much attention in the last
decade. The errors of Beijing on that occasion had an effect that could hardly
have been foreseen and that has had lasting repercussions.
It was not so much that Tibetan discontent became known to the outside
world: what was of lasting importance was that the events of that day propelled
Tibetan resentment to develop into the deep and highly motivated alienation
that resulted in the far greater turmoil that took place in subsequent months.
Before the outbreak of protest in 1987, Tibetans had apparently been aware of
the likely withdrawal of the concessions that Hu Yaobang had offered them some
seven years earlier; but the response of the authorities to their
demonstrations revealed the fear within the Chinese leviathan of the pinprick
of Tibetan dissent. That fear, as seen in the decision to open fire on the
protestors in Lhasa, was an indication that the dragon is more fragile than its
fiery breath would have its subjects believe. It is in that perception that the
potential for significant Tibetan impact resides.
In more technical terms, what the Chinese accomplished and are further
fomenting as they move to attack Tibetan culture itself has been the stoking of
a modern form of mass political consciousness among Tibetans. The
politicization that several decades of explicit indoctrination had failed to
inculcate is now being achieved by the same Chinese efforts that are currently
directed against the rise of nationalist consciousness in Tibet.
Current Chinese policy in Tibet, replete with such examples of contradiction
and extremity, has suffered ever since from a sense of fragility and
insecurity, with a tendency to concentrate its attack on the apparently
innocuous. Since 1995 it has banned the photographs of an amiable man in a
skirt, run a state campaign ordering the denunciation of a six-year-old child,
forced forty thousand monks and nuns to sign declarations concerning
thirteenth-century history, and declared a thousand-year-old religious
tradition to be a foreign import. Such decisions cannot be easily explained by
the logic of realpolitik or national interest; we have to look elsewhere to
explain the forces that drive Chinese leaders in Tibet.
It is as if China were operating, in its dealings with Tibet, in a universe
sustained not so much by its army or its factories, as by its ideological
constructions. After all, the central question for the leaders in Beijing may
not be, perhaps has never been, their creditworthiness with international
financiers or their standing with the international community, but their
credibility with the people of China. They are a regime of considerable youth,
scarcely fifty years old, whose power was achieved through conquest, through
the incompetence and barbarity of their opponents, and through lavish, utopian
promises to their followers. During their period of rule, despite some notable
successes, they have committed atrocities that in many ways dwarf those of
their predecessors—even Chiang Kaishek, for example, did not initiate a famine
that killed a reported thirty million people. And the current regime has
largely repudiated the aspirations and claims of its revolutionary
progenitors—not so much because it clearly espouses capitalism and social
disparity, but because it has also renounced the provision of free education,
medical care, or guaranteed employment to its people.
Whatever else one might say about the Tibetans, the one thing they have in
their favor is a substantial claim to legitimacy. As a nation-state, they may
have failed to register their credentials, but they enjoyed all the characteristics
of statehood; as a political force, they are unified to an exceptional degree
in their objectives; as a movement they have a leader who enjoys unusual
respect not merely in the West, where his significance is more symbolic than
actual, but inside Tibet, where the political unity he commands may well be the
final arbiter of Tibet's future. The strategic advantage of even partial
pacifism is of great relevance not at all because of any moral virtues we may
see in it, but because it can lay claim to legitimacy in a conflict where the
Tibetans' opponent has little legitimacy and has depended on force.
This is not to say that there can be any predictable outcome to this
dispute. The Tibetans are also capable of making strategic errors (as events
have already indicated) on a large scale, just as the Chinese are. They could
reject the leadership of the Dalai Lama, return to sectarian or regional
conflict, decide to revive their autocratic tradition, or reach such a
conciliatory compromise with the Chinese as to have no rights remaining. Or
they could, for example, decide on other objectives, such as the pursuit of
immediate wealth, already currently on offer to a certain class in Lhasa.
But even in these scenarios, the history of nationalist disputes suggests
that such tendencies are in a sense diversions. People may be distracted for a
period by the attractions of modernization or by internal conflicts, but
eventually their interest in asserting their identity will reemerge, and when
it does it will be equipped with increased expectations and better resources.
In other words the current Chinese (and Western) strategies for deflecting
Tibetan aspirations are unlikely to succeed in the long run, and may serve only
to exacerbate the dispute.
When Steve Lehman, I, and other Western tourists first saw protestors take
to the streets of Lhasa in October 1987, an arcane dispute emerged amongst us
as to the role of foreigners. Should we witness these events silently from the
sidelines, some of us asked, or should we stand in the middle of the crowd to
show support and to deter the soldiers from opening fire? In the event, those
who decided to stand among the crowd and wave their fists found that they were
shot at, too. More significantly, perhaps, their involvement was photographed
and filmed by officials so that to this day they are cited as evidence that
those protests were fueled by foreign provocateurs and not an expression of
Tibetan belief. Perhaps that would have happened whatever we, the outsiders,
had done, but the episode was a reminder that in the final analysis the role of
the foreign journalist or observer may be more limited than we like to imagine.
Though the West's response will undoubtedly be a
factor in the dispute, its outcome will ultimately be decided by Tibetans and
Chinese, and whether they eventually resolve their differences will depend
almost entirely on their ingenuity and tenacity. The landmark decision of the
Chinese in 1990 to stop killing demonstrators in Tibet may have been seen as a
consequence of international criticism of Beijing, but it was also to do with
the realization in China that the shooting was further antagonizing Tibetans in
Tibet. In other words, the Chinese were to a considerable extent afraid of
Tibetan unrest. The bottom line in this issue is thus not the legal status of
Tibet, the magnitude of the army, the stature of the Dalai Lama, or the moral power of the demands: it
is the risk that determined Tibetans may decide en masse to actively oppose
Chinese rule.
