The Chinese Man's Burden
March 20, 2008
AMID THE RECENT UNREST in Lhasa and elsewhere, The FInancial Times has compiled a very useful round-up of the resentments that many Chinese feel about Tibet, and what they see as its erroneous position in the Western political consciousness.
First, ordinary Chinese just cannot understand Tibetan ingratitude. The Chinese man’s burden. Go bind your sons to exile to serve your captives’ needs. Second, ordinary Chinese just cannot understand what the fuss is all about when it comes to the abuse of human rights in Tibet, or when it comes to the rights and wrongs of Chinese rule in the region. Whether that is a result of a sustained five-decade propaganda campaign by the Chinese government, or just a natural consequence of colonialism and the attitudes that are created to support it, is a subject of debate.
When foreigners express opinions we don’t like, we prefer to assume that they are being deluded, that they are trapped under a miasma of ruling-class hegemonic values and an ocean of false consciousness. But that goes for China as well, where a significant proportion of the population believe that the west are similarly deluded about the virtues of the Dalai Lama and the claims of nationhood that some Tibetans make. Perhaps iwe should at least try to understand it from their side, because there are complications.
This is not a remote African colony, but a border region whose sovereignty is disputed. China claims that Tibet has been part of China since the Yuan dynasty, when Mongols led by Genghis Khan in 1209 swept through China and headed west, continuing to wreak mayhem across central and western Asia. Genghis’s son and heir in China, Kubilai, has already been absorbed and assimilated into the vastness of Chinese history, and is just one more name in a long list of brutes and megalomaniacs who happened to seize temporarily control of the so-called Mandate of Heaven.
But if the Mongol rulers have indeed been assimilated into Chinese history by virtue of their position in a long line of dynasties, and if they were, nominally, the rulers of China after destroying both the Western Xia Dynasty (in modern-day Ningxia) and the Jin Dynasty (in Beijing), then their subsequent conquest of Tibet does, indeed, plant a Chinese flag in Tibetan soil at a very early stage in history. But then again, they went on to conquer Uzbekistan and Georgia. Does that mean that China now also has valid claims on Uzbekistan or Georgia? Furthermore, does Chinese hegemony over northern Vietnam, established during the death throes of the Yuan Dynasty, mean that China should also stake a claim for northern Vietnam too? How about the Manchu occupation of Mongolia during the Qing Dynasty? You would think not, but it was only relatively recently when the ruling Guomindang in Taiwan finally abandoned its claims of Chinese sovereignty over Mongolia.
When it comes to politics, history is always used selectively. It certainly cannot be used to derive any fixed conclusions about sovereignty. Historians might dispute to what extent a tribute relationship between Tibet and Beijing actually constituted genuine Chinese sovereignty over the region, especially when Korean kings were bound by the same obligations to pay homage to the Chinese emperor. They also say that for much of the time since the Yuan dynasty, Tibet was - in effect - a de facto independent state, and that during the course of the Ming Dynasty no one really cared what was going on in the Himalayas - an argument not difficult to make when one considers the logistics involved in governing a country the size of China and a satrapy as remote and inaccessible as Tibet. It was only when the Manchu Qing Dynasty arrived that the rulers, desperate to eliminate the threat of invasion from outsiders, established a formal protectorate in Tibet. Is that the real basis of China's sovereignty in the region? History is at the very least ambiguous on this issue.
Tibetan activists argue that at the time of "liberation" in 1950, it was indisputably an independent nation. But that itself brings further difficulties of interpretation, with China claiming that it was little more than a puppet regime carved out of the crumbling Chinese empire by imperialist British opportunists, and that it was little better than the Manchukuo puppet state established by the Japanese in the northeast. (Wikipedia says that many Tibetans cooperated with the Chinese during the “liberation”, and suggests that dissatisfaction with Chinese rule only began after the Communists attempted to crack down on Buddhism, and after Mao Zedong attempted to foist collectivization on the region.)
But activists might say that this is irrelevant, that history moves on, that sovereignty and nationhood cannot be determined just by the selective use of history and needs and needs to take into account current sentiments, many of which are determined not by history as such, but by myths. If myths play a central role in the foundation of a country, then one could argue that China has already lost control of the Tibetan people, who behave and think under the paradigm of oppression and colonial plunder.
Chinese experts also say, quite plausibly, that westerners have been taken in by the romanticism of the struggle, and by the popular idea that Tibet is a peaceful Buddhist nation that has been “raped” by foreign aggressors. As I do not tire of saying, this is a caricature of Tibet and a disservice to the complexities of the Tibetan character and history.
The problem with calls for independence, it seems to me, is not about history, or about the claims and counterclaims relating to sovereignty. Rather, it is a simple question of viability. Is the place viable as an independent nation? Well, only if you force isolation and poverty onto a population that, for better or worse, has now become accustomed to the idea of economic growth, even if the spoils of that growth are not being distributed very well. Many visions of independence seem to be based on the idea of a pre-Liberation; Golden Age in Tibetan history, which - like all Golden Ages - never actually existed.
