Tibet and cultural genocide
March 24, 2008
COMMUNIST PARTY MOUTHPIECE People’s Daily has described the government in exile in Dharamsala as “the epicenter of lies”, accusing them of “groundless fabrications” about the Lhasa riots. “When a fox tries to play angel,” it says about the Dalai Lama, “its tail will eventually stick out.”
Repeated inconsistencies between what Dalai says and what he does ended up leaving all in disbelief. Dalai claimed "non-violence", but furtively stoked bloodshed in Lhasa, he claimed "culture genocide" in the face of a thriving Tibet with a well-protected culture, and he even claimed to "serve" the Tibetan people whom his clique have chosen to victimize.
Premier Wen Jiabao said the other day that “the idea that China has destroyed Tibetan culture is a complete lie”. But the problem is that the forces of modernization are rightly or wrongly associated with Chinese occupation and oppression.
The whole idea of cultural genocide - as opposed to real genocide - rests on the belief that the inevitable transformation of Tibet has been done without the proper consent of the Tibetans themselves, and was inflicted on the natives whether they liked it or not. Wen argued that economic growth has genuinely improved the lot of the average Tibetan, while a discontented minority are stubbornly clinging on to old ways of life and refusing to accept that life under China is materially better. But Wen's claims are irrelevant because Tibetans do not wish to have a stake in improvements that have been made without their consent. The modernising dynamic has been typically colonialist.
Even if the Chinese demonstrated, in good faith, that the investments now flooding into Tibet were not disproportionately favouring Han Chinese immigrants and that mineral exploitation was not being conducted solely to meet Chinese demand, it would not make the slightest bit of difference. If Beijing argued, convincingly, that the reason why those investments were favouring Han Chinese immigrants was because Tibetans themselves were failing to take full advantage of the opportunities, it would not make the slightest bit of difference. The paradigm I mentioned earlier is cultural genocide and colonial rule, and societies - as a rule - prefer their own chaos and feudal benightedness to the paternalist-colonial imposition of economic growth by another country. A certain proportion of the oppression that arises from the colonial relationship is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What happens is that those old ways of life become symbols not of feudal benightedness as such, but of active resistance. The efforts by the Chinese government, for example, to house nomads in fixed settlements are interpreted, on the Chinese side, as a fine gesture that helps those minorities to find a way out of their wretched and precarious existence and give their children the chance to get educated, just as it argued when they resettled and housed nomadic tribes in Inner Mongolia and the Kazakh regions of Xinjiang (the forest-dwelling Ewenke are one example).
On the Tibetan side, this is an unforgiveable and politically-expedient attack on the traditions of Tibet in order to strengthen social control. But what are the Tibetans really hoping to hold on to here? Would such transformations have been acceptable had they been orchestrated by their own people?
The point is this: presumably, if Tibet had been left to its own devices in the last fifty years, its leadership would - sooner or later - have also had to come to terms with issues like social development and the modernisation of their traditional and hierarchical ways of life. China says that it when it decided to invade Tibet in 1950, it delivered a region from an unusually cruel type of feudal despotism backed up by British imperial might, and that is at least partly true, even though the replacement regime was hardly an improvement. So, what is the Dalai Lama saying? To what extent would he have allowed cultural diversity, democracy and economic change, had he remained the absolute ruler of a hermit kingdom? By now, he is saying that he accepts democracy and accepts science, but that is after decades of exposure to the outside world, and to his many supporters in the US and elsewhere. He is hardly going to continue to push for the feudal arrangements that characterized the pre-”Liberation” regime. Would Tibet have been like Bhutan? Is Bhutan necessarily the best model for a society?
The issue - ultimately - comes down to colonialism, and to a state of affairs where every achievement or social development is ipso facto tarnished by its association with the occupying power. The domestication of nomadic tribes is ipso facto a bad thing because the Chinese did it. The Lhasa-Goldmud train is ipso facto a disastrous folie de grandeur because the Chinese built it. Sporadic economic growth and urban renewal is ipso facto a manifestation of “cultural genocide” because the Chinese orchestrated it. Meanwhile, I read somewhere that some Tibetan exiles even objected to the holding of a beauty contest because it was regarded as a “western influence “. The worst consequence of occupation is always this sort of misguided and destructive quest for the restoration of ethnic and cultural purity.
A lot of propaganda is being pumped out, naturally, with China suggesting that the majority of Tibetans are actually quite happy with the state of things, that they are living happier and longer lives, but are being manipulated by the Dalai Lama “clique”. It makes perfect sense for propagandists to blame everything on cliques, because it takes the blame away from whoever happens to be in charge, and from a wider range of forces and unforeseen consequences that have arisen from particular policies or campaigns or historical movements.
Al Qaeda - a largely fictional grouping, according to some critics - serves a similar purpose, and the entirely rational attempt to understand why people are blowing themselves up in shopping malls - and whether or not it has some relationship with the atmosphere of discontent created by decades of unjust governance that is itself backed up by an inequitable world economic system - is submerged under waves of condemnations and shouted down by rather irrational claims that “trying to understand” actually equates to “trying to justify”.
How does this relate to Tibet? If reports of violence by Tibetan mobs against Han Chinese businesses are correct, then the Chinese government is also right to stand up and accuse its critics of hypocrisy.
Ethnic Tibetan mobs armed with sticks and swords maraud through the streets, destroying and looting property owned by Han or Hui Chinese, a spasm of frustrated violence against Han rule and all the grievances that Han rule might have aroused. This, naturally, gets far more favourable (or at the very least, thoughtful and non-condemnatory) coverage in the western press than it would have done had it been, say, Muslim Brotherhood gangs threatening the interests of the United States in Egypt.
Still, there is something a little absurd and overdone about the official media accounts. Shenzhen Daily published the following:
A migrant worker had his liver stabbed by a mob. A woman was beaten by attackers and had her ear sliced off.
A doctor named Losang Cering was assaulted by knife-wielding rioters when he was trying to save a 6-year-old boy who had been trampled and suffocated.
A rioter, who stopped at nothing, scooped a fish-sized piece of flesh from the buttocks of Liu Dingwei, a young police officer. The single incident, many say, highlighted the argument that police exercised maximum restraint and remained consistently defensive in the face of reckless rioters....
Ngagwang Namgyai, one of the rioters now in police custody, confessed that he paid people including ruffians to join the riot, and rewarded them according to the destruction they caused. Police records show the man was also involved in the 1989 Lhasa riots. He said the six people he paid were all former convicted separatists.
Zhoima, from the Nyingchi prefecture, told police that she made several hundred yuan in the March 14 riot. "The people gave me money to smash things up, and told me I could do whatever and beat up as much as I like," she said. (my emphasis)
Sam Harris, the famous atheist, has been notoriously soft on eastern mysticism, and speaks favourably about Tibetan Buddhism in particular and the forgiveness and non-violence that it supposedly espouses. I would prefer to focus on the political reasons why Tibetans appear to be passive, non-violent victims of oppression: they have absolutely no cross-border support or encouragement. They are trapped in a geographical, geostrategic dead-end.
When the CIA was able to airdrop arms and communication equipment into their strongholds, they fought ruthlessly and brutally for more than a decade, ambushing Chinese military personnel and slaughtering them without compunction - activities that, in the current one-size-fits-all political climate, would be described as terrorism. The rebels/insurgents/freedom fighters/terrorists stopped their campaign only when Kissinger/Nixon won rapprochement with Beijing and the CIA abandoned their support. The idea that their religion has somehow made them behave better seems ridiculous. The point is that the only surviving locus of protest exists in the monasteries.
