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Tibetans' suicidal protest

By Gabriel Lafitte - posted Wednesday, 19 March 2008


Having made it almost impossible for overt protest to occur in public spaces anywhere in Tibet, the hunt is now on to assign blame, and punish China’s enemies. The old Maoist slogan still applies: in any situation where the party is opposed (by definition 95 per cent of the masses are with the Party, and 5 per cent are opposed) they must be identified, denounced and punished. By Chinese definition, this is all a plot stirred up by the evil Dalai Lama, since it is impossible to face the truth that Tibetans simply dislike the greediness, racism and the contempt they experience whenever they find themselves having to deal with Chinese.

Yet another rectification campaign is now cranking up, to strike hard at “splittists”. So it goes. Nothing changes. All public space will be occupied exclusively by the Party once more, the only voices heard in public will praise the correct leadership of the Party and denounce the Nobel peace-prize winning Dalai Lama. Gradually, the Party will once again believe its own propaganda, until reality erupts once more in its face.

There is a grim obsessiveness to this refusal to learn anything from the past.

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Although the issues are the same as 20, 30 and even 50 years ago, the world has eyes and ears only for violence, which by definition is hard news. This distresses most Tibetans, since there is acceptance throughout the global Tibetan diaspora that non-violent resistance is the only policy that can eventually encourage China to relax enough to treat Tibetans as human equals.

But the ongoing non-violent resistance conscientiously practiced by Tibetans in and beyond Tibet attracts no headlines, no media at all. When it all gets too much, and stones are thrown, Tibet is momentarily in the news, as if out of nowhere, reported chaotically by media unused to listening to Tibetans, to highly professional Tibetan NGOs such as the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, which takes great care to report to the world only what it can verify from several sources.

The news from Tibet, at best, is the latest development in a complex story so far. For most of us, Tibet came out of nowhere, an echo of a past conflict. Media coverage has clutched at what little can be filmed, and at scraps of information. Much has been made of the Dalai Lama calling the situation cultural genocide. That’s a term he has used for years, and no one was listening. It’s a concept worth examining, perhaps even a clue as to the heart of the issue, and why Tibetans, knowing their protest against the world’s most modern and efficient dictatorship (proudly calling itself so) is suicidal.

Cultural genocide has not been much tested legally, nor does international law have the strength, or institutions, to mount a case. Yet putting together those two words makes intuitive sense, as descriptors of a policy that leaves bodies and outer clothing intact, while insisting on completely remaking the mentality of a whole people. As an idea, it is imaginable. The key question is whether this describes the Tibetan experience of living under Chinese communist modernity for the past 50 years.

Five decades ago China was revolutionary; today it embraces state capitalism and the rapid creation of wealth by a powerful well-connected class of bureaucratic entrepreneurs, to use the jargon of political scientists. China has changed so greatly, from communism to capitalism, it’s hard to see any continuity, but when it comes to Tibet there are continuities despite the swerves in the Party line. Fundamentally, China saw and sees Tibetans as backwards, in urgent need of rescuing from themselves, in need of modernity, progress and material consumption.

Tibetans were and are often nomadic, which seemed primitive, an enslavement to nature, in the eyes of educated urban Chinese, whether revolutionaries, bureaucrats or entrepreneurs.

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China decisively turned away from its own traditions of flowing with nature, in order to urgently catch up with global modernity, and insists everyone must participate, or be a drag on China’s attainment of comprehensive national power, exemplified in the Olympics. Tibetans seemed, through Chinese eyes, not only to be backwards, but stubbornly so in their preference for seeking the sources of human happiness in the mind, rather than in material consumption. Chinese economists and officials sent to Tibet loudly complained that Tibetans could get by quite happily without even cooking oil or soy sauce, so how could they possibly be taught to want and need tractors, billiard halls and karaoke?

China has for 50 years utterly and exclusively dominated all public spaces in Tibet, so as to improve the “low human quality” of the Tibetan masses. China, whether revolutionary or capitalist, has adopted the role of elder brother and teacher, instructing the ignorant Tibetan masses how to become more advanced producers and consumers. To today’s newly rich urban Chinese, Tibet has come to signify everything globalising China is trying to get away from. Tibet stands for superstition, indifference to commerce, with a stubborn resistance to wealth creation as an end in itself.

Tibetans, even if they have opportunity to become rich, prefer to donate their surpluses to the monasteries, seeing the nuns and monks as providing a social service for all sentient beings. What greater evidence could there be that Tibetans deserve the contempt with which they are treated, even in Tibetan cities now dominated by Chinese immigrants and state financed construction booms? It is just so obvious that Tibetans are backward (luohou), poverty-ridden (pinkun) and peripheral (pianpi), the opposite of everything that is developed (fada), wealthy (fuyu), civilised (wenming).

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About the Author

Gabriel Lafitte is a development policy consultant to the Environment & Development Desk of the Tibetan government in exile based in India. In 1999 he was asked by Tibetans to assess a World Bank project in Tibetan areas of Qinghai province that proposed alleviating poverty by sending tens of thousands of non Tibetans settlers to displace Tibetan nomads. While at the World Bank site he was detained and interrogated by China’s state security force for a week, then deported. He recently returned to China to present a plan to a state-sponsored conference on poverty, for improving Tibetan livelihoods by interbreeding Australian carpet wool sheep. Gabriel contributed to two reports just published, which explain the roots of Tibetan discontent: www.tibet.net/en/diir/pubs/edi/tib2007/content.html and www.savetibet.org/documents/document.php?id=245.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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