Tibetans' suicidal protest

When the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s enterprising Beijing correspondent, Stephen McDonnell, hopped over the wall of the elite Beijing Minority Nationalities Institute he and his camera glimpsed a sight we should long treasure.

There, on a bitterly cold night, out in the open, were two rows of Tibetan students, their faces lit only by candles, deep in prayer and meditation, as the yanda - strike hard - hour approached. Their vigil was for all Tibetans facing the wrath of a state equipped with every conceivable technology of surveillance, control and punishment, and a vast coercive, carceral apparatus. Silently, they went inwards, gathering strength for the coming storm, which will almost certainly sweep away what, till that moment, promised to be their brilliant careers.

These were not just any Tibetan kids, but the handpicked young of the highest Tibetan Communist Party officials in Tibet; the handful who have mastered the verbal and body language of the Chinese master race, and were, till their candle lit prayers, being groomed to return to Tibet, to implement China’s will.

Now, just by silent prayer, they have shown the jumpy leaders of the Party that no Tibetan is to be trusted, not even the new elite taken from their families, educated like a stolen generation in Chinese schools far from Tibet, carefully selected through their parent’s credentials as Party members.

The Tibetan students in Beijing found by the ABC cameras will, at best, now be required to undergo thought reform under close supervision by professional Party “thought workers”, to use a direct translation of the Chinese term. The students have shamed their Chinese teachers, who could be seen on camera pleading with them to go indoors, lest everyone lose face. Now the professors have lost face, as the students remained silent, in two rows facing each other, just as monks do each morning and evening as they sing the praises of the protector deities.

This is deeply shameful, since the world now sees it. Perhaps many of this new Tibetan generation, schooled so far from home, family and the land of Tibet, actually know little of Buddhism, just as Australia’s Aboriginal stolen generation had access to very little traditional knowledge, yet their body language, their candles, silence and prayers all mimed the lamas.

If even the new generation of Tibetan Party bureaucrats sides, in a crunch, with their fellow Tibetans, then China’s battle for the hearts and minds of Tibetans is lost. Yet again. China’s strategy of building and staffing highly academic schools for Tibetans, not in Tibet, but in distant provinces, has failed again.

What is especially shocking is how often the same cycle repeats, how often the Party believes its own propaganda, that all Tibetans love the Chinese motherland and, through coercive mass campaigns, embrace the current Party line. Then it becomes painfully apparent that coercion is counter productive, there is a fresh clamp down, a hunt to root out and liquidate the enemy within, and the cycle of fear, alienation and mistrust cranks up again.

The Tibetans revolted 20 years ago and 50 years ago. The issues have remained much the same. When I first met and interviewed Tibetans, for an ABC radio documentary series 30 years ago, the issues were so similar to today that the 1979 series Paths to Shangrila could be rebroadcast and only an expert would notice this is a doco from 1979 and not 2008.

China has changed so dramatically in almost every other facet of economy and society, yet remains in a Marxist timewarp over Tibet, endlessly repeating the same mistakes. The Party wants to be loved by the six million Tibetans whose physical areas designated as counties of Tibetan governance cover one quarter of China, in five Chinese provinces. Party hostility to Buddhism runs deep, and we are now hearing the harshest paranoid language from Zhang Qingli, the hardline Party boss of Tibet “Autonomous” Region, as he launches what he calls a people’s war to exterminate dissent.

But, for Party bosses on the rise, this is a standard way to the top. The last time Tibetans revolted - 20 years ago - Hu Jintao was the Party boss, as Zhang Qingli is today, and now Hu is China’s President. Hu imposed martial law; hundreds of Tibetans were imprisoned, tortured and given long sentences on the basis of confessing to anything prosecutors extracted. Being tough on Tibetans is always a good move for a man on the make, inside the Party leadership circles. Being soft on Tibetans is like being soft on crime, a tag that does nothing for a political career.

That’s one reason the Party never learns how to win over the Tibetans by showing a bit of respect.

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.

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.

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).

It is the duty of the state to instruct Tibetans to become civilised, hygienic modern subjects, ready to migrate to distant factories, just like the hundreds of millions of peasants throughout China.

Tibetans have always had broadacre land for their yaks, sheep and goats: a necessity in the coldest habitable climate on earth. They are no keener to be dispossessed of their land than were Australian Aborigines. In my experience, after working as a development policy consultant with Tibetans for many years, they certainly want modern education, health care, new livelihood opportunities, but not at a cost of having to become Chinese, with the Tibetan language having no public uses at all.

That is how it is in China today. It would be impossible to address an envelope for delivery across Tibet, in Tibetan, with any hope that it would ever arrive. The Tibetan language is restricted to the home, and has no economic utility. Tibetan Buddhism and the lamas revered by Tibetans as their wisest and best educated leaders are rigidly excluded from playing any public role. These are facets of what is packed into those two potent words: cultural genocide.

The Dalai Lama, in exile in India for 50 years, meets daily with Tibetans who manage to cross the Himalayas to escape this institutionalised, systematic contempt. Most of them seek a genuine spiritual life as a nun or monk, uninterrupted by endless political campaigns and “thought work”: sessions to rectify minds by forcing young monastics to denounce their most revered Buddhist meditation teachers.

Daily, he hears at first hand the grinding cost of China’s brittle superiority complex, its insistence that it knows at all times what is best for all Tibetans. After pouring out their grief to the Dalai Lama, they leave, to join one of the hundreds of Tibetan monasteries rebuilt in exile in India.

The Dalai Lama is left with the tragedy of an entire people. Tibetans just beg to differ. They prefer to seek happiness within rather than exclusively without. The Dalai Lama’s term, encapsulating myriad insults, is cultural genocide. When he puts those two words together, people around the world are now listening. Tibet may soon fade from the headlines as the apparatus of coercion excludes all cameras. In the absence of news crews, cultural genocide will soon be relaunched as a life or death struggle against Tibetan ways of thinking and being.