As loyal readers of my blog have probably noticed, I’m a bit behind on updates from the trip. The last two weeks of the trip were a whirlwind of experiences, and the first three weeks at home were a whirlwind of reunions, so it’s not until now that I’ve been able to sit down and write. And given how controversial the issue of Tibet’s political status is, both in China and abroad, I wanted to take some time to reflect before writing about my own impressions.
Travelling to Tibet
For a foreigner, even just getting to Tibet at all was cumbersome. In addition to a Chinese visa, foreigners need a travel permit to visit Lhasa, and another permit to visit other parts of Tibet, which both require a local travel agency and the accompaniment of a guide at all times. The government wants tourists (who bring in money), but doesn’t want journalists and activists (who bring trouble), and so the travel agencies are put in charge of issuing permits, and are responsible for the behaviour of their charges while they’re in Tibet. Some people find ways around the rules or sneak across the border (which is very difficult and dangerous to do), and wandering around Lhasa on your own is fine, but most people don’t want to get their local guide in trouble, and therefore stay on their best behaviour.
And so the Tibet that a tourist sees is a tightly controlled version of reality. We walked in and out of the old streets of central Lhasa, where old men and women walk clockwise around temples in prayer and the markets and shops are filled with pilgrims and tourists. We took pictures of the buildings and the people, but were strictly instructed not to photograph the soldiers — difficult to avoid, since they were everywhere. The military uniforms with huge guns and full body armour felt excessive in a place filled with religious pilgrims, and sharpshooters on the rooftops of temples and mosques seemed mildly inappropriate, but on the whole people seemed to get on with their lives, and the soldiers just mixed in with all of the rest of the colors and sounds of the market.
I had read a few books on Tibet before coming, and I knew that at least some people were sad that the Dalai Lama couldn’t return to Tibet, or frustrated that the new railway meant an influx of immigrants from Sichuan and fiercer competition for jobs. But I can’t remember anyone we talked to expressing any kind of anger or frustration. Our guide was very friendly and extremely professional. He answered every question we asked him, but never with any hint that he was unhappy about Tibet’s situation. Which makes sense — even if he did have other opinions, why vent frustration to a tourist who can’t do anything about it and will leave in a few days, when informants are everywhere, and saying something negative means risking everything?
And so, other than the overwhelming presence of soldiers in the Tibetan parts of Lhasa (and lack of soldiers in the newer, Chinese parts), which to me gave a feeling of being in a place under martial law, it would on the whole have been easy to come away with the feeling that things in Tibet aren’t that different from in the rest of China — a place with restrictions on things that Westerners see as important freedoms, like speech and religion, but people work around the restrictions, and for most, everyday life feels relatively free.
Tibet in the news
For someone who wants to get a sense of what the situation in Tibet is really like, turning to newspapers and magazines doesn’t necessarily give a simple answer either. The Chinese government has been very active in promoting its narrative of Tibetan history, and at the same time discredit Western reporting on current events. An old woman on a train in Shandong province, in northeastern China, saw that I was reading a book on Tibetan history, and told me about a documentary she had seen that told the story of how Tibetans had been freed from slavery by the Communist Party, chains literally removed from around their feet, and informed its viewers that now all Tibetans were happy and well-fed. Western media is accused of reporting on the actions of a few “extremists”, falsely implying that the majority of Tibetans would prefer for Tibet to be independent when only a small group of “separatists” hold this view, and exaggerating the brutality of crack-downs against demonstrators by cropping pictures and video clips to show police beating protesters but cutting away protesters attacking the police.
The idea that critical reporting on Tibet is a part of a Western media bias against China plays well with the nationalism that’s alarmingly common, especially in people of the post-80′s generation. The fact that it’s difficult for Western journalists to travel to Tibet to research reports only increases the chance that what is reported will contain mistakes or be one-sided, and makes the reporting even easier to discredit.
A complicated history
Central to the public debate, it seems, has been the issue of whether or not Tibet is “inherently” a part of China. The Chinese side cites a long history of contacts between Tibet and China — Tibet was once an empire of its own that exchanged tributes and princesses with the Chinese empire — and then a closer relationship that began with the Qing dynasty Qianlong emperor (a practising Buddhist) in the 18th century, during which time the emperor sent in the Chinese army to prop up the Dalai Lama’s government, in return for spiritual guidance and blessings from the Dalai Lama. Tibet was invaded in 1904 by the British (who wanted to hold this key position between Russia, China and India) but they withdrew once the government back in London found out about the invasion and realized it was a stupid idea. With the fall of the Qing dynaty, Tibet then enjoyed a few decades of de facto independence before being invaded once again, this time by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, who made it a part of the modern Communist State.
Long before the Communist Party took power, “liberating” Tibet (along with Taiwan and Hainan) was a part of the CCP’s agenda — a matter both of strategic military importance (the highlands of Tibet could serve as an entry point either for Indian or Russian armies), and as a matter of nationalist pride (the British invasion put Tibet on the list of areas loosely belonging to the Qing empire that had been invaded by imperialist forces). Later Western activism for Tibetan independence was seen as just the latest reincarnation of imperialist meddling with Chinese territory. The Chinese government often states that it freed Tibetans from what was essentially a slave society, and Tibet in the early 1900s probably was in need of serious reform, which the ruling elite at the time was too slow to deliver. But what followed under Chinese rule was certainly not better.
Tibet, like mainland China, suffered terribly during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. It’s sometimes said that in mainland China, the Great Leap Forward mainly affected the countryside, while the Cultural Revolution affected the cities, but Tibet, despite being mainly rural, most certainly suffered hugely during the Cultural Revolution, and probably felt the pain of the Great Leap Forward as well. In fact, in his book Tibet, Tibet, Patrick French cites someone who claims that the Cultural Revolution lasted for a full 20 years in Tibet, starting in 1960 and not ending until 1980.
During the reform period in 1980s, conditions in Tibet improved, and Hu Yaobang, one of the reform-minded politicians in power in the 80s, famously visited Tibet, apologized for the pain inflected on the region, and promised two-pronged reform, both political and economic. Tibetans, like many in mainland China, wanted more, and increasing demonstrations eventually convinced the leadership in Beijing that political reform had been a mistake. Since then, the strategy has instead been a “one-pronged approach”, full focus on economic reform.
Tibet today
The Chinese government has in the past two decades invested huge amounts of money in developing Tibet’s economy. There are policies in place to help Tibetans (and other minorities from poorer parts of the country), most notably extra points on the college entrance examination to make it easier for young Tibetans to get into university, and exceptions to the one-child policy. But critics say that economic development isn’t benefiting Tibetans, partly because low-level jobs go to Mandarin-speaking immigrants from other regions of China (like neighbouring Sichuan province), and higher-level jobs go to people with the right connections, who tend to be Han Chinese.
Critics of the Free Tibet movement sometimes claim that foreigners who say that they’re fighting to protect Tibetan culture really just want Tibet to remain a quaint, rural and essentially impoverished place. Change inevitably benefits some and hurts others, but for most Tibetans, economic development would probably be a good thing. The problem, in my opinion, isn’t economic development per se, but rather who gets the rewards of development (currently those with connections in government), and who pays the price (currently the environment, and local communities who depend on it). The official line seems to be that the majority of Tibetans are happy with the focus on economic development, and that the demonstrations and riots of the past few years are the work of a small number of extremists — but writers who do try to dig deeper seem to find widespread unhappiness with the lack of religious and political freedom, and frustration that the fruits of economic development for the most part don’t go to Tibetans.
Which brings us to today, and what needs to happen. To be honest, I don’t know what the answer is. The Western “Free Tibet” campaign seems to have been not only ineffective but directly counterproductive – the Chinese government’s response has been an appeal to nationalism, and it has essentially locked itself into a position that now makes any kind of negotiation with the Dalai Lama extremely difficult. But the current situation is clearly unacceptable (see here, here, here and here for coverage of some of the most recent crackdowns on Tibetans, and here and here for coverage on recent examples of the government asserting its control over the religious system in Tibet).
In my eyes, the basic problem in Tibet is the same as in the rest of China – a lack of basic political freedom that leaves local officials free to exploit their positions for personal gain without being held accountable for their actions, and silences any potential opposition from the public. To me, there doesn’t seem to be an inherent problem with Tibet being a part of China – the Chinese people I know are proud that this beautiful and culturally rich region is a part of their country, and if political rights were protected and economic rewards shared more fairly, there are potentially benefits to being a part of a quickly growing economy (in this article from ten years back, Peter Hessler, who is one of my favorite authors, points out that China has invested huge amounts of money in building basic infrastructure in Tibet, investment that might be difficult to attract if Tibet were an independent country). As for protecting culture, if Tibet were an autonomous region not only in name but also in practice (as things stand now, autonomous regions in China tend to be under tighter and not looser control from the central government), then it might even be possible to permit a role for the Tibetan language in the political and business spheres, beyond the role it currently has in local government, which seems mostly to be in decorating non-essential signs.
When I got back to Wuhan and talked to Chinese friends there about my thoughts on Tibet, they laughed at my suggestion that Tibet and the rest of China need political freedom, and they told me “that will never happen”. The trend during my two years in China certainly seemed to be in the wrong direction; James Fallows noted in his blog the irony that just as the US was leaving it’s Bush era, China was entering its own — he was referring to international relations, but I think this applies more broadly to the Chinese government’s hard-line approach of the past few years. I don’t know what I, as a foreigner, could, or should do to make a difference – foreign meddling in Tibet in the past has only made things worse. Talking about the issues at stake is important, and I can do so more freely than Chinese friends can and certainly more freely than Tibetans can, but even this blog would be blocked in an instant if it began to get enough of a following to make a difference.
And so, it’s complicated. I don’t think the issue at stake in Tibet is one that’s fundamentally different from the issue at stake in the rest of China — at heart, it’s a question of protecting the rights of those who are politically and economically weak everywhere in China — but the repression in Tibet (and Xinjiang) seem more extreme than in other parts of China, maybe because those two regions have an added racial and religious dimension that make the difference between those with and without power even more blatant, and so the whole situation is more urgent. China is by no means unique in having this type of issue in its history — the way in which the US annexed its western regions and its treatment in the past of Native Americans, and past British treatment of Ireland and the Irish, are just two examples of issues that are today seen as shameful aspects of these countries pasts — but the fact that other countries have committed similar crimes in the past is no excuse for a country to continue committing those types of crimes today, as difficult as finding a solution may be (as the US has painfully learned in its attempts to make things up to the Native American population). For now, visiting Tibet is a mixed experience — like so many other places in China, it’s a beautiful and fascinating place, and it’s easy to ignore the problems that are there, but they’re very clearly still there, under the surface.
Further reading:
For those of you who would like to read more, I like Peter French’s book Tibet, Tibet. It’s billed as “a personal history of Tibet”; French was active in the Free Tibet movement, but later became disillusioned with the movement because of its failure in contributing to any kind of progress in political freedom in Tibet, and so he travels to Tibet to research his book and understand the different sides in the debate. Abrahm Lustgarten’s China’s Great Train is an interesting account of the building of the railway line into Tibet, although some simple mistakes and an obvious sympathy for the Tibetan independence movement undermine the author’s credibility. A professor of Chinese history who we met at the airport on our way out of Lhasa also recommended Dragon in the Land of Snows as a good account of the events the past few decades.
