Olympic news: TIBET 1 CHINA 0

The recent events in Tibet redirected international spotlight on the socio-economic situation on the plateau whose cultural heritage has in recent years attracted passionate interest among Western or Westernized urban elites worldwide. For several convulsive days, international media struggled to provide footage beyond the spotty coverage of the violent riots that occurred in Lhasa on March 14. Reactions of outrage, dismay and exhilaration were mixed with premature hope that the Olympic year would finally force the government in Beijing to take the grievances of the Tibetan population into consideration and open up a more constructive dialogue with Tibetan leaders.

This hope proved to be short-lived. Not only did the PRC government decide to squash any dissent among the “extremist” elements in Tibet and other ethnically Tibetan parts of China. More importantly, Beijing has hijacked the significance of the events and for the domestic audience manufactured a meaning quite distant from message of spiritual enlightenment that the Western world usually associates with the Dalai Lama’s peripatetic mission. Foreigners in China were surprised by the outpouring of xenophobic nationalism, this time directed not at Japan or Taiwan, but at the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Lamaism in general. Egged on by the one-sided, state-controlled propaganda, excitable urban Chinese resorted to threats addressed at the Western media, accused of pro-Tibetan bias.

We visited Tibet several months before the recent tragic events. “We” are a mixed Western/Eastern couple, which gives us often privileged access to a variety of cultural and linguistic contexts. It was no different in Tibet. Everyone who arranged a trip to Tibet in the recent years realizes the difficulties of obtaining entry permits to various parts of the plateau. Chinese officials would eventually yield to your demands, but at a (hefty) price.

The trip had its magic moments. We shall never forget the feeling of being transported to another era when as the only outsiders among hundred of monks in Ramoche Temple, we felt uplifted by our own senses overreacting to the combined forces of regular sutra chanting, pungent smell of butter lamps and dark carmine waves of robed silhouettes. Marooned in our own sense of embarrassment we were somehow carried above the clean-shaven heads, clockwise around the smoky interior until we reappeared through the temple kitchen into the 21st century. This is where the Chinese police greeted us with their saturnine, green uniformed looks.



Through a Taiwanese agent we had found a Tibetan guide. In his teens he had escaped to Dharamsala, but the family in Tibet insisted on his return to marry a local woman. It was not long before we met other Tibetans who with varied levels of English and Mandarin introduced us to the contemporary Tibetan reality.

The situation in Tibet, or more precisely “Tibetan Autonomous Region” had deteriorated quite markedly since 2005, when Chinese Communist Party appointed Zhang Qingli as the head of the Tibetan Regional CCP Committee. Zhang Qingli assumed his role after spending several years in Muslim-dominated Xinjiang, where he “successfully” crushed religious opposition to Beijing’s atheist rule.

Mr Zhang set about introducing a series of policies aimed at strengthening the Chinese character of Tibet. Some of them were of purely symbolic nature. Tibetans building a new family house were obliged to hoist a Chinese national flag on the rooftop. Those Tibetans who wished to pursue a career or study were banned by the authorities from engaging in religious services. This ban extended also to their families.

The Communist Party actively supported stronger links between Tibet and China. The opening of the first train link was hailed as a great technological achievement and broke a 100-year old altitude record for a rail line (the previous record was held by Peru). This connection, shunned by many European tour operators due to potential health risks for non-acclimatized lowlanders, was quickly exploited by the China’s domestic tourism industry. The arrivals from China skyrocketed, but the impact on Tibetan economy has proved mixed.



The Chinese tour agencies control the point-to-point traffic, with all the main facilities in Tibet offering Chinese-style accommodation (complete with karaoke), Chinese food and mainland Chinese tour guides whose knowledge of Tibetan history and culture is spotty at best, and ideologically skewed at worst. We overheard Chinese “tour guides” focusing on a particular piece of jewelry in Potala Palace, but dodging questions about the region itself. In one case the guide confirmed that the “criminal Dalai Lama” was probably already dead. The somewhat unexpected emphasis on jewelry appeared to be a part of a well-known tourist trap ploy – the Chinese tourists were bussed directly from Potala to a Chinese trinket emporium.

Our guide could not enter Potala Palace with us. Any Tibetan who wishes to obtain a license as a tourist guide or a bus driver must pass a complex set of exams, although no such requirements are imposed on the Chinese who operate in Lhasa or Shigatse. Our guide, a former Dharamsala dweller, was not even allowed to sit such an exam.

The monasteries present a particularly acute problem for the authorities. Jiang Zemin, China’s former President outlawed images of the Dalai Lama, who continues to be revered in Tibet. Shortly before our visit to Lhasa, a group of Dutch tourists smuggled the Dalai Lama’s pictures. When a monk in Shigatse approached them to ask if they had any pictures, they readily volunteered the photographs. The “monk” turned out to be a police agent and the Dutch tourists were quickly rounded up and escorted to the Nepalese border with little chance of obtaining a new Tibetan entry permit any time soon. An attempt by other hikers to unfurl the banned Tibetan flag under Mt Everest also attracted a swift sanction – a proof that Chinese police is present in all the areas where foreign visitors are allowed to travel. Meanwhile, Jiang Zemin’s “patriotic” slogan emblazons the main courtyard at Shigatse’s Tashilhunpo Monastery.

Further north on the Plateau we were often reminded of the Chinese occupation. The cavalcades of PLA trucks with disoriented Chinese conscripts would clog the main thoroughfares whenever one of them stopped to allow the young soldiers to relieve themselves by the roadside. It was painfully ironic to spot an occasional Tibetan pilgrim crawling to Lhasa on the other side of the road.



The train link increased the immigration pressure into Tibet’s main cities. Chinese people are generally reluctant wanderers, unless a critical mass of the population from a familiar linguistic group offers a reliable support network. Over the last two years, their numbers have increased in the Tibetan cities and transformed the entire neighborhoods into crass Chinatowns with restaurants, gaudy neon lights, karaoke bars, gambling dens and brothels. There are no more Tibetan taxi drivers in Lhasa and a visitor now has to learn Mandarin names of the various destinations to be able to navigate around. The roads have become so dangerous that the racket of a car crash became commonplace. Woe to a Tibetan who is engaged in a car accident with the Chinese. If a brawl ensues, the Chinese police would always side with the ethnic newcomers, or so the locals claim. The food markets have also now come under control of the immigrants. For example, Chinese Hui Muslims seem to be in control of the yak meat market in Lhasa.

The speed with which the immigrants have taken control of the local economy can only partly be explained by the malignant economic apartheid promoted from within the CCP. Watching the mutual indifference between hard-working Chinese and eternally circumambulating Tibetans one cannot escape the sensation that the economic behavior of the latter group is, and has probably always been, highly dysfunctional. At the very least, it has not functioned particularly well within the system of commercial exchanges aimed at fast capital accumulation. When two weeks later I contemplated the plight of Native Americans in front of their depressing trailer parks in New Mexico, the reflection on maladaptive economic developments returned.



During the trip to Tibet, I was seeking to refute my old preconceptions about the Top of the World. Maybe I felt slightly guilty of the simplistic black/white view I had developed during my years in Western Europe. I could never delete from my memory the effect that Jiang Zemin’s failed visit to Switzerland had on my Chinese friend back in 1999. A large pro-Tibetan crowd blocked the access to the Parliament and Tibetan refugees occupied the rooftops around the main plaza. Ushered through the backdoor, and puzzled by the inability or unwillingness of the Swiss authorities to mow down the crowd Tienanmen style, the Chinese President threw away the prepared speech and stormed out of the formal gala meeting in front of the camera crews. An eminent sinologist who accompanied Jiang Zemin on the trip later recounted amusing stories about his erratic buffoonery. But in front of the unexpected spectacle on the TV screen, my Chinese friend was in tears, her entire body identified with the pangs of the CCP’s loss of face. The same person, a Chicago-educated professional originally from Wuxi, often reacted in tune with nationalistic sound-bites, haplessly translated into fractured English. But her revulsion at “Seven Years in Tibet” seemed genuine. And a comment that the Dalai Lama looked “like Jiang Zemin”, which sounded callous when pronounced in front of a Tibetan refugee, visibly reflected an overgrown collective ego that the Chinese Communist Party may so easily stir among mainland Chinese and their offspring. The myth of “unity with the Motherland” is not some genetic feature of the Chinese people, but rather the outcome of an elaborate colonialist mythology, aiming at persuading impressionable young Chinese students that the two countries were “always” one. The importance of wars between Tibet and Tang China is minimized and the marriage of the 33rd Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo to Nepalese and Chinese consorts is underlined as the proof that Tibet had “always” been under Chinese (but not Nepalese?) influence.

Before leaving Lhasa, I asked our Tibetan hosts about this two-speed society, where the main groups at best seemed to ignore each other and certainly had very little interest in each others’ affairs. Two revelations stunned me. The first was that, according to my hosts, at least 20% of Tibetan population supported Chinese occupation, mostly for economic reasons. This is certainly more than the romantic view of a monolithic nation suffering under the Goliath’s iron fist. The other message was one of hope. Our Tibetan friends told us that among the Chinese visitors there were increasing numbers of young students and intellectuals who were genuinely interested in Tibetan history and culture. Some tinkered with Buddhist religiosity. Others would go as far as to “apologize” to their Tibetan hosts for what the Chinese State had done to them. We are still far away from Australian “SORRY”, but it did strike an unexpectedly optimistic note.

But this is hard to imagine in the current anti-Tibetan and anti-Buddhist frenzy that has convulsed the urban Chinese so keen on reversing their perpetual sense of cultural and technological inferiority. The nationalistic themes at the Olympic were supposed to enhance the feeling of pride and cement the gratitude that some coastal Chinese feel vis-à-vis the government’s economic record. That these objectives have now been hijacked by an un-reformable band of feudalism-supporting, slavery-reviving, splittistly-brainwashed, unthankful ethnic “minority” is unpardonable. The popular overreaction to the Western media’s portrayal of the tragic events in Lhasa tells us less about what happened in Tibet and more about the unreflective frustration that the Chinese have to reconcile with their self-glorified collective identity. It must be unpleasant to be so unpopular.