Tibet Simmers

Tibet seems to be ill at ease with the Chinese again. With good reason—the last five decades can be called nothing short of cultural rape. Some of this was partially sparked by an ill-timed outburst from Björk, of all people, who called for Tibetan freedom at a concert she performed in Shanghai.

Agitating for Tibetan freedom is one of those causes that bother me, but not for the reasons you might think. Sure, it sounds nice—and the Han Chinese brutality against the Tibetans is unquestioned, and absolutely immoral—but it also smacks of empty self-righteousness: most of the protesters we see in the media, in general, are white people holding signs in English. It does nothing to address the concerns of values of the Han themselves, the vast majority of whom truly believe they have the right to conquer Tibetan lands. That many couch this in terms of a moral equivalence with our own Manifest Destiny is immaterial: that, too, was a brutal act of cultural genocide, and were it happening today, I hope I would be man enough to resist that as well.

Moving beyond that, the actual question of to whom Tibet belongs also lends itself to obfuscation. True, over the past thousand years “ownership” has passed back and forth between the Han and the Lamas… with one crucial difference: all the previous Han attempts at suzerainty were executed under the banner of a common religion. Tibet existed as a separate land before the Mongol conquest of 700 AD. When the Mongolian Empire fell apart in the 14th century, Tibet again became an independent country, but was conquered by the Manchu Empire in 1720, only again becoming independent during the Republican Revolution in 1912. All of these transfers of sovereignty, however, existed under the common banner of Buddhism, and the deification of the Lamas was accepted in Beijing as much as in Lampo. The modern day Han Chinese government soundly rejects Buddhism, and especially the special status accorded the Lamas (the childhood abduction of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the supposed next Panchen Lama, which happened thirteen years ago next month, is a particularly grievous abuse, and his continued detention is one of the many reasons I was stunned and dismayed the State Department removed China from its list of human rights abusers this year).

But the abuses of the Chinese should not obscure the clever propaganda campaign run by the Dalai Lama and the expats. Pre-Han visitors to the region—in this case, Madame Alexandra David-Néel, a Sanskrit-proficient Western lama who sneaked into Lhasa in 1923—described pre-communist occupied Tibet as a shockingly brutal, feudal, and impoverished place. The sheer animal nature of the ordinary Tibetans, described as such by a woman inclined toward a near-fanatical appreciation of their culture, is truly shocking. Ms David-Néel describes the plight of the people living near Tashi Tse—literally, prosperous mountain, in the starkest terms:

To leave the country, to look for better land or less exacting lords, is not permitted. A few ventured the flight and established themselves in neighboring provinces. Having been discovered, they were taken away from the new home they had created and led back to Tashi Tse, where they were beaten and heavily fined.Now many who had thought to imitate them, too frightened by the fate of their friends, remain resigned, all energy destroyed, growing poorer each year, expecting no deliverance in this life. Others looked toward China. “We were not illtreated in this way when the Chinese were the masters,” they said. “Will they come back? Maybe… but when? We may die before…”

So when China claims the Tibetans wanted it to invade to free them of the backward and imperious feudal lords… it isn’t a total lie. This is a bitter pill for many white-skinned Tibetan nationalists to swallow (and who knows, probably for many actual Tibetans as well), but Tibet is among the least of China’s brutalities. At least it has an active support system for its independence, and it does us the courtesy of having a religion with an air-brushed popular history to make it romantic (few remember the fearsome Tibetan warriors of the Middle Ages, which gave Genghiz Khan a run for his money in terms of sheer brutality). No, there two areas in particular, Inner Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan (a.k.a. Xinjiang), which have both seen far worse intentional cultural genocide, and a far more pervasive internal colonization. In Xinjiang, the relentless bussing in of Han Chinese—all of whom enjoy more opportunities for education, business, income, and even civil rights than the native Uighurs—has stressed water supplies so much, Kazakhstan is facing another Aral Sea in its far east. In Inner Mongolia, the actual Mongolians have all but vanished under a literal tidal wave of Han Chinese—many of whom gleefully and systematically destroyed the last vestiges of Mongolian cultural presence during the Cultural Revolution. And this is to say nothing of the hundreds of millions of Han Chinese themselves who have suffered untold horrors under the CCP: I don’t recall seeing many Tibetans marching for their freedom in Tiananmen Square.

However simply looking down upon China with Holy Western Outrage is not a solution. Ignoring the priggish and quite frankly offensive Han chauvinism (dwarfing even the gaudiest excesses of American chauvinism, which rarely goes beyond empty sloganeering and angry TV pundits), the current Chinese government—which kindly props up our entire financial system through its generous purchasing of our securities and bonds and cheap exports—literally stakes its existence on the government’s infallibility. Allowing Tibet independence would require allowing Xinjiang independence… which would also require Taiwan’s independence. Many Americans would cheer at the prospect, but hopefully not with the understanding that Chinese society is actually much less homogeneous and far less stable than the CCP likes us to realize. And, like it or not, a stable China means a stable America. We disrupt that at our own peril.

So yes, let us join hands with the spiritual, romantic Tibetan people—I cannot deny their appeal. But let us also do so in a proper context, taking a sober look at the true history and true issues surrounding it. Nothing in anyone’s past can justify the horrors visited upon any of the CCP’s hundreds of millions of victims. But that is why we should agitate for their redress in a constructive manner—which precludes angrily stomping our feet and shouting slogans. Brave people are literally dying for their freedom in China: let us do them the courtesy of seriously advancing their concerns.