Page 1 of
2 Tibet's
only hope lies within By Peter
Lee
The election of Harvard Law School
fellow Lobsang Sangay as the Kalon Tripa,
or prime minister, of the Tibetan government in
exile has been framed as a much-needed repackaging
of the Tibetan political agenda to meet the needs
of the Tibetan struggle after the 14th Dalai Lama
passes away.
However, an important new
book, Tragedy in Crimson by Tim Johnson,
McClatchy's Beijing bureau chief for six years,
[1] questions the effect that the marginalized and
impotent emigre government in India will have on
the spiral of repression, anger, resistance, and
more repression that characterizes the lot of many
Tibetan monks and lay people inside the
ethnic-Tibetan
regions of the People's
Republic of China (PRC).
Johnson's book is
an important contribution to what might be termed
an "exit interview" genre of China correspondents.
On new assignment, and relieved of the
worry of expulsion and conscious and
self-conscious self-censorship, Western
journalists can be frank in their choice of
subjects and conclusions while writing their China
books.
That wasn't easy while working in
China, as Johnson makes clear.
Since an initial trip in 2007, I had
submitted multiple letters and faxes seeking
permission to return to the Tibetan Autonomous
Region, all to no avail ... One foreign
journalist asked [Jampa Phontsuk, chair of the
Tibet Autonomous Region government] why
authorities blocked foreign journalists from
traveling to Tibet. Without a trace of mockery,
he responded: "We very much welcome journalists
... The 'problem' of not allowing foreign
journalists to enter Tibet does not exist."
(pages 46-47)
While Johnson was still
working in China, Chinese diplomats met with
McClatchy's chief executive officer to discuss his
Tibet book - a book he hadn't announced yet -
advertising that they had obtained the information
by monitoring his e-mails and phone calls.
With this context, it is easy to see why
Chinese government claims concerning events in
Tibet - indeed any events - receive a
less-than-sympathetic hearing from Western
journalists and their editors.
Johnson's
book is especially valuable because of the
overarching theme he has chosen - China's ethnic
policy, with a focus of Tibet - and, in its
first-hand testimony and cumulative detail,
providing a unified picture of China's aggressive
efforts to secure its borderlands, from Tibet in
the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and
Inner Mongolia to the north.
It is clear
that China is playing the economic integration
card, pouring investment and Han immigrants into
the Tibetan, Uyghur and Mongolian regions of the
PRC.
Inner Mongolia counts as a victory
for the Chinese policy. However, in Tibet,
Qinghai, western Sichuan, and Xinjiang, the flip
side of this economic and demographic incursion is
local dissatisfaction, coupled with ferocious
repression by security forces.
Even if the
PRC government had a genuine "hearts and minds"
approach to social control, apparently the best
and brightest don't end up in China's remote
westlands as security personnel and
administrators.
The Chinese government may
be able to build a 21st-century green train across
the plateau to Lhasa, but the local cops have the
mindset of good, old-fashioned racist goons of the
type that used to deliver injustice in the
American south.
Near the Labrang
monastery, Johnson had conversation with a young
monk and his sister:
I asked about the mood of the town,
and he said it was tense. Tibetans faced
discrimination. "If you look at government
offices, there are hardly any Tibetans. Tibetans
go to university and study hard, they can't get
a job ... ". He told me how, during protests a
year earlier, police raided the monastery, took
fingerprints of all the monks, made them sign
papers in Chinese characters that many didn't
understand, and ripped up all the photographs
they could find of the Dalai Lama, whose image
is banned in China ... "We really, really hate
Chinese people," the sister said ... "It isn't
the monks. It's us young people." (page 35)
In Xining, the capital of Qinghai
province, Johnson spoke with Jamyang Kyi, a
well-known local celebrity and writer, who sent
off a text message passing along a report that
several Tibetans had been killed in Qinghai during
the 2008 unrest:
[P]lainclothes officers in Xining
... took her away, first to the Public Security
Office, then after a few days to an undisclosed
location. During her captivity, she was bound to
a chair with rope and interrogated at length.
Over 21 days, she was given food on only 14 of
them ... She was barred from leaving Xining, she
said, and all her telephone and Internet
communications were monitored. She was not
allowed to use the Internet at state-owned
Qinghai Television, where she had been a writer,
news editor, and producer ... for some two
decades, ... before police let her return home,
one officer said that her life held the value of
a wadded piece of paper that could be cast away
... (pages 198-200)
Mistreatment is
not just for monks, activists, and sympathizers:
"[The brother of Johnson's interview
subject], a nomad, had taken a girlfriend on a
love trek to Lhasa ... when Lhasa erupted in
protest ... police ... accused him of being a
troublemaker because he'd come from outside the
autonomous region. They tossed him in a truck
and piled so many other detainees on top of him
he almost lost consciousness. Police held him
for 48 days, keeping a hood over his head for
much of the time. Authorities transferred him
many times during his detention, and when he was
finally freed, it was in Lanzhou, the capital of
Gansu province, outside the Tibetan region.
Police kept his shoes, sending him out of the
door barefoot. (page 30)
Wholesale
detention without due process or just cause,
combined with brutal treatment, has predictable
results:
Robin [alias of a young Tibetan in
Qinghai] described the region as a cauldron of
tension. Tibetans still were infuriated by
numerous arrests in the wake of the 2008
protests. But local Tibetans had not organized
themselves. "They are very angry at the Chinese
government and the Chinese people," Robin said.
"But they have no idea what to do. There is no
leader. When a leader appears and somebody helps
out they will all join." We ... heard tale after
tale of civil disobedience in outlying hamlets.
In one village, Tibetans burned their Chinese
flags and hoisted the banned Tibetan Snow Lion
flag instead. Authorities ... detained nine
villagers ... One nomad ... said "After I die
... my sons and grandsons will remember. They
will hate the government." (page 29)
This brings us back to the
government-in-exile in Dharamsala, aka the Central
Tibetan Administration or CTA, and its capacity to
provide leadership to angry and abused Tibetans
within the PRC.
Especially among
frustrated younger Tibetan exiles, there is
support for going beyond the Dalai Lama's policy
of negotiation with China towards autonomy, and
agitating for independence instead.
The
militant franchise in Dharamsala is held by
several non-governmental organizations (NGOs),
chief among them the Tibetan Youth Congress, the
Gu Chu Sam association of ex-political prisoners,
the Tibetan Women's Congress, the National
Democratic Front, and the Students for a Free
Tibet (India), as well as the charismatic
activist/author, Tenzin Tsundue.
In 2008,
these groups, with the vocal leadership by
Tsundue, banded together to form the imposingly
named Tibetan People's Uprising Movement.
Its manifesto stated:
It is time for Tibetans to take
control of our future through a unified and
coordinated resistance movement. We must now
proclaim to the Chinese and to the world that
the desire for freedom still burns in the heart
of every Tibetan, both inside Tibet and in
exile. In particular, the time has come for
Tibetans in exile to boldly demonstrate that
even after 50 years, we long to return to our
homeland. A return march from exile in India
back home to Tibet is being organized and will
revive the spirit of the 1959 Uprising.
The 2008 Olympics will mark the
culmination of almost 50 years of Tibetan
resistance in exile. We will use this historic
moment to reinvigorate the Tibetan freedom
movement and bring our exile struggle for
freedom back to Tibet. Through tireless work and
an unwavering commitment to truth and justice,
we will bring about another uprising that will
shake China's control in Tibet and mark the
beginning of the end of China's occupation. [2]
The "return march" fizzled under the
disapproving gaze of the Indian government, which
employed arrests, delays, and permit requirements
to make sure the marchers never got near the
border.
Nevertheless, the commencement of
the march - on March 10, 2008 - was also the day
that several hundred monks turned up at the
Bokhara - the heart of Lhasa - for a silent vigil
that promptly deteriorated into a security forces
assault and a bloody anti-Han riot that claimed
dozens of lives and sparked demonstrations and
crackdowns at monasteries and towns throughout the
Tibetan areas of the PRC.
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