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Published: July 22nd 2009
Before moving to China in January, 2009, a year of researching taught me there are two issues not to be broached over here in the Middle Kingdom. All of the foreigners on all the message boards and
websites call them The Big T’s;
Tienanmen Square is one, and
Tibet the other. For weeks after my arrival I danced around these issues when they came up. I remained polite and servile, wanting to be the good tourist, an Ambassador from the USA. But after a while I became more comfortable with my new home and noticed my hosts continued talking about both of the Big T’s as if they are both just topics of conversation like the weather, or the education system, or the joys of hot dumplings and milk tea.
Both topics have come up many times in my high school classes where I teach English. Just last week, as Jennifer, myself, and three other English teacher’s visiting from Canada all sat in an auditorium while receiving glowing accolades from our two weeks of successfully teaching Summer Camp, in front of over 150 students my host, Mr. Chen, wished us well on our summer vacation travels and was practically beaming as he announced our plans to go to Tibet for two weeks.
Nobody gasped. Nobody ran out of the gallery to flag down the secret police. In fact, the entire audience clapped and congratulated us, wishing us well.
I chuckled to myself, thinking Mr. Chen could have announced we were also stopping by Tienanmen Square, then trekking up to
Xinjiang to see what the riots are all about before heading over to Tibet. They still would have clapped and been pleased with our plans. We’ve gone from only whispering about these issues to announcing to hundreds that we are headed to Tibet and people are happy for us and wishing us well?
So from my experience on the ground here in China, I’m pleased to say that the Big T’s are more examples of how the West gets it wrong when it comes to much of their understanding of China. For instance, we walked all over Tienanmen Square earlier in the year along with the throngs of other tourists, taking snapshots, chatting up the poker-faced guards - it’s just another attraction here. Everyday we navigate our way through, over, beneath, and around the Great Firewall of China censor-machine, and share many laughs with both my Chinese hosts and my high school students who are all ears and proud smiles when I tell them how much I enjoyed Beijing and all of its attractions, especially T-Square. No police are showing up at our door. Nobody is following us. Our hosts are not writing reports and monitoring our behavior and whereabouts. The trick is, you can talk about T-Square, just don’t talk about the politics behind T-Square.
Same with Tibet.
To the Chinese,
Tibet is a non-argument. Tibet, like Taiwan, is part of China and if you don’t refer to it as such you are not clever, which is a nice way of saying you are obviously a victim of a Western education and you don’t know your geography. Not that protesters see it that way, and I have to be honest, I don’t see it that way either. Not entirely. But today I do see it differently than I used to. So as Jenny and I get ready to spend the next six weeks traveling around the whole country starting with eight days exploring Tibet, the other Big-T is going to be revealed, unraveled, and a bright light shone on it; all in the name of open-mindedness and cultural understanding.
Before coming to China I felt like Tibetans are kindred spirits and Tibet itself is a magical kingdom, ruled by a gentle, giggling monk, his Holiness, the 14th Dalai Llama. Back in 2006 I hustled over to Miami and saw his Holiness in person. He spoke for two days at the University of Miami and he and his entourage held my rapt attention with chanting so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes, deep belly laughs, many Lost in Translation moments of confusion, coupled with hours spent walking clockwise circles through endless booths and stalls of Save Tibet t-shirts, hand made trinkets, treasures - all tickets to the cause. My admiration for Buddhism has grown over the last several years and I sit here in amazement, knowing in about a week I will be in Lhasa.
So Tibet, nothing short of a mythical Himalayan utopia, has been an object of curiosity and passion for me for a long time as well as millions of other disillusioned Westerners. And the greater the disillusionment, the more attractive my rarefied notion of Tibet seems to become. Contrasted with the vacuous materialism and soulless consumerism of the West (primarily USA, but you can throw Canada and the European Union in for good taste), the idealized feudalism of Tibet becomes the Promised Land for American angst. Rich in mysticism and dripping with enchantment, Tibet is a Garden of Eden without all the foul-tasting fruits and slippery creatures. Is it any wonder that the People’s Liberation Army’s defeat of the Tibetan army in 1950 was nothing less than the fall of paradise in many Western eyes?
For the past decade or so, it seems that Free Tibet protests have always seemed oriented towards the outside world. They are designed for Western viewers hungry for a cause, and after living here for a while it’s also apparent these protests gain their legitimacy and verve from what is globally referred to as China-bashing. No doubt Tibet is caught between a global tug of war between the West and China. And I know people are genuinely inspired by the Tibetan unrest, but I also believe that many of the Western folks cheering the Tibetan cause and encouraging and applauding violent uprisings are motivated more by trying to humiliate China than their genuine commitment to liberty and democracy for Tibet. To be blunt, the West fears and loathes the Chinese. From my vantage point, the West appears to be driven by a deep and cynical desire to make life difficult for the Chinese.
If this seems crude and simplistic, that’s because it is. But this naive, simplified view of a very complex situation pervades the pro-Tibet lobby folks. To many, China is the embodiment of all that is wrong with modernity; an unthinking, uncaring menace to the spiritual gentle people of Tibet. The Western Development plan for Tibet involves natural resource extraction, large-scale infrastructure projections including population resettlement. They argue this will erase existing economic, social, and political divisions between western and eastern China. Wiping out the Tibetan identity and culture is what is at stake according to this argument - not the self-determination of the Tibetans themselves. Instead, the notion of Tibet as a paradise that will be eradicated - but this notion has been paid for, produced, developed, and consumed by the West and for the West. It’s a paradise in the West’s eyes but there is not enough information around the world about what the
Tibet people actually want for themselves.
As we pack for our trip to Tibet and especially the
trek up to the base camp of Mt. Everest (almost three miles above sea level), we are also required to send the full cost of our trip, around $2,500, as a deposit because you can not simply walk into Tibet and go on your own adventure. You must hire a travel company otherwise you will not be issued the permits that are required to enter and leave Tibet. This is China’s way of ensuring the burgeoning tourist economy gets into the Tibetan economy as well as mainland China’s coffers. A quick Google search using traveling to Tibet pulled up over 2,000,000 hits. The majority of these are travel companies competing for business - a thriving business, even as the Great Firewall of China censors as much information on the unrest in Tibet as technologically feasible.
A more confident West would be celebrated things like ambition, growth, leaping forward. I can’t help but believe that the money coming in from mainland China and the opening of the tourist-floodgates into Tibet can not be all bad for the Tibetan people. Perhaps what upsets most of the Free Tibet screamers is that China in on the fast-track of becoming guilty of being too Western. From economic growth to their fierce sports competitiveness, from using coal to building dazzling skyscrapers, from limiting or eliminating civil rights altogether when deemed necessary, today’s China-bashing is motivated by our own self-loathing and fears, I can hear us now chuckling like a patronizing parent, “Don’t make the same mistakes we did.”
It’s our spiteful envy towards the successes of China that lead us to believe none of these successes are being integrated into progressing the people of Tibet from a theocracy into something better. True, there will not be a democracy in China and therefore not in Tibet. But that’s another topic for discussion. Moving from the feudalistic society into the China’s high beams will bring more good, and also more unrest. In a decade, maybe less, I’m afraid that Tibet is on her way to becoming another
Hong Kong Disney, perhaps just another city where tourism and consumerism run rampant at the expense of what used to be a unique and beautiful, certainly majestic and enchanted, land and people. Although the last major protest was a result of rural Tibetans from the countryside who are not directly benefiting from the tourist economy, I know from experience that it won’t be long before they do begin benefiting, as the majority of China is now showing us. That is why are here, now, so we can see it before it becomes more like the West, and much less Eastern.
If it were not for the changes China is undergoing and embracing right now I would not be here and relishing the opportunity to write this from the Middle Kingdom. So we are off to explore this country and I will write more about what we experience in Tibet and its people, in a few weeks.
Cheers!
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James Li
non-member comment
The Big "T"
Hi, I happened to stumble upon this particular blog entry, and read, with great interest, your thoughts on Tibet. First let me state, for what it is worth, that I am an overseas Chinese (who has never been through the Chinese education system). Thus I hope that my comments will not be misconstrued as somehow pontificating Party lines. I believe that Tibet is the metaphorical baton that is used, by the West, to give China a bloody nose. That the Western media is often biased against China is now well-known. But the extent to which the media - often the only gateway of information and understanding between China and the English speaking world - portrays the Tibet story in a wholly one-sided fashion is appalling and serves, in fact, neither the interests of the Chinese government, the Tibetan government-in-exile nor the Tibetan people themselves. In fact, it would not be a hyperbole to suggest that some (Western) media outlets are mouthpieces of the Free Tibet movement. I do not make such an accusation lightly. But watching news channels (notably last year when troubles began) in which representatives of such groups were free to describe whatever "facts" (historical or current) they liked without any retort, or forensic questioning, from the reporter lends at least some credence to my claim. The Tibet story is presented, in the West, as a simplistic moral fable in which, to quote the academic Donald S Lopez Jnr, "an undifferentiated mass of godless Communists [are] overrunning a peaceful land devoted only to ethereal pursuits". In fact, Free Tibet groups often portray the Chinese (because Tibetans are not Chinese?) as subhuman, as a slitty-eyed, god-less, militarized, materialistic, and expressionless horde. This is seen easily in cartoons in many of their campaigns. This over-simplistic, and perniciously moralistic, portrayal of the Tibetan plight is served the oxygen of publicity to the extent that no-one has ever questioned the official account, whatever that may be. What is certain, though, is that whatever the Dalai Lama says is true, and not to be questioned, of course. I observed, and chuckled internally to myself, that no (Western) media coverage was afforded to the Western Shugden Society in their protests again the Dalai Lama when he visited the UK last year. That is not to say, however, that there are no serious grievances among the Tibetan people, politically, socially and economically, that need to be addressed. Of course it needs to be. However, no serious dialogue can take place so long as the Dalai Lama and his followers continue to advocate for Tibetan independence, or be prescribed "genuine autonomy” (which really is a euphemism for independence, as Serbia can attest). No country, indeed no government - communist or democratically elected - would give up territory willingly. Given China's painful history of seceding territories - Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan - this last point is particular poignant.