[Patrick Rolfe]
On the 10th of March peaceful protesters took to the streets of Lhasa and other cities. They remained there for five days, some demanding formal autonomy from China as the Dalai Lama himself has done, some demanding outright independence. On the fifth day, the gatherings turned violent. Symbols of the Chinese state – police stations, flags, and government buildings – were attacked, and in an unprecedented move, shops owned by Han Chinese (the ethnic identity of the majority of the Chinese population) were burned, and Han people were assaulted.
The Chinese government responded to the unrest in Tibet by expelling all foreign media, mobilising thousands of paramilitary police, and issuing an ultimatum to protesters, threatening harsh treatment for any who failed to turn themselves in by March 17th. Although world leaders made the usual disapproving noises about human rights, they dismissed calls to boycott the upcoming Beijing Olympics.
As an obscuring shroud covered Tibet, accompanied by rumours of arrests, violence, and repression, and as the story was rapidly being relegated to the back pages of the newspapers, one was left with the nagging feeling that the world had been duped. The attitude of the mainstream media seemed to be that Tibet’s historical claims to independence were dubious, that in any case, the violence committed by the protesters, especially against civilians, really wasn’t justified, and that though the Chinese are terribly heavy-handed, they probably had the right to secure law and order in their territory.
The Chinese government must be overjoyed at this response. The Communist government in China, ever since it abandoned its ideological lynchpin (Maoist Marxism), has been attempting to find new justifications for its illegitimate, centralised rule, its human rights abuses, and its continued occupation of Tibet. The massive upsurge in political violence and protest over the past 10 years, especially in rural areas, is neutralised by the claim that it is caused ‘merely’ by the inevitable discontent that accompanies economic development. Protests against poverty and social security cuts are “only natural” when the economy is growing so rapidly, and protests against land grabs and evictions are “just” manifestations of anger at corruption, a problem that will disappear as the country gets richer.
The Chinese government even removes the claws from grassroots opposition by quantifying “disturbances” and instances of “unrest” reducing them to statistics like inflation or steel production. That protestors could be questioning the very notion of rapid economic growth, social dislocation and cultural destruction is unthinkable. The Communist Party justifies itself by the de-politicisation of all opposition, and this is as true in Tibet as anywhere else.
Right from the start, the Chinese have used the violence committed by protesters as ammunition against them, as it provides the perfect opportunity, in the warped mind of an oppressive government, to turn the issue of Tibet into a mere issue of law and order.
Very few in the mainstream media have put forward the view that, when faced with a powerful, oppressive state, violence can be a legitimate political response. Tibetans are faced with a dilemma: though they face strong cultural pressures to deplore violence, their way of life is being systematically destroyed. Torture and disappearances, once tools of the Government (Ngawang Sangdrol, a nun who shouted “Free Tibet” at a protest, was arrested in 1987 at age thirteen, and endured torture in prison for twelve years), have abated since the late 70s, and the once gulag-like conditions in many Tibetan provinces have improved over the past three decades.
However, the use of government power against Tibet has not gone away - it has merely shifted. Han Chinese, given incentives to move to Tibet, are now the majority population, giving rise to an apartheid favouring recent Chinese arrivals. A new railway linking Tibet to the rest of China has recently opened, bringing even more migrants, troops and tourists, and opening up Tibet to industrialisation and exploitation of its natural resources.
Just as the abuses of the 60s and 70s could be justified by the goal of instilling class-consciousness and building socialism in Tibet, the current policies can be justified by the goal of economic growth and development. However, the fact remains that Tibet, as a territory, as a nation, a people, a cultural entity, is being destroyed, not by the people who compose it, but by an aggressive outside force.
The Dalai Lama constantly refers to ‘cultural genocide’: not the physical destruction of a people, but the destruction of their way of life, and its replacement with a cold, hard economics, which shows little sign of attaining the richness or sustainability of that which it destroyed. In order to truly understand what is going on in Tibet, we all need to realise that there are worse things in life than a low per capita GDP, and that many place the survival of their culture and autonomy far above any other considerations.
