I’m becoming quite adept at turning the other cheek, though whether of
the upper or lower anatomy must remain a matter for fascinating
conjecture, for as all good readers of Plato will know, all ideal
phenomena of the upper kind have their imperfect (indeed, sometimes
odiferous) counterparts in the world below.
So now it's time to deal with sundry affairs: Tony Martin, you begin
your critique of my position by personally insulting me, before
launching into a vitriolic ramble, and one that is based on a
misreading of my position. “Your whole theory relating to Tibet is
very similar to all of the other respondents supporting the continued
illegal Chinese occupation of a sovereign nation,” you say. “Your
position appears to be similar to other invaders of land in our
history, or to the various slave trading states over the years.
Namely, don’t look at how badly off Tibetans are now in comparison to
the rest of China and the world, but rather look at how well off they
are compared to how they might be if their invading masters weren’t so
benevolent and here to help them.”
I have presented no theories whatsoever relating to Tibet, nor have I
ever justified the Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet.
I did, however, point out that life for the majority of Tibetans has
been improving under Chinese governance since the 1980s, and I did so
because the weight of empirically verifiable evidence shows this to be
the case.
Let us look at the evidence. If Tibetans were so fiercely suppressed,
and if Chinese leaders in Beijing were really out to Sinocize Tibet by
increasing the ethnic ratio of Han to Tibetan, then why are all
Tibetan families permitted to have up to three children, and are only
fined small amounts of money if they exceed this number? Tibetan
families in Tibet average 3.8 children, larger than Tibetan families
in India. In fact, the population of Tibet in 1959 was only about 1.19
million. Today however, the population of Greater Tibet is 7.3
million, of which, according to the 2000 census, 6 million are ethnic
Tibetans. If we consider the Tibet Autonomous Region only, then
according to the census conducted in 2000, as referred to in
Wikipedia, “there were 2,616,300 people in Tibet, with Tibetans
totalling 2,411,100 or 92.2%% of the current regional population. The
census also revealed that the Tibetan's average lifespan has increased
to 68 due to the improving standard of living and access to medical
services.” In 1950 the average lifespan was only 35, and “infant
mortality has dropped from 43%% in 1950 to 0.661%% in 2000.”
As Barry Sautman, who is Associate Professor of Social Science at the
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology points out in his study
on Tibet and the (Mis-)Representation of Cultural Genocide, “the state
sponsored transfer [of Han Chinese] to Tibet is on a small scale. From
1994 to 2001 the PRC organized only a few thousand people to go to
Tibet as cadres. Most serve only 3 years and then return to China.
Those who move on their own to the Tibet Autonomous Region usually
return to China in a few years. They come for a while, find the cities
of Tibet too expensive, and then return to China. Some of the 72,000
Chinese who maintain their hukou [household registration] in Tibet
don't really live there. Pensions are higher if your household is
registered in Tibet.”
These facts are supported by articles in the Columbia Journal of Asian
Law and by an Australian Chinese demographer in Asian Ethnicity in
2000, and show that the claims of ethnic swamping in Tibet are
misleading. "What I think these articles show,” says Barry Sautman,
“is that there is no evidence of significant population losses over
the whole period from the 1950s to the present. There are some losses
during he Great Leap Forward but these were less in Tibetan areas than
in other parts of China. Where these were serious were in Sichuan and
Qinghai, but even there not as serious in the Han areas of China.
There are no bases at all for the figures used regularly by the exile
groups. They use the figure of 1.2 million Tibetans dying from the
1950s to the 1970s, but no source for this is given. As a lawyer I
give no credence to statistics for which there is no data, no visible
basis."
In fact, as Michael Parenti has pointed out in his article on Friendly
Feudalism: the Tibet Myth, “both the Dalai Lama and his advisor and
youngest brother, Tendzin Choegyal, claimed that ‘more than 1.2
million Tibetans are dead as a result of the Chinese occupation.’ But
the official 1953 census - six years before the Chinese crackdown -
recorded the entire population residing in Tibet at 1,274,000.33 Other
census counts put the ethnic Tibetan population within the country at
about two million. If the Chinese killed 1.2 million in the early
1960s then whole cities and huge portions of the countryside, indeed
almost all of Tibet, would have been depopulated, transformed into a
killing field dotted with death camps and mass graves - of which we
have not seen evidence. The thinly distributed Chinese military force
in Tibet was not big enough to round up, hunt down, and exterminate
that many people even if it had spent all its time doing nothing
else.”
Tibetans in exile and their supporters seem to pull such figures out
of a hat in the same way that the Chinese exile Harry Wu does in
relation to the number of mainland prisoners (see my piece On the
Nature of Chinese Governance and Society for details).
Barry Sautman also convincingly challenges claims that the Tibetan
language is being devalued and replaced by Chinese. "92-94%% of ethnic
Tibetans speak Tibetan,” he notes. “Instruction in primary school is
pretty universally in Tibetan. Chinese is bilingual from secondary
school onward. All middle schools in the TAR also teach Tibetan. In
Lhasa there are about equal time given to Chinese, Tibetan, and
English.”
There is also an upsurge of the performing arts, poetry and painting
by Tibetans, which many visitors to Tibet today cannot fail to notice,
all of which are encouraged and funded by Beijing, though of course
the growing tourist market also plays an important role in encouraging
Tibetans to continue practicing their traditional arts and crafts,
albeit, in a commodified form.
Importantly, Sautman, like me, has observed surprisingly “few aspects
of Chinese culture in Tibet, but there are many aspects of Western
culture, such as jeans, disco music, etc.”
Barry Sautman’s views are by no means marginalised within Western
academia either Tony. Colin Mackerras, Professor Emeritus of
International Business and Asian Studies at Griffith University,
Australia, for example, remarked that Suatman’s book “is a courageous
and long overdue study of a highly emotional and extremely important
topic’ in that it meticulously details and documents “the processes of
cultural change in religion, the arts, language, migration and various
other aspects” which are rightly attributed “mainly to Westernised
modernity.”
Another interesting and insightful study is the one carried out by
Melvyn C. Goldstein, who is Professor and Chairman, Department of
Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Research on Tibet at Case
Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, and Cynthia M. Beall, who
is Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University. Their
study, titled The Impact of China’s Reform Policy on the Nomads of
Western Tibet, was carried out over a 16 month period in the Tibet
Autonomous Region, and was supported by grants from the National
Academy of Sciences' Committee on Scholarly Communication with the
People's Republic of China, the Committee on Research and Exploration
of the National Geographic Society, and the National Science
Foundation.
It’s worth quoting at length from their conclusion:
“The new Chinese economic and cultural policies implemented in Tibet
following Hu Yaobang's investigation tour in May of 1980 have produced
a major transformation in Phala. Following decollectivisation, the
nomads' economy immediately reverted to the traditional household
system of production and management, which, enhanced by the concession
on taxes, has led to an overall improvement in the standard of living
even though local-level officials have not completely implemented an
open (or negotiated) market system. The new policies have also led to
increasing involvement in the market economy and dramatic social and
economic differentiation. Equally important, the post-1980 policies
have fostered a cultural and social revitalization that has allowed
the nomads to resurrect basic components of their traditional
culture….life in Phala today is closer to that of the traditional era
than at any time since China assumed direct administrative control
over Tibet in 1959. The post-1980 reforms created conditions whereby
the nomadic pastoralists of Phala were able to regain control of their
lives and recreate a matrix of values, norms, and beliefs that is
psychologically and culturally meaningful. The new polices have, in
essence, vindicated the nomads' belief in the worth of their nomadic
way of life and their Tibetan ethnicity.”
Tyler Denison reached similar conclusions in his study, titled
Reaffirmation of ‘Ritual Cosmos’: Tibetan Perceptions of Landscape and
Socio-Economic Development in Southwest China, published quite
recently in the Spring 2006 edition of the University of New Hampshire
Undergraduate Research Journal.
“Rather than finding Tibetan tradition being destroyed by Chinese rule
and the influx of people, goods and ideas from the modern world,”
concludes Denison, “I witnessed firsthand the importance of Kawa Karpo
and the ritual cosmos in the lives of the Tibetans of Deqin county: it
has not been diminished. Tibetans’ enduring perception of the
landscape as a ritual cosmos cannot be termed a static reality of
tradition, but more a dynamic cultural process, as they are
continually renegotiating and redefining their beliefs in light of new
social and economic realities.”
So much then Tony, for your claims of cultural genocide. And by the
way, most Tibetans, if you ever get a chance to visit Tibet and to
converse with the Tibetan locals, will tell you that they are not
“forced” to learn Chinese, but rather, do so keenly, and on the
expectation that being fluent in both Chinese and English will help to
empower themselves by broadening their future employment
opportunities.
Tony, I hereby charge you with having a patronising attitude towards
the Tibetan people – they are not passive victims, and you really
shouldn’t deny them of any agency. In fact, as Tsering Shakya has
pointed out in a paper he wrote for the New Left Review back in 2002,
"Tibetans are indeed well represented on bodies like the National
People’s Congress and the People’s Consultative Conference. In fact I
would go further and say that they are over-represented, given the
size of the Tibetan population." And don't forget the role that many
Tibetans themselves played in the destruction of monastries and the
various perscutions that took place in Tibet during the Cultural
Revolution. Let's not deny the people of Tibet of any agency.
Your assertion that Western journalists make their observations of
Tibet in the presence of “Chinese Communist Party lackeys” also
demonstrates your ignorance. Journalist and tourists alike are quite
free to wander about most parts of Tibet (provided they have PSB
permits) without the accompaniment of officials.
You asked me to provide you with evidence of journalists having met
Tibetans in Tibet who have expressed the view that the positives of
Chinese rule outweigh the negatives.
Let us take attitudes towards the Beijing to Lhasa railway for
starters. In the lead-up to the opening of that railway, the Dalai
Lama expressed fears that the railway was going to aid in the
Sinocisation of Tibet, and this was quickly seized on by Tibetans in
exile support groups throughout the Western world as a development
that would aid in Beijing’s alleged policy of genocide. Such claims of
course, excited the imaginations of many ordinary Tibetans, many of
who not surprisingly then expressed suspicions about what the new
train line would bring them. But as many tourists and journalists to
Tibet soon discovered, many urban ethnic Tibetans felt as though the
positives would outweigh the negatives, and this is because an
increasing number of Tibetans now have a very real material stake in
the new economy. Their living standards are improving, and although
Han retailers and small businesses stand to benefit more from
increases in tourism and trade, the fact is that this will likely
change as more and more Tibetans accumulate sufficient enough capital
to start up enterprises of their own. And many Tibetans know this.
Jonathon Watts, of The Guardian newspaper, reported that “Among the
four or five unscheduled meetings I had with Tibetans, most were
looking forward to the economic benefits the line is expected to
bring: 2.5m tonnes of cargo and 1m tourists and business people.”
Indeed, Tibetans are divided on the issue of whether or not the
benefits of being a part of China outweigh the negatives. “Tibetans
are divided,” noted Jonathon Watts. There are those “independence
activists” who expressed disapproval of the railway because they are
against being a part of China, and who therefore regard the new line
as evidence that Beijing is out to further entrench their rule, while
others acknowledged the good that the trains might bring. “I was
surprised to find a living Buddha make one of the strongest arguments
in favour of the railway,” wrote Watts. "’We've been too backward, too
isolated for too long,’ said the lama, who asked that his name not be
used. ‘The rest of the world is in the 21st century. We are still in
the middle ages.’ A more predictable advocate was the governor of the
Tibetan Autonomous Region, Jampa Pahtsok. "It is unimaginable to have
a high growth rate without a railroad.’” (see The Guardian, Sep.20,
2005)
And life is improving for many Tibetan farmers also, as Goldstein and
Beall’s research (mentioned earlier) shows. When Dexter Roberts came
across villagers in Northern Tibet’s Nagqu Prefecture, he discovered
that most of the villagers (barley farmers and herdsmen) were quite
content. “Life isn’t bad at all”, he quoted one villager as saying.
(see "Tibet: Caught in China’s Two Hands", Business Week Online, Sep.
19, 2003).
Tony, I have never argued that most Tibetans don’t want some form of
self-government. I simply said that I think it is presumptuous to say
that the majority of Tibetans want independence. I stand by that.
Maybe they do? But to assert with confidence that most want
independence without supporting such a claim with any empirically
verifiable evidence of a quantitative nature is questionable,
especially when there is a growing amount of qualitative evidence to
show that Tibetans are divided on such issues. Even the Dalai Lama
himself says that he no longer wants total independence from China,
but instead, some form of self-government.
Take a closer, more objective look at Tibet today. The mass protests
have stopped. As Robert Barnett, author of Lhasa: Streets with
Memories (published by Columbia University Press) stated in an
interview back in April 2006, “Tibet has become a dispute in which the
main weapons are forms of economic change that have benefits and
drawbacks: the market, the leisure industry, mass tourism, population
shift, uneven wealth, and consumerism.”
It won’t be all that much longer Tony, before Lhasa’s main
thoroughfares find themselves hosting McDonald’s, KFC, and Pizza Hut
fast food outlets, along with Starbuck’s and other such global
enterprises. And don’t be too surprised if some of the license holders
turn out to be ethnic Tibetans.
Tony, you argue that “Tibet and Tibetans might [have] been very
different had China not invaded, but for sure they would be sovereign
masters of their own destiny.”
Bollocks! How many ordinary Tibetans were ever the “masters of their
own destinies”? I’m not justifying China’s invasion and occupation of
Tibet, which was carried out for geopolitical reasons, and largely in
response to continual incursions by Britain and Russia, and which
therefore needs to be viewed in the context of the Cold War. The
Kuomintang of course consistently made it clear that they intended on
invading and occupying Tibet, and had they defeated the PLA, they
probably would have gone on to do just that. Had that been the case, I
bet the the U.S. State Department wouldn't have objected.
But let us not romanticise the life of Tibetans prior to the invasion
either. As Michael Parenti (and many others like Leigh Feigon, in his
book Demystifying Tibet) has documented, Tibet “was a retrograde
theocracy of serfdom and poverty, where a favoured few lived high and
mighty off the blood, sweat, and tears of the many. It was a long way
from Shangri-La.”
And “whatever wrongs and new oppressions introduced by the Chinese in
Tibet, after 1959 they did abolish slavery and the serfdom system of
unpaid labour, and put an end to floggings, mutilations, and
amputations as a form of criminal punishment. They eliminated the many
crushing taxes, started work projects, and greatly reduced
unemployment and beggary. They established secular education, thereby
breaking the educational monopoly of the monasteries. And they
constructed running water and electrical systems in Lhasa.”
Finally, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the Tibetans in
exile and their supporters have consistently exaggerated the human
rights abuses that have taken place in Tibet, as Barry Sautman and
others have convincingly demonstrated. Such exaggerations from the
Tibetan community in exile come as no surprise though. As Michael
Parenti says:
“For the rich lamas and lords, the Communist intervention was a
calamity. Most of them fled abroad, as did the Dalai Lama himself, who
was assisted in his flight by the CIA… throughout the 1960s, the
Tibetan exile community was secretly pocketing $1.7 million a year
from the CIA, according to documents released by the State Department
in 1998. Once this fact was publicised, the Dalai Lama's organisation
itself issued a statement admitting that it had received millions of
dollars from the CIA during the 1960s to send armed squads of exiles
into Tibet to undermine the Maoist revolution. The Dalai Lama's annual
payment from the CIA was $186,000. Indian intelligence also financed
both him and other Tibetan exiles. He has refused to say whether he or
his brothers worked for the CIA. The agency has also declined to
comment….Today, mostly through the National Endowment for Democracy
and other conduits that are more respectable-sounding than the CIA,
the US Congress continues to allocate an annual $2 million to Tibetans
in India, with additional millions for ‘democracy activities’ within
the Tibetan exile community.”
The Tibetan issue is by no means clear-cut. It is complex, and in
constant states of flux. Even Tibetan specialists find it difficult to
fit together images and realities, and so one might imagine how much
more difficult it is for the great majority who make no pretence to
knowledge about Tibet and who, if interested, seek guidance in the
formulation of their own images. Those who seek such guidance from the
plethora of publications produced by the numerous existing Tibetan
support groups should therefore read them with some considerable
caution, given their obvious bias.
I am not a Tibetan specialist, by any means, but I have more
confidence in the findings of independent academic researchers (who
present more objective, more soberly balanced views that are based on
empirically verifiable research data of both a quantitative and
qualitative nature) than I do in both the claims of official Chinese
sources and of the various Tibetans in exile support groups.
Oh, and by the way Tony, your puerile attempt to discredit me by
dismissing me as an employee of the Chinese government really is
pathetic, and only serves to further demonstrate the height of your
ignorance. I have been in China now for five years, not four, and I am
not, and never have been, employed by the Chinese government. I teach
a university preparation program at a Chinese private university in
Hangzhou for a Sydney-based college, and I am paid an Australian
salary, in Australian dollars, by my employer of over 15 years, the
N.S.W. Department of Education and Training. There is absolutely no
pressure on me to “two the Partly line” – in fact, nobody here has
ever interfered with my teaching.
I suggest, Tony Martin, that you take a sedative and calm down. A few
laxatives will no doubt help!
M.A.Jones
Hangzhou
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