TIBET: TRUTH VS. MYTH
by Smurfing
03/30/2008, 11:27 AM

Protests in Tibet and Separatism: the Olympics and Beyond

Recent protests in Lhasa and other Tibetan areas were organized to
embarrass the Chinese government ahead of the Olympics. The Tibetan
Youth Congress (TYC), the major Tibetan exile organization that
advocates independence for Tibet and has endorsed using violent
methods to achieve it, has said as much. Its head, Tsewang Rigzin,
stated in a March 15 interview with the Chicago Tribune that since it
is likely that Chinese authorities would suppress protests in Tibet,
"With the spotlight on them with the Olympics, we want to test them.
We want them to show their true colors. That's why we're pushing
this." At the June, 2007 Conference for an Independent Tibet organized
in India by "Friends of Tibet," speakers pointed out that the Olympics
present a unique opportunity for protests in Tibet. In January, 2008,
exiles in India launched a "Tibetan People's Uprising Movement" to
"act in the spirit" of the violent 1959 uprising against Chinese
government authority and focus on the Olympics.

Several groups of Tibetans were likely involved in the protests in
Lhasa, including in the burning and looting of non-Tibetan businesses
and attacks against Han and Hui (Muslim Chinese) migrants to Tibet.
The large monasteries have long been centers of separatism, a stance
cultivated by the TYC and other exile entities, many of which are
financed by the US State Department or the US Congress' National
Endowment for Democracy. Monks are self-selected to be especially
devoted to the Dalai Lama. However much he may characterize his own
position as seeking only greater autonomy for Tibet, monks know he is
unwilling to declare that Tibet is an inalienable part of China, an
act China demands of him as a precondition to formal negotiations.
Because the exile regime eschews a separation of politics and
religion, many monks deem adherence to the Dalai Lama's stance of non-
recognition of the Chinese government's legitimacy in Tibet to be a
religious obligation.

Reports on the violence have underscored that Tibetan merchants
competing with Han and Hui are especially antagonistic to the presence
of non-Tibetans. Alongside monks, Tibetan merchants were the mainstay
of protests in Lhasa in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This time
around, many Han and Hui-owned shops were torched. Many of those
involved in arson, looting, and ethnic-based beatings are also likely
to have been unemployed young men. Towns have experienced much rural-
to-urban migration of Tibetans with few skills needed for urban
employment. Videos from Lhasa showed the vast majority of rioters were
males in their teens or twenties.

The recent actions in Tibetan areas differ from the broad-based
demonstrations of "people power" movements in several parts of the
world in the last few decades. They hardly show the overwhelming
Tibetan anti-Chinese consensus portrayed in the international media.

The highest media estimate of Tibetans who participated in protests is
20,000 -- by Steve Chao, the Beijing Bureau Chief of Canadian
Television News, i.e. one of every 300 Tibetans. Compare that to the
1986 protests against the Marcos dictatorship by about three million
-- one out of every 19 Filipinos.

Tibetans have legitimate grievances about not being sufficiently
helped to compete for jobs and in business with migrants to Tibet.
There is also job discrimination by Han migrants in favor of family
members and people from their native places. The gaps in education and
living standards between Tibetans and Han are substantial and too slow
in narrowing. The grievances have long existed, but protests and
rioting took place this year because the Olympics make it opportune
for separatists to advance their agenda. Indeed, there was a radical
disconnect between Tibetan socio-economic grievances and the slogans
raised in the protests, such as "Complete Independence for Tibet" and
"May the exiles and Tibetans inside Tibet be reunited," slogans that
not coincidentally replicate those raised by pro-independence Tibetan
exiles.

While separatists will not succeed in detaching Tibet from China by
rioting, they believe that China will eventually collapse, like the
former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and they seek to establish their
claim to rule before that happens. Alternatively, they think that the
United States may intervene, as it has elsewhere, to foster the
breakaway of regions in countries to which the US is antagonistic,
e.g. Kosovo and southern Sudan. The Chinese government also fears such
eventualities, however unlikely they are to come to pass. It
accordingly acts to suppress separatism, an action that comports with
its rights under international law.

Separatists know they can count on the automatic sympathy of Western
politicians and media, who view China as a strategic economic and
political competitor. Western elites have thus widely condemned China
for suppressing riots that these elites would never allow to go
unsuppressed in their own countries. They demand that China be
restrained in its response; yet, during the Los Angeles uprising or
riots of 1992 -- which spread to a score of other major cities --
President George H.W. Bush stated when he send in thousands of
soldiers, that "There can be no excuse for the murder, arson, theft or
vandalism that have terrorized the people of Los Angeles . . . Let me
assure you that I will use whatever force is necessary to restore
order." Neither Western politicians nor mainstream media attacked him
on this score, while neither Western leaders nor the Dalai Lama have
criticized those Tibetans who recently engaged in ethnic-based attacks
and arsons.

Western elites give the Chinese government no recognition for
significant improvements in the lives of Tibetans as a result of
subsidies from the China's central government and provinces,
improvements that the Dalai Lama has himself admitted. Western
politicians and media also consistently credit the Dalai Lama's charge
that "cultural genocide" is underway in Tibet, even though the exiles
and their supporters offer no credible evidence of the evisceration of
Tibetan language use, religious practice or art. In fact, more than
90%% of Tibetans speak Tibetan as their mother tongue. Tibet has about
150,000 monks and nuns, the highest concentration of full-time
"clergy" in the Buddhist world. Western scholars of Tibetan literature
and art forms have attested that it is flourishing.

Ethnic contradictions in Tibet arise from the demography, economy and
politics of the Tibetan areas. Separatists and their supporters claim
that Han Chinese have been "flooding" into Tibet, "swamping" Tibetans
demographically. In fact, between the national censuses of 1990 and
2000 (which count everyone who has lived in an area for six months or
more), the percentage of Tibetans in the Tibetan areas as a whole
increased somewhat and Han were about one-fifth of the population. A
preliminary analysis of the 2005 mini-census shows that from 2000-2005
there was a small increase in the proportion of Han in the central-
western parts of Tibet (the Tibet Autonomous Region or TAR) and little
change in eastern Tibet. Pro-independence forces want the Tibetan
areas cleansed of Han (as happened in 1912 and 1949); the Dalai Lama
has said he will accept a three-to-one Tibetan to non-Tibet population
ratio, but he consistently misrepresents the present situation as one
of a Han majority. Given his status as not merely the top Tibetan
Buddhist religious leader, but as an emanation of Buddha, most
Tibetans credit whatever he says on this or other topics.

The Tibetan countryside, where three-fourths of the population lives,
has very few non-Tibetans. The vast majority of Han migrants to
Tibetan towns are poor or near-poor. They are not personally
subsidized by the state; although like urban Tibetans, they are
indirectly subsidized by infrastructure development that favors the
towns. Some 85%%of Han who migrate to Tibet to establish businesses
fail; they generally leave within two to three years. Those who
survive economically offer competition to local Tibetan business
people, but a comprehensive study in Lhasa has shown that non-Tibetans
have pioneered small and medium enterprise sectors that some Tibetans
have later entered and made use of their local knowledge to prosper.

Tibetans are not simply an underclass; there is a substantial Tibetan
middle class, based in government service, tourism, commerce, and
small-scale manufacturing/ transportation. There are also many
unemployed or under-employed Tibetans, but almost no unemployed or
underemployed Han because those who cannot find work leave. Many Han
migrants have racist attitudes toward Tibetans, mostly notions that
Tibetans are lazy, dirty, and obsessed with religion. Many Tibetans
reciprocate with representations of Han as rich, money-obsessed and
conspiring to exploit Tibetans. Long-resident urban Tibetans absorb
aspects of Han culture in much the same way that ethnic minorities do
with ethnic majority cultures the world over. Tibetans are not however
being forcibly "Sincized." Most Tibetans speak little or no Chinese.
They begin to learn it in the higher primary grades and, in many
Tibetan areas, must study in it if they go on to secondary education.
Chinese, however, is one of the two most important languages in the
world and considerable advantages accrue to those who learn it, just
as
they do to non-native English speakers.

The Tibetan exiles argue that religious practice is sharply restricted
in Tibetan areas. The Chinese government has the right under
international law to regulate religious institutions to prevent them
from being used as vehicles for separatism and the control of religion
is in fact mostly a function of the state's (overly-developed) concern
about separatism and secondarily about how the hyper-development of
religious institutions counteracts "development" among ethnic
Tibetans. Certain state policies do infringe on freedom of religion;
for example, the forbidding, in the TAR (Tibet Autonomous Region), of
state employees and university students to participate in religious
rites. The lesser degree of control over religion in the eastern
Tibetan areas beyond the TAR-- at least before the events of March,
2008 -- indicate however that the Chinese government calibrates its
control according to the perceived degree of separatist sentiment in
the monasteries.

The Dalai Lama's regime was of course itself a theocracy that closely
regulated the monasteries, including the politics, hierarchy and
number of monks. The exile authorities today circumscribe by fiat
those religious practices they oppose, such as the propitiation of a
"deity" known as Dorje Shugden. The cult of the Dalai Lama, which is
even stronger among monks than it is among Hollywood stars,
nevertheless mandates acceptance of his claim that restrictions on
religious management and practice in Tibet arise solely from the
Chinese state's supposed anti-religious animus. Similarly, the cult
requires the conviction that the Dalai Lama is a pacifist, even though
he has explicitly or implicitly endorsed all wars waged by the US.

The development of the "market economy" has had much the same effect
in Tibetan areas as in the rest of China, i.e. increased exploitation,
exacerbated income and wealth differentials, and rampant corruption.
The degree to which this involves an "ethnic division of labor" that
disadvantages Tibetans is however exaggerated by separatists in order
to foster ethnic antagonism. For example, Tibet is not the poorest
area of China, as is often claimed. It is better off than several
other ethnic minority areas and even than some Han areas, in large
measure due to heavy government subsidies. Rural Tibetans as well
receive more state subsidies than other minorities. The exile leaders
employ hyperbole not only in terms of the degree of empirical
difference, but also concerning the more fundamental ethnic
relationship in Tibet: in contrast to, say, Israel/Palestine, Tibetans
have the same rights as Han, they enjoy certain preferential economic
and social policies, and about half the top party leaders in the TAR
have been ethnic Tibetans.

Tibet has none of the indicia of a colony or occupied territory and
thus has no relationship to self-determination, a concept that in
recent decades has often been misused, especially by the US, to foster
the breakup of states and consequent emiseration of their populations.
A settlement between the Chinese government and Tibetan exile elites
is a pre-condition for the mitigation of Tibetan grievances because
absent a settlement, ethnic politics will continue to subsume every
issue in Tibet, as it does for example, in Taiwan and Kosovo, where
ethnic binaries are constructed by "ethnic political entrepreneurs,"
who seek to outbid each other for support.

The riots in Tibet have done nothing to advance discussions of a
political settlement between the Chinese government and exiles, yet a
settlement is necessary for the substantial mitigation of Tibetan
grievances. For Tibetan pro-independence forces, a setback to such
efforts may have been their very purpose in fostering the riots.
Tibetan pro-independence forces, like separatists everywhere, seek to
counter any view of the world that is not ethnic-based and to thwart
all efforts to resolve ethnic contradictions, in order to boost the
mobilization needed to sustain their ethnic nationalist projects. They
have claimed that China will soon collapse and the US will thereafter
increase its patronage of a Tibetan state elite, to the benefit of
ordinary Tibetans. One only has to look round the world at the many
humanitarian catastrophes that have resulted from such thinking to
project what consequences are likely to follow for ordinary Tibetans
if the separatist fantasy were fulfilled.

--
Barrry SAUTMAN, JD, LLM, PhD
Associate Professor
Division of Social Science
Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

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