Tibet: The Shangri-La that exists only in the West’s imagination
By Kevin Deluca
Source: http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_10359098
With the Olympics over, I hope the Western sport of bashing China over Tibet might stop.
Working in Beijing during the Tibet riots and the preparations for the Olympics gave me a unique perspective. Growing up with Western media and Hollywood, I am used to our embrace of the Dalai Lama. Being in China, I saw the Chinese point of view.
Seeing both sides suggests the need to abandon simplistic political stances in favor of some self-reflection and historical context.
Although we should criticize China’s censored media, the Tibet riots revealed some troubling blindness among our own media. While the causes of Tibetan unrest are complex, it is clear that the March riots were started by Tibetan protesters and that they were quite violent. Indeed, they were violent enough to lead the Dalai Lama to threaten resignation if his followers did not stop the violence.
Since “violent Tibetan” does not fit our stereotype, our media fixed the news. While Chinese media showed extensive footage of violence and interviews with Chinese and Tibetan victims, Western media manipulated images and even showed footage from other countries (Nepal and India) in order to paint a picture of ruthless oppression by China’s government.
Chinese media exposed the Western media manipulations, forcing the BBC, N-TV and RTL-TV to apologize. Not surprisingly, the American media has yet to acknowledge
its bending of the truth. The point is that while the Chinese know their media is censored and do not trust it, we believe our news is objective and end up being righteous while misinformed.
If we had seen the violence of the Tibet riots, our condemnations may be more nuanced. Quite simply, no government, democratic or not, allows such violence within its own borders. Providing peace and stability, even by force if necessary, is what governments do.
Large and powerful countries tend to have regions that were not always part of the country. In America, we proudly call it Manifest Destiny and never trouble ourselves with how we got much of California and Texas from Mexico, never mind the rest of the country and our sordid history with Native Americans.
On the Chinese flag there are five stars commonly interpreted as representing the five major ethnic groups in China. One of those stars represents Tibetans. China’s claim to Tibet spans centuries and it is a claim that the United States and the rest of the world recognizes.
To Chinese people, removing one of those stars is akin to removing one of our states, such as Hawaii. Our history with the native people of Hawaii has been relatively brief and quite brutal and there exists a tenacious independence movement. Still, there is no talk in the mainstream media and among the Hollywood celebrity activist circuit of Hawaiian independence, not to mention Puerto Rican independence or the American Indian movement.
Government repression of these movements also escapes media scrutiny. Before we lecture China, we may want to tend to our own backyard.
Amid cries of “free Tibet” and calls for religious freedom, the question is what does freedom have to do with Tibet? Under the Dalai Lama, was there religious freedom? Was there any freedom? Actually, no.
We would recognize the Dalai Lama’s Tibet as a medieval religious theocracy with a small elite class served by a large and oppressed serf population. The Dalai Lama ruled a region with no religious freedom, no political freedom, indeed, no human rights of any kind. The rulers were ruthless. Torture and mutilation were widespread. Poverty and starvation were rampant. It was Shangri-La only in the West’s imagination.
Richard Gere, Sharon Stone and other Hollywood devotees may be surprised at their idol’s current positions. The Dalai Lama condemns abortion and homosexuality while accepting prostitution. For decades the Dalai Lama secured millions of dollars from the CIA and runs his government in exile like a monarch.
Despite its shortcomings, Chinese rule has provided the Tibetan region with infrastructure and public schooling and provides Tibetans with widespread opportunities and a degree of personal freedom unheard of under the feudal theocracy of the dalai lamas.
China is far from perfect and deserves honest scrutiny and criticism. To expect China not to act like a large and powerful country, however, and to throw stones from our glass house, proves nothing but our own ignorance.
KEVIN DELUCA is an associate professor of communications at the University of Utah and author of “Image Politics.”
Truth is tough! Politicians never like truth. Read the article about CIA involvement in Tibet. It is a joke to award Dalai Lama Nobel Peace Prize. No wonder the Chinese are unforgiving.
Mark A.
4 Sep 08 at 11:55 pm
It was apparent to everyone in China and a lot of people elsewhere safe the very parachial Westerners who are still npt quite awake to the idea of a rising China that the riot in Tibet was planned to disrupt the Olympic Games.The Americans and Europeans must learn to come to term that China has awakened. Sure she carries with her a heavy historical baggage of feudal cultural norms and practices that are not consistent with those of present day Western ones. Sure she is slow to adopt the liberal western modal of human rights policy but the West must try to learn and understand the extend to which China is try to achieve a set of goals that will be competibe to her strength, and her stage of development.To expect a country like China who has just come through a long slumber that was rudely awakened by Western bullying and humiliating domination to be able to be ‘just like us’ is not only unrealistic but utterly irresponsible or belligerent even.
E. Esaw
6 Sep 08 at 7:47 am
The Roman Empire brought some benefits to the area it colonised. The British Empire brought some benefits as well as exploitation to India etc. However in the end, most ethnic groups decide that they want to rule themselves. I would like to see discussion on these questions:
What is an empire?
Can Tibet be considered part of China’s empire?
Gert by Sea
6 Sep 08 at 9:00 pm
A well written editorial which barely scratches the surface of the Sino-Tibetan problems, however I applaud such a succinct overview of the current situation, subjective as it was.
Keith Goodrum Ph.D
Keith Goodrum
7 Sep 08 at 11:33 am
Kevin, it is so good to be kepy informed of the truth by someone with love for the truth and a heart that had been opened by your own presence in Tibet. Pl. forgive all those media and peoples for all their manipulations and twisted info that was send to the world. All this time my husband was right when he said that the West should never condemn nor impose their views when they have only a tunnel vision! Somehow the world had never really liked the manipulation and interference of the rich West and it is no wonder! How can they understand the Chinese , their history and culture, the poverty and hardships when the Rich of the last century had never experience what the Chinese had gone through! Communism is the best thing that had happened to China but then the West would never understand until they had experience what it is like to be poor and starving!!!!!!!! China would not be such a power house today had it not been for communism and the dedication, vision, love, and hope of their leaders for their country. Let us apply the “law of allowing” and not cast the first stone!
Leng Chong
Leng Chong
8 Sep 08 at 8:22 pm
Leng Chong, how did you come to this conclusion? What made Singapore or Taiwan, Korea successful? I totally disagree that Communism is the reason for China’s rise today. At best you can say, after paying a HUGE price including millions of lives of people, maybe China’s one party system helped in a way to make things happen faster in the last 30 years. But the economic success only happened when China gave up the ideology of Communism. China’s success has nothing to do with Communism.
Mike
8 Sep 08 at 8:50 pm
Hmm, well written argument, but a little ignorant of history and lacking in logic. The idea that a backwards government justifies invasion and modernisation is exactly the same logic of the British Empire’s late-19th Century policy of gentification of the ‘heathens’ in South Asia, Africa and other places. This idea that being a ‘feudal’ backwards system, as Tibet (and of course China) inarguably was in 1959 doesn’t forgive the crimes of the present. Ask any of the scores of currently free states, from Ireland to India, who (when given the option, a luxury ethnic Tibetans don’t have) opted for independence.
Secondly, the issue is not with whether the Chinese as a people consider the Tibetans part of the family of China (re: your argument regariding the Chinese flag). As a long-term resident of China, I don’t believe that the average city-dwelling, well-educated Chinese person (almost exclusively Han) who has the luxury to dwell on such situations doesn’t not believe for a second that Tibetans are not part of China’s happy family. In the same way that many Americans, sending black Americans to the deaths in the two World Wars or native Americans to their deaths in the American Civil War, believed that the fellow soldiers were anything other than countrymen and kin. However, around 95% of China is the Han ethnicity and the belief in the unity of the 56 Chinese ethnicities (which existed before Mao’s invasion in 1959 and is not majoratively shared by the entirety of those ethnicities - e.g. the Xinjiang muslims) is part of a nationalism fostered in an historic culturalism created by the invading (non-Han) Manchu dynasty, encouraged by a succession of post-imperial unionist leaders from Sun Yat-sen, through the reluctant creator of Taiwanese separatism (the quasi-fascist Nationist leader) Chiang Kai-shek, past Mao Zedong (politicised Han peasant, legitimised with nationalistic rural support) and into the recent years. To take on such a central tenant of Chinese unionism, essential for such a large nation with a relatively weak government, you have to overcome centuries of propaganda that has continued almost unabated until the present day. Evidence for the true weakness of the Chinese state can be seen by the prevalance of anti-government propaganda outside of the major cities and political centres (such as Chongqing) and the lack of police presence and response (by Western standards) within those major metrapolises. This is a huge country which, suprisingly, continues to be so despite mass poverty as, as a result, a very low per capita tax basis.
Thirdly and, you’ll be relieved to know, finally: the issue is not about modernisation, nor is it about Tibetan independence. Even the Dalai Llama has conceeded that the best hope for the (ethnically, rather than encouraged Han settlement in the CCP years) Tibetan people is that they achieve semi-autonomy under Beijing’s rule - as has Hong Kong and Macau and as continues to be the offer to Taiwan from the CCP leadership themselves. This would allow freedom of their suppressed religion, protection against repressive control (as seen following last years pre-Olympic protests - in which most Chinese I speak to believe resulted in no Tibetan deaths, a number lower than CCP estimates), discontinuation of the ‘Sinocisation’ (a process which began under the Qing Emperors and was renewed by Mao to ensure nationalistic unity) which cuts down Tibetan culture like it were the Amazon rainforest, and the treatment of the ethnic Tibetans as full-Chinese citizens, ending a system which has been likend to Apartheid South Africa, pre-civil rights USA and Anglo-French colonial rule.
Still, China cannot be judged by Western standards - it is a country which not only lacks uncensored media but where even the most educated of citizens are unable to comprehend how such a thing works, such is its unfamiliarity. On top of this, China is a developing country and thus prone to acts of inhumanity which is how the Western countries reached their summit and, if the UN and Amnesty International are to be believed, maintain their economic superiority today. Most importantly, China is the largest country by population the world has ever seen, attempting to modernise at an historically unprecedented speed with mistrustful (for right or wrong) trading partners, a third-world average per capita income (some subsitance farmers make an annual profit of around £1/$1.50 according to a recent BBC report) and therefore has bigger fish to fry than the middle-class liberal ethics of the ‘Enlightened’ (environmentally destructing, financial crisis unexpecting, islam isolationaling, torture conducting, UN overlooking, social-breakdown incompetent) West. Are we really so different?
Humanitarian in China
20 May 09 at 3:47 pm