Over the past few weeks, I have tried to gain greater understanding about Tibet and internal Chinese reactions to Tibet. As someone who has personally benefited enormously from Tibetan culture as a Buddhist practitioner, I feel that is the least I can do. China is no stranger to me since three generations of my Russian family were born and raised in Shanghai. In some sense the culture is deeply embedded in my psyche--a kind of motherland. If anything, China is suffering from a spiritual depravity whose full-blown manifestation was experienced in the cultural revolution of the late '60s--that rabid spurt of nationalism that wrecked havoc on all aspect of Chinese culture--destroying historical and cultural anchors of Chinese expression that every Chinese of that era shudders to remember. Still, it remains a miracle that a younger generation of Chinese are ever ready to challenge the state controlled status quo and rise to the sanity of an internal human rights movement. Even more of a miracle, is that these individuals have rallied around Tibet as an emblem for human rights inside China. I fear for them.
The 14th Dalai Lama is no religious fundamentalist, but a man who has made it his personal mission to integrate with Western philosophical and scientific concepts. His role in world politics is not because he is Tibetan or a religious cult figure but because he is a global citizen whose empathy towards others is highly developed, as well as articulated. In other words, he is informed by knowledge and wisdom, not ignorance. His middle way proposal to China for Tibet is a serious solution that would benefit China tremendously by giving China an opportunity to release its draconian grip of control in favor of a more balanced trust in its own internal sovereign rule that allows for a multiplicity of national identities to co-exist, not as a finger of the larger hand of Han Chinese but with their own hand. As Mr. Cohen suggests below in his op ed today, this is the big league, and China is either up to the mark or will retreat miserably into its habitual iron-clad rhetoric that simply is outdated and destructive. Fomenting Chinese nationalism against Tibetans and other minority groups by labeling them terrorists is preying upon ignorance and fear. Moreover, the tact itself displays ignorance.
A Passage To Tibet
By ROGER COHEN
Published: April 7, 2008
Remember how we had to learn about the Shia, the Sunnis, the Kurds and all the smaller agents of Iraqi fragmentation? Over the next four months, until the Beijing Olympics open, the world is going to get a crash course in China’s various ethnic and religious minority groups and their resentments.
Violent stirrings in Tibet are just the beginning. With the world as stage, the Uighur Muslims of the northwestern Xinjiang region, the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement, Mongols and Kazakhs and whoever else wants his moment in the sun will have a dream opportunity to rail.
I hope violence is contained, and the Chinese authorities show flexibility, but I’m not optimistic after a big demonstration in London on Sunday.
If a Tibetan monk grabs the Olympic torch in San Francisco this week and immolates himself, nobody should be astonished. If the 19th anniversary on June 4 of the Tiananmen Square crackdown passes quietly, everyone should be surprised.
Playing in the major leagues is no breeze. That’s where China is after the remarkable transformation that led to the hosting of the Olympics. No talk of “peaceful rise,” “harmony,” “multilateralism” - self-effacing Chinese buzzwords all - can hide that a global power must make tough calls, decide what it represents, and be judged.
China can no longer pretend to be the unobtrusive power par excellence, in contrast to American intrusiveness. In Burma and beyond, that just won’t wash.
President George W. Bush has called President Hu Jintao twice since the troubles began to urge him to reach out to the Dalai Lama, stop vilifying him, establish a dialogue, and open Tibet to foreign journalists.
But Christopher Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, who advised the president on these calls, told me Bush’s laudable pleas had fallen on deaf ears. “I don’t really expect anything good over the next few months,” he said.
Hu, who crushed protests in Tibet as party chief there in 1989, typifies the national consensus that China has delivered Tibetans from feudalism, ushering them toward modernity with infrastructure and investment. Tibet, in this view, should be grateful, and the region’s obstinate “splittists” crushed.
At the Williamsburg Conference here, an annual high-level get-together on Asian themes, I did not hear one word from Chinese delegates that deviated from the view that outside agitators have stirred up the Tibet protests, that foreign media are mendacious or malevolent, that lectures on human rights are unacceptable, and that no government can tolerate a separatist movement.
In short, I heard the typical conspiracy theories of any one-party state unable to reach beyond the logic dictated by its own need for control.
“There was an order for disruption,” said Wu Jianmin, the president of the China Foreign Affairs University. “But it would be a terrible mistake to politicize the Olympics. Everyone will be hurt. The people of Tibet were serfs and have made huge progress.”
I don’t dispute the feudal aspects of Tibetan society. I’d be surprised if there were not seditious plans hatched outside Tibet. But the Chinese authorities need to face some greater truths.
These include the facts that a half-century of repression has not worked; that the Dalai Lama is the most moderate Tibetan interlocutor they will find; that he has called for autonomy but not independence; and that he is a revered global figure.
Rather than decry foreign plots, China should also recognize that the mass arrival of Han Chinese has fed legitimate Tibetan fears of cultural extinction, and that a stop-go approach to allowing foreign journalists into Tibet is ham-fisted.
For a long time the core question about China has been whether a dictatorship with an open market economy can resist its internal contradictions. The core question now is how you federalize a diverse society under one-party control.
Or, as Raja Mahan, an Indian political scientist, put it to me: “In a country that does not separate party and state, how do you create the space for different peoples to express themselves?”
Democratic India is V. S. Naipaul’s land of “a million mutinies.” Each mutiny is a safety valve. “But China cannot afford even one mutiny,” Mahan noted.
China’s Communist party leadership has proved remarkably adept at adjusting to the country’s explosive growth. But in crisis it is not nimble. The next few months will present a number of crises that I see, at root, as challenges to the fashionable authoritarian-capitalist model.
Bush is right to attend the Olympic opening ceremony. Boycotting it would only accentuate old Chinese feelings of victimization. That’s good for nobody. But China needs to get over the repressive reflexes of the one-party state, talk to the Dalai Lama, and understand that harmony in rigidity is impossible.
A multi-ethnic dictatorship is of its essence brittle; it will be more so if it does not bend at its Tibetan edge.
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