We are back! Tibet...

I decided to restart this blog but talking about China, once again… I will write, occasionally, about news coming from China and being reported over here, in the Western world or wherever I will be living.

I am sure that this will show some big difference in the way things are reported, especially if compared to what I used to write when I was in Beijing.

I will try to get the impressions of some Big Noses in China or some Chinese folks living there, when the important news strikes.



The Italian capital, Rome, and Venice have a new citizen, the Dalai Lama. His Holiness has been granted the honorary citizenship and in a very measured way has declared that nearly 6000 people have been arrested in the last few months by the Chinese authorities. The Dalai Lama has also warned the Tibetans not to fight as it is not the right way to achieve a sort of greater independence. According to the Dalai Lama, they have never asked for independence but just some greater autonomy to make sure that traditions and Tibetan culture don’t go lost. I am wondering then, why, if Dalai Lama doesn’t want the independence, the whole world is protesting and fighting for it. Someone here is not telling the truth as, according to China, they want independence, according to the Tibet support overseas they want independence, according to His Holiness, this is not the case.

I looked around the web trying to find some points of view from Tibetans and from Chinese authorities and I found this very interesting blogger. I recommend reading it, especially to those that are for the independence of Tibet:


Link here: http://twofish.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/what-the-dalai-lama-is-really-against-tibetan-independence/


One reason I sympathize with Tibetans trying to figure out what it means to be Tibetan within a larger national and global community is that I have to do figure out how to do the same thing.


I’ve observed that Westerners admire Tibet because they see it as a “garden of eden.” A pure land unspoiled by modernity. The trouble is that if you don’t become modern, you become extinct, and part of the largely successful struggle that the Chinese nation has undergone is the struggle to be modern and avoid national extinction. To survive, you must have power. This means economic power and military power. You will get nowhere by throwing rocks at tanks, you must be able to build your own tanks. The question then becomes once you have power then how do you use it without either destroying yourself or becoming a monster. Very, very difficult.



There is a fundamental contradiction in Tibetan independence that I don’t think Westerners aren’t quite aware of. To become an independent nation-state, you must have an army, you must have schools that teach young people to salute the flag, you must have a power structure, you must be prepared to deal with demonstrators with a mix of carrots and sticks, you must write history books that justify the existence of the nation. You must in the end teach people to die and to kill for the motherland.



You must in short do hundreds of things that Westerners *don’t* want Tibetans to do.



It’s interesting to compare Tibet with Mongolia. Mongolia was able to achieve independence, but it had to completely destroy its Lamaist institutions to do so, and have a Marxist-Leninist revolution and basically become a Soviet satellite. Mongolia had to create a one party state and undertake some ethnic cleansing to achieve national independence. Tibet could have easily gone down that route.



In the 1920’s there was a major debate within Tibet about what to do, and the decision was made to keep the Lamas and not modernize, and this meant that when the PLA entered Tibet in 1951, they couldn’t shoot back. If Tibet had made different decisions in 1920, then then could have fought back in 1951, but having a huge army to fight would make Tibet today probably look something like Burma. The army that shoots the invaders would then shoot the Lamas.



This by the way is why the Dalai Lama is against Tibetan independence. An independent Tibet becomes “just another third-world country” with flags, schools, propaganda, soldiers, bureaucrats, history books, and riot police. The brutal reality of the world is that nation-states must be prepared to fight, to die, and if necessary to kill.



The Dalai Lama realizes that to have even the slightly chance of independence, Tibet must destroy its soul. I think he is probably more scared of his own supporters than he is of the Chinese army. The PLA can suppress the monasteries for centuries, but the Buddhist ideals will survive, since you can’t shoot an idea with bullets. The PLA is not the real danger to the Dalai Lama’s ideals, the real danger is subversion from within. People use the works of Muhammad to justify suicide bombing, and it is not hard to go down that slope and have the ideas of the Dalai Lama perverted into justifying something similar, and mixing the message of non-violence with the idea of the state which is all about violence, makes this easier.



He realises this but I don’t think most of his supporters do.



I agree with blogger, to be honest but, Dalai Lama should make this much cleared and tell the Richard Geres and all those people giving him every sort of memorabilia in exchange of the Tibetan scarves that with their request for independence they are actually against Tibet and against the people of China which have no guilt towards the way history went.



This is an interesting excerpt from the website of the Council on Foreign Relations (http://www.cfr.org/publication/15965/) explaining how the Chinese claims came to live:



China claims that Tibet has been an inalienable part of China (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-04/08/content_7935999.htm) since the thirteenth century under the Yuan dynasty. Tibetan nationalists and their supporters counter that the Chinese Empire at that time was either a Mongol (in Chinese, Yuan) empire or a Manchu (Qing) one, which happened to include China too, and that Tibet was a protectorate, wherein Tibetans offered spiritual guidance to emperors in return for political protection. When British attempts to open relations with Tibet culminated in the 1903-04 invasion and conquest of Lhasa, Qing-ruled China, which considered Tibet politically subordinate, countered with attempts to increase control over Tibet’s administration. But in 1913, a year after the Qing dynasty collapsed, Tibet declared independence and all Chinese officials and residents in Lhasa were expelled by the Tibetan government. Tibet thenceforth functioned as a de facto independent nation until the Chinese army invaded its eastern borders in 1950.

· But even during this period, Tibet’s international status remained unsettled. China continued to claim it as sovereign territory. Western countries, including Britain and the United States, did not recognize Tibet as fully independent. After founding the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the new communist government in China sought reunification with Tibet and decided to invade it in 1950. A year later, in 1951, the Dalai Lama’s representatives signed a seventeen-point agreement with Beijing, granting China sovereignty over Tibet for the first time. The agreement stated that the central authorities “will not alter the existing political system in Tibet” or “the established status, functions and powers of the Dalai Lama.” While the Chinese government points to this document to prove Tibet is part of Chinese territory, proponents of Tibetan independence say Tibet was coerced into signing this document and surrendering its sovereignty.



Up to this the facts, you can read the rest on the CFR website, as after this point there are speculations and point of views of different parties.



As I always say:



· Tibet is very important to China’s sense of nationhood, says CFR’s China expert Adam Segal. “There is a fear that if Tibet gets independence, Uighurs and Taiwan will want independence.”

·

· Then it continues:

·

· Segal notes that Chinese authorities have frequently suggested that they are just waiting for the Dalai Lama to die, expecting Tibetan nationalism to disappear after his death, but says this may be a miscalculation. “I think the more radical Tibetans would direct the movement for independence after Dalai Lama’s death.”

Experts agree that unless there is political reform within China, the resolution of the Tibetan question remains bleak. "The historical question was never unsolvable," says Barnett. "It would not have been a problem necessarily if China had been able to develop policies for Tibet that were acceptable to most Tibetans." In November 2008, the Dalai Lama said his efforts to bring autonomy to Tibet had failed so far and called for a meeting of Tibetans from around the world to consider the future of the Tibetan movement. The meeting, which took place Nov. 17-22 in Dharamsala, India, drew more than five hundred Tibetans. Though the meeting closed with what was described as a "strong endorsement" (http://www.savetibet.org/media-center/ict-press-releases/tibetan-exiles-back-dalai-lama-challenge-talks-with-china) of the Dalai Lama's "middle-way" approach, participants also "clearly stated" they might seek independence if talks with China do not bring progress "in the near future."



So, dear Western readers, my point of view is very simple, is the one of the Dalai Lama: more autonomy, but forget the independence. Those who advocate their causes to a Free Tibet are those condemning the Dalai Lama’s ambitions for a greater autonomy.



Think about it people...



I am looking forward for an official point of view from China, about this.



I leave you with the Proclamation issued by the Dalai Lama XIII in 1913



http://www.tibetjustice.org/materials/tibet/tibet1.html



bye folks!