[Reader-list] Tsering Shakya | Tibet and China: the past in the present

[Pranesh Prakash]

Tsering Shakya is research chair in religion and contemporary society
in Asia at the Institute for Asian Research, University of British
Columbia. He is the author of The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A
History of Modern Tibet since 1947  (Columbia University Press, 1999)

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/tibet-and-china-the-past-in-the-present


Tibet and China: the past in the present
Tsering Shakya

China's official commemoration of its "liberation" of Tibet in 1959 is
underpinned by a colonial vision that denies Tibetan voice and agency,
says Tsering Shakya.
18 - 03 - 2009

The Chinese government proclaimed in January 2009 that for the first
time a festival called "Serf Liberation Day" is to be celebrated in
Tibet, in commemoration of the events of 1959 when Chinese forces
occupied Lhasa and established direct control over the country
following the uprising of Tibetans against their encroaching rule.

The decision - a response to the widespread protests that engulfed the
Tibetan plateau in March-April 2008 - was carefully crafted and
presented as if it reflected the heartfelt sentiments of the Tibetan
people. The announcement of this "liberation day" - 28 March 2009 -
was made by the Tibetan members of the standing committee of the
regional National People's Congress in Lhasa, a body that represents
China's promise of autonomy to Tibetans but which in fact functions
invariably as a conduit for the iteration of Chinese Communist Party
directives rather than expressing local views.

It is indeed possible that such an initiative may have come from one
group of Tibetans - senior party apparatchiks on the receiving end of
internal criticism for their failure in 2008 to guarantee a loyal and
docile populace.  But this itself is telling of the nature of the Serf
Liberation Day initiative: for in an authoritarian regime, the failure
of a client administration leaves performance as one of the few
options available. It is natural then that authoritarian regimes have
a love of public displays of spectacle, engineered to perfection, in
which the people are required to perform ceremonial displays of
contentment.

The phenomenon is most evident in North Korea. But there as elsewhere,
the local logic of such events may be quite different from the
external message they communicate. When a North Korean refugee once
told me that he had liked taking part in these performances, I thought
he might have been appreciating their aesthetic merit; in fact, he
said, the reason he liked performing was because the participants were
fed during the rehearsal and on the day of the performance.
For local Tibetan officials, the intended message of Serf Liberation
Day will be the delivery of public mass compliance to the leadership
in Beijing. A choreographed spectacle - in which former "serfs" will
tearfully recount the evils of the past while locals in their hundreds
march past the leaders' podium, dressed in colourful costumes and
dancing in unison - will both reinforce the party's narrative of 1959
and convey the contentment of Tibetans today. This will allow the
Tibetan officials to produce the performances required to retain their
posts, and the local people to fulfil the needs of the local leaders
so that they can be allowed to maintain their livelihoods. As Joseph
Conrad discerned in his evocation of the native predicament under
European imperialism in Africa a century ago, the local subject learns
to savour the "exalted trust" of the colonial master.
The way to survive
There are other and more immediate precedents. China itself
experienced a similar situation under the Japanese occupation, when
local collaborators - such as Wang Jinwei, a official in the early
1940s now known to most Chinese as a hanjian ("traitor to the Han") -
were forced to carry out orders to coerce the people on behalf of
their rulers. Today, the party in its dealings with non-Chinese needs
such local intermediaries to provide a semblance of native
acquiescence; it reportedly holds regular meetings of such officials
where for hours they are alternately praised and admonished by
apparatchiks sent from Beijing for the purpose.
Tibetans do not accuse these people of treachery, but rather mock them
using a slang word that refers to their need to say different things
to different people: go nyi pa ("two-headed men"). At the same time,
the local leaders are sometimes seen as immensely skilful, because
many of them retained their positions decades longer than any Chinese
counterpart; no other leaders from the cultural-revolution era were
allowed to remain in power after the ultra-leftists of that time were
purged in 1976. But there are also instrumental reasons for their
survival: the party could not operate without them in the
"nationality" areas.

The routes of culture
This longevity has had its semi-comical dimensions, particularly in
the cultural sphere. The party, for example, has maintained a roster
of acceptable Tibetan pop stars whose songs are considered exemplary.
But the list has never changed: the official diva of Tibetan song is
Tseten Dolma, who has since the 1950s been decreed the most loved of
all Tibetan singers. She appears regularly at every political event
even though many people despise her music. The reason is plain. What
the party finds enchanting is the symbolism constructed around her
life: the fairytale saga of a poor serf girl who was liberated by the
People's Liberation Army (PLA), brought to national status through her
voice, seen as a vindication of class struggle and an authentic sign
of native approval for the state.
The difficulty with elaborate performances of loyalty such as Serf
Liberation Day is that local interpretations are always impossible to
control. As a child growing up in Lhasa, I remember when the epic
Chinese film Nongnu (The Serf  [1963], directed by Li Jun) was first
shown in Tibet. The film depicted the harrowing life of a "serf"
called Jampa whose parents are killed by an evil landlord and who is
used as a human horse for his master's child until freed from bondage
by the arrival of the PLA. The film, meant to arouse indignation
amongst the people against the Tibetan elite's class oppression, is
still seen in China as a powerful depiction of the Tibetan social
system.

But when it was shown in Lhasa, nobody watched it with quite those
sentiments. Many of the local audience had watched Li Jun and his crew
shooting the film; they also knew the actors, and had heard stories
that they were just following instructions and were not allowed to
correct many of the inaccuracies in the film.

This didn't affect the performance of sentiment. Everyone in Tibet was
supposed to watch the film and cry; in those days if you did not cry,
you risked being accused of harbouring sympathy with the feudal
landlords. So my mother and her friends would put tiger-balm under
their eyes to make them water.

In one famous scene, Jampa is shown being beaten by monks after hunger
had forced him to steal food left as an offering on a temple shrine.
Lhasa people at the time saw this not so much as a moment of class
oppression but as the karmic reward due to a sacrilegious thief.  The
film became known locally as Jampa Torma Kuma  (Jampa, The Offering
Thief): even today hardly any Tibetan uses the official title when
referring to the film. The risk for China's officials is that Serf
Liberation Day will face a similar fate in popular memory once the
public spectacle is over.
The problem for the Chinese goes deeper, for the claims embodied in
the 1959 anniversary commemoration require a cultural as well as a
political rearrangement, where local gods are denigrated and local
traditions are branded as redundant (even when being seen as
"exotic").

The homeland effort

The Chinese government has been unable to establish good governance in
Tibet, and to appoint cadres who are attuned to the people.  The
government's primary goal is the "life or death" fight against
"splittism" and "the Dalai clique"; local politicians must repeat the
appropriate slogans and demonstrate their anti-splittist zeal. But to
establish these as the only criteria needed for survival and promotion
is to create an obstacle to the development of good policy.

For a long period - ever since the "anti-rightist" campaign in the
late 1950s, and even earlier in eastern Tibet - local Tibetan
officials who could have brought genuine accommodation between the two
peoples have been edged out of position. This too is a feature that is
typical of colonial administrations, where legitimacy is created
through public endorsement by local intermediaries and maintained
through mass performances of native compliance. At the heart of this
project is denial of indigenous agency, though it is typically
presented as the opposite: a local populace's welcome to a foreign
model of modernity.
This highlights the fact that a crucial priority in Chinese political
calculations in Tibet is to convince a "home" audience (rather than
the subject one in the occupied area). The act of possession - and the
ritualised displays of power, ceremony and state symbolism that grow
up around it - has to be explained and legitimated to key domestic
constituencies.

The way this works can be transparent. The Chinese press, for example,
often publishes articles about exhibitions (abroad as well as in
China) that display the evils of Tibetan life before the Chinese
arrived in the 1950s. The formula is to quote a Chinese interviewee
attesting to the persuasiveness of the exhibits (rather than a Tibetan
confirming their authenticity).

An official party paper, the China Daily, reported on a gory
exhibition in Beijing of the Tibetan past hurriedly launched during
the height of the 2008 protests in Tibet by quoting a Chinese visitor:
"I feel in the exhibition the barbarianism and darkness that permeated
old Tibet, and have a better understanding how the backward system of
mixing politics and religion thwarted Tibet's development and
progress." The uncertainty and anxiety that underlies the colonising
project is indicated by the need to have the metropolitan centre
persuaded of the merits of its mission.
This need to appease the home audience can have complications,
however. When the protests in Tibet erupted in March 2008, Chinese
state television repeatedly broadcast footage of Tibetans lashing out
against innocent Chinese civilians in Lhasa and reported the death of
shop-workers. The same images and the same reports were broadcast over
and over again, arousing the wrath of Chinese people in China and
around the world against Tibetans.

But the wave of support for the Chinese government and its crackdown
that ensued also inflamed and licensed ethnic antagonism in China,
further dividing Chinese and Tibetans, and undoing decades of rhetoric
in China about the unity of nationalities and the harmony of society.

It also helped create tensions between aggressively nationalist and
progressive Chinese citizens. A group of leading Chinese intellectuals
circulated a petition criticising Beijing's response to the protest,
and the first point they urged on the government was to desist from
one-sided propaganda. Zhang Boshu of the Philosophy Institute at the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing wrote that "although the
authorities are not willing to admit it", the problems in Tibet "were
created by the Chinese Communist Party itself as the ruler of China."

A further complication in the Chinese government's effort to ensure
the consensus of the domestic audience is inscribed in the portrayal
of the Tibet unrest as the work of outside forces - the Dalai Lama,
the CIA, CNN, the west in general or other institutions. This
deflective response - common to besieged administrations everywhere -
allowed the government to avoid answering questions about its own
policies. But it also insinuates a potent notion (again, one that
echoes many other comparable situations): a denial of the "native's"
reasoning capacity and in its place an assumption of his inherently
violent character. The spectators are not asked to consider why the
natives are restless.

Again, the Chinese themselves were long the target of the very same
depictions. The Yihetuan rebellion of 1900 - which can be regarded as
the Chinese people's first uprising against western imperialism - was
portrayed by western powers as a kind of racial project of cruel,
heathen masses. The reporting of Chinese residents in Lhasa applauding
the government's action and welcoming the police's armed
street-patrols echo those of the western press with regard to
Europeans in Beijing in 1901: order is restored and life returned to
normality.

But order and normality for whom? Today, citizens of Lhasa live under
surveillance. Their houses are liable to be searched; every text they
produce, every piece of music they record on a CD or download on a
phone can be examined for its ideological content. Every local cadre
has to attend countless meetings, and to declare loyalty to the party
and the motherland. The central question is avoided: why are the sons
and daughters of "liberated slaves" rising against the "liberator"?
The only permissible answers are foreign instigation and an inherent
ethnic propensity for violence.
The naturalisation of violence
The discourse of Serf Liberation Day is revealing of how the Chinese
government sees Tibetans. For in repeatedly using the words "serfs" or
"slaves" (albeit in relation to past oppressions), official China also
reduces Tibetans to the status of primitives, and authorises outside
management of their lives.

Jiang Dasan, a retired PLA pilot who was stationed in the Qinghai
region of eastern Tibet in the 1950s, wrote a tale on his blog that
illustrates this view.  He was witness to an incident where Chinese
army generals, realising that the initial attempts to win over local
Tibetans through "education" had failed, invite the Tibetan leaders to
witness a bombing display by their air-force. When Tibetans saw the
PLA's firepower, Jiang writes, "they really believed the PLA was
‘heaven's army'". A few people couldn't take it and fainted; some
urinated in their pants; others shouted slogans at the top of their
voice: "Long live the Communist Party! Long live Chairman Mao!" The
incident recalls similar accounts in western colonial literature where
the natives fall to their knees and submit, awestruck by the white
man's techno-magical power and reified as emotionally driven
simpletons without reflective capacity.
There are many parallels too in China's presentation of the protests
of March-April 2008.  The bloodiest early incident of these protests
occurred on 14 March in Lhasa, when a number of civilians (official
reports say eighteen) were killed, twelve of them after rioters set
off fires in Chinese shops. It's not clear if the arsonists had any
idea that there were people hiding in the shops' upper floors or
backrooms, or that they were unable to escape.

The "Lhasa incident" resembled the anti-migrant urban riots familiar
from elsewhere in the world: a crime of the urban dispossessed that
reflects the failure of the local political process. It is not
comparable to the ethnic cleansing seen in Bosnia in 1992, where
crimes were meticulously planned, with weapons imported and
hate-propaganda fomented; nor to the religious pogrom seen in Gujarat
in 2002, when Hindu zealots murdered hundreds of Muslims. But the
Chinese media did handle it in ways reminiscent of the United States
media's coverage of victims of 11 September 2001: in terms of what
Paul Gilroy (in openDemocracy) called  "the imperial topography, which
dictates that deaths are prized according to where they occur and the
characteristics of the bodies involved."

The death of these Chinese shop-workers was broadcast repeatedly on
Chinese national television news and overseas Chinese-language
stations, with little or no mention of the Tibetan shop-workers who
died in the same fires (nor, later, of any Tibetans killed or injured
by security forces). This silence is symptomatic: for as with all
struggles by the powerless, the actual experience and voices of
Tibetans inside China are regarded as unimportant. Where they are
noticed at all, they are regarded as the effects of other forces
(whether these be foreign powers, natural disasters or ethnic
tendencies).
This argument has served the Chinese government well, and helped
arouse nationalistic sentiments - on both sides. As the 2008 tensions
escalated, the Chinese community in large part heeded its government's
call to defend the motherland against the west. As a result, every
pro-Tibetan or human-rights protest tends to be countered by Chinese
counter-protests. There have been persecution-campaigns too - just as
a Chinese student at Duke University who publicly reached out to
Tibetans on her campus was vilified by her compatriots and even
Chinese state-owned media, an exile Tibetan student at Harvard who had
spoken on American television in complex terms about the nuances of
the current situation without demonising the Chinese as oppressors was
viciously attacked by Tibetan nationalists (and in both cases the
attacks extended to the students' families). These experiences
demonstrate the workings of a mindset where prejudice, blind
nationalism, and an ugly anger in language transcend differences of
political alignment.
The huge imbalance of power, however, means that the Chinese depiction
of Tibetans can more easily reach and influence citizens' attitudes.
The period since March-April 2008 has seen a hardening of attitudes
against Tibetans, which draw on long-standing attitudes that view them
as primitive and "ungrateful" natives who are predisposed to violence.
Even many young Chinese abroad and those who escaped the aftermath of
the 4 June 1989 massacre supported their government's actions and
condemned the Tibetan protesters as "looters" and "hooligans" (the
same words used to depict the Tiananmen protesters).

The idea of the Tibetan being luohou (backward) is entrenched in the
official state discourse on Tibet; and the perception has penetrated
the Chinese popular image of Tibet.  Yet it is notable how recent an
invention this is: it has been systematised only after the conquest of
1959, as part of the process of transforming a conquered people into
the uncivilised awaiting the gift of civilisation from the conqueror
(and is a marked contrast to earlier centuries, when the Chinese
acknowledged their copious learning from the Tibetans, particularly in
matters of philosophy and religion).
A half-century of the Chinese mission civilisatrice has left Tibetans
with what the social anthropologist Stevan Harrell calls a
"stigmatised identity". This is reflected in the requirement for
Tibetans in China to propitiate the benevolent ruler in their speeches
and writings; almost every published text opens with such ritual
invocations. People become accustomed to performing their assigned
roles in society; they internalise the logic that has made these
roles, and the wider unequal relationship that fixes them, seem
natural and necessary.

Many Tibetans have (as Emily Yeh has shown) come to believe the widely
disseminated notion that they are "naturally" more idle than their
Chinese counterparts; again, a familiar aspect of the experience of
every colonised people. This makes it all the more shocking to the
rulers when elements of this docile and indolent native population
protest: like a fish speaking back to ichthyologists.

The limits of economics
The Tibetan unrest is a product of the paradox of modern China, in
which the government wants the people to passively accept its
programme of modernisation and its framing of Tibetan subjects as
grateful natives. Hu Jintao's notion of a harmonious society is
tantamount to a call for passivity on the part of the citizens. The
radical changes being introduced to Tibet - including large-scale
infrastructural projects - are accepted as a facet of a modern Tibet
but the people do not acquiesce, as they do not have a voice in this
transformation of their lives.
The main discourse of modern China - albeit with somewhat less
confidence as the severe effects of the recession are felt - is the
economic-development paradigm, where the core issues are growth,
efficiency, productivity and consumption.

It is true that material well-being is crucial for any society. But it
is not enough. As Vincent Tucker has written: "without consideration
of culture, which essentially has to do with people's control over
their destinies, their ability to name the world in a way which
reflects their particular experience, development is simply a global
process of social engineering whereby the economically and militarily
more powerful control, dominate, and shape the lives of other for
their purposes".

This is a precise description of what is happening in Tibet. For the
Tibetans, the imposition of the economic paradigm has aroused
resistance. The resistance is also about the right to have a voice in
the process, and wider dignity and recognition.  As long as these are
denied, the conditions for people to take to the streets will remain.
The Chinese state, with all its might, can and will be able to control
the land, but will find underlying resentment harder to erase. The
removal of the Dalai Lama's pictures and the banning of songs will not
remove the reasons why the people put the photographs there in the
first place.
The Chinese government response to protest favoured by party
hardliners is to combine nationalist fervour, colonial attitudes and
brute force in shifting increasingly towards an agenda of control and
rushed development. This approach, far from eliminating Tibetan
opposition, will further alienate the Tibetan population.

The commemoration of "Serf Liberation Day" is a classic illustration
of the nature of Chinese power over Tibetans. Until local voices are
listened to and local memories understood, until issues of perception
and language that surround the Tibetan situation are addressed, until
a political settlement based on the devolution of power is considered,
it is unlikely that any progress will be possible.