Tibet Buffer state

[dabong1]

This week, spiked editor Brendan O’Neill will be reporting from Tibet.

The first sounds that greet me as I arrive in Lhasa are the incandescent honking of horns as car-drivers and motorcyclists (some with three to a bike) negotiate the roads. My own Tibetan driver is wearing a Playboy jacket. Maybe he bought it in the Playboy shop that I later see in the centre of Lhasa. It’s near the Tibet Steak House (‘juicy meat for you!’) and the Lhasa casino, in which Tibetan men in leather jackets pile coins into slot machines. On the streets young men in Kappa and Nike sweatshirts (fakes, I’m guessing), with hair by Topman, flirt with casually dressed young women, one of whom is sporting hotpants that even Kylie would consider too risqué. How can they dress like this in the freezing kingdom of snow and Yetis, as made famous by Tintin in Tibet? Because that’s another myth of Tibet, at least in July, and at least here in Lhasa: I might be 3,650 metres above sea level, inside a mountain range and with the clouds so close by I almost feel I could touch them, but it’s so hot that I get sunburnt.

The first place I visit is the Tibet Green Barley Brewery, where Tibetans don’t make peace but beer - 470,000 cans a day. It’s the highest brewery in the world. Whatever harsh conditions mankind finds himself in, he’ll find a way to make beer. The bespectacled Tibetan showing me around this temple to booze rather than to Buddha tells me Tibetans love this brand of beer (after downing my complimentary cans I can see why) and they drink it everywhere - ‘in bars, in restaurants, at home. Not at temple though.’ A German engineer (Germans helped build the brewery) is sat at his desk, looking miserable, beneath a German flag on the wall. ‘We don’t mention the World Cup’, says my guide. Tibetans, like people across China, followed the World Cup religiously (no offence intended by my use of the word religiously).

Even when we encounter devout Buddhists, ‘calm’ and ‘stillness’ are the last words that come to mind. On the road to Lhasa we pass a group of men, women and children who have been journeying by foot from southern Tibet on their way to the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, Tibetan Buddhism’s holiest site. The journey has taken them two months, which isn’t surprising: they have wooden boards on their hands and with every fifth or sixth step they take they fully prostrate themselves on the ground, making a deathly clatter as their wood-covered hands and then their foreheads hit the earth. I’d like to see that young man in the white coat try this. Stillness, calm, projecting positive energy? This looks more like a backward, painful and very loud zapping of one’s own energy. Richard Gere Buddhism it ain’t. The men and women look ****** and exhausted. One thrusts her hand through our car window for money. She’s wearing a Kappa hat.

Yet in central Lhasa, the only culture shock I experience is how similar Tibetans are to other Asians and to us Westerners, too. Tsering Shakya, a Tibetan historian who grew up in England, was once told by an academic colleague who saw him arrive at work by car: ‘I can never get used to the idea of a Tibetan driving a car.’ That academic should brace himself if he ever visits Lhasa: here they drive cars, drink beer, smoke, dance, wear leather, sit in parks, play cards, flirt, chat, talk rubbish, and do all the other things that the rest of us do. It is testament to the influence of the Western Tibetophilic lobby, all those actors, princes and middle-class healing nutjobs who have spread such a severely distorted image of Tibet as a land of childlike monks and nuns who smile softly all day long, that even I find myself surprised by the reality.

Of course Tibet has unique cultural traits. And yes, it is more religious than some other countries. As we get closer to Jokhang Temple we see old women in traditional clothing spinning prayer wheels and more and more of those saffron-clad monks and nuns (but even then, one of the monks is chatting to a young Tibetan who is a dead ringer for Morrissey circa 1984: hyperquiff and specs). Out of a population of 2.9million, 46,000 - or 1.5 per cent - are monks or nuns. That is quite high. But there are places around the world, from Scotland to Bhutan, Afghanistan to Alaska, where people have what look to the rest of us like strange eating, believing and living habits. So what is it about Tibet that has led to it being viewed, in the words of one Tibetologist, as a ‘country that is somehow outside the rest of the world’? Where does that image, so wrong, come from?

Ironically, it originates in large part with British imperialism. British forces invaded Tibet in 1904 and administered it until 1947. Their aim was to create what they self-consciously called a ‘buffer state’ to protect their immense interests in India, then run by the British Raj, from potential advances by Russia and China. Tibet was turned into a guard dog for Britain’s vast Indian Empire. And the British discovered that the idea of Tibet as a mystical, paranormal land - that is, not a normal state and certainly not a part of those other normal states of China or Russia - was a very useful propaganda tool. As Alex McKay, author of Tibet and the British Raj: The Frontier Cadre 1904 to 1947, points out: ‘The [British] found that the mystical image could serve British interests. The mystical image reinforced Tibet’s separate identity… furthering the interests of the British cadre.’ The British had a strict policy of only allowing in writers and explorers who were sympathetic to the mystical image of Tibet and who also would not criticise the severities of British rule or of Buddhist serfdom. And, says McKay, ‘in the absence of a viable alternative, the image of Tibet they constructed became the dominant historical image followed by Western academics’ (2).

Indeed, it is during that period of the self-serving Orientalism of British rule in Tibet that the popular modern image of Tibet as a mystical, cut-off entity takes shape - most notably in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933), which invented the idea of ‘Shangri La’. As McKay points out, the writings of the British imperialists, and of their sympathisers, are still regularly cited in the propaganda produced by the Dalai Lama’s people, which is designed to prove that Tibet is a unique and special place that only they can and should govern. Some of those old Orientalist writings were available at that hippy-fest in Lambeth, too - British imperial paternalism recycled as anthropological New Age ‘at-oneness’. What connects the old imperialists with the new Tibetophiles is their desire to have Tibet as a ‘buffer state’ – only where the imperialists wanted to use Tibet to protect their material interests against China and Russia, the new lot want to use it to protect their emotional interests, to preserve an idea of innocent, childlike humanity so far uncorrupted by modernity.

Both sides have indulged in borderline racist fantasies that are all about themselves rather than reality. Arriving in Lhasa I’m delighted to find that it is not mystical at all. Beautiful and buzzing? Yes. Paranormal and utterly unlike the rest of humanity? No. I’m in a real place populated by real people, with all the fun and flaws and tensions that involves, not an otherworldly kingdom or a posh person’s buffer state.

This week, spiked editor Brendan O’Neill will be reporting from Tibet.
Tibet: still a ‘buffer state’ for posh Westerners? | spiked

 

[yangtomous]

Damage，Tibet in the histroy and now and future all is a part of China.so foolish for you don't know anything about histroy .just to study a little China histroy then speak .why here are so many people like lie but fact .Please just give any China dynasty map that indicate that Tibet is a country?It is FOR thousands years that Tibet is a part of China .

 

[faithfulguy]

Damage，Tibet in the histroy and now and future all is a part of China.so foolish for you don't know anything about histroy .just to study a little China histroy then speak .why here are so many people like lie but fact .Please just give any China dynasty map that indicate that Tibet is a country?It is FOR thousands years that Tibet is a part of China .

Tibet was an independent country as certain time in history. Such as in the 600AD. There was a strong and independent Tibetan state. Tibet was also an independent state back in 1500-1700 until the Qing dynasty stroops invaded and took over Tibet. Since then, Tibet has been part of China.

 

[pla]

Dalai's rule in Tibet (1920)

 

[pla]

 

[Srinivas]

Damage，Tibet in the histroy and now and future all is a part of China.so foolish for you don't know anything about histroy .just to study a little China histroy then speak .why here are so many people like lie but fact .Please just give any China dynasty map that indicate that Tibet is a country?It is FOR thousands years that Tibet is a part of China .

For centuries there is no nation called pakistan now we have pakistan as our neighbour

 

[faithfulguy]

For centuries there is no nation called pakistan now we have pakistan as our neighbour

Actually, Pakistan never existed as nation in history until 1947. And so does India. Both these are new nations that never existed before and now exists. This is different from Israel or Poland as it was a nation in the long past until it was created in the modern times.

 

[Srinivas]

Actually, Pakistan never existed as nation in history until 1947. And so does India. Both these are new nations that never existed before and now exists. This is different from Israel or Poland as it was a nation in the long past until it was created in the modern times.

Poor in your history India existed many centuries it was at its peak during mauryan empire. But as the time past due to invasions it was split into small kingdoms. The culture and traditions of hindus who form majority of population in the sub continent share common heritage.

 

[indushek]

Actually, Pakistan never existed as nation in history until 1947. And so does India. Both these are new nations that never existed before and now exists. This is different from Israel or Poland as it was a nation in the long past until it was created in the modern times.

Sorry but India existed for a long long time albeit as a conglomerate of individual kingdoms. The Gupta and Magadha empires can be best examples of modern history as they are attested by many historians, although it existed way back before B.C also mentioned in ancient greek works. It was known by a different name Bharata Khanda.

 

[xuxu1457]

More than 270years ago,there was no America,so if you want you can call US down and give land to Amerindian

 

[chauism]

For centuries there is no nation called pakistan now we have pakistan as our neighbour

This is not a very good arguement though. With my limited knowledge of Indian history, India was not a unified country as it is now for more than a century but rather a confederacy of many independent states. It was the British East India Company that reunited those states under its rules that forms the modern India.

So are those states entitled for its independence now? I don't think so.

 

[third eye]

Actually, Pakistan never existed as nation in history until 1947. And so does India. Both these are new nations that never existed before and now exists. This is different from Israel or Poland as it was a nation in the long past until it was created in the modern times.

India never existed before 1947 ?

It is news that India is a ' new' nation.

 

[dabong1]

What the CPC and the Free Tibet lobby have in common

Tourism is booming in Tibet, especially among the Chinese. In 1980, only 3,525 tourists came here: 1,059 of them internationals and 2,466 of them Chinese. In 2007, four million tourists visited Tibet, around 370,000 of them internationals and a whopping 3.6million of them Chinese. The most striking thing is why these Chinese are traipsing to this tough terrain, which for five decades has had a frequently troubled relationship with China. It’s for the same reason that Westerners came to Tibet, or more popularly went to India and Nepal, in the 1960s, 70s and 80s - to escape the grime of modern daily life and ‘find themselves’.

‘For some Chinese people, the fast pace of economic development has left them yearning for a pre-modern world’, says Lian Xiangmin of the China-Tibetology Research Centre in Beijing, which I visit before travelling to Lhasa. ‘They want to escape for a while. They are a little bit disappointed when they find that Lhasa is actually a modern place.’ My flight from Chengdu in south-west China to Lhasa is packed with youthful Chinese and Chinese families (and also a smattering of Western faces, including a hippyish German family whose young son is wearing a t-shirt that says ‘Learn Swahili!’ - someone needs to make their mind up about which is their favourite exotic ethnicity).

A teacher from the Sichuan province of China tells me she travels to Lhasa to ‘empty my mind’. A handsome banker from Chengdu - who I am delighted to say is wearing Fred Perry - loves Lhasa because ‘it’s so different to the rest of China’. The most fascinating thing is the way the Chinese authorities themselves have co-opted the Western-invented imagery of ‘Shangri La’ to promote tourism to Tibet. Once super-keen to emphasise the inherent Chineseness of Tibet, the idea that it’s a natural, historic, permanent and inseparable part of the motherland, the Communist Party of China (CPC) now seems increasingly relaxed about advertising Tibet’s alleged exoticness.

As one report puts it, ‘China promotes Tibet as an exotic holiday destination, appropriating the Shangri La imagery familiar to Western readers of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, Lobsang Rampa’s Third Eye, and colour travelogues on Buddhist hermits and the Tibetan landscape’ . So when I arrive in Lhasa airport I am greeted by a vast poster featuring dancing Tibetan women and the words ‘Magical Tibet - Land of Pure Wanders’ Or maybe it’s not sic if they mean Tibet is a place of great walks. And then the strangest sight of all: a youthful member of China’s authoritarian People’s Liberation Army putting the kata, a traditional Tibetan greeting scarf, around the necks of Chinese dignitaries arriving at the airport.

This all points to perhaps the most startling thing I have discovered during my visit here, something that runs so counter to trendy opinion in the West that I’m not even sure I should say it for fear of being labelled, not for the first time in my life, a contrarian. And that is that Chinese officialdom, far from raping and pillaging Tibetan culture, manically celebrates and promotes it. And it does so for entirely self-serving reasons, as a new, effectively PC way of justifying its undemocratic governance of what remains a tense, quite poor territory.

Free Tibet UK argues that the Chinese, whom it always depicts as faceless, marauding monsters, are seeking to ‘wipe out Tibetan identity and culture altogether’ . This is simply not true. My official guides, a mixture of Chinese officials from Beijing and representatives of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), who run Tibet on behalf of the CPC, assault me with Tibetan culture and religion. They take me to Jokhang Temple and hand me over to an excitable monk who explains at great length why this is Tibetan Buddhism’s holiest site. Then to the magnificent Potala Palace, the home of the Dalai Lamas from the seventh century up to the fleeing of the fourteenth Dalai Lama to northern India in 1959, where I am given an extensive (and fascinating) education on Tibetan Buddhism.

We visit not one but two Tibetan Medicine Hospitals, Tibetan medicine being a curious mix of Buddhist mysticism, homeopathy, massage, acupuncture and blood-letting (yes, they still do that). I am told that both the central Chinese government and TAR have pumped millions and millions of yuan into funding these hospitals, and also educational facilities that will create a new generation of Tibetan Medicinists, so concerned are they that young Tibetans are rejecting these archaic practices in favour of the ‘quick fix’ of Western medicine with its manufactured pills and injections. Finally, after failing to convert me to Tibetan Buddhism, they take me to see one of Tibet’s many modernisation programmes - a breakthrough IT initiative at Tibet University.

It’s not surprising that Western Tibet activists are spectacularly wrong about how official China engages with Tibetan culture, and are insensitive to some important changes that have taken place. After all, they’ve always had a supremely childish view of the tensions between Tibet and China. In the words of Donald S Lopez Jr, author of Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, they view the Chinese as ‘an undifferentiated mass of godless Communists overrunning a peaceful land devoted only to ethereal pursuits’ and come to see Tibetans as ‘superhuman’ and the Chinese as ‘subhuman’ . That is, they reduce a complex conflict, massively informed and influenced by international tensions as well as by local stand-offs, to a Hans Christian Andersen-style morality tale.

So they overlook the key, somewhat ironic role played by the British rulers of Tibet in the 1920s, 30s and 40s in creating so-called Tibetan Independence. Where under the feudal rule of the Dalai Lamas, Tibet had conceived of itself largely as a religious entity, the lamas were convinced by the British to adopt the trappings of nationalism. As one fascinating historical study points out, the British funded the creation of a national Tibetan flag, a Tibetan football team and Tibetan school uniform, with the explicit, express aim, in the words of one British imperialist, of ‘showing that Tibet had its own art etc and that in some ways Tibet is more closely allied to India than to China’ . In short, the idea of ‘Tibetan independence’ was born largely from the needs of British imperialism in India, and from British conflict with China, rather than from the demands of the Tibetan masses.

Western pro-Tibet activists also overlook the role later played by Washington, in particular the CIA, in funding and training the Dalai Lama’s armed forces in the 1950s. Between China’s invasion of Tibet in 1951 and the fleeing of the Dalai Lama in 1959, the CIA took a keen interest in directing the Tibetan forces as part of what the Dalai Lama himself later described as Washington’s broader international campaign of ‘anti-Communism’ . There is nothing simplistic about this historic clash. In their constant focus on the ‘cultural freedom’ of Tibet, with their claims about a ‘cultural genocide’ and the annihilation of an identity, Western pro-Tibet activists demonstrate that their aim was never to understand the complexities of this region, far less to put the case for grown-up freedoms for Tibetans, but rather to protect their own reified image of an unspoiled cultural entity.

And lo and behold, their narcissistic prejudices have ended up serving the Chinese well. When the entire focus of Western criticism of Chinese governance in Tibet is that it doesn’t sufficiently respect Tibetan culture, then the Chinese can fairly easily make a display of their commitment to preserving Tibetan traditions while getting on with the business of denying Tibetans political freedoms, democratic rights such as the right to vote, and freedom of speech. The Chinese have effectively made the Western fantasy of Shangri-La a reality, increasingly treating Tibet as a special place where harsh farming life (a majority of Tibetans still work in agriculture and animal husbandry) is not a sign of underdevelopment but a tradition to be celebrated; where extreme and backward forms of Buddhism do not raise awkward questions about social progress but rather reveal Tibetans’ inner souls; where there is no need for Tibetans directly to elect their political rulers because they have their own lamas and monks and nuns to look up to. The Free Tibet brigade and the Chinese authorities have more in common than either side would like to admit: both promote Tibetan traditions for self-serving reasons, to the neglect of a meaningful debate about political self-determination for Tibetans.

The real problem here is not a national one; there was never a mass movement for national independence in the way there was in Ireland or Palestine in the 1970s, for example. No, the problem is that Tibetans are like all other Chinese, in that they are denied some very fundamental political rights. They have that ‘cultural freedom’ that Western observers have been demanding for so long, but they aren’t free.


This week, spiked editor Brendan O’Neill will be reporting from Tibet. Read his earlier reports below.
Chinese officialdom embraces ‘Shangri-La’ | spiked

 

[CardSharp]

Tibet was an independent country as certain time in history. Such as in the 600AD. There was a strong and independent Tibetan state. Tibet was also an independent state back in 1500-1700 until the Qing dynasty stroops invaded and took over Tibet. Since then, Tibet has been part of China.

China's foreign policy for the past 2000 years goes through cycles of introversion during times of weakness and assertiveness during times of wealth and power. When China was strong and unified, it demanded nominal fealty from its neighbours in return for trade and gifts and when China was fragmented, these fealties were allowed to lapse.

Tibet was one of those countries that intermittently comes under Chinese rule.

But this is all beside the point. China holds the place now under direct rule and if those free Tibet protesters are really serious, they can take up arms and try to take it. I'd love to see a bloody battle between Tibetan exiles + American hippies vs the PLA Special Forces soldiers from Lanzhou MR.

 

[hembo]

Good read.. thanks for sharing.