Why Lhasa is not Tienanmen

international | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Sunday March 16, 2008 23:20 by Fu Manchu - ( iosaf )

This is not a struggle for Democracy it is a conflict for Ethnic purity.

Firstly, I do not intend to exhonerate or belittle human rights abuses by the PRC in this piece. However, I feel it appropriate to provoke the thoughts of the readership & our horizontal media community on what exactly are the main issues & ethical social principles at the root of the recent violence in Tibet & other provinces of the PRC with ethnic Tibetan communities.

Ever since the exile on foot by the 14th Dalai Lama in 1959 to India, westerners have held a romanticised image of the land of the Tibetans & an inaccurate concept of what Tibet had been before or ought be in the future. US foreign policy was quick to foment pro-Tibetan sympathy & worked on all fronts of its power from hard to soft to use Tibet as a tactical device in the containment of the communist regime of the PRC under Mao Tse Tung.

In the meanwhile PRC took the UN security council seat of Taiwan, Kissenger's strategy in Asia itself transformed & discredited, the Tibetan government in exile dropped demands for independence, Buddhism is rivalled only by Scientology as the belief system central to Hollywood & China's population growth on longer controlled by the state is not yet completely welcomed beyond the borders of the PRC.

The migrant communities of Chinese or whatever ethnicity are the smallest demogaphically representational groups in the principal states & economies who use immigrant labour in the world. The Chinatowns of the US west or east coast are not found in the vast majority of US states, the Chinese ethnic population of Australia at 2.1% compared to the ethnic Italian population of Australia 1.9% reflects a pattern found worldwide. Even leaving aside notions of geographic proximty and the now supposedly past policy of favouring Caucasian immigrants to Australia the comparison ought be clear. Japan with a population of 127.4 million only hosted 335,575 "Kakyō" or ethnic Chinese in 2001 (*). The Korean peninsula perversely sends more people to China fleeing the North Korean state than receives seeking their fortune in the South Korean state.

c/f
(*) Refsing, Kirsten; Colin MacKerras (ed.) (November 2003). Ethnicity in Asia. United Kingdom: Routledge, 58-59. ISBN 0-415-25816-2.

Ngawang Lozang Gyatso, the 5th Dalai Lama known as "the great" (1617 – 1682), was the first of the 14 such characters held to be incarnations of a deity to exercise effective power over a region which approximates to less than half of what modern supporters of Tibetan indepedence consider to be Tibet. It is worth noting that Dalai Lama to wield effective political power over central Tibet. He is frequently referred to as the "Great Fifth Dalai Lama" & managed through shrewd political management to counter the threat of the Mongols by being the first to form an alliance with the Chinese empire under the Qing dynasty. "......."appointed governors to the districts, chose ministers for his government, and promulgated a set of laws. The young Dalai Lama also transformed his regent into a prime minister, or, as the Tibetans called him, the Desi. Administrative authority remained with the Desi and military power with Gushri, who was entitled king of Tibet."
The Dalai Lama also established warm relations with the Shunzhi Emperor of China, the second Manchu emperor of the Qing Dynasty, during a state visit to Beijing in 1652 after several earlier invitations. He set out accompanied by 3,000 men and stayed at the Yellow Palace which had been specially constructed by the Manchu emperor to house him. The emperor met the Dalai Lama in January 1653 when he was only 14 (15 by Western reckoning). The Dalai Lama stayed in Beijing for two months and was honoured with two grand imperial receptions. The emperor treated the Dalai Lama as an equal[ and gave him the honorific title Dalai Lama, Overseer of the Buddhist Faith on Earth Under the Great Benevolent Self-subsisting Buddha of the Western Paradise. From this meeting onwards, the Dalai Lamas were considered priests to the throne by successive Qing emperors......." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobsang_Gyatso%2C_5th_Dala..._Lama

Subsequently the Qing dynasty absorbed Tibet into the Chinese empire through the 17th & 18th centures & the 6th & 7th Dalai Lamas despite attempts at invasion & annexation by both Mongols & Nepalese. The exact history from 5th Dalai Lama to the 1908 recognition of the Thubten Gyatso the 13th Dalai Lama by the then recently formed republic of China includes invasion by the British, involvement in the Opium war & popular cultural references in European pulp fiction to the sinister cults & associated occult powers of "Lamaism".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thubten_Gyatso%2C_13th_Dal...10.29

Since 1908, that is to say 100 years neither Chinese state be it either the PRC or the "national republic of Taiwan" have dropped their claim on Tibet. Meanwhile the current & 14th Dalai Lama (& also the first of 9 such supposed rulers to have glasses & speak English) has dropped his claims for independence.

Therefore Tibet is a region of China and the Tibetans are of the over 60 ethnic groups to use & enjoy their own language which is today spoken in more than 6 provinces of the PRC as well as small pockets of other Asian states including India.

If western socieites are not prepared to open their doors, economies & living space to Chinese or more specifically Han ethnic Chinese, which I hope to have shown they have not done in any demographically just sense, nor considering that Chinese workers in Europe suffer the worst labour abuses comparable in many ways only to the construction workers of Dubai - then it is not only ethically vain & hypocritical but ultimately politically foolish to oppose the natural consequence of the new rail links from the Han provinces to Tibet.

It was under Richard Nixon's presidency that western foreign & economic policy attempted for the first time since the Boxer rising to open the markets of China. That reprochement ensured cheap labour for US corporations who as seen in the recent Mattell Toy scandal often broke the safety regulations of their customer's states in yet even more wicked pursuit of cost cutting. Hysteria and fear of an emergent globalised China as some sort of modernised equivalent of the 19th century "yellow peril" has increased in the last years just as both an emergent EU economic superstate has legislated against both Chinese products & begun to close the door on the single unitary population on this planet which has not enough living space or ground suitable for arable or other agricultural use, yet perversely welcoming foodstuffs from the PRC which include potatoes.

IAgain, I insist that I do not wish or intend to underestimate or dismiss human right abuses by the PRC state - nor do I wish the readership to consider the demands for democratic reform in the PRC state which brought students to be massacred in Tienanmen Square are comparable in any true sense with the attempts to expel Han Chinese from Tibet.

It is an ethnic conflict, a sectarian conflict which shall find its solution not in futile & nonsensical Western demands for independence or a "Tibet for the Tibetans". Such thinking seems to have sneaked into our world vision of liberty & rights as well demonstrated by the support for a "Israeli prosperity for Jews alone" or "Kosovo for Albanians alone" which has long past the stage we ought think hard upon our hypocrisies.

Since last year the current Dalai Lama & his government in exile have maintained that PRC is engaged in "demographic aggression" http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=18451&articl...na+of+'demographic+aggression'&t=1&c=1
or as yesterday "cultural genocide". Is that not true of our own attitude to the resources of this planet our lifestyle & economies need and the workers we choose not to employ? Is there in fact any statistical proof of the "demographic aggression" His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama speaks of?

I contend that in fact there is none.

Hole your opinions, Champion rights, Choose neither a theocracy based on divine right or a one party state which seems incapable of embracing the 21st century and leading the world in workers rights as well as productivity. But please don't lap up the propaganda & lies of knee-jerk Hollywood values.

Being hit in the face by a violent Tibetan hurts just as much as being hit in the face by an angry pacifist Skinhead.