Reprint for academic discussion only. The following [subsequent to the URL] is from The SF Chronicle
[note: it is not the poster's intention to turn this forum into a political thread, he posted this and the prior post #9193 to show that maybe [some of] the news media in the West are not so naive after all and they can identify the many shades of gray.]
sfgate.com
ASIA
Tibet Caught in China's Web Investment transforms face, culture of Himalayan land
John Pomfret, Washington Post
Saturday, July 24, 1999
It's always Christmas at JJ's Disco in Lhasa, a cheesy Chinese nightclub in the heart of Tibet's ancient capital. Grimy plastic cutouts of Santa line the halls into the cabaret. Neon-colored tassels of tinsel droop from its Greco-Roman columns.
Inside, Lu Zhen, a Tibetan elementary school teacher moonlighting as a nightclub singer, croons to a crowd of Chinese patrons, decked out in three-button suits and ultra-minis, all wielding mobile phones.
``Chinese, Tibetans,' she sings, ``we are all the daughters of one mother.'
Lu's salary at the nightclub is 10 times what she earns teaching Chinese and Tibetan language classes in a ramshackle school across town. ``With the money they give her,' said a friend, ``it makes it easier to believe the words she's singing.'
Forty years after Chinese troops crushed a rebellion in Lhasa, Tibet is at a crossroads -- its soul longing to be rid of China but its livelihood tied ever closer to Beijing.
While China pours billions of dollars into developing the region with its spectacular and forbidding landscape, Tibetans say they have little love for their colonial masters. Despite Chinese attempts to stifle Tibetan resistance -- including a ``patriotic education' campaign that since 1997 has defrocked hundreds of monks and closed dozens of monasteries -- support for the Dalai Lama, the exiled religious leader who is the campaign's target, remains sky-high.
A year ago, a rapprochement seemed possible between the Dalai Lama and Beijing. As resident Jiang Zemin spoke openly with President Clinton about China's secret contacts with the Dalai Lama's representatives, Chinese strategists floated an image of a multiethnic Chinese empire, of one country with many systems, a federation encompassing freewheeling Hong Kong, ancient Tibet, rust-belt Manchuria and Islamic Xinjiang.
The winds are now blowing in another irection. Chinese policy in Tibet is heavily influenced by the war in Kosovo, which fanned Chinese fears that some Tibetans, in a similar revolt, would take up arms against China and win backing from the West. Negotiations with the Dalai Lama are broken off, and the Chinese approach seems to be to let the 64-year-old leader die in exile in India.
But this strategy could bury the last chance for a peaceful solution to one of China's most vexing internal problems.
In the West, Tibet is framed as a simple issue, the lines of right and wrong so tightly drawn that no room is left for ambiguity. The reality is more complex.
The road from Lhasa to the aquamarine Yang Lake winds past panhandling yak herders. At an altitude of 18,000 feet, the high desert is punctuated by boulders the size of houses and spreads beneath the white tentacles of glaciers descending from the mountains.
At a bend in the road, Kagong, a pint-sized 14-year-old in tattered clothes, explains is stunted frame in simple terms: ``I eat one meal a day.'
About 2 million ethnic Tibetans live in Tibet -- about half of all the Tibetans in China. Although 78 percent of the population are farmers or herders, they are unable to feed themselves. China's annual shipments of food aid -- averaging 110 pounds for each person in Tibet -- tide over the region during the barren winter months.
Kagong is lucky; he's in school. His 12-year-old friend, Kaxi, dropped out a year ago because his family needed him to tend the yaks. In the 1990 census, 72.8 percent of ethnic Tibetans over age 15 in Tibet were listed as illiterate or semiliterate -- more than three times China's national average.
About 10 hours by bad road from Yang Lake is Shigatse, Tibet's second city, on the banks of what becomes the Brahmaputra River as it flows south to Bangladesh. At 13,000 feet, Shigatse is one of the highest cities in the world. Under Chinese rule, its core of two-story earthen houses in the traditional Tibetan style has been eclipsed by Chinese urban design featuring boxy, white-tiled buildings.
In front of a $7 million downtown shopping center donated to Shigatse by the government of Shanghai is a monument to Chinese-Tibetan cooperation: a sculpture showing a Chinese woman from the country's dominant Han ethnic group in a miniskirt and go-go boots holding a ``belt of friendship' with a Tibetan lass in traditional clothing.
The shopping center is shaped like a ship, a symbol of Shanghai's openness to the outside world. In landlocked Shigatse, this ship doubles as a brothel.
Similar wacky investments abound throughout Tibet. The central government has paired provinces in China with cities in Tibet and pushed them to invest here.
The Shandong provincial government built the tallest building in Shigatse -- 10 stories -- for more than
$8 million. With its marbled interior, wine cellar, coffee shop and massage parlor, it's already a top hangout for Chinese and Tibetan public officials.
Inside the ship-shaped shopping center,
24-year-old Nima Siwang, a pudgy Tibetan banker, with a gold watch, is rolling strike after strike in the state-of-the-art bowling alley. Educated in Sichuan province and with a father in the police, he's one of the beneficiaries of Chinese rule.
``I come here all the time,' he said while two of his girlfriends cooed nearby, ``but very few other people can afford it.' In a moment of reflection, he conceded that Shigatse might have benefited more if Shanghai's largesse had resulted in something more useful, like a water treatment plant or street lights.
Back in Lhasa, Danzen, a truck driver who like many Tibetans has a single name, is the same age as Nima Siwang but inhabits another world. In 1997, Danzen spent a month in police custody after he was turned in for his views on independence.
At the station house, police shackled Danzen's hands behind his back, attached a wire to the handcuffs and administered an electric shock. ``It was like pieces of meat were falling from my body,' he said, speaking in a grungy speakeasy in a muddy Tibetan neighborhood. ``I'm ready to die for independence.'
On the streets of Lhasa and Shigatse, signs of China's domination are everywhere. Han Chinese run the factories, man the bars, do the shoe repairs, even sell the peaches. Official figures say that the population of Lhasa remains 89 percent Tibetan. Most people here estimate the ethnic division at
about 50-50 in the city center.
Many Han Chinese in Tibet view their Tibetan neighbors as backward heathens who benefit from China's manifest destiny. Chinese officials speak openly of assimilating Tibetans like the Han Chinese assimilated the Manchus, a northern tribe that ruled
China from 1664 to 1911. Today, Han make up 95 percent of China's 1.3 billion people.
``The Tibetans are lazy. It's only natural that Han people show them how to work,' said Li Menghui, a shoe repairman from Sichuan.
The Chinese are pursuing a strategy that banks on economic development to erode support for independence in Tibet -- as it has fostered stability
elsewhere in China -- and ultimately bridge the gap between Han and Tibetan cultures. ``As long as Tibet develops economically, all problems can be solved,' said Sonam Tsering, an economist in Tibet's government.
Meanwhile, Beijing is also relying on its ``patriotic education' campaign -- a program basically designed to sully the image of the Dalai Lama -- to break Tibetans' faith in Buddhism. The Dalai Lama's pictures have been banned in public. And the number of monks and nuns has been limited to 46,000, down from 150,000 before the 1959
rebellion.
``The government's limits are hurting our religion,' said one postulant at Lhasa's Jokhang monastery. ``We who are in our 20s and 30s don't have knowledge. The monks in their 40s and 50s have been either defrocked, killed in the Cultural Revolution or have gone to India. What is the future of Tibetan Buddhism? I don't know.'
While love for the Dalai Lama overflows in Tibet, few Tibetans would welcome a return of the corrupt aristocratic clans that fled with him in 1959 and that comprise the bulk of his advisers. Many Tibetan farmers, for example, have no interest in surrendering the land they gained during China's land reform to the clans. Tibet's former slaves say they, too, don't want their former masters to return to power.
``I've already lived that life once before,' said Wangchuk, a 67-year-old former slave who was wearing his best clothes for his yearly pilgrimage to Shigatse, one of the holiest sites of Tibetan Buddhism. He said he worshiped the Dalai Lama, but added, ``I may not be free under Chinese communism, but I am better off than when I was a slave.'
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