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04/24/2008
Comment on the Current Tibetan Chinese Conflict -----Excerpted from Gelek Rimpoche's Sunday Talk
By Gelek Tenzin
Close to two years ago, communist officials had the idea to ensure that the monks there didn't respect His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They made up a document that basically said: "The Dalai Lama is evil" and wanted everybody to agree by signing it. The monks refused to sign.They said their refusal had nothing to do with politics, but was purely for spiritual reasons.
The authorities arrested the monks who refused to sign and put them in jail and never released them. A few days ago, some Drepung monastery monks went into the market place to demonstrate their request for these monks to be released. They were beaten, tear gased and jailed. Turn by turn, each day following, monks from Sera, then Ganden monasteries also demonstrated, were beaten and jailed as well as nuns from various monasteries. The sound of their cries and screams were heard all over Lhasa. Everybody was crying. Eventually, some people got angry and started to throw molotow cocktails into Chinese owned shops, so there was a huge amount of destruction. The central government of China declared martial law at three am on March 14. . The whole city of Lhasa is now completely filled with soldiers and para-military that were trucked in and the Chinese government said they would violently suppress any demonstrations. The Chinese claim 10 people were killed. Tibetan sources say that more than 200 were killed -- quite a different picture.
It is very clear that the Chinese authorities have had complete control over Tibet for 50 years but failed to win the heart of the people. That is because their policies are not helping the people much. In particular the local government of Tibet is run by lesser educated officials, many of whom are relics of the Cultural Revolution. They are confused and don't understand the true situation. Their reports to the Central government in Beijing are confused and incorrect and that is why the Chinese authorities were taken by surprise by the events of the last weeks.
The local Chinese authorities also can never understand the relationship between the Dalai Lama and Buddhism. They can neither separate the two nor put them together. They are completely confused about the role of the Dalai Lama. Vilifying statements like "The Dalai Lama is nothing but a wolf covered by monk's robes, a demon with human face" clearly show the limit of knowledge and character of those making such statements.
This situation is indeed very, very sad. It really calls for international support. This can be done by people expressing their sympathy and feelings and also urging their representatives, senators and house representatives, as well as journalists in national and local media, to pay attention and try to find out the true situation.
10:45 Posted in Freedom of expression | Permalink | Comments (5) | Email this | Tags: tibet
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Published on Monday, April 14, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/14/8287/
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The Hypocrisy and Danger of Anti-China Demonstrations
by Floyd Rudmin
We hear that Tibetans suffer “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide”. But we do not hear those terms applied to Spanish and French policies toward the Basque minority. We do not hear those terms applied to the US annexation of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1898. And Diego Garcia? In 1973, not so long ago, the UK forcibly deported the entire native Chagossian population from the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. People were allowed one suitcase of clothing. Nothing else. Family pets were gassed, then cremated. Complete ethnic cleansing. Complete cultural destruction. Why? In order to build a big US air base. It has been used to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq, and soon maybe to bomb Iran and Pakistan. Diego Garcia, with nobody there but Brits and Americans, is also a perfect place for rendition, torture and other illegal actions.
When the Olympics come to London in 2012, the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu will certainly lead the demonstrators protesting the “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide” in Diego Garcia. The UN Secretary General, the President of France, the Chancellor of Germany, the new US President and the entire US Congress will certainly boycott the opening ceremonies.
The height of hypocrisy is this moral posturing about 100 dead in race riots in Lhasa, while the USA, UK and more than 40 nations in the Coalition of the Willing wage a war of aggression against Iraq. This is not “demographic aggression” but raw shock-and-awe aggression. A war crime. A war on civilians, including the intentional destruction of the water and sewage systems, and the electrical grid. More than one million Iraqis are now dead; five million made into refugees. The Western invaders may not be doing “cultural genocide” but they are doing cultural destruction on an immense scale, in the very cradle of Western Civilization. Why is the news filled with demonstrators about Tibet but not about Iraq?
And as everyone knows but few dare say, “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide” can be applied most accurately to Israel’s settlement policies and systematic destruction of Palestinian communities. On this, the Dalai Lama seems silent. Demonstrators don’t wave flags for bulldozed homes, destroyed orchards, or dead Palestinian children.
The Chinese Context
The Chinese government is responsible for the well-being and security of one-fourth of humanity. Race riots and rebellion cannot be tolerated, not even when done by Buddhist monks.
Chinese Civilization was already old when the Egyptians began building pyramids. But the last 200 years have not gone well, what with two Opium Wars forcing China to import drugs, and Europeans seizing coastal ports as a step to complete colonial control, then the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of the Manchu Dynasty, civil war, a brutal invasion and occupation by Japan, more civil war, then Communist consolidation and transformation of society, then Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Such events caused tens of millions of people to die. Thus, China’s recent history has good reasons why social order is a higher priority than individual rights. Race riots and rebellion cannot be tolerated.
Considering this context, China’s treatment of its minorities has been exemplary compared to what the Western world has done to its minorities. After thousands of years of Chinese dominance, there still are more than 50 minorities in China. After a few hundred years of European dominance in North and South America, the original minority cultures have been exterminated, damaged, or diminished.
Chinese currency carries five languages: Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uigur, and Zhuang. In comparison, Canadian currency carries English and French, but no Cree or Inuktitut. If the USA were as considerate of ethnic minorities as is China, then the greenback would be written in English, Spanish, Cherokee and Hawaiian.
In China, ethnic minorities begin their primary schooling in their own language, in a school administered by one of their own community. Chinese language instruction is not introduced until age 10 or later. This is in sharp contrast to a history of coerced linguistic assimilation in most Western nations. The Australian government recently apologized to the Aboriginal minority for taking children from their families, forcing them to speak English, beating them if they spoke their mother tongue. China has no need to make such apology to Tibetans or to other minorities.
China’s one-child-policy seems oppressive to Westerners, but it has not applied to minorities, only to the Han Chinese. Tibetans can have as many children as they choose. If Han people have more than one child, they are punished.
There is a similar preference given to minorities when it comes to admission to universities. For example, Tibetan students enter China’s elite Peking University with lower exam scores than Han Chinese students.
China is not a perfect nation, but on matters of minority rights, it has been better than most Western nations. And China achieved this in the historical context of restoring itself and recovering from 200 years of continual crisis and foreign invasion.
Historical Claims
National boundaries are not natural. They all arise from history, and all history is disputable. Arguments and evidence can always be found to challenge a boundary. China has long claimed Tibet as part of its territory, though that has been hard to enforce during the past 200 years. The Dalai Lama does not dispute China’s claim to Tibet. The recent race riots in Tibet and the anti-Olympics demonstrations will not cause China to shrink itself and abandon part of its territory. Rioters and demonstrators know that.
Foreign governments promoting Tibet separatism and demonstrators demanding Tibet independence should look closer to home. Canadians can campaign for Québec libre. Americans can support separatists in Puerto Rico, Vermont, Texas, California, Hawaii, Guam, and Alaska. Brits can work for a free Wales, and Scotland for the Scots. French can help free Tahitians, New Caledonians, Corsicans, and the Basques. Spaniards can also back the Basques, or the Catalonians. Italians can help Sicilian separatists or the Northern League. Danes can free the Faeroe Islands. Poles can back Cashubians. Japanese can help Okinawan separatists, and Filipinos can help the Moros. Thai can promote Patanni independence; Indonesians can promote Acehnese independence. New Zealanders can leave the islands to the Maori; Australians can vacate Papua. Sri Lankans can help Tamil separatists; Indians can help Sikh separatists.
Nearly every nation has a separatist movement of some kind. There is no need to go to Tibet, to the top of the world, to promote ethnic separatism. China is not promoting separatism in other nations and does not appreciate other nations promoting separatism in China. The people most oppressed, most needing a nation of their own, are the Palestinians. There is a worthy project to promote and to demonstrate about.
Danger of Demonstrations
These demonstrations do not serve Tibetans, but rather use Tibetans for ulterior motives. Many Tibetans, therefore, oppose these demonstrations. Many Chinese remember their history and see the riots in Lhasa and subsequent demonstrations as another attempt by foreign powers to dismember and weaken China. There is grave danger that Chinese might come to fear Tibetans as traitors, resulting in wide spread anti-Tibetan feelings in China.
Fear that an ethnic minority serves foreign forces caused Canada, during World War 1, to imprison its Ukranian minority in concentration camps. For similar reasons, the Ottomans deported their Armenian minority and killed more than a million in death marches. The German Nazis saw the Jewish minority as traitors who caused defeat in World War 1; hence deportations in the 1930s and death camps in the 1940s. During World War 2, both Canada and the USA feared that their Japanese immigrant minorities were traitorous and deported them to concentration camps. Indonesians fearing their Chinese minority, deported 100,000 in 1959 and killed thousands more in 1965. Israel similarly fears its Arab minority, resulting in deportations and oppression.
Hopefully, the Chinese government and the Chinese people will see Tibetans as victims of foreign powers rather than agents of foreign powers. However, if China reacts like other nations have in history and starts systematic severe repression of Tibetans, then today’s demonstrators should remember their role in causing that to happen.
Conclusion
The demonstrators now disparaging China serve only to distract themselves and others from seeing and correcting the current failings of their own governments. If the demonstrators will take a moment to listen, they will hear the silence of their own hypocrisy.
The consequences of these demonstrations are 1) China will stiffen its resolve to find foreign influences inciting Tibetans to riot, and 2) the governments of the USA, UK, France and other Western nations will have less domestic criticism for a few weeks. That is all. These demonstrations can come to no good end.
Floyd Rudmin can be contacted by email?Floyd.Rudmin@psyk.uit.no
Posted by: James | 04/25/2008
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frudmin April 15th, 2008 3:27 am
I (Floyd Rudmin) have no conflicts of interest vis-a-vis China. Neither my department nor my faculty has any ties to Chinese universities that I am aware of, and I certainly have not participated in any China exchanges. I have been to China once, in 2004, for one week, in Beijing, for the International Congress of Psychology. I know one graduate student at the University of Nanjing, whom I met at a Theoretical Psychology conference in Toronto last year, whom I asked to fact-check my statements about currency, schooling, and university admissions. My topic of research is minority relations to the dominant majority. Two major papers and bibliography are online at:
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~culture/rudmin.htm
http://www.anthroglobe.info/
My motivation for writing against the current anti-China campaign is that these demonstrations cannot conceivably result in an independent Tibet (which not even the Dalai Lama is seeking) but could result in the complete destruction of Tibetans. History has shown that other nations have destroyed their minorities when they are perceived to be a threat. China is a very old nation, but it is also a brand new nation when it comes to the experience of mass nationalism. People are now playing with dynamite, in my opinion.
Claims that China has been doing “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide” are simply not substantiated by the facts. China has about 5 million Tibetans and about 1000 million Han Chinese. If there were, in fact, a five decades policy to displace Tibetans and destroy their culture, that would have been complete by now. Complete.
Commentators in this discussion (www.commondreams.org) repeat over and over that China has been doing bad things to Tibetans. But what are the specifics? For example, we know that the Nazis fired all of the Jewish minority from their jobs, made them wear the Star of David, then deported them, then murdered them en mass. We know that the Ottomans forced the Armenians into death marches. We know that Americans used Blacks as slaves and made war on the Indian tribes. We know that Canadians forced Native Peoples into small reserves and tried to destroy their languages and religions. We know that Israelis take Palestinian land and destroy their homes and cut down their orchards. What are the specifics of the supposed cultural aggression against the Tibetans? Has China done any of these kinds of culture oppression to the Tibetans? Is China doing any of these things now?
As far as I can tell from my limited knowledge of this, the Buddhist monasteries were the feudal lords and landowners in Tibet, and with the arrival of communism, they lost that status, tried to rebel, fled to India, where they agreed to serve in US operations against China. In this, they are like the White Russians fleeing into diaspora following the 1917 communist revolution in Russia. Similarly, there is a diaspora of Cuban exiles from Castro’s 1959 revolution. And there is a diaspora of Iranian royalists following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. All revolutions result in a diaspora of the losers. The diaspora from the American Revolution were called Loyalists, and they moved to Canada. My ancestor, Asa Webster, was one of them, moving from New Hampshire to what is now Brockville, Ontario. In three or four generations, these kinds of exiles settle down, inter-marry, and forget their historic quarrels and claims.
Please look at the facts of reality and think before becoming politically passionate. Judge your actions not by your own good intentions but by the possible consequences of your actions. Put a priority on correcting the abuses of your own government for which you have moral responsibility.
Posted by: James | 04/25/2008
well hello =D
Posted by: chicken joe =P | 04/29/2008
your all silly
Posted by: hot stuff | 04/29/2008
i think this is just awful, 50 years is a long time and 200 people is an awful lot, i wish this could just all stop! im a 14 year old girl living in the USA and i feel afected by all of this and i have no tebbeian or chinese roots in my family!
Posted by: Raven | 04/30/2008
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