So you could say that all of us had patriotic reasons for coming—perhaps that's the biggest reason. But I also came because it was a good opportunity, and the salary is higher than in the interior of China. Talking with these young men was in many ways similar to talking with an idealistic volunteer in any part of the world. Apart from the financial incentive to work in Tibet, many of the motivations were the same—the sense of adventure, the desire to see something new, the commitment to service.
And government propaganda emphasizes this sense of service, through figures like Kong Fansen, a cadre from eastern China who worked in Tibet and became famous as a worker-martyr after his death in an auto accident.
Han workers are exhorted to study the "old Tibet spirit" of Kong and other cadres as they serve a region that in the Chinese view desperately needs their talents.
Central to their task is the concept of jianku. I heard this term repeatedly when the Chinese described conditions in Tibet, and life is especially jianku for Volunteers Aiding Tibet, who commit in advance to serving eight-year terms. Most government-sent Han workers fall into the category of Cadres Aiding Tibet—teachers, doctors, administrators, and others who serve for two or three years. Having graduated from a lower-level college, Mei Zhiyuan could not qualify for such a position, and as a result was forced to make an eight-year commitment.
The sacrifice is particularly impressive considering that he assumed it would have serious repercussions on his health. Many Chinese believe that living at a high altitude for long periods of time does significant damage to the lungs, and a number of workers told me that this was the greatest drawback to living in Tibet.
It shortens your life. There is no medical evidence to support such a belief; indeed, in a heavily polluted country like China, where one of every four deaths is attributed to lung disease, the high, clean air of Tibet is probably tonic.
Nevertheless, this perception adds to the sense of sacrifice, and it is encouraged by the government pay structure, which links salary to altitude: the higher you work, the higher your pay.
Even so, his salary is two to three times what he would make as a teacher in rural Sichuan, and he is able to send half his earnings home to his parents, who are peasants. It's good money by Chinese standards but seems hardly a sufficient incentive for a young man to be willing to shorten his life. From the Chinese perspective, Tibet has always been a part of China. This is, of course, a simplistic and inaccurate view, but Tibetan history is so muddled that one can see in it what one wishes.
The Chinese can ignore some periods and point to others; they can cite the year , when the Qing Emperor sent a Chinese army to help the Tibetans drive out the invading Nepalese, or explain that from to there were Qing ambans, imperial administrators, stationed in Lhasa.
In fact the authority of these ambans steadily decreased over time, and Tibet enjoyed de facto independence from to An unbiased arbiter would find Tibetan arguments for independence more compelling than the Chinese version of history—but also, perhaps, would find that the Chinese have a stronger historical claim to Tibet than the United States does to much of the American West. Most important, China's reasons for wanting Tibet changed greatly over the years. For the Qing Dynasty, Tibet was important strictly as a buffer state; ambans and armies were sent to ensure that the region remained peaceful, but they made relatively few administrative changes, and there was no effort to force the Tibetans to adopt the Chinese language or Chinese customs.
In the Qing view, Tibet was a part of China but at the same time it was something different; the monasteries and the Dalai Lamas were allowed to maintain authority over most internal affairs. In the early twentieth century, as the Qing collapsed and China struggled to overcome the imperialism of foreign powers, Tibet became important for new reasons of nationalism.
Intellectuals and political leaders, including Sun Yat-sen, believed that China's historical right to Tibet had been infringed by Western powers, particularly Britain, which invaded Tibet in to force the thirteenth Dalai Lama to open relations.
As Tibet slipped further from Chinese control, a steady stream of nationalistic rhetoric put the loss of Tibet into a familiar pattern—the humiliation by foreign powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Hong Kong went to the British, Manchuria and Shandong to the Japanese, Taiwan to the U.
By the time Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China, in , Tibet had figured into the nation's pre-eminent task: the reunification of the once-powerful motherland.
Tibet thus changed from buffer state to a central piece in Communist China's vision of itself as independent and free from imperialist influence.
Orville Schell, a longtime observer of China, says that even today this perception is held by most Chinese. This issue touches on sovereignty, it touches on the unity of Chinese territory, and especially it touches on the issue of the West as predator, the violator of Chinese sovereignty.
The irony is that China, like an abused child who grows up to revisit his suffering on the next generation, has committed similar sins in Tibet: the overthrow of the monasteries and the violent redistribution of land, the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, and the restriction of intellectual and religious freedom that continues to this day. And as in any form of imperialism, much of the damage has been done in the name of duty.
When the Chinese speak of pre Tibet, they emphasize the shortcomings of the region's feudal-theocratic government: life expectancy was thirty-six years; 95 percent of Tibetans were illiterate; 95 percent of the population was hereditary serfs and slaves owned by monasteries and nobles.
The sense is that the Tibetans suffered under a bad system, and the Chinese had a moral obligation to liberate them. Before traveling to Tibet, I asked my Chinese friends about the region. Most responded like Sai Xinghao, a forty-eight-year-old photographer: "It was a slave society, you know, and they were very cruel—they'd cut off the heads of their slaves and enemies.
I've seen movies about it. If you were a slave, everything was controlled by the master. So, of course, after Liberation the rich lords opposed the changes [instituted by the Chinese]. It's like your America's history, when Washington liberated the black slaves.
Afterward the blacks supported him, but of course the wealthy class did not. In history it's always that way—it was the same when Napoleon overthrew King Louis, and all of the lords opposed Napoleon because he supported the poor. My friend is not an educated man, but many Chinese intellectuals make the same comparison. President Jiang Zemin made a similar remark during his visit to the United States although he correctly identified Lincoln as the Great Liberator.
The statistics about Tibetan illiteracy and life expectancy are accurate. Although the Chinese exaggerate the ills of the feudal system, mid-century Tibet was badly in need of reform—but naturally the Tibetans would have much preferred to reform it themselves.
Another aspect of the Chinese duty in Tibet is the sense that rapid modernization is needed, and should take precedence over cultural considerations. For Westerners, this is a difficult perspective to understand. Tibet is appealing to us precisely because it's not modern, and we have idealized its culture and anti-materialism to the point where it has become, as Orville Schell says, "a figurative place of spiritual enlightenment in the Western imagination—where people don't make Buicks, they make good karma.
But to the Chinese, for whom modernization is coming late, Buicks look awfully good. I noticed this during my first year as a teacher in China, when my writing class spent time considering the American West.
We discussed western expansion, and I presented the students with a problem of the late nineteenth century: the Plains Indians, their culture in jeopardy, were being pressed by white settlers. I asked my class to imagine that they were American citizens proposing a solution, and nearly all responded much the way this student did: "The world is changing and developing.
We should make the Indians suit our modern life. The Indians are used to living all over the plains and moving frequently, without a fixed home, but it is very impractical in our modern life We need our country to be a powerful country; we must make the Indians adapt to our modern life and keep pace with the society.
Only in this way can we strengthen the country. Virtually all my students were from peasant backgrounds, and like most Chinese, the majority of them were but one generation removed from deep poverty. What I saw as freedom and culture, they saw as misery and ignorance. In my second year I repeated the lesson with a different class, asking if China had any indigenous people analogous to the Plains Indians. All responded that the Tibetans were similar. I asked about China's obligation in Tibet.
The answers suggested that my students had learned more from American history than I had intended to teach. One student replied, "First, I will use my friendship to help [the Tibetans].
But if they refuse my friendship, I will use war to develop them, like the Americans did with the Indians. Regardless of China's motivations, and regardless of its failures in Tibet, the drive to develop the region has been expensive.
According to Beijing, more than , Han workers have served in Tibet since the s. Taxes in Tibet are virtually nonexistent; Tibetan farmers, unlike those in the interior, receive tax-free leases of land, and a preferential tax code has been established to encourage business.
Low-interest loans are available, and business imports from Nepal are duty-free. Despite the dearth of local revenues, government investment is steadily developing a modern infrastructure.
It is estimated that more than 90 percent of Tibet's government revenue comes from outside the region. This investment of both human and financial capital complicates the issue of Tibet in ways that few outsiders realize. Foreign reports often refer to the exploitation of Tibetan resources as a classic colonial situation, which is misleading. Khamba tribesmen rebelled against the Chinese government in eastern Tibet beginning in August The Dalai Lama departed from Lhasa on March 17, Tibetan rebels launched attacks against Chinese government officials and troops on March 19, , and Chinese troops launched a counter-offensive against the Tibetans on March 20, Chinese government troops captured Lhasa on March 25, , resulting in the deaths of some 2, Tibetan rebels.
The Chinese government dissolved the Tibetan government headed by the Dalai Lama on March 28, , and the Panchen Lama assumed control of the Tibetan government on April 5, The Dalai Lama and some 80 supporters fled into exile in India on March 31, Some 87, Tibetans and 2, Chinese government troops were killed, and some , Tibetans fled as refugees to India, Nepal, and Bhutan during the conflict.
Some , Tibetans died during famines caused by economic reforms between and In , the PRC government ended its repression of Tibet and granted amnesty to Tibetans who had earlier been imprisoned. The Tibetan government-in-exile sent three fact-finding missions to Tibet from August to July Representatives of the Tibetan government-in-exile began a first round of talks with the PRC government in Beijing on April 24, They were ordered to return immediately for lobjong.
So a fortnight after the mass arrest we saw the two lords return on horseback, accompanied by their usual retinue of servants, riding rather ceremoniously to prison.
They could easily have escaped. In Sakya no one was directly or physically involved with the revolt, but the Chinese were paranoiac about the nationalist movement and spared neither time nor effort in tracing out the remotest connections with the revolt. Tibetan nationalist activities were called counterrevolutionary as well, and nationalist sympathies became a most serious crime. If a poor peasant was found guilty of having connections with rebels, he was a first-class political criminal and treated harshly.
In Sakya four peasant leaders tried to organize a peaceful demonstration in support of our governor, who was respected for his sense of justice and concern for the people. We people of Sakya wanted to plead before the Chinese and persuade them not to mistreat the governor. The pleading was to be done in the traditional Tibetan style with a khadar, a ceremonial scarf.
The four leaders got a severe public flogging and were imprisoned. If Tibetan leaders had been able to publicize incidents like this to the people, they could have set Tibet ablaze with revolt. Soon after the mass arrest, the entire town of Sakya, in common with the rest of Tibet, was divided into groups of ten families called Mutual Aid Teams, and I was able to watch the Chinese organizational skill and zeal. Each team had its chairman and secretary, who ensured and enforced group efficiency.
Through these organizations the Chinese made us work or sleep, sing or cry, as the party wanted. Such people used their positions to pay off old scores. As lower middle peasants, our family did not get anything. My oldest sister, who was classified as poor peasant, received two old silk shirts, a pair of ornate old boots worn by some senior lamas on festive occasions, a huge ant-eaten wooden box, two tables, one wooden saddle, and a brocade chuba.
No valuables, with which the rich houses abounded, were distributed; they were stored away in one place. The poor peasants were not satisfied. By the end of April our life had acquired a new pattern; it fell into a dull two-stemmed routine, from which no one could escape. Meetings and work. Work and meetings…. The Chinese anti-Buddhist activities and preachings, which were part of the ideological or indoctrination meetings, were most keenly resented by all sections of Sakya.
When we saw our most venerated lamas carrying human excrement, mixing it with water, and sprinkling it over a newly made Chinese vegetable garden, many of us shed tears. That was part of their lao-dun hard labor. During thamzing artificially created class struggle lamas were accused and sometimes beaten by native progressives under Chinese supervision.
It was as if some strict Tibetan parents had told their son that the girl he loved was their enemy but that he could marry her anyway. Out of nearly five hundred monks in the Great Sakya Monastery, only thirty-six remained.
The thirty-six were mostly aged and became objects of ridicule. They all were required to live in the Great Monastery. One hundred seven small monasteries stood vacant, without a soul to look after them. Marriage was openly encouraged, and those monks who married were applauded and congratulated.
We could not invite lamas to perform our annual family rituals. The attacks on Buddhism were one of the main items of our ideological remolding.
The substance and objectives of all meetings and indoctrination were to create a new cosmology, not dissimilar to our old conceptions: horrors of hell, i. In there were two meetings daily: during lunch break a discussion at our team level, after work in the evening a mass meeting at town level, and once a week a mass meeting at the district level. But mere attendance was not enough.
Mandarin is used in most Tibetan schools while the Tibetan language is taught as a subject. Similar efforts are under way in Inner Mongolia. The CCP maintains the invasion was a peaceful liberation of Tibetans from an oppressive theocracy. In the Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India after an abortive uprising against Chinese rule, and his supporters have continued to document human rights abuses.
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