What we don’t hear about Tibet - A sight from another side
Sorrel Neuss, Guardian.co.uk
Sexual abuse in monasteries and oppressive feudalism in traditional Tibetan society has been factored out of the argument against China’s occupation, oversimplifying it.
Han Chinese guards deliberately obstruct the pilgrim route through Lhasa to the holy Jokhang temple by sipping tea at strategically placed tables in the middle of the road. In front of the Potala, the Dalai Lama’s former seat of power, an imposing guarded concrete square glorifies China’s occupation.
Tibet seems like as a celestial paradise held in chains, but the west’s tendency to romanticise the country’s Buddhist culture has distorted our view. Popular belief is that under the Dalai Lama, Tibetans lived contentedly in a spiritual non-violent culture, uncorrupted by lust or greed: but in reality society was far more brutal than that vision.
Last December, Ye Xiaowen, head of China’s administration for religious affairs, published a piece in the state-run China Daily newspaper that, although propaganda, rings true. "History clearly reveals that the old Tibet was not the Shangri-La that many imagine", he wrote "but a society under a system of feudal serfdom."
Until 1959, when China cracked down on Tibetan rebels and the Dalai Lama fled to northern India, around 98% of the population was enslaved in serfdom. Drepung monastery, on the outskirts of Lhasa, was one of the world’s largest landowners with 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. High-ranking lamas and secular landowners imposed crippling taxes, forced boys into monastic slavery and pilfered most of the country’s wealth – torturing disobedient serfs by gouging out their eyes or severing their hamstrings.
Tashi Tsering, now an English professor at Lhasa University is representative of Tibetans that do not see China’s occupation as worse tyranny. He was taken from his family near Drepung at 13 and forced into the Dalai Lama’s personal dance troupe. Beaten by his teachers, Tsering put up with rape by a well-connected monk in exchange for protection. In his autobiography, The Struggle for Modern Tibet, Tsering writes that China brought long-awaited hope when is laid claim to Tibet in 1950.
After studying at the University of Washington, Tsering returned to Chinese-occupied Tibet in 1964, convinced that the country could modernise effectively by cooperating with the Chinese. Denounced during the Cultural Revolution, arrested in 1967 to spend six years in prison and labour camps, he still maintains that Mao Tse-Tung liberated his people.
Caught between a system reminiscent of medieval Europe and a colonial force that brought forced collectivisation and similar human rights abuses, Tibet moved from one oppressive regime to another.
During the 1990s, Tibetans suspected of harbouring nationalist tendencies were arrested and imprisoned and in 2006, Romanian climbers witnessed Chinese guards shooting a group of refugees headed for the Nepalese border. China’s abhorrent treatment of "political subversives" has rightly spurned a global Free Tibet movement, diminishing the benefits that it did bring to society.
After 1959, it abolished slavery, serfdom and unfair taxes. Creating thousands of jobs through new infrastructure projects, it built Tibet’s first hospitals and opened schools in every major village, bringing education to the masses. Clean water was pumped into the main towns and villages and the average life expectancy has almost doubled since 1950, to 60.
Even so, in 2001 the Dalai Lama said: "Tibet, materially, is very, very backward. Spiritually it is quite rich. But spirituality can’t fill our stomachs."
Freedom for Tibet is not simply a case of liberation from China and the reinstatement of traditional values. Around 70 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line and enhanced spirituality alone will not improve economic conditions. Poverty is not quaint no matter how colourful the culture and the Tibet question is one that should be addressed from a rational, rather than an idealised viewpoint.
Nearby Bhutan, which has a similar Buddhist culture that it tried to preserve by banning television until 1999 and limiting foreign visitors, only held its first democratic elections in 2007. The Dalai Lama now promotes democracy, but Tibet may well have looked worse than it does today if the old order had been left to its own devices.
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September 27, 2009 2:42 pm
By euclid, February 13, 2009 @ 7:38 pm
This article treads the same old conniving, hackneyed ground that has long since been debunked by serious historians.
But it is always a ‘good’ read to knock anyone who dares defy Chinese communist hegemony of mind control and “truth” dissemination.
Every single aspect of Tibetan society, its history, its culture, its language, its people, everything is being distorted, inversed, reinvented and used as a propaganda tool.
Tibetans have been systematically denigrated, from every conceivable angle, at every conceivable opportunity by their Han Chinese occupiers.
In order to achieve this the CCP completely fabricated and reinvented Tibetan history, add on top their arrogance and delusions and a complete lack of any conscience, plus the most massive mind control and propaganda lies machinery plus intimidation and threat of economic repercussions if there is a mere mention of Han Chinese atrocities in the west.
Indeed, the Han Chinese Communist occupiers would want to have it both ways.
On the one hand they claim that they “owned” Tibet all along, controlled it, and was “part” of “china”, and on the other they claim it was “feudal, barbaric and backward”.
Some elucidation to this.
Why was this “barbarism” allowed to go on if they “owned, governed and controlled” it? In fact Tibet was nothing like this, a pure fabrication, aided and abetted by such infamous hacks as AL Gelder, I Epstein, S& R Gelder, and more recently Parenti, Nebe etc., all of which had a Machiavellian ulterior motive for their mendacious distortion of the historical facts.
Plus a whole bevy of western sycophants, who, in order to protect their jobs, careers and access to China and the worlds biggest ‘market’ have been cowered into selling academic rigor, honesty and truth for duplicitous expediency, and instead toe the ccp line for fear of offending this cabal and jeopardising their chummy ties with this regime.
The reality is that Tibet was no worse at the time than its neighbours and particularly china, which has an appalling record of human rights. And today, in the 21st century no less is practicing policies of institutionalised torture, discrimination and disenfranchisement of the Tibetan people on a scale unimaginable.
Discrimination on every level, but then having the temerity to send out Propaganda Lies soldiers with concocted stories of “privileges” for the Tibetan people – problem is that if you try and verify all these propaganda lies on the spot in Tibet you’re met with menacing intimidation, instant expulsion, or jail, being charged with spying and infringements of state secrets!
State secrets indeed; for the official line bears no semblance to the stark reality Tibetan people face every day under Han Chinese occupation.
http://one-just-world.blogspot.com/2008/08/will-olympic-spirit-survive.html
http://one-just-world.blogspot.com/2008/08/new-real-shangri-la.html
http://one-just-world.blogspot.com/2008/11/does-tibet-really-have-historical-claim.html
By Cliff, February 16, 2009 @ 8:19 pm
Today’s grim reality is occupied Tibet. To repeat again and again that it was bad in the “past” doesn’t do anything to help Tibetans today. That’s how I see it.