T.G. Jacob
The developments in Tibet, though not at all sudden or spontaneous, are ominous for the whole continent if not for the whole world. Ever since the Chinese People’s Liberation Army attacked Chamdo in the Kham province of Tibet in 1950 entire Tibet became a turbulent region. Armed revolt broke out in Eastern Tibet in 1955 and there was a tremendous national uprising in Lhasa in 1959, which was put down with an iron heel by the PLA. This repression marked the great exodus of Tibetans to Nepal and India which included the Dalai Lama and his immediate followers. This out-migration subsequently spread to Europe and America. The occupation of Tibet contributed in no small measure to the Indo-China war. Now in India alone there is a more than 1.25 lakh Tibetan refugee population distributed in camps all over the country. Also, there is a Tibetan Government-in-exile under the spiritual and temporal leadership of the Dalai Lama. Tens of thousands of people, predominantly nuns and monks, were put behind bars in Tibet and an unknown number of Tibetans were killed due to torture, executions and famines. Periodic protests by the Tibetans within Tibet were always put down mercilessly and the situation remains the same in spite of the opening up of the Chinese economy in the 1980s. This is the sketchy background to the present wave of protests in Lhasa and worldwide against the Chinese rule in Tibet.
Chinese historiography concerning Tibet is simple, in fact, a little too simple. They simply assert that ever since the beginning of recorded history Tibet is an integral part of China. Unfortunately for the Chinese historians, even a cursory glance at the history of the region clearly refutes this simplistic, arrogant claim. Tibet was an independent kingdom since its unification in the 7th century CE and there were occasions when the centralised army of Tibet threatened the very existence of China as an independent entity. So the Chinese claims can be taken as ahistorical, empty rhetoric. The only fact that remains is that Tibet is now part of China because and through the force of the PLA. It is also to be noted that ever since the hundred thousand strong PLA occupied Tibet in the mid-1950s their numbers have only persistently gone up; so also, the quantum and sophistication of the weapons in its hands.
It is not only through the PLA’s brute force that China is holding on to Tibet. Since the mid-1950s a series of well planned measures have been designed and executed in Tibet by the think tanks of the Chinese Communist Party to cement the occupation and obliterate the Tibetan identity. Immediately after occupation Tibet was dismembered and huge chunks were pasted on to pre-existing Chinese provinces, thus making a large number of Tibetans into a minority population in their own homelands. More than half of the 5.4 million Tibetans thus became minorities in Chinese speaking provinces which was a severe blow to Greater Tibetan identity and culture. In effect, this clever move of dismemberment left only what is known as Tibet Autonomous Region [TAR] as a Tibetan majority area. And by the early 1990s even this majority was actively sought to be subverted. In the wake of the adoption of a neo-liberal economic regime by China and the dismantling of communes millions of Chinese peasants became destitute vagabonds and China made active efforts to resettle them in Tibet and other ethnic minority areas. This migration of the Chinese population has reached such a level that presently the Tibetans are a minority in their own two thousand year old city of Lhasa.
Any visitor to Lhasa will tell you that trade and commerce, including the tourist services, are now effectively controlled by the Han Chinese settlers. All these decades since the “peaceful liberation of Tibet from the clutches of reactionaries and imperialists,” there had been conscious and sustained efforts by the Chinese authorities to bring down the Tibetan population through coercive family planning methods and manipulated famines. These family planning methods included forcible sterilization of Tibetan women in the reproductive age and even killing of new-born babies who are born outside the stipulated number.
The economic plunder of Tibet is being executed in a thoroughgoing manner. Traditionally, Tibet is called the Western Treasure because of the great natural wealth, which includes strategic metals and minerals, high value timber and hydro power. The Lhasa-Golmud railway, currently eulogised as a great achievement, is meant precisely for accelerated extraction and transportation of the wealth of Tibet as well as increased in-transportation of settlers. The gross disparities between Tibet and other parts of China are an ever growing phenomenon and are well documented by international Tibet Support Groups. On every index of the physical quality of life the situation is the same making official Chinese claims of great progress of Tibet hollow. The deliberate destruction of the pastoral economy precipitated by large-scale environmental destruction, unsustainable grazing for supplying meat to the Chinese markets and overall restrictions imposed on the pastoral communities by settling them, forcible replacement of barley by grains that the Chinese prefer—all these and more have destroyed the traditional Tibetan agrarian economy without providing a viable, sustainable alternative.
The cultural genocide aspects of Chinese rule in Tibet are also well designed and equally destructive. Tibetan history is treated as a small, insignificant part of Chinese history; Tibetan language is discouraged through discrimination in the employment market in favour of the Chinese language; vicious social evils like prostitution, gambling and alcoholism are directly and indirectly encouraged, and Tibetan Buddhism is deliberately suppressed through a variety of arbitrary measures. A large number of monasteries were converted into piggeries and similar economically “productive” units. Severe restrictions were imposed on the propagation of Tibetan Buddhism after levelling to the ground thousands of monasteries. All these and several other features of cultural genocide are hallmarks of Chinese rule in Tibet.
The political developments in Tibet are fraught with serious consequences for the present political and economic structure of China, which is monolithic in its basic character. The development of the Tibet issue can easily have a cascading effect in some other provinces of China, which are ethnic minority nationality areas and are subject to the same sort of exploitation as Tibet is subjected to with only degrees of variation. Such a development can have even more impact on the world than the collapse of the Soviet Union.