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Home » Newsroom » Tibet News
Chinese oppression ‘uniting Tibetans’
by Paul Mooney, The National
October 27th, 2008
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Tibetan monks carry lamps at the Labrang monastery in Xiahe, in western China’s Gansu province. Ng Han Guan / AP Photo
Experts say the protests
that broke out in Lhasa in March were unique in that for the first time
the trouble escalated and spread to the so-called Tibetan autonomous
regions around China – the result of the IT age and the proliferation
of the internet and mobile phones.
A US-based western expert on
Tibet said the Chinese government exacerbated the situation by its
heavy-handed media campaign that exaggerated the Tibetan involvement in
the violence, which he believed rapidly triggered a “grassroots
animosity” among Chinese citizens against Tibetans.
“There’s been a breakdown in the trust in the party’s promise to treat people impartially,” he said.
A
by-product of this is that it has altered the way many Tibetans see
themselves, even in areas that were not traditionally strongly united
in their identity as Tibetans.
“There seems to be a uniting of Tibetans in all areas,” said Jamyang Norbu, a Tibet analyst based in the United States.
“That’s why these distant and disparate groups have been waving the [Tibetan] national flag.
“In some of these places, they never even saw the national flag before.”
Woeser,
a popular Tibetan poet and writer, who visited Lhasa in August, says:
“The national consciousness of Tibetans has never been so strong.”
She
said she found this feeling was strong even among farmers and common
people, who she said are more conscious of being Tibetan. “I never
heard this expressed so strongly before this time,” she said.
Mr
Norbu said there was a growing realisation that Tibetans were not part
of China. “They feel they can never be a part of China. Even if they
wanted to, they can’t be accepted in a genuine way.”
The
US-based western expert said Tibetans had always felt a sense of
difference with the Chinese, and opposition to Chinese colonialism.
“But I never saw signs of hatred or aggression. This was very rare,” he
said. “I’m not sure now whether this sense of distance is beginning to
move towards aggression. It’s not impossible.”
He said, however,
that the government’s policy towards Tibet had resulted in a huge
backlash and a fall in the credibility of the Chinese government.
Tibetans feel the state “has let them down”, the expert said.
Woeser
pointed to worsening relations between Tibetans and Han Chinese, which
she said “has never been so bad before”, especially in Lhasa.
“Tibetans
were always angry about Han Chinese taking their jobs and breaking
their rice bowls, but they felt they could accept it,” she said. “Now
they can’t.”
Loesel Tenzin, a researcher for the International
Campaign for Tibet in Dharamshala, India, agreed. “There’s now a huge
emotional gap between Han Chinese and Tibetans,” he said. “It did exist
before, but it was not as strong as now.”
Woeser said the
attitude affected even young Tibetans. She told the story of a Tibetan
friend who worried because her two middle-school children unexpectedly
rooted for Chinese to lose in the Olympics, which Beijing hosted. “They
didn’t want China to win,” Woeser said.
“It will be very difficult to paper this over. It will be very difficult to return to normal.”
Observers
say the growing differences are leading to a change in thinking about
how to resolve the Tibet question. Mr Norbu, who has criticised the
Dalai Lama’s approach to China as conciliatory, pointed out that the
50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s escape from China would be next
year, that the religious Tibetan leader was getting older and that his
brother died recently.
“People think they have to make some hard changes,” he said, “and so people are looking for stronger answers to their questions.
“Unless Tibetans can come out with their own political identity, there’s no chance they can survive.”
He
said the recent trouble had nudged Tibetans towards “taking positions
they would not have taken. The whole game has changed now.
“A
lot of Tibetans are saying whether we get independence or not; we have
to keep up this demand in order to survive, so we are not wiped out
completely.”
He said Tibetans had learnt that the issue of independence was the only way to reach out to the Chinese people.
“Even
if they are against independence, they know there is this issue. And a
lot of Chinese didn’t know there was a Tibet issue before.”
Mr
Norbu, who served as a member of a Tibetan resistance group, warned
that with China’s overwhelming military power, turning to violence
would be a mistake.
“My advice to young Tibetans is to forget about bombs and violence,” Mr Norbu said.
“We don’t have the capacity to do anything like this. But we can hit them where they are the weakest.
“Just
keep the issue of Tibet going, keep harassing the Chinese,” Mr Norbu
said. “The biggest weakness of the Chinese is the need to be accepted
as a big power, and this affects them like no bomb could.”
He said the underlying resentment was there, and there would be more problems.
“There’s
no short-term solution,” the writer said. “It’s going to be a grim and
hard slugout. Let’s face it. This is China, a big power in the world,
and Tibet is small. But you can keep the game going until you find an
opening. I tell people to keep their expectations low.” |
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