TIBETSPACE

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BEIJING'S YELLOW BRICK ROAD

Jamyang Norbu's most recent column, "Negotiation Nightmare," gives ample evidence of the frustration a lot of us felt as Kelsang Gyaltsen and Lodi Gyari returned from their meeting with the Chinese.  I, and many other commentators, felt that these talks were little more than stall tactics, buying time until the Olympics were done.  Norbu gives us a glimpse into the daily reality faced by the Tibetans, both in Tibet and by those Tibetans whose sources of information are a good deal more reliable than mine.  This of course is a reality that these dialogues have done nothing to address:

I have also heard of many hundreds, maybe even a thousand or so men in rural Amdo and Kham hiding out in the mountains, to avoid police and military crackdowns in their districts. There has been the report of a gunfight between Tibetans and Chinese security personnel. A couple of days ago I received an unconfirmed account of two women in a village in Amdo who were harassed beyond endurance by Chinese policemen about religious images in their home. The women stabbed three policemen to death and were themselves subsequently gunned down. In all likelihood it appears that the situation in Tibet will deteriorate further. The situation is deeply troubling especially since there is little or no information on what is actually happening.

Clarification here is needed; much of the material we read on both sides seems convinced that the Chinese or the Tibetans can be persuaded that their policies are wrong.  If only one more body, one more atrocity is uncovered, then they will see!  This I believe is naive. 

Fruitful dialogue is possible only when both parties feel that their fundamental principles are, to some degree, negotiable.   If this spirit of co-operation is absent, there are various ways to induce it, and Norbu proposes one such way in his post.  I mentioned Alisdair MacIntyre in a previous post; he acknowledges that protests can be effective, but that they do not, in their modern guise, win over converts by the force of their logic:

The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose an argument either.  Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors' premises.  This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this (71).

In other words, if you view Tibetan autonomy as a fundamental political right, and you are talking with those who view autonomy as a direct threat to national unity--their own notion of a fundamental political right--then until one of you concedes his fundamental political right, dialogues are logically impossible.  And conceding fundamental political rights isn't currently the order of the day.

Of course, this is old news, Diplomacy 101.  The negotiations that occur at the table--and this is particularly true in the current situation--are the smallest percentage of the negotiations that are actually occurring.  This is where MacIntyre's sense of protest is important.  Protests are not held to win arguments logically; they are held to compel those who hold opposing views to abandon those views by building consensus against them and showing them ultimately that their power--usually calculated in numbers--is dwindling. Black children were not allowed to attend public schools in the South because Civil Rights workers logically demonstrated to the Klan that such racist practice was inhuman.  Integration occurred because the world finally saw black children facing the business end of high-powered water hoses and skidding across pavement.  The media covered the protests, broadcast the images, and the world responded.  Most of the time, if the world is given a choice between senseless human slaughter and bountiful human life, they will choose the latter.

But until this critical mass of outrage is reached, the Chinese will continue to use the diversionary tactics that Norbu so wearingly recounts in his post.  And because the media have been effectively taken out of the formula with the Chinese crackdown, this critical mass will build much more slowly; therefore, bloggers like Woeser, who I mentioned yesterday, are all the more important.

Like the Wizard of Oz, though, the Chinese are continually asking us to pay no attention to the  man behind the curtain.  But the Tibetans parted those curtains in March, and now the Wizard is asking us to look away (while he shuts the curtains again), to look toward the Olympics, to acknowledge the murderous conspiracies of the Dalai Lama, to remember the feudal society of Tibet.  And in the meantime they're frantically pulling the levers of oppression.

So these are not logical arguments that can be won at a negotiation table or on the streets; to try to win such an argument is to play the Wizard's game.  It's time to get off the Yellow Brick Road. 

Let your argument be the bearing of witness, and let your witness gather strength daily by however you choose the strengthen it.  I'd recommend education, and I'd recommend as a first step to garnering that education, reading Jamyang Norbu's column and the forum that follows his posts. 

THE HAPLESS HANS, AND OTHER STORIES

John Powers, in his concise and masterful study of the history of Sino-Tibetan relations, HISTORY AS PROPAGANDA, concludes that the hope for a satisfactory resolution to the current problems facing China and Tibet are grim.  In the last paragraph of the book, he writes:

The certainty with which most Chinese accept their 'regime of truth' with regard to Tibet should give pause even to the most passionate Tibet activist.  Chinese people commonly assert that they have a valid perspective that has largely been ignored by a world that is either ignorant of the facts or deliberately misrepresents Chinese actions in Tibet.  They claim that trying to present their case to pro-Tibet foreigners is like arguing with a brick wall--exactly the experience their opponents have with them.  In this situation, it seems likely that both sides will continue to argue at cross-purposes, and it is difficult to imagine a resolution in light of the incommensurability of their respective premises and sources of evidence (162).

What Powers has made imminently clear in his book is that each side presents its point of view based on a different, even antagonistic, data set.  He even quotes Alisdair MacIntyre, the ethicist whose AFTER VIRTUE is still prevalent in certain philosophical circles.  Powers writes:

As MacIntyre notes, when two polarized sides of protestors shout at each other, their messages are primarily aimed at those who already share their imaginings, and so each faction is essentially talking to itself or shouting slogans that are ignored or rejected by the other.  Thus, each group ends up talking to itself and those who already agree with it (161).

Powers points out that the Han Chinese, isolated for centuries in the self-imposed splendor of their Middle Kingdom, were shocked when the British arrived at their shores in the 19th century and introduced them to the joys of gunboat diplomacy.  A lesser race the British were, but with far bigger guns.  And so today, we detect the not-so-faint odor of Han superiority when the Chinese look toward the West, as well as a genuine incredulity that the Tibetans wouldn't leap at the chance to be counted among their number.

Neither side seems on the verge of capitulation.  Power, however defined, however levied, will eventually have its say.  The Chinese, of course, manifest their power in several ways, all of them totalitarian in nature.  The Tibetans are beginning to define power in several ways too, and like the liberal democracies they would attempt to model, their "citizens" disagree on those definitions.

The disagreements break down along traditional lines:  old vs. young; religious vs. secular; contemporary vs. traditional.  Nothing wrong with that.  It's a good sign, in fact.  There is criticism being directed now toward His Holiness, and what I've read is responsible and informed.  See, for example, this recent interview with Jamyang Norbu, one of Tibet's leading intellectuals, writers, and dissidents (he lives, by the way in Monteagle, Tennessee).

Two things here seem relevant.  First, whatever criticism the Dalai Lama bears for his particular brand of foreign policy--which both he and his critics call the Middle Way--it must always be remembered that he has been a central force in putting the Tibetan people on the international map.  That Tibetans are discussing the best way to back down the Chinese, and that people in Peoria support Tibetans, is possible only because His Holiness has tirelessly circled the globe for the last half-century, gathering allies from Colombia to Mongolia.  Second, while the Tibetans have waged an heroic struggle, both in Tibet and in exile, the international scope of this resistance has afforded the Chinese their greatest stumbling block. 

The media coverage, the books, the articles, the essays, the phone calls, the classes, the blogs, the web sites, the bumper stickers, the demonstrations, the protests . . . they're working.

Other related developments of interest:  In case you hadn't heard, our State Department dropped China from its Top 10 List of Human Rights Violators.  This is the State Department's annual report, and it is significant that the report was filed on March 12, as we approach the Beijing Olympics.

And can someone please tell me how and why this extraordinary woman named   Woeser has avoided house arrest yet? 

Pass her name around, read this article, tell your friends.  It's the least we can do, in the face of what she's done.

And the by the way:  87.8 of you thought we ought to boycott the opening ceremonies; 12.2 said not.  I received votes from Washington, California, Utah, Alabama, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, France (Perpignan), and Hong Kong.

MAGICAL MISERY TOUR HITS TIBET

On June 18, the Olympic torch will arrive in Chengdu and begin its two-day journey to Lhasa.  Students for a Free Tibet has provided a helpful interactive map of the torch's route, along with pop-up information on some of the major protest sites throughout Tibet.  This is clearly one of the more abominable rituals in recent international history.  The banality of its evil is off the scale:  this is mental thuggery, pure and simple.

Call your friends, write your Congressman, tell your dog, instruct your children in the fundamentals of righteous indignation. 

TIBETAN ENVOYS HEAD TO BEIJING; TIBETANS DIE IN TIBET; GEORGE ORWELL RETURNS

Since the problems in Tibet arrived on the world stage in early March, I have found myself wishing that George Orwell were still with us and that his keen eye might survey the situation and tell us all what to think.  Totalitarianism, empire, human survival, human dignity, human freedom--these were his subjects, and he wrote about them all of his life.  And he wrote about them with great passion and great clarity, two qualities that most often exclude one another.

But we have Orwell's writing, and so we have the best of the man, and while all totalitarian governments are not the same, much of what Orwell wrote applies directly to the current situation in Tibet.  One of Orwell's most well known essays, "Notes on Nationalism," is directly pertinent here.  It was written in May 1945 on the heels of the Second World War, a period of time ripe for reconsidering the relationship between an individual's freedoms and the demands of the state.

Orwell begins by describing the difference between the terms "nationalism" and "patriotism."  And he does so, helpfully, by clarifying the human--very human--behavior associated with each term.  He begins with "nationalism:"

By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classfied like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad.'  But secondly--and this is much more important--I mean the habit of indentifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.

It is not difficult to see the parallels here between this defintion of nationalism and the   Chinese conception of it as evidenced by their behavior toward the Tibetans.  Patriotic re-education programs, museums designed to bolster Chinese nationalist chauvinism, the imprisonment, torture, and execution of those Tibetans who publicly support the Dalai Lama . . . all of these activities are perfectly in accord with the will to classify human beings as insects, and then classify the insects as good or bad, harmful or harmless. 

But what about patriotism?  Here is Orwell:

By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people.  Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.  Nationalism on the other hand is inseperable from the desire for power.

It is a short step from patriotism to nationalism, and the stepping stone is power, the desire for it, the plan to achieve it, and the lack of regard for human suffering that occurs in the acquisition of it.

The Tibetan monk pictured above, whose name is Choetop and who was recently shot and killed by the Chinese, was a patriot who died at the hands of Chinese nationalism.  Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is offensive.  There is a lot of confusion now in our own national dialogue about these two terms, and we would be well advised to examine the American abuse of these terms as well. 

Remember, though, that whenever we go to war to force our way of life on others, this is an act of nationalism and has nothing to do with patriotism.  And a lack of enthusiasm for such wars will be advertised by the administration as a lack of patriotism.  A bait and switch of the highest order and the gravest consequences. 

As the Tibetan envoys head for China, we are witnessing the meeting of Tibetan patriots and Chinese nationalists.  The Tibetans have so far proven themselves unsusceptible to this bait and switch, and they have suffered the gravest consequences for having done so.

Our prayers go with them.  May their vision and bravery endure.

A CHINESE MUSEUM OF TIBETAN HISTORY? THEY AREN'T KIDDING.

If you've been following the recent arguments regarding Sino-Tibetan history, and if you've realized gradually, or suddenly, that history--or what happened--amounts to little more than historiography--or how you write up what happened--then you've probably been a little confused from time to time.  Was Tibet ever an independent nation, as we currently understand the term?  If so, when?  What is the difference between sovereignty and independence?  How do we come to a reasonable estimation of these rather complex problems?  You need to read John Powers' book, History as Propaganda.  Coming in at 160 pages, and published in 2004, the book is relatively current and a manageable size.  Plus, it's clearly written.

As long as we're on the subject of history, it's worth noting that the Chinese have developed some long-range plans regarding the rewriting of their own history.  We all became so enamored of the Grace Wang story in The New York Times on April 17, that we missed the other story that ran directly beside it:  "New Museum Offers the Official Line on a Region."  Here's the second paragraph from that article, describing the contents of Beijing's first museum devoted exclusively to Tibet: 

Inside, curators will display antiquities, dynastic records and reproductions to demonstrate China’s dominion over Tibet as far back as the 13th century. Many experts question China’s historical claims, but few clouds of doubt are likely to darken the museum. Even the Dalai Lama is being edited out of the narrative.

That's right.  The Chinese are doing a Tibetan history museum.  Of course, the Cultural Revolution comes to mind here, and the reports that we've been receiving concerning the forced re-education programs currently going on in Tibet are also relevant.  To see a graphic example of history-as-narrative, have a look at the comparative numbers of the Deaths / Injured / Detained in the recent struggle.  This represents historiography in action, and as the numbers change so too does the indicated reality.  Political structures are defended, explained, exonerated, and rationalized by narrative, and a museum is one of our most powerful narratives.  Ever been to one of those old, out-of-the-way Native American museums in the West, and seen Native American culture represented by a glass case of arrowheads?  You get my point.

That's why it's important that we inform ourselves, as best we can, of the history that we're concerned about here.  The Chinese are working overtime to produce the counter-narrative of lies, misinterpretation, and unbalanced opinion.  And we have to understand where their mistakes lie, and whether they can be corrected, and if so, how so.

The best way to do that is to read.  Read the history, read the philosophy, read the  blogs.  An informed opinion is worth far more than a bumper-sticker because an informed opinion is derived from an evolving narrative, and an evolving narrative, an evolving understanding of the problem, is nothing more nor less than an evolving reality.  And who could ask for more? 

An old blues player I knew once said that if you hold a wrong note long enough, it'll eventually sound OK, and the band will adjust to your mistake.  That's the hope of the Chinese.  That we'll all eventually adjust. 

But it's best, my friend confessed, to hit the right note the first time.

The Chinese are very adept at holding these wrong notes for a very long time.  But we don't have to play along, we don't have to accept their ineptness at historical narrative.  We don't have to buy their oppressive histories.

But we do have to author our own understanding of these histories.  We do have to participate in whatever way we can. 

This, of course, is what the Chinese fear the most:  the truth of understanding.  And this is what is available to all of us who live in a liberal democracy. 

WELCOME TANG DANHONG TO THE DIALOGUE--A HAN CHINESE WHO UNDERSTANDS THE TIBETAN SITUATION

Last week, Grace Wang made the headlines of The New York Times at Duke University when she attempted to interject the spirit of dialogue into the vitriolic debates occurring on her campus between the Tibetan supporters and the Chinese.  Welcome now, Tang Danhong, a Han Chinese and filmmaker currently living in Israel.  Her essay, which originally appeared on her Chinese-language blog and is now available here at the Tibetan Women's Association website, is a model in many ways.  It's a moving appeal for human equality coming from someone with first-hand experience of the struggle from both the Tibetan and the Chinese sides.  We can only hope that more people like Tang Danhong will step forward and let their voices be heard.

DESMOND TUTU URGES WORLD LEADERS TO BOYCOTT OPENING CEREMONIES OF BEIJING GAMES

Bishop Desmond Tutu, who was born in the Transvaal and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, called today for world leaders to boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.  Aside from the Pope and the Dalai Lama, Bishop Tutu is certainly one of the most recognized spiritual authorities in the world, and his support of the boycott is significant.  He will bring this issue to the serious attention of Anglicans throughout Africa and beyond, and the show of solidarity with his old friend, the Dalai Lama, sends a signal to the Chinese of a growing consensus around the world that the Chinese arguments against the Tibetans are seeming daily more absurd. 

If we can speak of a critical mass of opinion that is slowly growing in opposition to the Chinese abuses of fundamental human rights, then we can also agree that Bishop Tutu's stance brings a great deal to this critical mass.  The Chinese are being slowly isolated, and while that can be seen as dangerous, it is also now inevitable.

DALAI LAMA CAUTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC OVER TALKS WITH CHINA

Speaking in Dharamsala today, the Dalai Lama expressed a note of cautious optimism over the recently promised talks with China concerning the situation in Tibet.  Many commentators--myself included--have expressed a degree of skepticism over this offer, believing that it arises largely from the desire to stem the tide of international criticism that has engulfed the Beijing Olympics. 

The Dalai Lama, a veteran of Chinese stall tactics and frustrated negotiations, expressed similar concerns. A meeting just to appease international concern would be "meaningless," the 72-year-old spiritual leader said.  Others have argued that "China's offer is unlikely to bring a breakthrough on Tibet and that it is a PR exercise ahead of the Beijing Olympics."

So we will wait . . .    And see if the Chinese are ready to negotiate in good faith.  And count the days until the Olympics begin. 103 to go.

PRESS STATEMENT BY SAMDHONG RINPOCHE CLARIFIES TIBETANS' INTENTIONS IN CHINESE TALKS

Samdhong Rinpoche released an official statement today regarding the proposed talks with the Chinese.  The full text of the statement appears below.  It was posted at the Official Website of the Tibetan Central Administration, and you can view it in the original here.

We have seen the Xinhua report of April 25, 2008 of the Chinese government wishing to meet with His Holiness the Dalai Lama's envoys. His Holiness the Dalai Lama for a long time, especially since 10 March of this year, wanted to reach out to the Chinese people and the leadership. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has always wanted to resolve the issue of Tibet through face to face discussions with the Chinese authorities.

Throughout the present crisis in Tibet, we have maintained contact with the Chinese authorities, not only to share our deepest concerns at their repressive measures to deal with the development in different parts of Tibet, but more importantly to provide suggestions to resolve the crisis. His Holiness even sent a personal communication to President Hu Jintao as early as March 19, 2008 wherein he had even offered to send representatives to help calm the situation. The immediate greatest concern for His Holiness and the Tibetan leadership continues to be the fate of the Tibetans and in this regard His Holiness the Dalai Lama's envoys have been in regular touch with their counterparts, including exploring the possibilities of early meetings, to address this issue.

We feel it will require normalcy in the situation in the Tibetan areas for the formal resumption of the talks and we are committed to take all steps, including informal meetings, to continue in bringing about this. It is our position that for any meeting to be productive it is important for the Chinese leadership to understand the reality and acknowledge the positive role of His Holiness the Dalai Lama rather than indulging in vilification campaign that is even contained in the same Xinhua report.

Dated: April 25, 2008

Prof. Samdhong Rinpoche
Kalon Tripa
Central Tibetan Adminsitration
Dharamsala, India

It's important to understand Samdhong Rinpoche's distinction between "informal" meetings and "formal" meetings.  The informal meetings would presumably be held first and would ask for certain concessions from the Chinese before the "formal" talks could begin.  These concessions include a restored "normalcy in the situation in Tibet" as well as an acknolwedgment of the "positive role of His Holiness the Dalai Lama." 

This would amount to substantial concessions on China's behalf.  As I said in a previous posting, the Chinese are burning time until the Games begin.  But the Tibetan insistence on accuracy and truth-in-reporting are essential to these dialogues, whether formal or informal.  Patience is essential too, but then His Holiness has been waiting for 50 years, so patience is his strong suit.