TIBET: Tibetan people want economic and social benefits without feel ing that their identity is at risk Tibetan nationalism needs to abandon a vision based on an imaginary idyll, writes Fintan O'Toole
One day, driving along the 360km road from Tibet's second city, Xigaze, to its capital, Lhasa, I noticed that more than half of the private houses, though obviously those of native Tibetans, were festooned with the vivid red flags of the People's Republic of China.
What was most interesting, though, was that the flags had not been there the previous day when I had travelled in the opposite direction. It turned out that a high-level delegation from another province was visiting and would travel this road on its way to the airport.
The ostentatious display did not seem to be the result of intimidation - many houses carried no flags. But it was clearly not spontaneous either. And it certainly had the air of protesting too much: you don't see the national flag on many houses in Beijing or Shanghai. The very need to declare Tibet's Chineseness is a reminder that it remains in doubt.
A few days earlier, more than 5,000 Tibetans made their way to the Kumbum monastery in the neighbouring province of Qinghai, much of which was originally part of Tibet. They travelled because a rumour had spread that the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader and former theocratic ruler of Tibet, was making a pilgrimage to the monastery. The rumour had no basis in fact but apparently a significant basis in wish-fulfilment.
That so many people would turn up in a relatively inaccessible place merely in the hope of seeing a man who fled Tibet in 1959 reinforces the inescapable impression that after more than half a century of direct Chinese rule, the vast mountain region retains a strong sense of its distinctive identity.
The big question, though, is what political shape that identity can take in the context of China's unshakeable belief that Tibet is, as a long article in the official China Daily put it last month, "an inalienable part of the Chinese territory".
Arguments on the status of Tibet tend to get caught between two mutually exclusive, and equally untenable, rhetorical structures.
One of them is the official contention that China's ownership of Tibet is simply "an historical fact". This relies, rather ironically, on the repetition of the statement that "Tibet was incorporated into the Chinese map in the 13th century, when the Yuan dynasty ruled China. It has remained an inseparable part of the country ever since."
The irony is that the Yuan dynasty is more commonly known in the West as the Mongol Empire, which conquered both China and Tibet. The historical record is actually more complex: China's rulers, whether from the imperial dynasties, the Republic of the first half of the 20th century or the People's Republic, have always claimed sovereignty over Tibet.
The extent to which Tibet has recognised those claims has always depended on the relative strengths of the Chinese and Tibetan regimes: under the Republic, when China was weak and divided, Tibet achieved a de facto independence. Crucially, however, it failed to turn that freedom into recognised nationhood, neglecting, for example, to apply for membership of the League of Nations or the United Nations.
A competing, but perhaps equally useless, rhetoric, favoured both by Tibetan nationalists and by western romantics, tends to picture Tibet as a place outside history, an isolated, purely spiritual idyll, ruled by serenely mystical lamas, whose ancient innocence was brutally shattered by the Chinese occupation of 1950.
In reality, Tibet has always been subject to power politics. The Yellow Hat sect, which dominated theocratic politics and chooses the Dalai Lama, came to power when a Mongol army helped the fifth Dalai Lama defeat the rival Red Hat sect. (The very word "Dalai" is Mongol, not Tibetan.)
The present Dalai Lama is not the first to be removed from power. His predecessor fled from a British invasion in 1904 and the sixth and seventh Dalai Lamas were also exiled. The ninth to 12th, inclusive, were all murdered before they reached the age of 22 to prevent them from taking power. Regents ruled Tibet for more than 150 of the 200 years before 1950. Most of them were selected by the Manchu emperors of China's Qing dynasty.
Nor was Tibet before the Chinese occupation an idyllic place. Its society was essentially feudal. Two-thirds of the arable land was in manorial estates, owned by either the lay aristocracy or by the great monasteries. Most of the ordinary people were serfs, bound to the estates by a web of feudal obligations. There was no education system outside the monasteries. Life expectancy was poor and the population remained low: fewer than one million in 1950, compared with 2.7 million today.
If it had been conducted sensitively, therefore, the Chinese occupation might have established a firm base of popular support. Much of the religious establishment was prepared to accept it as a fait accompli: the Dalai Lama applied to join the Communist Party, and the Panchen Lama welcomed the PLA troops.
But resistance (some of it organised by the CIA) met with vicious repression, the Cultural Revolution unleashed a wave of zealous vandalism in which monasteries and religious artefacts were destroyed, and the promised benefits of modernity - education, healthcare, economic development - were very slow to materialise.
In 1980, the reformist Chinese leader Hu Yaobang (later deposed) spoke an uncomfortable truth when he told the Tibetan Communist Party chiefs that Tibet was worse off in many areas than it had been before its "liberation" and that the party should "apologise to the Tibetan people". Such words are unlikely to be repeated by any members of the current Chinese leadership, which tends to see foreign concern for Tibet as no more than, in the words of one of its senior members, Zeng Qinghong, a way to "damage China's stability, divide China's territory and contain China's development".
The most powerful man in China, Hu Jintao, who is both president and general secretary of the Communist Party, became party secretary in Tibet in December 1988, just as Lhasa was being rocked by riots. The following month, the death of the Panchen Lama triggered another series of disturbances. In March 1989, Hu declared martial law in Lhasa, setting a precedent for the use of the army against demonstrators in Tiananmen Square two months later.
Even the most generally liberal member of the leadership, Li Ruihuan, is in favour of tight central control over Tibet. Li, however, is also an advocate of a sophisticated and pragmatic approach that recognises the reality that the Tibetans remain firmly attached to their own culture and to the Dalai Lama who personifies it.
He has been quoted as advocating a conciliatory approach: "In dealing with the Dalai Lama, we don't have to take a hostile attitude and use excessive measures. Just as long as he doesn't engage in Tibetan independence [ activities], we can talk with him. We should be clear, under present conditions, that no plan can last for long that doesn't include the Dalai Lama."
That pragmatism is evident in Tibet now. The military presence in Lhasa is noticeable - the bridge that links the railway station to the city is heavily guarded, and there is a garrison inside the Dalai Lama's seat, the Potala - but low-key.
Phuntsog Nyidron, the last member of a group of nuns imprisoned for taking part in pro-independence demonstrations in 1989 and then further punished for making tapes of protest songs, was quietly released into exile in the United States in March, and local estimates suggest that fewer than 100 political prisoners remain in custody.
Damage to many of the important religious sites has been painstakingly reversed. Attempts to eradicate Tibet's Buddhist culture have been replaced by attempts to turn it into an economic asset through tourism. Large-scale infrastructural projects like roads, bridges and sewage works, many of them sponsored by the regional governments of other Chinese provinces, are highly visible in the countryside, as is a rash of house-building that seems to point to a relative prosperity. If not quite "killing Home Rule with kindness", the Chinese government seems to be attempting to construct a belated practical case for its rule in Tibet.
It also seems confident that time is on its side. Li Ruihuan's belief that no long-term solution to the Tibet problem is possible without the Dalai Lama is probably shared by his colleagues in the Chinese leadership, but they also know that the present holder of that office is 71 and won't be around forever.
His death, whenever it occurs, could provoke a crisis in Tibet, but it could also provide an opportunity for the Chinese government to do what it did in 1995, when, on the death of the Panchen Lama, it forced the Tibetan abbots to accept its own candidate, the five-year-old Gyalsten Norbu, as his reincarnation.
Whether the Tibetans as a whole would accept such a development probably depends on two things. One is the ability of the Chinese government to deliver economic and social benefits without making the Tibetans feel that their underlying identity is at risk. The other is the ability of Tibetan nationalism to develop a vision that doesn't depend on a return to an imaginary idyll.
The sense you get in Tibet now is that Tibetans want to be different, but not quite in the way they were different in the past.
As the Tibetan writer Tashi Tsering puts it: "I adamantly do not wish a return to anything remotely like the old Tibetan theocratic feudal society, but I also do not think that the price of change and modernity should be the loss of one's language and culture."
The ability to fulfil that complex desire may be what ultimately determines who has the right to claim Tibet.