Tibet: Endangered Civilization
For decades Tibet has captured the imagination and fancy of the Western world as a remote, mystical land with magical inhabitants, fabled golden monasteries, and all-knowing lamas sitting on Himalayan peaks dispensing the meaning of life to those who must only climb up to them.
Yet Tibet has been more of a metaphor of remoteness and spiritual mastery than a real place with real people. And perhaps this "mythologizing" has been a two-way street. Kyabje Gelek Rinpoche, a Tibetan incarnate lama who was born in Lhasa and lived there until he fled the Chinese Communists in 1959, said that when he was a teenager he also had heard of a far-away land called "America." However, all he knew of this exotic, mythical land was that its people were fabulously wealthy, they had buildings the size of mountains, and had rulers who lived in a house of white crystal in a mighty city called Wa Shing Ton.
In the past several years the issue of Tibet and the Tibetan people has been thrust into the public spotlight and has become some what of a cause célebre of the fashionable and hip. Two major feature films on Tibet and the Dalai Lama ("Seven Years in Tibet," by director Jacques Annaud; and "Kundun," by director Martin Scorscese) have come out in the last year; major benefit concerts with the cream of alternative rock and rap have lit up both coasts, and organizations such as Students for a Free Tibet and the International Campaign for Tibet now have thousands of members nationwide. When Chinese president Jiang Zemin came to the United States in a historic state visit last fall, he was dogged and denounced every step of the way by determined, emotional, and vociferous supporters of Tibet. Where has this recent interest come from?
Certainly some of the attention is due to the tireless efforts of Tibetan Buddhist Lamas and teachers who for the past 25 years have been openly and patiently teaching the peaceful and profound spiritual and psychological techniques of their ancient Buddhist system in the West. His Holiness the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace prize in 1989 for his peaceful and nonviolent efforts to negotiate with the Chinese occupiers of his country. For centuries the Dalai Lamas have been the spiritual and temporal leaders of the Tibetan people. Once hidden from all but the most elite in the ancient Potala Palace overlooking the sacred city of Lhasa, today he travels incessantly around the world, meeting with ordinary Tibetans and people of any nationality, giving Buddhist teachings and initiations, and pleading for the world's governments to save Tibet from destruction by the Chinese government.
However, it seems that the interest in Tibetan Buddhism and humanitarian issues by such people as Richard Gere, Adam Yauch (of the Beastie Boys), Steven Seagal, and Harrison Ford has done the most to introduce Tibet to the general American public. Most people in the West are now hearing for the first time the tragic history of Tibet in the last 50 years, a peaceful Buddhist country which was invaded by Chinese Communist armies in the 1950s and annexed to China, undergoing great suffering and oppression ever since.
Invasion, Uprising & Repression
In 1949 the Chinese Communist Party under Mao defeated the "Nationalist" Kou Min Tang forces in the Chinese civil war. Fresh from this victory, Mao sent over 30,000 Chinese "People' s Liberation Army" (PLA) troops into its peaceful neighbor to the west, Tibet. The main task of "liberating" Tibet was given to Deng Xiaopeng, who at that time was the secretary of the Party's south west bureau, as well as the political commissar of the 2nd field army of the PLA.
Tibet's tiny, mainly ceremonial army was quickly defeated and the Communists took control of Tibet and forced the Dalai Lama's government to sign the "17-Point Agreement," which acknowledged that Tibet was part of China. However, as this "agreement" was forced upon the government under duress and threat of armed force, it is not valid under international law, and was later repudiated by the Dalai Lama.
For almost ten years, the Tibetan government did not overtly resist the Communist armies, but rather attempted to negotiate with them to find a solution by which the two peoples could peacefully coexist. To be sure, there was little that the Tibetan government could do with only a few thousand troops on horseback with swords and decrepit English rifles, as they were totally overwhelmed by a war-seasoned, efficient modern army with planes, tanks, and artillery.
However, the CIA has recently publicly acknowledged that it was actively training, arming, and supporting Tibetan resistance groups between 1956-1973. In actions that seem straight out of a thriller novel, Tibetans, especially from tribes in the eastern region of Kham, were being flown out of Tibet to train in secret bases in Colorado, and then air-dropped back into Tibet to carry out guerilla raids on PLA positions.
The Khampas are notorious for their stubborn endurance and fighting ability, and have proudly carried on a tradition as fierce warriors on horseback since before the days of the Mongol Empire. They proved surprisingly effective against regular PLA troops.
However, as has been pointed out by several analysts, the Americans never really expected the Tibetans to win. China's army was simply better equipped and better trained. As John Prados states in Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since W.W.II (1986), "from the beginning it had been clear in Washington that Tibet could never be more than a large-scale harassment of the People's Republic of China. To achieve this effect, the CIA had promised liberation to the Tibetans, who were caught up in their hopes and dreams, but whose agony was extended by the war. The issue of Tibetan human rights had gotten the U.S. involved, but the U.S. was not primarily interested in Tibetan human rights in the long-run."
With guerilla resistance raging in many parts of Tibet, the Communists began to tighten their stranglehold on the country by introducing "reforms" that abolished more and more aspects of the ancient Tibetan way of life. The Tibetan people's resentment of the strange people from the East began to grow. Tensions were high in 1959, when on March 10 a rumor emerged that the Chinese Army command intended to kidnap the teenaged Dalai Lama. The remnants of the Tibetan Army and the civilian population of Lhasa took to the streets to form a human shield between their beloved Dalai Lama and the Chinese forces. Exactly what took place that day, such as who fired the first shot, etc. may never be known; but what is clear is that by the end of the week the Dalai Lama had fled to India and nearly 80,000 Tibetans lay butchered in the streets of Lhasa, mowed down by Chinese machine guns and artillery.
The destruction of Tibet's culture and the oppression of its people was brutal during the twenty years following the uprising. Many thousands languished in prisons and labor and concentration camps where they were systematically tortured and starved to death. More than 6,000 monasteries, temples and other culturally historic buildings were destroyed and their contents, priceless and irreplaceable ancient works of Tibetan art and history, were confiscated and destroyed. There has been a massive relocation and colonization of Tibet by Han Chinese, and now Han people outnumber native Tibetans in every major city of Tibet.
Tibetan Realities: Old & New
The ongoing actions of the Chinese government in Tibet have been labeled "cultural genocide" by respected human rights leaders. An estimated 1.2 million Tibetans, one-fifth of the country's population, have died as a direct result of China's policies. Forced or coerced sterilization of Tibetan women and forced abortions are routine in Tibet.
Buddhist nuns and monks and other political dissidents are held in Chinese prisons for up to 20 years for offenses such as singing banned songs, having in their possession the banned Tibetan flag or "subversive" religious teachings by the Dalai Lama, or saying the wrong thing to foreigners.
Once in prison, they are regularly beaten and tortured, and several prisoners die each year as a result. In addition to more traditional torture techniques such as beatings, sexual abuse, hanging prisoners by the thumbs and lighting fires under their bodies, or forcing them to kneel on broken glass, electrical torture seems to be a favorite of the Chinese prison staff. Hard evidence of this ongoing torture was recently presented in sworn testimony to the U.S. Congress by the Buddhist monk Ven. Palden Gyatso, who spent over 30 years in the Chinese gulag.
However, "Old Tibet" prior to the Chinese occupation was not the utopian Shangri-La that some of the "Tibet Chic" movement seem to think. Until the Communists invaded and began their "reforms," Tibet was an ancient feudal theocracy ruled in parallel by monastic officials and aristocrat landlords in a manner that resembled medieval Europe.
Life in Tibet, a barren, arid country with a mean altitude of over 12,000 feet, has always been very hard for all but the most elite, and Tibetan society was rigidly class oriented. Technologically speaking, Tibet was one of the most backward and undeveloped regions of the world, with an ultra-conservative feudal society that rigidly resisted change. (In fact, the very words for "innovation" and "invention" can be used as pejoratives in Tibetan.) The majority of the population was made up of illiterate tenants or serfs on monastic or aristocratic manors, tilling barley fields with hand tools and producing traditional handicrafts, often extremely poor and with little or no chance of upward mobility within society.
One fifth of the population were monks and nuns. While they enjoyed relatively high social status, a legendary educational system, and could participate in arguably one of the most advanced intellectual societies in human history, for the poorest of them life was abject poverty, with one small meal a day. The affairs of the old Tibetan elite were also notoriously filled with intrigue and power struggles between the Lama's administrators, noble families, and powerful "monk-officials." Several Dalai Lamas never lived to adulthood, and are presumed to have been poisoned by scheming members of the court.
Yet most scholars agree that the old feudal Tibet was also not the "slave society" shrilly proclaimed by the Chinese Communist Party and its official propaganda organ, Xinhua, as "the darkest and most vicious chapter of human history." While difficult and inherently unfair by our standards, the old Tibetan state was an ancient way of life that was uniquely Tibetan, and one that was fought for and defended desperately by these same "serfs" when the Chinese invaded.
For better or for worse, the overwhelming majority of all Tibetans, even hardened Tibetan Communist cadres, deeply revere the Dalai Lama and regard him as their undisputed national leader. The Dalai Lama has repeatedly pleaded with the Chinese authorities to begin talks with him to try to find reasonable solutions to the vast suffering and political and human rights problems in Tibet. And repeatedly he has been rebuffed by the Chinese.
At first they said they would be happy to talk with the Dalai Lama, but demanded that he must first publicly renounce Tibetan independence. The Dalai Lama then offered a Five-Point Proposal in which he actually renounced Tibetan independence in favor of real cultural autonomy within the framework of the Chinese state. Under this plan, China would continue to administer all defense and foreign policy, with Tibetan authorities being allowed to run local Tibetan affairs themselves.
To date, the Chinese government has only denounced, insulted, and ridiculed the Dalai Lama, and still refuses to negotiate in any meaningful way. While the Dalai Lama enjoys celebrity status and meets often with world political leaders as a religious figure, he has been essentially barred from the UN due to Chinese pressure. No government in the world recognizes his government in exile, and any meetings he has with politicians and diplomats are vehemently hounded by the Chinese.
Religious Persecution in Modern Tibet
There has been overwhelming religious persecution in deeply Buddhist Tibet. After the 1949 Chinese invasion and the years of the Cultural Revolution that followed, most of the high lamas (Buddhist teachers) remaining in Tibet were arrested as "class enemies" and sent to concentration camps. Many were killed in thamzing, or "struggle sessions," others were publicly forced into heavy manual labor in prison chain gangs, much to the heartbreak of the Tibetan people who had to endure seeing their most beloved and cherished religious leaders humiliated and desecrated.
Thousands of ancient monasteries - the highest cultural and scholastic centers of the old Tibet - were destroyed. Ancient and irreplaceable works of art were destroyed or stolen and melted down for their gold which was shipped back to China. Whole libraries of ancient manuscripts and wood-block printed Buddhist texts were burned or used as toilet paper. And recently, for the first time in Tibetan history, the government of China has imposed on Tibet its own candidate for a new Panchen Lama and has rejected the new Panchen Lama selected by the Dalai Lama. The Panchen ("precious scholar") Lama is the second-highest religious authority in Tibet, and is the "spiritual father" of the Dalai ("ocean of wisdom") Lama. The reincarnations of the Panchen Lamas have always been recognized by the Dalai Lamas, and vice versa. On May 14, 1995, the Dalai Lama announced recognition of six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the next Panchen Lama, after making the determination in the traditional Tibetan Buddhist way. Enraged by the Dalai Lama's "interference" in Tibetan affairs (!), the Chinese government "recognized" and enthroned its own candidate for the Panchen Lama, and arrested and disappeared the six-year old Nyima and his family.
This incident revealed a somewhat ironic side of the Communists, since they publicly mandated that only the atheist Chinese Communist Party is able to correctly identify people with the reincarnated souls of dead Tibetan religious leaders. Chatrel Rinpoche, who was the head of the original search committee for the new Panchen Lama and who refused to denounce the Dalai Lama' s selection of the new Panchen Lama, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in "leaking State Secrets" to the Dalai Lama, his religious leader. Severe restrictions apply to monks and nuns in the monasteries; they are forced to undergo "patriotic re-education" and to publicly denounce their highest religious leader, the Dalai Lama. For monks, this is a direct violation of their religious vows.
For its part, the Chinese government contends that there is no religious persecution in Tibet, but rather that Tibetans enjoy freedom of religion under Chinese rule, and that there is no discrimination of Tibetans, but rather Tibetans and Han Chinese live together in brotherly love and happiness, united at last. The Chinese point to the great improvements they have made in Tibet; they love to speak of the billions of dollars they have pumped into Tibet to build a modern infrastructure, roads, hydroelectric plants, hospitals, newspapers, industry, farming. And this is true, though many Tibetans feel that many of these developments more specifically help Chinese colonists than the native people. The Communists also conveniently forget to mention the forced export of lumber and minerals such as iron, uranium, and tin from Tibet to China. It is estimated that the Chinese have taken $70 billion worth of lumber alone, decimating the virgin Tibetan wildernesses.
To be sure, the religious situation in Tibet today is not nearly as bad as in the '60s and '70s, when the practice of Buddhism was all but abolished, and everything "old" was being destroyed. The Chinese authorities in Tibet reintroduced limited freedom of religious activity in the 1980s, and the Tibetans responded to this decree with a flurry of monastery building. Tens of thousands of young Tibetans strove to become monks and nuns, desperately poor farmers and animal herders managed to raise relatively large sums of money for construction. The people worked day and night on rebuilding the shattered symbols of their identity.
Wa Shing Ton Politics: Strange Bedfellows
The story of Tibet has also produced some very strange political bedfellows, with highly respected, august groups such as the International Commission of Jurists and the UN High Commission on Human Rights, and heroic moral figures such as Wei Jingsheng (the Chinese dissident who was recently released to the U.S.) apparently working hand-in-hand with the Beastie Boys, the Transnational Radical Party, and even the Christian Right, to try to influence American and Western European governments that seem far more concerned with not offending the masters of the world's largest potential consumer market than with issues of "human rights" and "cultural genocide."
When it comes to the issue of Tibet in the U.S. Congress, moderate-to-liberal Democrats like Rep. Nancy Pelosi (California, 8th District) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (California) find allies in conservative Republicans like Rep. Frank R. Wolf (Virginia, l0th District) and even the ultra-conservative, tobacco-promoting, commie-bashing Senator Jesse Helms (N. Carolina). President Clinton sternly rebuked then-president Bush for "coddling the butchers of Beijing" and mentioned Tibet several times while conducting his first campaign, yet quickly flip-flopped once in office, and de-linked human rights issues from extending the "most favored nation" trading status to China.
However, due to increasing pressure in Congress, Clinton named the well-respected director of policy planning, Gregory Craig, to be the "special coordinator for Tibet" in October of last year. The State Department announced the appointment one day after Chinese President Jiang Zemin ended a two-day state visit to Washington. The coordinator has a mandate to help preserve Tibet's distinct culture and promote dialogue between the Beijing government and the Dalai Lama.
Congressman Wolf traveled in Tibet last year incognito, along with an unidentified American academic who speaks fluent Tibetan. In Representative Wolf's words: "In Tibet humane progress is not even inching along, and repressed people live under unspeakably brutal conditions in the dim shadows of international awareness. When people know...what is going on in Tibet...they will demand that China change its policy of boot-heel subjugation and end...the cultural genocide...the PRC has a near-perfect record of vicious, immediate and unrelenting reprisal against the merest whisper of Tibetan dissent."
Rep. Wolf has recently introduced legislation called The Freedom from Religious Persecution Act (H.R. 2431) which contains specific provisions relating to Tibetan Buddhism. The bill now has over 100 bipartisan co-sponsors and enjoys vigorous support by The International Campaign for Tibet and other Tibet support groups. This legislation will provide a permanent mechanism for examination by the U.S. government of religious persecution in Tibet, and also has the teeth to punish governments it finds to be engaging in religious persecution by barring them from non-humanitarian U.S. aid. This bill goes to a vote on the House floor the week of March 16.
Yet it seems there could be a peaceful and reasonable solution to "the Tibetan Problem" if the Chinese government would compromise just somewhat. The Dalai Lama, who carries incredible weight with the Tibetan people, has publicly renounced any attempt to re-establish an independent Tibet. It seems the Chinese could greatly benefit from peace and stability in Tibet, while keeping "ownership" of the nation, and greatly enhancing its own international reputation.
The Ann Arbor Connection
A chapter of Students for a Free Tibet was recently formed at U-M (764-5927 or see their webpage http:www-personal.umich.edu/~samadhi/Tibet.html). They are working to raise awareness and put pressure on the U.S. government to urge the Chinese government to negotiate. They are also sponsoring a number of events in Ann Arbor in March to commemorate the Tibetan National Uprising Day (see sidebar).
The teachings of Tibetan Buddhism are also flourishing in Ann Arbor. Karma Thegsum Choling (761-7495) is a Tibetan Buddhist center established by His Holiness the Karmapa in Ann Arbor in 1981, and which has brought the teachings of a number of Karma Kagyu Lamas to Ann Arbor since then.
In 1987, in Ann Arbor, Kyabje Gelek Rinpoche, a Gelugpa Lama trained at Drepung monastery in Tibet, founded Jewel Heart , an international organization of Tibetan Buddhist centers (994-3387, http://jewelheart.org). Rinpoche has been living and teaching in the Ann Arbor area ever since, and gives open and free public teachings every Tuesday at 211 E. Ann St. The Jewel Heart community recently opened a bookstore and art gallery, featuring traditional Tibetan paintings and carpets at 208 S. Ashley, which also functions as a cultural center for receptions, holistic health classes, and other events.
Anthony P. King, Ph.D., is a National Institute on Drug Abuse Research Fellow in Neuropharmacology at the Mental Health Research Institute. He is also a staff advisor to Students for a Free Tibet.