Authors: Dervla Murphy
Naturally, the Chinese use Old Tibet’s bad habits in their ‘We have Liberated Tibet From Feudalism’ propaganda. Those habits were very bad in a standard sort of way: slicing off ears, noses and limbs, gouging out eyes and so on. But such un-Buddhist punishments were officially abandoned long before Europeans abandoned the thumbscrew, the rack and hanging, drawing and quartering. Moreover, some countries continue, as I write, to use the most up-to-date torture methods – commonly importing the necessary instruments from Western democracies. Meanwhile the Dalai Lama’s ‘message’, his forlorn but persistent attempts to find a peaceful solution to ‘the Tibet Problem’, is listened to as other pacifists’ messages are listened to: the already converted applaud him and feel encouraged, the majority who either advocate violence (‘Let’s bomb Iraq/Afghanistan/the Sudan!’), or accept its inevitability, regard him as a benevolent unrealist.
After the arrival in India of some 85,000 refugees (an insignificant number by present-day standards), China’s occupation of Tibet stirred strong feelings throughout the First World – though not strong enough to inspire the UN, or any government, to take action on Tibet’s behalf. Two opposing camps soon emerged. In one were those who cherished a vision of Old Tibet as Shangri-la, where everyone was all the time
happy and holy. In the other were those who rejoiced that at last Tibet’s ‘serfs’ had been freed from the tyranny of manipulative lamas and rapacious nobles, and were being provided with roads, hospitals, factories and schools; now a generation could grow up equipped to live rationally in the second half of the twentieth century. Between the camps stood those who recognised that for better or worse Old Tibet was doomed but who wished change could have come about slowly and gently under the guidance of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama – a man with the inclination and capacity to become a keen reformer.
Shortly before
Tibetan Foothold
appeared, Stuart and Roma Gelder published
The Timely Rain,
describing a journey to Tibet in the autumn of 1962 when they were given the first permit to visit Tibet issued by Beijing. Thirteen years later Han Suyin published
Lhasa, The Open City;
in the interval no other English-language account of the New Tibet had appeared, proving how carefully Beijing chose visiting authors. Those three elderly, experienced, well-respected writers revealed an astonishing gullibility; having spent, respectively, five weeks and two months in Tibet, using guide-interpreters provided by the Chinese, they reported exactly what Beijing would have wished them to report.
The celebrated Beijing-born Han Suyin, her propaganda value immense since the publication of
A Many-Splendoured Thing,
misled her readers thus: ‘In Tibet as elsewhere in China the Cultural Revolution was a turning point in accelerating industrialisation. There is little documentation on what happened in Tibet during that time but … the Cultural Revolution, for the women of Tibet, was also a turning point. The “four olds”, old traditions, customs, behaviour, ways of thinking, were all violently denounced.’ In fact the documentation records that between May 1966 and January 1969 (when Amala came to Ireland), more than ninety per cent of Tibet’s temples, monasteries and historic monuments were demolished by the Red Guards – statues shattered, frescoes defaced, libraries burned, with monks banished to labour camps. In Tibet the Cultural Revolution reached a frenzied climax of hatred and rage. What distinguished that country was the extent to which its home-grown form of Buddhism influenced everyday life. To the Chinese this spirituality, percolating to
the remotest corners of the land – even to the nomads’ tents on the furthest steppes – was anathema. A few years before the Cultural Revolution they had begun to extirpate Tibetan Buddhism with a determination fuelled by their own fervent belief in materialism. The emotional suffering thus inflicted on the ordinary Tibetans, as they experienced the dissolution and subsequent destruction of temples and monasteries, the public humiliation of revered senior lamas, and the outlawing of the domestic and communal rituals central to their inner well-being, exceeded even the unprecedented physical suffering (hunger, forced labour, imprisonment) caused by the new regime.
The Gelder and Suyin volumes grieved and/or enraged all friends of Tibet – then we cheered ourselves up by reflecting that most readers would be well able to measure their worth. However, over the
intervening
years I have noticed that even amongst robust anti-Communists such skilfully contrived propaganda leaves a mark.
When
Tibetan Foothold
was originally published some readers were taken aback by my honestly recorded impressions of a first meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama – then aged twenty-seven and as yet unable to speak fluent English, so we needed an interpreter. I remember a few people – from the Shangri-la camp – deploring what they
misinterpreted
as my lack of reverence for His Holiness, but on reading those pages now I cannot feel that the intervening decades have invalidated them. And I am surprised by my own prescience about what I described as ‘the Dharamsala ruling clique’. I used brackets to exclude the Dalai Lama from that clique – which was over-optimistic. Inevitably, the clique were able to co-opt him – for them an essential move, given that most Tibetans, at home and in exile, then regarded him as the person who should make all decisions for them and speak on their behalf. It would be unreasonable and unfair to criticise his leadership; he never chose to participate in what Dawa Norbu calls ‘this political game played on the religious terrain’ – it was his karma.
Four decades have passed since the Dalai Lama fled to India and those anxious and demanding years have not been made any easier for His Holiness by the Western media’s adoption of Tibet’s ‘God-King’ (in tabloid-speak) as one of their Cold War heroes. In this role, the
Dalai Lama was all the more useful because of his appeal to generations of young Westerners earnestly seeking ‘eastern wisdom’. This is not to suggest that His Holiness lacks wisdom, compassion and genuine spirituality. But what I wrote recently of Nelson Mandela could equally apply to him: ‘In President Mandela the media have an ideal hero, someone whose image needs no touching up. Yet every leader deserves some criticism and may be rendered less effective by a media canonisation that stifles it.’
The political manoeuvres that have occupied so much of His Holiness’s time were and remain extremely convoluted. An excellent account – shrewd, lucid, courageous – is to be found in Dawa Norbu’s
Tibet: The Road Ahead
(HarperCollins, 1995). When I first heard of Dawa Norbu he was a little boy; Jill Buxton mentioned him, during our journey to Dharamsala, as one of the outstandingly gifted peasant children who must be ‘given a chance’. Jill gave him that chance and now – having acquired his doctorate at Berkeley University and published many scholarly papers – he is Professor of Central Asian studies at New Delhi’s Nehru University.
In 1980 China’s Tibet policy shifted – and became apparently more relaxed, more sensitive to outside opinion. Deng Xiaoping admitted that ‘mistakes had been made’. Tibetans were exempted from paying taxes until 1988. The rigidly controlled agricultural production teams (instituted in 1959 and loathed by Tibetans) were granted some degree of ‘autonomy’ and allowed to use five to seven per cent of their land as private plots. The ban on rural trade fairs – pivotal to the prosperity and gaiety of Old Tibet – was lifted and border trade resumed with Nepal, India, Bhutan and Burma. Holiday travel to India became possible and, after a twenty-one year separation, Amala and Jigme-la were joyously reunited with the many members of their family who had been unable to escape. Most startling of all, a fulsome Communist Party document praised Tibetan Buddhism as ‘a culture worthy of serious study and development based on socialist orientation’. Religious practices were permitted, on a restricted scale, and the Chinese presented their careful reconstruction of the more famous monasteries in and around Lhasa (tourist bait) as proof of their new
benign policy of ‘freedom of religion’. However, Communist Partycontrolled committees run these major monasteries, usurping the traditional roles of the Abbots, and a thorough vetting of novices ensures that only ‘reliable’ youths are accepted. Many of the
bureaucrats
supervising this phoney ‘religious revival’ are the very men who before and during the Cultural Revolution joined in reducing the monasteries to rubble. But throughout the remoter regions, where even now Chinese administrators are few, restrictions seem to be less severe. In 1987 over 5000 pilgrims circled the sacred mountain of Kailas in Western Tibet – at least a week’s journey, by truck, from Lhasa. Evidently, for many resilient Tibetans, the Cultural Revolution’s erasing of the visible props of their faith has in no way weakened it.
When Tibet was opened to tourists in 1984 ‘to visit or not to visit’ became a bone of contention among Tibet-lovers. On the plus side, sympathetic foreigners, discreetly dispensing photographs of His Holiness, must be good for the Tibetans’ morale, making them feel less forgotten or ignored. Also, importantly, tourists can – and some do – bring back valuable eyewitness and ear-witness accounts of how things really are. On the minus side, to indulge in Chinese-regulated tourism signals a tacit acceptance of the brutal policy of ‘Sinicisation’ – an ugly word for an ugly deed. Moreover, the inflow of precious dollars benefits the Chinese rather than the Tibetans. In 1988 more than 40,000 tourists visited Lhasa – though in 1989 the imposition of martial law reduced the numbers to 4000. By now Tibet is attracting countless backpackers – some of whom daringly elude their official minders – and it seems His Holiness approves; he provided the Foreword to the 1996 Tibetan Handbook, a guide for visitors to the area.
Personally, I feel no desire to visit the New Tibet. When someone sent me a cutting from the
South China Morning Post
(23 September 1985) I shuddered to read Pierre Donnet’s report: ‘Tibet’s two largest cities, Lhasa and Shigatse, look thoroughly Chinese with residential districts and administrative buildings indistinguishable from their Beijing counterparts. Colourfully clad Tibetans are hard to spot among the Chinese who crowd the streets and make up more than half the
population of Lhasa. The overwhelming majority of the merchants are Chinese.’
On 21 September 1987 His Holiness laid a five-point proposal before the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus. It included an end to population transfers, an end to China’s abuse of Tibet for the testing and deployment of nuclear weapons and the dumping of nuclear waste, and the transformation, by international agreement, of the whole of Tibet (Inner and Outer) into a zone of peace – ‘in keeping with Tibet’s historical role as a peaceful and neutral Buddhist nation and buffer state separating the continent’s great powers’. The withdrawal of troops and military installations from Tibet, and from India’s Himalayan regions, would release incalculable amounts of money for the alleviation of poverty and this proposal appealed powerfully to sane people everywhere. But it was not even considered by Those In Charge. At the end of the second millennium, militarism has so taken over our world that Those In Charge have no intellectual space left for the concept of a peace zone.
A year later His Holiness addressed the European Parliament and suggested a new ‘Framework for Sino-Tibetan Negotiations’ – an initiative rewarded by the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize. What became known as ‘the Strasbourg Statement’ made a major political concession: China could retain control of Tibet’s defence and foreign policy in exchange for ‘the whole of Tibet becoming a self-governing democratic political entity founded on law by agreement of the people … in association with the People’s Republic of China’. This concession, His Holiness emphasised, was based on a pragmatic acceptance of the status quo: the Communist annexation had made Tibet part of China. BUT pre-1950 Tibet had been an independent nation. This ‘BUT’ caused the Chinese to reject the proffered compromise. They were – and remain – paranoid in their insistence that the Dalai Lama must play the game their way, by publicly affirming that Tibet had always been part of China. Only this could cancel the popular impression of the People’s Republic of China as an imperial power which has greedily grabbed a defenceless neighbour – despite anti-imperialism being the ideological cornerstone of Mao’s revolution. So, post-Strasbourg – stalemate …
By this stage, many among the younger generations (the ‘Tiblets’ as adults) had become educated, thoughtful, emancipated citizens of India – and elsewhere. No longer did all exiles passively accept His Holiness’s political leadership, though the majority might still revere him as their spiritual mentor. His willingness to compromise with Beijing alarmed and distressed a considerable number, who continued to demand total independence for Tibet. Meanwhile, on the fringes of Tibland, a smallish but worrisome faction revived memories of Tibet Militant and plotted to organise a guerrilla army. Very unwisely, His Holiness has always overlooked the contributions the younger generations (both in exile and in Tibet) could make in any future selfgoverning Tibet; none of the detailed plans he has devised gives them any part to play. Nor has he fostered the growth of a new and flexible leadership class to replace the Dharamsala Government-in-exile – the ‘ruling clique’.
What I referred to in 1963 as that clique’s ‘high handed’ actions were, sadly, replicated in 1990–95 during the contest between the Dalai Lama and Beijing on the tricky issue of searching for and recognising the Panchen Lama’s eleventh Incarnation. This grim power struggle – Tibetan spiritual authority versus Chinese temporal authority – echoed several ancient confrontations and underlined those subtleties within the Sino–Tibet relationship which so confuse the modern West. When it comes to defining a nation-state, to questions of independence,
self-determination
and international relations, we don’t think in terms of balancing spiritual and temporal powers. From this bitterly fought contest no one emerged with honour. It ended when the six-year-old Gedun Choekyi Nyima disappeared, no doubt to spend his life sequestered in Beijing – unless a time comes when he can be of use as a political trump card.