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Diário do Centro do Mundo » Blog Archive » O Tibete antigo não é o Shangrilá e nem o Dalai é o Papai Noel Says:
August 2nd, 2010 at 10:17 am[...] traçou um retrato sombrio do que viu num livro. A riqueza concentrada numa fração. Aqui, um documentário sereno e [...]
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February 23rd, 2010 at 11:42 pm
So, this documentary is from CCTV, Chinese government-controlled media. I post below an interesting, if long, article that addresses and critiques leftist, rightist, and Chinese nationalist views of Tibetian uprisings.
“Tibet and the Problem of Radical Reductionism”
Emily T. Yeh
1 Department of Geography, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA; emily.yeh@colorado.edu
Copyright Journal compilation © 2009 Editorial Board of Antipode, Volume 41, Issue 5, Pages 983-1010
Abstract: This article takes issue with a mode of argumentation advanced by a number of left-leaning, radical scholars, including those associated with China’s New Left, about the causes of the Tibetan unrest in China in spring 2008. According to this stance, the Tibetan protests were the result of external manipulation by neoconservative, reactionary forces, ranging from the CIA to the Dalai Lama. The unstated premise of this response is that taking a critical stance against western imperialism and neoliberal globalization necessitates a defense of China’s policies in Tibet. Such arguments take the form of unfavorable comparisons between Tibetans and Palestinians especially because the former are often romanticized, suggestions that Tibetans are unfortunate ideological victims of US-funded propaganda, and claims that they should be grateful for Chinese state-funded development. This response renders Tibetans incapable of being authentic political subjects. A radical stance on Western imperialism and capitalism should reject such reductionism.
Introduction
March and April 2008 saw an unprecedented wave of more than 90 protests by Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the interpretation of which has been the subject of vigorous and often acrimonious debate.1 In this article I critically examine Left contributions to those debates that rely on an implicitly vanguardist approach to politics, which allows for only the most constrained notion of Tibetan agency, paternalistically reducing Tibetan participation in the protests to false consciousness and external manipulation. This profoundly reductionist stance presumes that protesting Tibetans can only be puppets of capitalist and imperialist powers, and that they can have no agency that is not already determined in the last instance by ideological structures of western imperialism. This stance leads further to an uncritical defense of Chinese nationalism and an economistic endorsement of Chinese state development policies. I argue instead for a more conjunctural understanding of the unrest, an analysis that does not reduce contingent alignments of interests to ideological domination, and an acknowledgement of the possibility of Tibetan agency. By agency I refer not to Tibetans as completely autonomous, sovereign subjects acting according to their pre-formed, inner selves, but rather to capacities for action enabled by specific relations of subordination and animated by historically sedimented memories (cf Mahmood 2001).
My focus is on demonstrating the flaws, both empirical and theoretical, embedded within three prominent radical critiques. Before turning to these, I briefly review what is known about the events of the spring of 2008. The vast majority of the incidents, which ranged from nomads replacing Chinese with Tibetan national flags at schools and township headquarters to a rare candlelight vigil by Tibetan students at the Central Nationalities University in Beijing, were peaceful. The protests, unprecedented in both geographical scope and extent of societal participation, were the most significant in the last 50 years. Whereas the Lhasa demonstrations of 1987–89 were primarily urban and led by monks and nuns, the 2008 protestors included also herders, farmers, cadres, and university students. Western news reports frequently described them as having “spilled into neighboring provinces” from Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR),2 a phrasing which elides not only the actual order of events,3 but also the fact that the places in Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan provinces where most of the demonstrations occurred have closer affective ties with Lhasa than with their respective provincial capitals: they are all part of “cultural Tibet”, an area covering nearly one-quarter of PRC territory that is linked by religion, language, and other markers of identity. Politically united under the Tibetan empire from the seventh to mid-ninth centuries, it is increasingly being unified again in the twenty-first century by resentment against state policies and practices designed to eliminate the sentiments and identifications they ironically call forth instead.
The response from the state, the Chinese media, and Chinese citizens at home and abroad, was swift and furious. Chinese citizens were especially angered by what they interpreted as the biased and distorted Western press coverage of Tibetans, which they felt downplayed the Tibetan violence in Lhasa against Han and Hui. The Dalai Lama denounced the violence, as did many Tibetans. PRC media repeatedly played images of Tibetan violence, whipping up rage against both Tibetans and what is understood as the ongoing history of Western imperial meddling in China’s affairs. In response, as protests against the Olympic torch relay began, a Facebook group, “Tibet was, is, and always will be part of China”, was formed and quickly attracted more than 30,000 members. Similarly, the website anti-cnn.com, founded on 20 March to expose the “lies and distortions of facts from the Western media” concerning the unrest in Tibet, boasted more than 500,000 visits a day in its early weeks.4 The sentiments of many counter-protestors are encapsulated in a poem, posted online, lamenting:
… When we closed our doors, you smuggled drugs to open markets
When we embrace free trade, you blame us for taking away your jobs
When we’re falling apart, you marched in your troops and wanted your fair share
When we’re putting the broken pieces together, “Free Tibet” you scream, “it was invasion” …5
Other reactions took the form of leftist conspiracy theories. The video “2008 China Standup!” generated millions of hits and was fourth most popular on the Chinese website Sina.com6 (Osnos 2008). It begins with a Cultural Revolution-era radiant Mao icon and an exhortation to remember the Chairman’s words, “imperialism will never abandon its intention to destroy us!” It ties rising food prices in China and the “besiegement [of] Chinese financial institutions” by foreign capital with scenes of the 14 March Lhasa riots, logos of BBC, CNN and other western media companies labeled “global network of liar [sic]“, a dialogue bubble drawn over a photo to portray the Dalai Lama doing the bidding of George Bush, and the statement, “obviously, there is a cabal, a cold war against China!” Reactions also conflated nation and race, as when Duke University freshman Grace Wang was harassed, threatened with death, and labeled a “race traitor” for advocating dialogue between Chinese and Tibetans.7 CNN’s Jack Cafferty exacerbated the situation with his inexcusable racist reference to Chinese as “goons and thugs”.
Questions have been raised, for example about why Lhasa’s massive security apparatus did not act sooner, or why there were no attempts by on-duty People’s Armed Police to rescue Han migrants who died from fire.8 Severe limits on independent media access to Tibet have made it impossible to answer these questions, or to determine the number of Tibetan casualties of state violence. The draconian state control over information flow reinforces the dichotomous narratives that have driven the framing of these events inside and outside of China, making the truth of the events further contested and indeed, somewhat unknowable under these circumstances. Nevertheless, it is clear that thousands of Tibetans were arrested, many in places where no protests took place, such as Shangri-la, Yunnan, and Dawu, Qinghai, and often for no more reason than having tried to access blocked websites or having too many foreign friends.9 Though martial law was not formally in effect, the mobility of Tibetans was strictly controlled for several months, and throughout the summer of 2008 surveillance continued to be extremely heavy (McLaughlin 2008). A Chinese visitor to Tibetan parts of Sichuan, where 70,000 troops were stationed, remarked in late June that the checkpoints and troop buildup made the rural areas “look like Iraq. It’s as if there’s a war” (Macartney 2008). The state has also reached beyond its borders to inculcate fear in its Tibetan citizens abroad, whose families at home have been questioned and warned that they are responsible for their relatives’ actions.
Despite the announcement of a new round of negotiations between representatives of the Dalai Lama and those of the PRC after the unrest, official media in China continued to denounce the Dalai Lama as a “jackal in monk’s robes” and promised to “totally smash the splittist schemes of the Dalai clique”.10 The negotiations, held after the Olympics, made no progress, and led to even more hardline pronouncements. At the same time, a greatly intensified “patriotic education” campaign is being carried out in monasteries, schools, work units, and villages. If governmentality is a form of power that cultivates subjects and educates their desire toward convenient ends, then the strategy being employed is doing precisely the opposite. Hardliners within the PRC leadership do not seem to appreciate the fact that there is no surer way to incite anguish and anger than to force Tibetans to publicly and repeatedly denounce the Dalai Lama. Cultural Revolution techniques to ward off capitalist tendencies by keeping China’s citizens in a state of permanent class struggle did not pan out, and there is little reason to believe that the application of similar techniques will be any more effective in the long term in convincing Tibetans that, as TAR Party Secretary Zhang Qingli claimed recently, “the Central Party Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetans”.11
Reductionist Narratives and Radical Critique
Much of the acerbic debate has been characterized by a search for the single root cause driving the unrest. Thus while some observers have argued “it’s the economy, stupid” (Lustgarten 2008; cf Hillman 2008), others counter “it’s not the economy, stupid!” (Norbu 2008b). Among those who argue that the events were fundamentally motivated by nationalist politics rather than dissatisfaction with economic marginalization are left-leaning commentators who echo the Chinese government’s insistence on framing the fundamental issue as externally manipulated reactionary separatism. Many Tibetan exile nationalists also identify struggles over nation as the fundamental driver of the protests, but argue the mirror image of charges of reactionary separatism. Prominent writer Jamyang Norbu (2008a), for example, suggests not only that the protests can only be interpreted as heroic demands for independence, but also that those who offer a more complex and nuanced explanation for the unrest are, in effect, traitors or at best self-serving “barefoot experts” who secretly wish Tibetans would stop protesting because they are “getting in the way of … my research project, my tenure track, and visas for my students”. Norbu’s diagnosis of their “intellectual failure … to sufficiently understand what is happening in China” mirrors the view that it is the cloud of western media bias that prevents westerners from truly understanding why most Tibetans are, or should be, grateful to the Chinese government.
Jamyang Norbu is absolutely correct in insisting that Tibetans in Tibet should not be “represented as hapless victims” (Norbu 2008a). To recognize Tibetan agency, however, requires recognizing that the protests were overdetermined, not reducible to one ultimate factor that was determining in the last instance. Many Tibetans, differently positioned within society vis-à-vis class, gender, religious status and sect, geographical and rural/urban location, took part in the protests, making a wide range of stated claims and demands. In addition to acknowledging this sheer multiplicity within Tibetan society, we need to recognize Tibetans as capable of being political subjects, who like all historical subjects, are inevitably complex and contradictory.
I will return at the end of the article to the positive reading of the protests as exclusively a demand for independence. However, my main argument here is not with Jamyang Norbu, but rather with another set of arguments that he critiques (but which shares with his writing an insistence on a singular explanation for the protests). I am concerned here with the way in which the protests have been described, explained, and framed by a set of commentators who, though different, share in their broadly radical (left-wing/(post)Marxist/socialist/anti-racist) politics and analysis. This includes scholars, pundits, activists, and bloggers: among them are contributors to the liberal political blog, Daily Kos; leading cultural theorist of the left, Slavoj Žižek; Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery; and members of the China Study Group (CSG), a network of left-leaning scholars and activists focused on China who aim to examine “the struggles of China’s subordinated classes in today’s capitalist context … [and] how such struggles … relate to the struggles of people everywhere oppressed by capitalism, patriarchy, and racism and to contribute to the … building of a more just, sustainable and inclusive world”.12 The latter is loosely associated with China’s New Left, a name used to refer to those who (in contrast to China’s New Liberals) take a critical stance on China’s embrace of globalization, privatization, and the neoliberal market economy (Zheng 1999). I pay particular attention to political scientist Barry Sautman’s (2008) widely circulated and cited “Protests in Tibet and separatism: The Olympics and beyond”, published in the new journal of the CSG, because Sautman not only shares in the radical critique of the devastating effects of neoliberal globalization on China’s working class, but also has written extensively about the Tibet issue (Sautman 2001, 2002, 2005; Sautman and Dreyer 2006; Sautman and Eng 2001).
The line of argumentation I take issue with here starts with a broadly radical stance, critical of the depredations of capitalism and its deep imbrications with western imperialism. However, its proponents proceed from here to a reductive stance in which there can be no Tibetan agency, subjectivity, or interest outside of that already determined by a Manichean divide, of socialist liberation vs capitalism, and of China vs western imperialism. Tibetans are found to fall on the wrong side of these overbearing structural dualisms that underlie the analysis, making them bearers of false consciousness. This type of reductionism is by no means characteristic of all radical thought, yet there is a long history of the kind of vanguardist approach to politics embodied in the representations of the Tibetan protests I examine here. Despite extensive epistemological and political critique, vanguardism and the resort to the concept of false consciousness live on.
Radical interpretations of the Sandinista–Miskito conflict in Nicaragua in the 1980s are a case in point that has striking resonances with the critiques of Tibetan protests I examine here. Marxist analyses focused on support for the revolutionary Sandinista state and interpreted Miskito demands for autonomy and territorial rights as a product of CIA manipulation and false consciousness (eg Ballard 1984; Díaz-Polanco and Swarthout 1987; Ortiz 1982, 1987). Solidarity with the anti-imperialist, socialist project of the Sandinistas translated for many leftists into a denial of state violence and human rights abuses (see Dennis 1993), an insistence on the “profound humanitarianism of the Sandinistas”, and a critique of the Miskito’s “separatist sentiments” which were said to be bad for their own interests, “amounting to a throwback to the days of imperialist domination” (Ballard 1984:61, 55). Sautman (2008) echoes the language of these critiques in his writing about what he sees as the misguided and anti-progressive nature of Tibetan “separatists”: “Tibet has none of the indicia of a colony or occupied territory and thus has no relationship to self-determination … the protests in Tibet had no progressive aspect … [and are similar to] movements the world over in which marginalized people have taken a reactionary and often racist road, for example al-Qaeda or much of the base of the Nazis”.
A fundamental problem with these Marxist analyses of the Miskito is that they accepted the implicit premises of the Sandinistas that the Miskito were incapable of acting as self-conscious political subjects, of bearing their own political project. Geographer Bernard Nietschmann’s (1989) spirited defense of Miskito rights to self-determination was an easy target for criticism because of its unfortunate simultaneous appeal to the idea that indigenous nations could serve as a firebreak to stop the spread of Communism. Others also defended the rights of the Miskito from the Right, on anti-Communist grounds (Moore 1987; Muravchik 1986). Yet, there were also more fruitful attempts to refuse the false dichotomy of Right: Miskito supporters/Left: Sandinista supporters; Hale (1994), for example, drew on a Gramscian analysis in an attempt to stake out a position at once deeply sympathetic to the anti-imperialist and socialist project of the Sandinistas, as well as to Miskito aspirations for self-determination. More recent work has drawn on analyses of subaltern agency from postcolonial theory to problematize a metanarrative in which the only possible subjects are US imperialism and revolutionary nationalism (ie the view that those who reject the revolutionary nationalism of the Sandinistas can only be subjects of US imperialism) (Baracco 2004; Mande 2000).
The radical critiques of the Tibetan protests of 2008 have been rather similar to those made of the Miskito and their supporters in the 1980s. They can be summarized as follows: the Tibetan protests were the result of a right-wing or CIA plot against China; China liberated Tibetans from a brutal feudal system and has offered them development, for which the formerly impoverished Tibetans should be grateful; western representations of Tibet are romantic and overly simplified, and many Tibet sympathizers do not adequately sympathize with other oppressed groups, particularly Palestinians, which in turn makes both Tibetans and their supporters ideologically suspect.
The lineage of such arguments includes the glowing reports of earlier ardent supporters of China’s “liberation” of Tibet (Epstein 1983; Strong 1960), which grew out of the authors’ experiences of living in China and personal commitment to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (though not any knowledge of Tibetan culture or facility with Tibetan language). Recent left-leaning critics who have written about Tibet have tended to share this lack of Tibetan (and except for those associated with the New Left/CSG, also Chinese) language ability (eg Grunfeld 1996; Parenti 2007), relying on secondary sources (cf Rabgey 1999) to make arguments that are rooted fundamentally in their support for anti-imperialist, socialist projects. Problems arise not only from their tendency to engage only in armchair analysis, but more importantly from their vanguardist approach and their unstated premise that the only choice for understanding Tibet is between western imperialism and the claims of an unacknowledged Chinese nationalism. Rejecting the former means, for these critics, embracing the claims of the latter—of supporting a government that successfully created a narrative of having come to power against imperialism (cf Gries 2004; Schrei 2008).
The emphasis on anti-imperialism (and the claims of Chinese nationalism vis-à-vis Tibet) in these critiques is strengthened by China’s rapid trajectory toward capitalism and its role in neoliberal globalization. Because of this, radical critics today cannot easily offer unconditional support for China’s socialist project (the way Marxist scholars did for the Sandinista regime or the Maoist regime immediately after their respective revolutions). However, rather than recognizing the contradictions and interactions, or even the possibility of multiple, intersecting forms of oppression, some critics take the position that the only possible fundamental problem in China today is capitalism’s exploitation of the working class, and that other claims, particularly those of China’s ethnic minorities, are little more than the wedge of imperialism (Sautman 2008; Žižek 2008).
Within China’s New Left, as well, there is a tendency to adopt a nationalist position that defends the importance of maintaining “stability” and holding together the multi-ethnic Chinese state with the Han as the dominant ethnicity (Yu 2006; Zheng 1999). Indeed, the nationalist position of some New Left intellectuals has led Yu (2006) to suggest that rather than opposing globalization and standing with workers and farmers against the ascendant capitalist class, their implicit support for the Chinese state’s suppression of independent organizations and social resistance to neoliberalism simply promotes a Chinese-dominated rather than western-dominated form of globalization.
One of the common ways in which these radical critiques of Tibet echo Chinese state claims is through a fixation on Tibet’s “feudalistic” past, often invoked in the context of the romantic and oversimplified representations of Tibetans in the West (Parenti 2007; Weil 2008; Žižek 2008). Thus, after rightly arguing for the need to “open up a more multifaceted discussion of this complex issue” CSG contributor Robert Weil (2008) gives a list of questions that should be asked in order to do so, including: “Why are so many ‘latte drinking, SUV driving’ Westerners enamored of a historically feudalistic and theocratic regime?” When read along with his entire set of questions, the implication is not only that friends of latte drinkers must be enemies of radicals, but more importantly, that Tibetans as a people are incapable of participating in the making of their own history.
The “feudal” past is a staple of Chinese state discourse, which uses comparisons between Tibetan livelihoods under the PRC today and those 50 years ago as a basis for Tibetans’ requisite gratitude. It implies that without the interventions of the PRC, Tibetans would have remained in absolute stasis, undergoing no change whatsoever from the conditions of half a century past, incapable of “progress” or indeed any kind of temporal movement except by the intervention of the PRC. This erases the agency of historical figures such as Baba Phuntsog Wangyal, who established a secret Tibetan Communist Party in the 1930s with the intention of establishing a communist, independent Tibet (Goldstein, Sherap and Siebenschuh 2004). When this became impossible, Wangyal and others created a Tibetan branch of the CCP, but he was later imprisoned for 18 years for criticizing harsh reforms in the 1950s; rehabilitated, he is today both a committed Communist and one of the most outspoken internal critics of China’s Tibet policy.
Just as surely as the sound-byte tactics of the Free Tibet campaign criticized by Left observers elide complexities such as the role of people like Phuntsog Wangyal, so too do the same commentators ignore the possibility that Tibetans who share their critique of capitalism could also simultaneously make genuine demands for greater autonomy. The crux of the problem with the strain of radical critique I respond to here is that it is profoundly economistic and reductionist, as I show below in analyzing three prevailing arguments: about romanticization of Tibetans, about external manipulation, and about Tibetan gratitude.
Romanticization and the Politics of Comparison
In an essay in Counterpunch that appeared shortly after the protests began, Uri Avnery (2008) states that he condemns the Chinese government’s repression and supports the Tibetan people’s struggle, but is not ready to join the worldwide protests because if he did, he would feel brainwashed. His gripe is with the hypocrisy of the world media, which supports Tibet but ignores Chechnya, the Kurds, Western Sahara, the Basques and especially Palestine; thus, the world is shedding tears for Tibetans while ignoring Palestinians. This, he says, is because Tibetans enjoy the “ideal conditions” of having an “especially exotic culture”, gifted spokespersons, and being “’sexy’ in the view of the media”. Avnery’s commentary captures two common, intertwined themes in the radical critique of the Tibetan protests: the romanticization of Tibetans, and the comparison with Palestine.
While Avnery (2008) does not deny state repression, he finds that Tibetans do not measure up in his analysis of their deservingness of his sympathy precisely because they measure up too well in the eyes of the wrong parties and for the wrong reasons (”sexy” and “exotic”). Their low relative deservingness is coded in the language he employs to refer to Tibetans. Describing the Tibetan violence in Lhasa that resulted (according to official Chinese reports) in 19 casualties, most of whom were Han migrants, as a “murderous pogrom”, he goes on to claim, “clearly, the CIA has planned and organized the riots”.
Avnery is hardly the first to notice that Tibetans have been romanticized. As numerous scholars have noted, a long history of Orientalist representation and fascination with Tibet tells us more about the west than about Tibet itself (Anand 2007; Brauen 2004; Dodin and Räther 2001; Harris 1999; Lopez 1998). Many Tibet scholars (by which I mean scholars specializing in Tibetan history, religion, and society, usually through field-based research or reading of primary texts) have also written critically of oversimplified and romanticized representations of Tibetans. They have shown how representations of Tibetans as innately peaceful, enlightened about gender, and environmentally aware are strategic essentialisms designed to appeal to the liberal norms of potential supporters rather than timeless truths (Barnett 2001; Dodin and Räther 2001; Huber 2001; Sperling 2001), and how efforts to maintain such representations can have anti-progressive and indeed racist effects (Yeh and Lama 2006). However, these critical works have not simply discredited Tibetans by their association with the ways in which they have been represented, but rather have sought to untangle the web of complexities, complicities and desires that inhere in those representations, and to examine their effects.
One of those effects has been what Donald Lopez (1998) memorably called becoming “prisoners of Shangri-la”; Lopez argues that far from leading to effective support for Tibetan independence, the long history of Western representation of Tibetan Buddhism takes away from it. In other words, the “sexy” and “exotic” qualities that Avnery reinscribes on Tibetans are in many ways liabilities more than assets. The largely symbolic achievements of the Tibet movement over the past two decades has encouraged Tibetans inside Tibet to believe that they have more concrete political support outside than is really there, often leading to demonstrations which are repressed at great personal cost but with no significant political effect (Barnett 1998).
However, for Avnery, the apparent support that Tibetans receive based on their “exotic” image lowers the moral standing of their struggle vis-à-vis that of Palestinians, in a spurious comparison between their levels of deservingness and moral legitimacy. Thus, the unsurprising fact that Tibetans, like any other people, are not inherently nonviolent and never have been13 leads Žižek (2008) to ask “if Tibetans can attack Chinese immigrants, why can’t the Palestinians do the same to the Israeli settlers on the West Bank?” Of course, they can, and they do. This leads many Tibetan exiles to draw the inverse conclusion. To them, it seems that compared to Palestinians, Tibetans receive very little attention—of the kind that really matters. Indeed, a count of the number of stories about Palestinians vs Tibetans in mainstream English-language news sources over the last decade would no doubt result in many more stories about the former, not because Palestinians have won the sympathy or the respect for their rights that they deserve, but because violence is fetishized, and draws attention (Caprotti 2005). It is precisely because they fear they are not being taken seriously that there is now a growing sense of disillusionment among Tibetans inside and outside of China about their inability to attract efficacious political support.
I have met diasporic Tibetans who believe that Tibetans are more morally deserving than other groups, and that conditions in Tibet are worse than in Palestine. Both claims are unsupportable, engaging in a spurious kind of “oppression Olympics”, a race to the bottom in the search for recognition of moral legitimacy. A radical critique should not simply reverse the binary and produce the mirror image of the same wrong-headed analysis. CSG contributor Weil (2008) asks, as an accusation, “Why do those like U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi so concerned about Tibet avidly support Israel with its ’settlements’ in Palestine?” Rather than conceptualizing justice for different peoples of the world as a zero-sum game, as such comparisons between the supporters of Tibetans and Palestinians appear to do, we should embrace a politics that both recognizes common humanity and also strives toward “ethical singularity” for the subaltern (Spivak in Devi 1995:xxv). The question should be instead why Pelosi and Weil cannot both be concerned about both Tibet and Palestine, through a politics that recognizes historical and political uniqueness while holding open the possibility for alliance.
There is a responsibility toward both Tibet and Palestine. Analytically, both can be understood as cases of what Halliday (2008) calls “the syndrome of post-colonial sequestration”, in which certain peoples failed to establish themselves as independent countries at decisive moments of international change when imperial powers were retreating. A radical, postcolonialism-inspired, way to understand these situations would be (as Halliday suggests) to abandon the notion that our contemporary nation-state system corresponds to “fundamental principles”, and further to caution that “nationalism cannot cut the link between reason and capital at the core of imperialism” (Chatterjee 1993; Wainwright 2008:15). As Spivak notes, “We cannot take national liberation as a model of anything anymore. We don’t support Palestine’s struggle because it’s anti-colonial. We support it because Israel is a geopolitically violent state. In the name of anticolonialism you get the kind of national identity politics that can lead to fascism. Edward Said once said ‘… once the state of Palestine is established, I will become its first critic’ (in Yan 2007:439). However, with respect to Tibet, Left critics are not making a critique of the nation-state system at large, of all forms of nationalism (Chinese as well as Tibetan). Instead, Sautman (2008) argues that Tibetans are not oppressed, and that China’s rights within the contemporary nation-state system must naturally be defended: “[the Chinese government] acts to suppress separatism, an action that comports with its rights under international law”. This is less a truly radical critique, but rather one that aligns itself with (Chinese) nationalism.
Conspiracy, Agency, and the Radio
Let me return now to Avnery’s claim that “clearly, the CIA has planned and organized the riots”. This common insistence in the left-wing critique that the unrest could only have resulted from foreign instigation echoes closely the Chinese government’s insistence that it was masterminded by the Dalai Lama. Citing publicly available information about the US National Endowment for Democracy’s funding of some Tibetan exile groups, William Engdahl (2008) claimed on the website of the Centre for Research on Globalization that the events were engineered by the US, and that, “as the Chinese government itself was clear to point out, the sudden eruption of anti-Chinese violence in Tibet, a new phase in the movement led by the exiled Dalai Lama, was suspiciously timed … on the eve of the coming Olympics”. Criticizing the Dalai Lama for traveling in “conservative political circles”, he claims that the 2008 protests are a clear sign of US intent to foment a “color revolution” to control the world’s water from the Tibetan Plateau.
Engdahl’s exaggerated theories make him easier to dismiss (he eventually retracted his statements), but the spirit of his argument is of a piece with those of more measured left-leaning critics who claim the protests to have been orchestrated in some way from outside China, whether by the CIA, the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Youth Congress, the US government, or perhaps all of the above. This presumes that Tibetans within Tibet have no grievances sufficient to lead to protest unless instigated from outside, and further, that Tibetans within Tibet are incapable of thinking and acting without assistance. They can only be the objects of historical forces; they cannot make history. Rejecting this condescending, racist stance, it makes far more sense to consider the protests a result of the calculation that the government would be unwilling to deploy lethal force to shoot protestors before the Olympics, a sign of, as Barnett (2008) puts it, “an intelligent wish to remain alive”, rather than a product of nefarious plots.
The coincidence of timing of the Tibetan protests inside and outside of the PRC—both falling on and around the 49th anniversary of the failed March 10, 1959 uprising—is taken as evidence of manipulation. Yet, in addition to questions about the actual order of events in the PRC—with at least one major incident taking place 3 weeks before 10 March (Makley 2009)—and its problematic assumptions about Tibetan agency, this interpretation also misreads the nature of the relationship between Tibetans inside and outside of the PRC. There are certainly personal connections, for example within families who send their children to India to study, but there is also a significant cultural divide between Tibetans who were born and raised in exile and those in China (Shakya 2008a, 2008b; Yeh 2007a). Families split between the PRC and India do communicate, for example by cell phone, and a small number of Tibetans who have lived in India return to China by making a second dangerous crossing of the Himalayas. This flow of information and people, however, is far from unimpeded and does not have the character or capacity to instigate or organize. As a result of the same forces of state surveillance and control, there is no clear mechanism by which foreign organization or instigation could be carried out, nor any evidence that this actually happened (Shakya 2008a, 2008b). No evidence has been produced that the 10 March protests by Drepung monks in Lhasa—which started as a specific request to stop patriotic education campaigns and release monks previously imprisoned—or any of the subsequent protests, was ordered, planned or manipulated by those living outside the PRC.
US-sponsored radio programming is another easy target of critique. A contributor to a CSG discussion notes:
[O]f course, people who don’t understand Tibetan have no way of knowing what Radio Free Asia (RFA) has been broadcasting into Tibet … but we can guess it’s not just ‘objective news coverage’ funded by the US government out of the kindness of its heart … Tibetans working for and interviewed by RFA are sympathetic to the separatist cause.14
Another more extensive example comes from a blogger calling himself Zwoof (2008), whose post on Daily Kos was picked up by China Digital Times. His claim: “the civilian Tibet people were provoked to riot. It was not a religious uprising but a race riot manipulated by a group that desires conflict by any means”. His argument proceeds as follows. One of the few sources of information that we have about what is happening in Tibet, other than the Chinese media, is RFA. RFA is funded and regulated by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which is headed by James Glassman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, which is itself an arm of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Because the PNAC is a neoconservative organization, its association through Glassman with RFA and the fact that Tibetans listen to RFA means that Tibetans are pawns of the PNAC. Furthermore, it’s extremely disturbing that much of what RFA reports about events in Tibet currently consists of “unconfirmed reports”; their unconfirmed nature make them suspect. Testimonies by eyewitness tourists and the only accredited western journalist (from the Economist) in Lhasa at the time of the riots reported rumors among Lhasa residents that monks had been beaten, which helped provoke the violence on 14 March. The fact of unconfirmed rumors is suspicious: the rumors must have been planted by neoconservatives as part of their effort to destabilize the region. Tibetans, in this account, are puppets in the neoconservatives’ global game of imperial domination.
This narrative starts with a valid and noteworthy argument about the political economy of information dissemination and the objectionable politics of the head of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, but moves beyond productive critique into reductionist caricature through its reliance on an assumption of Tibetans’ lack of agency and its failure to take context into account in the evaluation of (lack of) evidence. The CIA was involved in training and assisting the Tibetan guerilla movement, Chushi Gangdru, from a base in northern Nepal until 1974, but there is no evidence of support or connections since that time. It would not be surprising to find neoconservative interests hoping to use the Tibetan issue to their ends, but the legitimate grievances of people living in Tibet today against various forms of surveillance, control, and political and economic marginalization are not therefore equivalent to or reducible to right-wing aims. As recent work on the rise of political Islam has amply shown, CIA support for various insurgent groups has been the product of highly contingent alliances, rather than ideological unity or domination (Mamdani 2004). Refusing to see Tibetans as ideological puppets is not the same as believing naively that RFA was created “out of the kindness of [the US government's] heart”. Instead, it is an insistence on an approach to the political that does not rely at its core on the premise that those with whom one disagrees can only be victims of false consciousness.
RFA is important to address because it, along with Voice of America (VOA), is one of the most popular radio shows for Tibetans in the PRC, especially in rural areas where government interference with the broadcasts is less intensive. A Tibetan scholar described to me a recent visit to a dark, cramped, low-ceilinged sod-brick winter home of nomads living in a remote location without access to electricity, running water, or roads. The only modern appliance he saw was a battery-operated radio, wedged into a corner of the sod wall, with its dial covered in a thick layer of dust indicating that it had not been turned for quite some time; it was set to the frequency of RFA. A key reason so many Tibetans are so fond of RFA is that the shows regularly follow, broadcast, and discuss at length the world travels and teachings of the 14th Dalai Lama; I have encountered many a rural nomad and farmer who can tell me with great precision the names of various countries and cities where the Dalai Lama has recently given teachings, even if they have only the vaguest of notions of where those places might be. Their interest in the Dalai Lama is neither conservative nor progressive. It belongs to another participation framework altogether, a Buddhist one in which the Dalai Lama is an emanation of Chenrezig (Avalokitesvara), bodhisattva of compassion and patron deity of Tibet. They turn clandestinely to RFA because such information is blocked in Tibet, where display of photographs of the 14th Dalai Lama is forbidden, and possession of sympathetic documents about him can lead to arrest.
The motivations of RFA employees also exceed the narratives ascribed to them. The current head of the Tibetan service, Ngapo Jigme, defected to the US from Beijing in 1985; he is the son of Ngapo Ngawang Jigme, head of the delegation that signed the 17 Point agreement in 1951, which recognized China’s sovereignty over Tibet in exchange for a series of political and cultural conditions and who, as a high ranking PRC official, is despised by many Tibetans (Becker 1998; Shakya 1999). Many Tibetan RFA staff members were raised and educated in the PRC. Positions at RFA and VOA are among the most coveted in the US for educated Tibetans as they are among the few where Tibetan literacy is useful and where, as a result, they do not have to face serious down-skilling in the labor market. Their desires to work at RFA, the particular situation that propelled each to leave Tibet, and their role in shaping the news about Tibetans inside and outside of Tibet, cannot be reduced either to “separatism” or to a monolithic, neoconservative American agenda.
The source of RFA’s funding is not without implications. The programs have a viewpoint; they will not report from Xinhua headlines, argue that Tibetans should be grateful for being lifted by China out of poverty and misery, or criticize the US for meddling in China’s internal affairs. However, to date left-wing critics have been satisfied to make assumptions about the programs without listening to them. The content of the thirty-some hours of Tibetan programming I listened to in preparation for this article would certainly displease the Chinese government but was hardly the material of insurrection. World news headlines were translated, and the Dalai Lama’s tours in various countries were closely followed, clips from his teachings often repeated several times. On the call-in show one day in June 2008, the topic was donations from Tibetan areas for the Sichuan earthquake, which in some areas were collected voluntarily, and in others by decree, or deducted from paychecks. A Tibetan caller from India reported that he heard that back in his hometown, some residents were happy to donate while others reportedly complained about doing so with the phrase “what’s the point of giving to the CCP?” The host responded with a rebuke for the latter, remarking that as Tibetans, callers and listeners should remember to have compassion and kindness and not to focus on issues of ethnicity. The exchange makes sense from within the framework of Tibetan cultural idioms, but not from a viewpoint that insists on reading RFA as nothing but a vehicle for separatism.
The Daily Kos post also takes specific aim at a rumor in Lhasa that monks had been beaten, finding the very fact of rumor, along with RFA’s mention of “unconfirmed reports” to be suspicious. Rumor, however, is a fact of life in Tibet and probably most other places where state agents routinely and blatantly block desired information; it is both a conduit of information (some things that start out as rumors turn out to be true) and a reflection of aspirations (see Tibet Info Net 2007). In the summer of 2006, for example, I witnessed the rapid spread of one (false) rumor, that the Dalai Lama had been allowed to return to China and was visiting Kumbum Monastery in Qinghai. Thousands of nomads packed up their families and traveled for days to reach the monastery, only to be gravely disappointed. Another rumor, that the Chinese-selected 10th Panchen Lama had fled to India, spread rapidly for some time in 2007. Such rumors are aspirational but have no discernable benefit for shadowy forces hoping to geopolitically destabilize the region, as the Daily Kos piece insinuates.
The fact that stories are “unconfirmed” is similarly neither as surprising nor sinister as implied, given the restrictions placed on reporting and movement into and out of Lhasa. Surveillance has been especially heavy since the protests, with officials keen on finding those who “leak state secrets” to the outside. A Tibetan friend from Lhasa visiting the USA found herself unable to contact her family for a number of days after the protests. When phone connections were restored, however, her husband asked her to please not call again soon, fearing that merely receiving an overseas call would put the family in danger. Such conditions make it too risky for most people to be willing to convey information, making most stories that get out “unconfirmed”.
Much of what has been reported as unconfirmed has traveled in one of several ways: in the initial days (before heavy surveillance), by cell phone calls from Tibetans in Tibet witnessing events to RFA’s toll-free call-in show; by Tibetans in India whose relatives in Tibet called them about specific events in their hometowns; and from the blog of Beijing-based Tibetan dissident writer Woeser. Under house arrest, Woeser for several months collected information from friends and acquaintances about protests and arrests, which she then published on her website, hosted outside China.15 It was her blog that first reported the arrest of four Tibetan artists and singers from Golog, an area that saw few protests. The news of their detention with unknown charges was posted on Woeser’s blog and led to significant concern, but US-based scholars who hoped to call for their release faced the problem of the “unconfirmed” report: neither news agencies nor human rights organizations would touch the story without a second, independent source. Those with local contacts feared it would be far too dangerous for Tibetans to be contacted by someone from the USA asking about the detentions. (The arrests and conditions of eventual release were confirmed in the end, after significant delay [see Demick 2008].) Unconfirmed reports are not always accurate, and the ones that have appeared are necessarily framed within particular narratives that may or may not correspond to the experience of those in Tibet. The fact that this is so, however, underscores the extent of surveillance and fear, rather than the reducibility of RFA reporters and listeners to a neoconservative agenda.
Governance, Gratitude, and Autonomy
Another common strand of the left-wing critique appears in the form of statements about how well China’s laws and policies for ethnic autonomy and development have treated Tibetans, how much better the standard of living of Tibetans is now compared to the pre-1950s (the assumption of Tibetan stasis), and the implication that Tibetans should be grateful to China. It suggests that the socialist Chinese state was in fact very beneficial to Tibetans (liberating them), and it is the PRC’s capitalist turn that is responsible for the problems that Tibetans face. However this argument goes, capitalist globalization hurts all PRC citizens, not just Tibetans; further, Tibetans are not the worst off, as indicated by higher state expenditures into Tibet than other impoverished areas, such as Guizhou province. Thus, ethnicity is not important; Tibetans who are marginalized should realize that they are of a class with other poor Chinese. When they protest instead along ethnic lines, this is reactionary (Sautman 2008). In this view, the structural violence of ethnic governance is not only unimportant, but does not exist.
My argument is not that globalization and neoliberalism should be embraced as good for Tibetans. In fact, the discourse of neoliberalism, with its requirements of free, frictionless flows of people, money, and goods, has been increasingly deployed by the state against the cultural and economic concessions offered briefly to Tibetans in the 1980s. Through the mid-1990s, TAR officials felt they had to specially justify the presence of Chinese migrants, but today, the language of the free market justifies and renders unproblematic the increased flows of migrants into Tibet. Žižek (2008) is thus telling only half the story when he writes: “it seems the Chinese Communists finally learned the lesson: what is the oppressive power of secret police, camps and Red Guards … compared to the power of unbridled capitalism to undermine all traditional social relations?” Capitalism does disembed and undermine social relations. But the situation on the ground is not one of secret police vs capitalism, but rather secret police and capitalism; in the name of their own “autonomy”, Tibetans are as a group more, not less, closely managed by the State Security Bureau, while at the same time the discourse of the free market is used to justify the refusal to offer any meaningful concessions to help balance out the inequalities of the labor market. The problem for Tibetans is not simply one of the “free” market, but rather the strategic mobilization of free market discourse against a historically sedimented, ethnically marked unbalanced playing field and a system of ethnic governance that selectively curtails certain forms of Tibetan enterprise and activity in the name of stability.
The argument that the massive investment of state funds into the “development” of Tibet ought to make Tibetans grateful, and that the fact that they are not proves their reactionary character, is flawed on many counts. Many Han migrants are in fact resentful of what they see as extraordinary state largesse into Tibet’s development—much as many whites in the US are resentful of affirmative action—but a radical analysis cannot stop at their resentment to blame Tibetans for anti-progressive ingratitude. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine left-leaning scholars accusing minorities in the US of being insufficiently grateful to the state for bringing them improvement. Moreover, Han migrants who feel that the government helps Tibet more than their hometowns freely admit that they travel to Tibet for work precisely because “it’s much easier to make money here than at home”. Tibetans, outcompeted on the labor market by lack of skills, lack of connections to labor contractors, and sometimes plain prejudice, do not have similar opportunities to migrate to a place where they can send remittances home (Yeh 2007b).
The TAR has in fact reported greater economic growth in recent years than impoverished Guizhou, but this growth has come almost exclusively from the expansion of government and party administration (Fischer 2005). Other than this, aid from the central government and other provinces comes in the form of large-scale infrastructural construction projects, in which all equipment as well as labor is typically brought in from the outside, so that migrants working on such projects eventually take home in wages the state’s investment into “development of Tibet”, with few backward and forward linkages and few jobs created for local residents. A Sichuanese contractor for the $4.1 billion Qinghai-Tibet railway whom I interviewed stated outright to me that he hired no Tibetans because “they are too stupid and can’t use their brains to figure anything out”. According to official statistics, central government aid has a negative multiplier effect that has worsened over time, and the TAR economy rivals the worst cases of aid dependency in Africa (Fischer 2005). Spending on capital construction in the TAR is quadruple spending on education, and there are fewer primary and secondary schools per capita in Tibet than the rest of China (Fischer 2005).16 On the other hand, urban incomes for a small class of Tibetan cadres are exceedingly high, reaching the highest in all of China in 2002, representing a group that the state successfully bought off following the 1987–89 protests (Barnett 1998, 2006a, 2006b). At the same time there is a large and growing urban Tibetan underclass with few prospects for employment, as well as a growing urban–rural divide (Fischer 2005).
Nevertheless, Žižek (2008) argues that “the Chinese invested heavily into Tibetan economic development … infrastructure, education, and health services … the average Tibetan has never enjoyed such a standard of living as today”. As further “proof” that Tibetans should be grateful to the state, he offers that in Tibet, “depoliticized religion is now tolerated, often even supported”. Žižek’s arguments here are of a piece with the denunciations of New Age “obscurantists” in his recent writing (thus Tibetans are devalued by Žižek because he objects to the way in which they have been appropriated and represented by the New Age movement) and his self-declared “Eurocentrist” views of the Judeo-Christian tradition that led him to compare the Dalai Lama unfavorably vis-à-vis the Pope (Hart 2002; Žižek 2000, 2002).
It is important to question Žižek’s premise of “depoliticized” religion, especially as it is quite similar to Sautman’s (2008) argument that the “Chinese government has the right under international law to regulate religious institutions to prevent them from being used as vehicles of separatism”. Yet, the state has itself politicized Tibetan religion to such a degree that it is difficult to see how a notion of a depoliticized religion can be supported, especially when the Dalai Lama (emanation of the bodhisattva of compassion, patron deity of the land of Tibet itself) is branded the archenemy, against whom China is locked in a “fight to the death struggle”. It is as difficult to convince Tibetans that they do have religious freedom, just as long as they “draw a clear line” between themselves and the highest and most sacred figure of their faith, as it would be to convince Catholics who are required to disavow the Pope, that they really are free to worship as they please. It may indeed be the case that for many rural poor, the national struggle means little (cf Spivak, 2007),17 but religious faith means a great deal. Many in Tibet insist that they follow the Dalai Lama because he is their religious leader, full stop. But the state insists that this cannot be. In the framework mandated by the Chinese state for its Tibetan citizens, the 14th Dalai Lama is always already politicized and must be rejected, contradicting the state’s simultaneous insistence that there really is religious freedom.
In a similar vein, Sautman suggests, “Tibetans have the same rights as Han [and] they enjoy certain preferential economic and social policies” (2008). Yet, just as China’s excellent environmental protection policies demonstrably do not result in excellent environmental protection, for a whole host of structural reasons, the apparently favorable conditions given to Tibetans often do not translate into favorable or even equal treatment. This is particularly true of the regional ethnic autonomy that the Constitution, laws, and policies guarantee to Tibetans. For Sautman and other critics, such guarantees prove that Tibetans are not oppressed and have “no relationship with self-determination”. In fact, laws of ethnic autonomy play out in three ways. First, when exceptions are really implemented for minorities in the name of autonomy, they often have little political consequence. Second, other policies that would actually provide a measure of significant cultural and political autonomy go unimplemented. And finally, in some cases, policies implemented in the name of ethnic autonomy increase rather than decrease state control.
An example of the first is the rule, enshrined in the Constitution, that the Chairman of the TAR is always a Tibetan; however, the Party Secretary has never been a Tibetan (and is usually Han) and Party Secretaries have more political power than government leaders at the same administrative level. Other examples of autonomy and self-government offered by the State Council (2004) include the fact that the TAR has designated Tibetan New Year and the Yogurt Festival as official holidays, hardly proof of significant political autonomy. Under the second case come measures which would have a more direct impact on cultural and political autonomy, such as the claim that in the TAR the “Tibetan language [is] the major one, thus putting the work of using and promoting Tibetan spoken and written language on a legal basis” (State Council 2004). In practice, however, Chinese is the working language of the TAR government, at least at the county level and above. Today, despite the statement of the State Council, Chinese officials are not encouraged to learn Tibetan. Though Tibetan language textbooks exist for many subjects, they are not used. Despite a 1990 directive by the Lhasa Municipal Education and Sports Committee that students who did not pass a Tibetan examination would not be able to graduate from secondary school, secondary education in the TAR continues to be taught in Chinese (Bass 1998:234). Regulations require that signs on all government work units, shops, hotels and restaurants be in both Tibetan and Chinese, but increasingly, this rule goes unenforced. Furthermore, when the signs are in fact multilingual, the Tibetan is often too small to read, or worse, simply transliterated from Chinese, rendering the result meaningless to a non-Chinese speaker. The form of autonomy—the rule that the sign must be multilingual—remains, but its meaning is eviscerated (cf Tournadre 2003).
In yet other arenas, claims of autonomy are used to both facilitate and obfuscate what is in fact decreased political autonomy. The State Council (2004) cites as evidence of Tibet’s autonomy the fact that it has enacted local and separate regulations including not only those concerning holidays and the use of Tibetan language, but also “Resolutions on Safeguarding Unification of the Motherland, Strengthening Ethnic Unity and Combating Separatist Activities”, in other words, the right of Tibetans to be particularly scrutinized for signs of separatism. Since appeals for further ethnic autonomy—beyond what the state has already granted—are routinely interpreted as separatism, this regulation trumpeted as proof of wide-ranging autonomy actually guarantees strict limits on autonomy (Yeh 2008).
At the same time, there are many extra-legal ways, in violation of the Chinese Constitution, in which Tibetans are not in practice equal to Han citizens. These unwritten rules, enacted particularly severely in Lhasa since the mid 1990s, include the prohibition of religious practice not just by Party members, but by all government employees (eg teachers) and their families, as well as students of all ages, from kindergarten through college (Barnett 2006b).18 Schoolchildren in Lhasa are prohibited from wearing the otherwise ubiquitous red cords, blessed by lamas, and from visiting temples and monasteries or circumambulating mountains. This is important insofar as these circumambulations and temple visits are not just religious but also key practices in the performance and creation of Tibetan sociality and community. Monks and nuns, important figures in Tibetan society, are banned from entering official spaces in Lhasa, including not just government offices but also school campuses (Barnett 2006b). These and other such unwritten rules violate both the Chinese Constitution and the principles of autonomy, provoke great resentment, and must be considered in any analysis of the spring 2008 protests.
Conclusion
Much ink has been spilled in the pages of this journal about whether leftist critique has become too watered down, and whether the overzealous pursuit of theoretical nuance has overshadowed necessary political action (eg Waterstone 2002; Watts 2005). Against the grain of these discussions, perhaps, I have argued here from the perspective of a 2008 conversation among Left scholars, pundits, and activists about the recent protests in Tibet, for the continued necessity of nuance, and for a position that always considers the interlocking nature of multiple forms of identification and oppression. Our analyses must take into account subaltern agency and the ways in which conditions for action are conjuncturally produced, rather than adopt a vanguardist approach in which false consciousness and ideological domination determine in the last instance.
I have made these critical observations about the way in which the Tibetan protests have been framed and analyzed from a position that shares the New Left’s critique of US imperialism and of the environmental and social injustices that have followed from China’s embrace of capitalism. What I find problematic is that many who take this position are content to embrace a reductionist and economistic view of Tibetans and to label those who disagree—including many scholars who take very seriously the study of Tibetan language, culture, and history—as ideologically suspect (rendering familiarity with the subjects of one’s research itself suspect as far as the study of Tibetans is concerned).19
Progressive scholars can and should steer between accusing subalterns of false consciousness and of defending them by making right-wing claims about the dangers of Communism or in the name of defending US imperial interests. It is necessary, and possible, to be vigilant against both anti-Chinese racism and fear-mongering about China as well as a form of racism against Tibetans (or any other group of people) which suggests they have no potential for agency. We need to reject the idea that romantic representations of Tibetans necessitate a deep skepticism that they can do no more than fit a script already written for them by western imperialism. The inevitable ways in which Tibetans, like any group of people, do not measure up to ideals of social justice, do not therefore justify either the extraordinary or the everyday forms of violence including surveillance, imprisonment, and extra-legal regulations specifically targeted at them and that restrict their mobility, religious and cultural practice. It should be possible to pursue a radical vision of social justice without trading in one side of a binary for the other, and without accepting that “my enemy’s friend must be my enemy” is an adequate guide to ethical understanding.
Finally, much of the radical critique of the Tibetan protests has taken for granted that the spring 2008 unrest was fundamentally “separatist”. While Sautman (2008) and Jamyang Norbu (2008a, 2008b) position themselves in diametric opposition to each other, both seem to agree that a call for independence was at the heart of the unrest. Yet this, too, needs to be complicated. This is not to suggest that improved material standards of living alone will quell Tibetan dissatisfaction, nor to deny that some of the incidents involved the Tibetan flag or the use of independence slogans. Nationalism does not, however, exist as a thing, pre-formed, unchanging, and static. It is, rather, processual, and actively produced, called into existence and cultivated by the very state policies that hope to destroy it.
Current state policies privileging “stability” above all have pigeonholed all dissent and complaints about the government into the category of “splittism”, so that even what Sautman (2008) calls the “legitimate complaints” of some Tibetans about economic marginalization are, in normal times, difficult to express as such because the imperative of stability reads all dissent as separatism. The state, in effect, channels all manners of grievances and Tibetan identity itself into the idiom of nationalism. It then exacerbates the situation by casting so wide the scope of all that can be encompassed under separatism, and by asking its citizens to “draw a clear line” between themselves and the Dalai Lama. It gives its Tibetan citizens this choice: perform your loyalty by denouncing the Dalai Lama, or be guilty of being a Tibetan nationalist.
Gayatri Spivak may be right in arguing that the age of anticolonialism is today an anachronism, a thing indelibly and only of the past. Resistance framed in nationalist terms has proven insufficient for bringing about a decolonized, just world. Yet China’s policies funnel Tibetans precisely into this model of the past while the 14th Dalai Lama himself states, nearly daily these days, that Tibet is best served as part of the much larger and stronger entity of China, while retaining cultural and religious autonomy. His vision matches quite closely the kind of regionalism Spivak suggests for Hawaii:
… when I was teaching there last year I tried to say that the separatist idea of the national liberation of Hawaii for native Hawaiians is anachronistic. I myself found the coding of Hawaii as a Pacific state, part of Oceania, with the advantage of being inside the US system, an insider-outsider, much more us
March 2nd, 2010 at 10:12 pm
hey. your website is awesome but the quality is pretty poor. at least make a bigger size of the video like on youtube. yours is too small and if you enlarge it to full screen then is very bad. pls find something in the middle
thanks
August 13th, 2011 at 9:33 am
Noossa meus sinceros parabns pelo vdeo. Fiz meu web page hj ice estava meio perdida! Vcs ajudaram mto msm! vlw
August 31st, 2011 at 1:38 pm
Je me permets de partager sur facebook votre article , merci|
January 23rd, 2012 at 2:46 am
Interesting discussion on my post. It’s been a while since I wrote that but occasionally I do a search to see if it still has legs. Thanks for the additional information.
Zwoof