5-20-08, 9:00 am
The horrible earthquake in Western China has pushed the story of the Olympics and Tibet out of mass media. Even though some commentators have thrown in anti-Chinese propaganda, asserting that the crisis may bring about “glasnost” in Chinese media and help topple the “totalitarian” government, the general response everywhere is one of deep sympathy for the Chinese people and anxious concern for what will happen. Much of the world is watching as the Chinese government mobilizes its resources to deal with a natural disaster about which there was no warning and a level of devastation and loss of human life much greater than Hurricane Katrina. Many in the U.S. are thinking but not saying: this could be Los Angeles, or San Francisco, on some other major population center.
Perhaps now is a good time to look at the Tibet question in historical perspective.
Americans came to see Tibet after WWII largely in terms of a fictional place called Shangri-la. In the 1930s, James Hilton wrote a popular, essentially escapist novel, Lost Horizon. In 1937, 'Lost Horizon' was made into a very popular film by Frank Capra, famous for his political films and later director of the the WWII Office of War Information (OWI).
The novel and the film deal with 'Western travelers' (fleeing ironically political upheavals in China,) who crash land in the Himalayas, are rescued and brought to a valley of peace and contentment peace, a place called Shangri-la, whose people are led by a wonderful high Lama. This is a valley of eternal life and peace, one far greater than the 'civilization' from which the travelers have escaped. To make matters more mystical, one of the travelers fleeing China, a suave British diplomat, is informed by the High Lama that he has been sent to replace him. Without continuing the fantastic but entertaining story, it is about finding, losing and for some finding again Utopia. There were many odd parallels between the film and later real life in the Cold War. Sam Jaffe, who played the high Lama, was later blacklisted in the 1950s because of his opposition to McCarthyism, as was Jane Wyatt, who played Sondra, an ideal woman who had spent her life in Shangri-la. (She was to play the ideal suburban homemaker in the classic TV series, Father Knows Best).
Franklin Roosevelt liked the film (which in its contrast between the peaceful egalitarian world of Shangri-la and the mixed attitudes of the travelers, including one prominent capitalist crook is understandable). Roosevelt initially named the presidential retreat that the world today calls Camp David Shangri-la, and the term passed into general usage. If there was to be peace after WWII, Roosevelt’s policy of building cooperation with the Soviet Union through the United Nations and using the United Nations social agencies to address global inequalities offered from the U.S. side the best possibility.
That possibility was lost in the years immediately after WWII. The European based “containment policy” which the Truman administration used as its rationale for using economic military means to defeat socialist movements became a global policy in 1950 after the triumph of the Chinese revolution. In the years to follow, Asian dictators like Chiang K’ai-shek on Taiwan and U.S. government created tyrants Syngman Rhee in South Korea and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam would be hailed as defenders of freedom and democracy because they were anti-Communist, anti-Chinese, and ready to do anything the U.S. wanted in terms of anti-Chinese military policies. When the Dalai Lama fled Tibet after a failed uprising against China’s anti-feudal policies, pre-1951 Tibet became Shangri-La and the Dalai Lama a version of the High Lama who Sam Jaffe (making a comeback on television in the Ben Casey series) had played in Lost Horizon. Although it was unclear where the fictional Shangri-La was in the novel and the film (Tibet, Nepal, maybe somewhere it was thought in Northern India), the anti-Chinese section of global U.S. based Cold War ideology and policy helped to complement the theological mythology behind the U.S. supported Tibetan Dalai Lama and the theocratic landlord class of which he was the nominal leader. Tibet was now the cite of Shangri-la, as I remember a grade school teacher telling me more than 50 years ago. Sam Jaffe, Jane Wyatt, and Franklin Roosevelt are long gone, but I think that if they were still with us, and all were progressives, they could distinguish myth from reality, particularly a myth that only serves the interest of the reactionaries who attacked them in their lifetimes While Tibetans are not ethnic Chinese, the history of Tibet, both the old feudal theocratic regime and the new post revolution Tibet, cannot be separated from Chinese history and China itself.
First, Tibet in effect became a part of the Chinese empire when Mongol invaders established a dynasty, the Yuan Dynasty, in the mid-13th century, a few decades after the battles between feudal lords and King John were raging in England and another mythical figure, Robin Hood, was born.
For centuries before that there was extensive commercial contact and interconnections between ruling class groups in China and Tibet. When Tibet became part of the Yuan Empire, Kublai Khan (a real historical figure mythologized for centuries in the European world) then in effect created a Grand Lama, a sort of Pope Figure in Chinese (including Tibetan) Buddhism, which failed to overcome religious sectarian conflict.
The Ming dynasty, (an ethnic Chinese dynasty) which overthrew the Yuan, pursued different policies, distributing religious titles as European feudal aristocrats gave titles and wealth to their vassals. Conflicts intensified as the later Ming Chinese court for their own purposes gave great power to one Tibetan sect, whose leader eventually took the name of Dalai (or Ocean) Lama.
Meanwhile, the Lamas (or teachers) were, whatever the mysticism surrounding their 'incarnations' and their formal proclamations of peace and decency, in effect great lords and political leaders seeking to gain support from the Chinese court to expand their wealth and power, using Chinese military force to defeat and in some famous examples savagely persecute their rivals. The theocratic conspiracies, murders of various Dalai Lamas by high priests, persecution of rival sects at the very least rivaled the worst internal plots and crimes of European feudal lords and the Papacy. And this went that way for centuries and didn't end until our lifetime.
Tibet was a brutal feudal society which, from my readings, stands among the worst feudal societies in world history, far more repressive than Chinese feudalism and, even with the Buddhist clergy playing a more powerful role than the Catholic clergy and hierarchy in West European feudalism. The overwhelming majority of Tibetans were serfs living and working on manorial estates controlled by the high lamas and secular landlords (who were drawn often from the same families and constituted provincial the ruling class of what was a tribute state of the feudal Confucian Chinese Empire). Serfs had no rights even by the standards of European serfs. If they could not work, their personal property was seized. They could be leased out and even sold. Their children could be taken from them and brought to the monasteries, where they were virtually enslaved Escape or resistance was often met with torture (eye gouging, cutting off of limbs, and even death by beheading).
Actually, referring to this system as feudal in the Marxist sense of a feudal mode of production may be generous. While I see the feudal mode dominating from my understanding of the larger system, it was as a synthesis of feudal and slave modes of production were the slave mode remained very significant. From the perspective of the serf-slaves, it would be difficult to say that the feudal mode predominated over the slave mode. What is important also about this is that the Tibetan old regime could not until the post WWII era be separated from clerical power in the form of the high lamas, led by the Dalai Lama. By the 19th century, though, the region of which Tibet is a part experienced other influences as it became a battleground between the British and Czarist Russian empires in the 19th century at a time that the Chinese empire found itself being carved up into commercial spheres of influence by major capitalist states.
The Chinese masses through the 19th and early 20th centuries experienced the horrors of imperial penetration, the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion and its suppression, the creation of cities within cities where Europeans did what they wished without any Chinese control, the entry of European and U.S. capital into China to develop railroads, mines, and other enterprises for themselves, the brutal suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, and of course the later support that imperial powers gave to various regional warlords, the Chiang regime, and finally the Japanese invasion aimed at transforming China into the foundation of a Japanese global colonial empire. Even though the ruling lamas had not challenged Chinese authority for centuries (Chinese authority was after all the basis of their authority), the Chinese revolution was to change that. As China was fighting the U.S. in the Korean War, the government of the Peoples Republic in effect entered Tibet directly through an agreement with the two leading rulers, the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama (or rather those in power in their courts). Both accepted posts given to them by the new Chinese government in the next few years (or rather their priests), as they had from Chinese governments for centuries, seeking to adjust to and profit from what they probably thought was merely a new dynasty. Regardless of its ideology (little after all had changed under the KMT).
However, as the Chinese began to enact anti-feudal reforms, the high lamas (theocratic landlords) and the secular landlords in effect launched a campaign of resistance. First they demanded in 1956 that the great estates be continued. Then, with direct CIA support, they launched an armed struggle against the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army as it sought to both liberate serfs and recruit them for the liberation of Tibet. With China radicalized under the Great Leap Forward, the Tibetan feudal landlord class declared for the first time ever an independent Tibet in 1959 and launched a military uprising in the capital of Lhasa.
The Peoples Liberation Army suppressed the uprising, which most commentators noted did not have the support of the masses of serfs, and the Dalai Lama then fled to India.
Since then, the dispossessed former Tibetan exploiting classes have continued to fight for a 'free and independent Tibet' which for them at least, like other émigré groups from revolutions through the world, means the restoration of their wealth and power, something as likely as finding Shangri-la.
The Dalai Lama politically has been all over the place in recent years in his statements: praising Marxism at times perhaps to curry some favor with both the Tibetans who realize that their lives have improved and the Chinese government, and showing solidarity with his anti-Chinese friends on the right by embracing Jesse Helms and joining with Margaret Thatcher to oppose the extradition of General Pinochet in London. He has also suggested that the poor should not envy or be hostile to the rich since the rich today are rich because of their good qualities in previous lives (an interesting non monotheistic twist on the use of religion to support privilege).
Americans particularly should know that, according to documents released by the State Department in 1998, the Dalai Lama was receiving an annual 'stipend' from the CIA in the 1960s of $186,000. Although he was a child at the time and in no way directly involved, two of his older brothers were active in the CIA supported propaganda campaigns and uprising in the 1950s.
Today the 'Endowment for Democracy' created by the Reagan administration to do overtly what the CIA did covertly in the ideological conflict is, along with various other U.S. funded organization, providing millions a year to the Tibetan exile community in India and internationally to foster” democracy' in Tibet.
The Chinese, who were barred from the United Nations for twenty-two years by the U.S. government and saw Tibet as a pawn in the cold war against them, certainly know all of that. The also know deeply what the imperialist powers did to them. For the Chinese people, the attacks on their role in Tibet as imperialism, “cultural genocide,” etc., is particularly galling, given the contempt that the imperialist powers showed for Chinese traditions as they went about their business of exploiting China and using force to suppress opposition. I am not saying that the Tibet-China issue is a simple struggle between good revolutionaries and bad counter-revolutionaries, the flip side of the way that capitalist media sees the Chinese as evil warlike villains and portrays the Dalai Lama as a second Mohandas Gandhi.
Tibetans who were liberated from serfdom by Chinese also suffered greatly from the failures of the Chinese revolution – from the economic failures of the Great Leap Forward and especially from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when religion (and the people, from my readings remain very religious) was massively suppressed and ideological dictates prevailed over reason in the creation of large communes.
Also, in recent years, as China has turned toward a 'social market economy,' ethnic or Han Chinese have come to Tibet in significant numbers and tensions and conflicts between Tibetans and ethnic Chinese have become significant. But most of what Tibetans suffered in the Great Leap Forward Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Chinese also suffered.
That some Chinese look down on Tibetans as backward and still feudal is probably true. This, along with the capitalist forms that characterize China's mixed economy may very well be fueling contemporary Tibetan nationalism inside the country that the émigré community supports. But this is separatist nationalism, the kind that has intensified poverty and exploitation through the world in recent decades
Cheerleading for the Dalai Lama and histrionic attacks on the Olympic Torch in the name of human rights. the big stories before the reality of the earth quake pushed them to the periphery, offers the Tibetan people nothing that is positive and denies that questions like slavery and feudalism, the way in which the Dalai Lama and the high lamas lived in the past, and the suffering of the Tibetan people under the old system, are an essential part of human rights.
While the Dalai Lama in recent years has criticized the old feudal system and said that he favors a constitution and representative government in Tibet (like so many of his predecessors over the centuries, he has said many different things at different times to different audiences) China will not support an “independent Tibet” and frankly the Tibetan people would be far worse off if an independent Tibet came into existence. It is difficult to see it becoming anything more than a little Pakistan, a reactionary theocratic state and a “frontline state” used for anti-Chinese purposes. Capital would not be invested by the imperialist powers, and the return of the Dalai Lama, assuming that many of the émigré landlords returned with him, would only lead to a loss of economic and social rights by the people. Angering the Chinese people who know both the feudal history of Tibet and the history of their own bitter experiences with the imperialist powers hurts everyone, except those who seek to foster conflict with China to divert attention here from U.S. economic, social, and political problems.
Let me say in conclusion that those who denounce the Peoples Republic of China for 'cultural genocide' in Tibet should remember that the population has doubled since 1950 and the average life expectancy of Tibetans has increased from 36 years to 65 years.
Those who say that the colonial powers made similar claims should also remember that the colonial powers were liars. They brought forced labor, death and destruction for the colonized peoples of the world. They educated small minorities to do (the hoped) much of the administrative work for them. What they built in all of their colonies they built for themselves.
Feudal Tibet, a society of illiterate brutalized serfs, was no Shangri-la.
No one is claiming that Tibet as part of China's 'social market economy' will be anything like Shangri-la.
But there has and hopefully will continue to be progress. Progress has nothing to do with separatist nationalism. It has everything to do with creating greater economic and social integration among the peoples of Asia, especially the people of the China and India, resolving conflicts and fostering development in regard to standard of living, life expectancy, and social welfare.
