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hope you appreciate the risk I am taking in writing about this on my Web page. The Golden Firewall and the Nanny are not the most sophisticated of filtering softwares, and I may easily spit out the string of words that will make my own Web page forever inaccessible.

However, amidst the international hysteria surrounding what is going down in Tibet, I feel compelled to write my take on it.

This is not a news article. I am not going to cite every single source for everything I have heard. I am merely putting to word all that has been kicking about my head since Friday, but without the charge found in most media coverage. AFP and Reuters were quite objective, but the New York Times continues to tow strings of unsubstantiated claims and misrepresented facts.

How riots happen

Various headlines have attempted to brand the riots in Tibet as being “pro democracy.” This is, at best, laughable, and shows the utter ignorance of foreign media to what is going on. The only thing anyone anywhere knows right now is that at least 10 people are dead: whether they are soldiers or civilians is anyone’s guess. (Edit: As of Monday, it is 16 dead, with five or more being police and soldiers.)

This is a riot like any other, and attempting to hold up the confused, initial screams of terrified people as gospel truth is a serious mistake. The Dalai Lama supporters outside Tibet are the only ones to claim that Chinese soldiers opened fire on the crowds. He himself has said there are 80 bodies, but I doubt his astral projection skills as much as I doubt the power-hungry yes-men he has surrounded himself with for 40 years.

The monks were marching all week. Why is one thing no one has been clear about. Most likely, it is for the same reason they usually march. Since the Dalai Lama was spirited out of Tibet in 1969, the power of the religious orders have continued to dwindle. Traditionally, Tibet’s monks were the aristocrats of the country. It was a theocracy. They, in a kind of spiritual and political fusion, commanded legions of serfs who died young and no hope of advancement in this life. This was done with the approval of the Yuan and Qing dynasty government, which were more interested in Tibetan tribute than the welfare of minority subjects.

I guess 40 years is hardly enough time to get over losing your god-given right to manipulate and abuse the shit out of anyone less politically influential than yourself.

As in most protests, people got arrested. In Tibet, this means monks got arrested. All was well until a group of monks attempted to march on Lhasa from a monastery in the north, and were stopped at the border by local police. The monks got angry and attacked, and the local police responded by arresting everyone at the scene to sort it out later.

Unfortunately, nearby Tibetans joined in the assault. Some fled, and others got swept up along with the monks. Word spread through the Tibetan community, and soon Tibetans took the to streets with backpacks full of rocks, knives and gasoline. The Chinese Han majority was their target, and any Han-owned shop, hotel or car was vandalized and burned. Tibetan mobs descended on Chinese civilians, beating, stabbing and stoning them. Last I heard, at least 160 - 200 stores, as well as several entire markets, had been burned to the ground. Some estimates went as far as to say that 30 percent of Lhasa had been torched by the Tibetans.

For US readers, hopefully this sounds similar to the LA riots, except without the acquittal of a LA cops who beat the shit out of a crazy man while he was hopped up on angel dust.

Lhasa, as well as many other areas with a strong Tibetan population, are currently being patrolled by military vehicles and a curfew is in effect to prevent more violence.

The Dalai Lama said this incident was the expression of the “deep-rooted resentment of the Tibetan people under the present (Chinese) governance.” That may be so, but the problem is that “deep-rooted resentment” means something entirely different than what Western media thinks it means.

Now is not the time to be hurling around slurs against the ruling communist party. The idea that somehow capitalism wears a white hat and communism wears a black hat and these two isms duke it out on the world stage is so backwards it could only work in Rocky IV. The world is more complex than Ivan Drago, though him killing Apollo Creed to the tune of “Livin’ in America” is propaganda any government would kill to have on its side.

I have limited respect for the monks, if any. Most of these men are members of an old order, desperate to recover the political influence that has been lost since the Chinese government forcibly separated church and state. However, the plight of the Tibetan people is a sad affair, and one that is echoed by native populations around the world.

Where did this begin?

Tibet is a mess and has been a mess for a long time. Before 1949, it was anything but the Utopia that Richard Gear would have you believe. Check out The Making of Modern Tibet by Tom Grunfield, a book I ran across while doing a research paper on the topic my last year of university.

According to his sources, by the early 1900s, more than half the Tibetan people suffered venereal disease, and most of their medicine was made of the Dalai Lama’s urine and feces, which the monks collected in a golden receptacle. Even Qing Imperial records note that when he came to Beijing with his monks, the receptacle followed to collect the most powerful of all Tibetan medicines. There was no education in the entire country outside monastic education, and few children ever had the opportunity to enter monastic studies: how to interpret the sutras and more effectively swindle true believers out of their money.

Combine this with the abject poverty and you had a lovely little feudalism.

Tibet became part of China in 1246 AD when it surrendered to the Mongols, who then incorporated it and China proper into the Yuan Dynasty. After the collapse of the Yuan, Chinese and Mongolian influence in Tibet waned, and there was little interest in the area during Ming Dynasty.

The Qing Dynasty changed all that. Its Manchu rulers learned from the mistakes of the Yuan, and established a dynasty that lasted from 1616 - 1924. They aimed to reclaim many of the lands previously possessed by the Yuan, including Xinjiang, Mongolia and Tibet.

In 1727, under the reign of Yongzheng, Chinese forces entered Lhasa and laid down the boundary between China and its Tibetan tributary, with Lhasa remaining under Tibetan control. The Qing installed two commissioners in the city, who were to possess power equal to the Dalai and Panchen lamas.

In 1750, the Lhasa government murdered the commissioners, and the Qianlong emperor sent in Qing troops to crush the rebels and install the Dalai Lama as head of the Tibetan administration. Lhasa became home to a permanent installment of 2,000 Chinese soldiers.

Three of the following Dalai Lamas were selected by a “golden urn” lottery system that was established by the Qing government, and those not selected by the lottery still went through Qing approval.

From then until the British invasion of India, Tibet was effectively part of China. It was ruled by an administration the Chinese government put in power, and routinely defended from Nepalese aggression by the Chinese military.

Hint: 1750 means it was fully incorporated into China proper even before the founding of the USA.

Things get muddy

The Chinese government weakened under internal corruption, British attack and Japanese invasion. The British, having already taken control of India by 1904, needed a base to spy into the Russian interior. The set their sights on Tibet and marched in. The Dalai Lama fled into Qing-controlled Mongolia, a Tibetan Buddhist region, and in his absence the British forced every official they could locate to sign a paper saying Tibet now belonged to the British crown.

China went ape shit, because Tibet was part of China, and the British government should have muscled Beijing for the rights instead. The already weak government tried to send troops to repel the invasion, but when they arrived, the British had pulled out. Local Tibetans murdered the troops. The Qing government had already been discredited for its failure to repel the Japanese.

The country splintered into the hands of local warlords. The new nationalist government hardly held any power even in its capital, let alone in distant provinces. Despite this, neither the Qing government, the Republic or China nor the People’s Republic of China ever renounced its claim to sovereignty of Tibet, even though they handed Mongolia over to the USSR to curry Soviet favor.

As part of its campaign to reunify the country, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army marched on Tibet in 1950 and forced the Tibetans to sign an agreement saying that they were still part of China. The new government took a more active interest in public works like education, health care and roadways.

Whether this was for the good of the people or to ensure effective administration is as debatable as public education and road works are in any country.

This was, at first, somewhat welcomed by the monks. However, the Lamas grew opposed as they saw their political power cut away. They were already losing their serfs, and with them their primary source of revenue and food. God forbid the aristocrats work.

The CIA and Kissinger pulled some operations in Tibet with the Nepalese government and created incredible turmoil there during the 1960s. In 1969, the Dalai Lama’s followers spirited him out of the country when they saw their grip on political power doomed.

Tibet was rocked by the same problems as all of China during The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Tons of shit was destroyed or vandalized and several thousand monasteries were leveled. It sounds like a lot, but you have to come to Asia to understand how tiny of a building can be called a “monastery” and how many thousands are still standing.

What “resentment” really is

I think that the people who can best appreciate Tibet’s situation, aside from Tibetans, are native populations in North America — or what is left of them. While today, North American governments have favorable policies as a way of “making up” for centuries of genocide and land grabs, such policies can never be enough.

In the modern USA, Native Americans are viewed as a cultural curiosity.

They are wise medicine men, peddlers of cheap jewelry, casino owners or drunks who are notable only for their continued existence as total outsiders. Arab taxi drivers in New York are seen a more a part of cultural America than the Navajo weaving woman.

White families drive out to reservations to see these quaint people much as they drive to the zoo to see monkeys. The native populations continue to dwindle as government policies draw them away from the reservations and into the public education system, which is highly effective at eradicating heritage and rendering them “American.” Many tribes no longer have a living descendant who can speak the tribe’s own language.

A quick look at Ethnologue should be enough to inspire tears of shame: more than 300 languages in North America are entirely extinct, and these are only the languages which were studied and named.

When you hear the Dalai Lama talk about cultural genocide, this is what he means. Sure Tibetans continue to learn Tibetan in public school, and unlike the Native Americans, they continue to live in their homeland, but with the spread of pop culture and the overwhelming opportunities provided by a working knowledge of Chinese, Tibetans are being pushed into the mainstream. Many who leave Tibet find government jobs that favor minorities or go into business packaging and selling their culture for mass consumption in cuisine and performance.

The Han Chinese people headed for Tibet are going there to capitalize on the Han hunger for tourism. Just as many of those Navajo jewelry sellers in the US southwest are actually out of work Mexican ladies, so many hawkers in Lhasa are Hans in Tibetan dress. It’s all the same for tourists who snap a few photos, buy their trinkets and head home.

That Tibetan people are failing to compete in the tourism business against Han outsiders speaks more of their business sense than any government policy. Let’s face it, if Chinese people can recognize that foreign tourists will pay US $20 for terra cotta warrior statues that cost a nickel to make, they can almost certainly figure out what Tibetan-looking junk will appeal to fellow Chinese tourists.

You can find the same situation in Inner Mongolia, and I suspect in Xinjiang as well. In Inner Mongolia, the Mongols were forced to settle and abandon their nomadic lifestyle. For a Mongol, to be a Mongol means to be a nomad. In Inner Mongolian cities, there is an intense rift between the Han and Mongol populations. The Han look down on the Mongols as being uncultured, rough types, and the Mongols view the Han as invaders with no right to be on their lands in the first place. Somehow, they all end up in the same schools and find common ground in Chinese productions about Genghis Khan, who everyone — except the Catholic Church — loves.

Anger

Tibetans have a right to be angry and upset. What is happening sucks, but it is not a unique problem. Native cultures have been destroyed all over the world. They have been beaten down for thousands of years, and are today in “globalization.” Tibetans got lucky and found a few very influential spokespeople, and the backing of governments still locked into an us-versus-them Cold War mentality.

I grew up in the end of Cold War era. I remember being assigned in fifth grade to write papers on “Why I would not want to live in a communist country,” and more specifically “Why I would not want to live in China.” In middle school, they showed us “documentaries” about poor Mexican communities and how “these Mexicans will make their run across the border tonight.” For years, I sat through the same propaganda as everyone else, which portrayed the USA as the best country in the world and where everyone wanted to go — legally or illegally.

Well, I escaped, and I’m sorry to shatter some dreams, but the world is far more complicated than that. When I talk to people here in China about school life and other common topics, they are often saddened to realize that life in the USA is not any different from life here, or life anywhere else, I would suspect.

I do hope the Tibetans find a way to preserve their culture. Very few people retain their own ideas when faced with a media, pop culture and education which all promote assimilation. Cultures are unique in the world, and when they vanish, they can never be recovered.

However, this smear campaign against the Chinese government is wrong, and the monks scrambling to reconstruct a savage theocracy have become experts at manipulating foreign media. The USA and other countries remain hungry for any chance to pounce on communism. In some ways, the 1980s never ended.

China will renounce its claim to Tibet the day the USA renounces its claim to, well, America. And much as the USA has done every time a part of the country attempted to break away, it will reunite: possibly by force.

Overall, I think China has learned a lot since 1989, especially given its the handling of the current crisis in Tibet. According to some media reports, soldiers were mauled by Tibetans and struck in the head with rocks, but they still did not open fire. One story carried by a non-Chinese news wire said they heard soldier shouting not to fire, and most reports of gunfire have said the gunfire was into the air to scare people away.

The only report of a shooting comes from one of the Dalai Lama’s guys in India, who said he heard from a person who heard from a person that Chinese soldiers opened fire on a crowd, killing two people. Pardon me, but even a Chinese-made AK can project a bullet fast enough where, if you aimed it at a crowd, the single bullet will take down several people.

Exit wounds for the win.

The report would be believable … if all the Tibetans marched in neat rows like British Imperial troops during the days of volley fire, and if the Chinese soldiers were armed with Revolutionary War-era muskets.

I hope things calm down soon and there is not another disaster like 1989. The country cannot afford that, especially this being the year of the Olympics.

To some extent, I imagine those monks were trying to get the soldiers to shoot them. A Chinese soldier shooting a monk on camera while the world watched would be all that is needed to whip up the kind of international frenzy that would cause a boycott of the Olympics and more aggressive intervention.

Other posts of interest

• Stallman boycotts China, should you? …
• (Not) Blocked in the Mainland …
• Chinese History in America …
• Sigh … …