making Tibet "Hanfrei"

Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, accused China of "cultural genocide" after a violent crackdown on Buddhist monks and Tibetan citizens in the capital Lhasa and other Tibetan centres left at least 100 people dead.

Or so it is claimed. There was a time, during the Cultural Revolution and its attendant campaign to eradicate feudal thoughts and practices, when China’s policy in Tibet was actually near genocidal. Overall, a government of unparalleled ruthlessness has had over nearly sixty years in complete control of Tibet to commit “cultural genocide” if that was its policy. And yet, after that time, we have a mass uprising in support of Tibetan independence by people who believe themselves to be culturally Tibetan.

This is actually the best argument for Tibetan independence. China has had various policies towards Tibet. Above all, it’s had sixty years to establish the inevitability of the fact of Chinese control, to exert weight and permanence through any stick/carrot combination it can think of. And the end result is that many or most Tibetans will have none of it. Tibetans themselves may be subject to control by outsiders and be in the position of losers in a forced modernisation programme. But their cultural identity seems to be doing just fine.

A proximate reason for the use of the word “cultural” here is to extract political value from the use of the word “genocide”, which would not apply otherwise. At any rate, the phrase crops up a lot in political discourse about Tibet: google gives you a whopping 539,000 hits. But it’s a particularly dangerous technique when you have – for the first time in the recent history of Tibetan uprisings – lynch mobs roaming the streets of Lhasa looking for Han and Hui victims. Or perhaps they’re just resisting cultural genocide. After all, if you recast the Tibetan independence struggle in racial nationalist terms then every Chinese who pollutes the sacred soil of Tibet is an oppressor, subject to summary justice.

Comments

[CL]

How enlightening! We were too nice to them! We had 60 years to kill them off and round them up into reservations....but we blew it. By allowing them to keep their unique culture and traditions, we are actually supporting the argument for Tibetan independence. Thanks for your insight.