Mountain forces

Tibet

Mountain forces
Mar 22nd 2008
From The Economist print edition

AFP

Two unusual new books analyse Tibet's turbulent past and its uncertain future

CHINA will not hear a word against its imperial claims to Tibet. Any criticism of how it behaves there draws a swift and sometimes brutal response from Beijing. That is what happened this month. On March 10th, the 49th anniversary of the first great uprising against China's military occupation, young Tibetans once again rose up against Chinese control and the takeover of Lhasa and other Tibetan towns by immigrant businessmen and workers. As before, Chinese troops were ordered to put down the rebellion. On March 18th the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, accused the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, of masterminding the violence from his home in exile in India.

Tubten Khetsun's “Memories of Life in Lhasa Under Chinese Rule” begins with that first uprising in 1959. The author was then 18 years old. He had recently passed the state entrance examination and was working for the government as a clerk when the rebellion against China began. He was at the Dalai Lama's summer palace on the edge of today's Lhasa when the Chinese responded by bombarding the residence. The Dalai Lama had already secretly left the country. As a member of a prominent Lhasa family of government servants Mr Khetsun was declared a “class enemy” along with the rest of his family and sentenced to five years in jail. All their property, including their house, was confiscated and the family was scattered.

Mr Khetsun was moved from prison to slave-labour camp and back again. When he was finally set free he could work only where his neighbourhood committee ordained. That meant labouring on government hydro-electricity stations or smashing stones on other building sites—under-paid jobs that only requisitioned labour could fill. Each day ten or 12 hours of heavy work was followed by two hours of political indoctrination and “struggle” sessions, a euphemism for the violent personal attacks the Chinese used to destroy dissent.

There is a deep sense of isolation reflected in this depressing and cruel story of men and women being deprived, crushed, starved and exploited. When news reached them of the Indo-China border conflict in 1962 and the Sino-Soviet clashes in 1969 they believed Tibet was about to be liberated. There are also some shocking descriptions of the Mao-induced famines when starving Tibetan prisoners would search the faeces and vomit of fellow prisoners for any food that had not been digested. The only humour in this setting is black. Tibetans who had collaborated in the Chinese takeover and who later fell victim to China's deadly political battles entered the work camps exuding ideological solidarity and eager-beaver enthusiasm, rushing from place to place with their heavy loads of stone. Within a few days they were broken hulks, emaciated and covered in sores, more helpless than the original camp inmates.

Pico Iyer, who is of Tamil origin, has written a very different book. A journalist son of an Indian-born academic, he grew up in Britain and California, was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, and now lives in Japan with his Japanese partner. Mr Iyer is a man of many cultures, who has known the 14th Dalai Lama since he was a teenager, when his father first sought out the Tibetan leader in his exile in Dharamsala and took his uninterested son to meet him. This background has given Mr Iyer an access and insight into the Dalai Lama that lifts his writing above the clichés that normally surround him, whether it is Rupert Murdoch's “political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes” or the “living god” of some of his followers.

Mr Iyer is not a devotee of Tibetan Buddhism, but he admires the Dalai Lama's constant learning, his philosophy and his spiritual and secular insights. “The Open Road” is not a biography but it probably reveals more about its subject than any formal study. After nearly 30 years of annual visits to Dharamsala, Mr Iyer has met everyone of any significance in the Tibetan exile community. He takes the reader to the Dalai Lama's mass teachings in Japan, Canada, America and India.

The one word most commonly heard in the Dalai Lama's conversations and in this book is dialogue. Modernisation, surprisingly for a leader who is branded a “splittist” and feudalist by the Chinese authorities and has supposedly been reincarnated 14 times over as many generations, comes a close second.

It is easy to understand the Chinese leadership's fear of the Dalai Lama. Half a century after his escape from Chinese occupation his name inside Tibet is still as powerful as ever, perhaps more so given his access to the rest of the world and the support he now has in the West. As the symbol of Tibet's independence, the Dalai Lama is the only recognised international figure with the moral authority to chastise the Chinese authorities for their abuse of their own people as well as Tibetans. For all Tibetans, in exile or living under Beijing's rule, he is their homeland, their faith and their sense of self, as Mr Iyer explains. For this reason the Chinese government seems quite content to stall talks with him and his representatives on the assumption that he will die soon and that will be the end of it.

The Dalai Lama's suggestion that on his death he could be reborn outside Tibet is likely to cause some distress among Chinese rulers, if only briefly. The atheist Communist Party of China insists it is the only authority that can determine whose terrestrial body the soul of a dead monk will move to. But the Dalai Lama may have outwitted them. His latest “modernist” suggestion is an internationally observed referendum in Tibet and among the Tibetan diaspora to decide how or indeed if he should be reincarnated at all. Tibetan nationalism remains a determined and untiring force.

Memories of Life in Lhasa Under Chinese Rule.
By Tubten Khetsun. Translated by Matthew Akester.
Columbia University Press; 318 pages; $32.50 and £19

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
By Pico Iyer.
Knopf; 288 pages; $24. Bloomsbury; £12.99