Diane Wolff
Tibetan Review
March 19, 2015
Guards keep watch over Buddhist pilgrims near the Jokhang temple in Lhasa. (Photo courtesy: Greg Baker/AP)
Diane Wolff* argues that China’s orthodox communist ideology of ethnic sensitivity and assimilation practiced within the framework of a “tight reins” policy is inherently faulty, that it has failed and reportedly reached a dead end in Tibet, as well as Xinjiang; she suggests that Beijing opt for the historically proven, win-win “loose reins” model of restricting its powers only to national sovereignty issues.
Sixty-four years ago, the People’s Republic of China invaded Eastern Tibet and wrested an agreement for the peaceful liberation of Tibet from the governor of the easternmost province.
The year was 1950, five years after the end of World War II. The People’s Republic of China was barely a year old. Much has been written about Mao Zedong as a utopian thinker, a giant of twentieth-century history who despised bourgeois thinking and bourgeois forms of government, who believed that socialism and communism were superior forms.
Mao had come to power as a revolutionary leader and a theorist of people’s war, but he was a cold-blooded practitioner of geopolitics.
In public, Mao enunciated the ideological line of communism, using anti-imperialist rhetoric. In private—as shown by newly opened Cold War archives of the PRC—he was a realist. He had the emperor’s syndrome: this was an imperial taste, a predilection that drew more on national tradition and history than on communist ideology. He indulged in the colonial strategy of creating buffer zones at the perimeters of territory. It was a bit hypocritical. While denouncing the colonialism of the West, a justly deserved criticism, he practiced colonialism to establish his new People’s Republic. It was a contradiction much commented on by the Politburo member, Hu Yaobang, when Hu visited Tibet in the 1980s. “This looks like colonialism,” is what Hu said. And it was. And it is.
A power vacuum cannot exist at the heart of Asia and Mao knew it. Mao decided that China’s borders would be the southern Himalayas because he feared the encroachment of Russia and India—China had border disputes with both. The new rulers of China, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, wished to close China’s back door from foreign encroachment. With modern weapons, the security of China’s southwestern border is no longer an issue. The borders can be protected. This is the one and only geopolitical goal that the Chinese gain from the “tight reins” policy in Tibet.
The Chinese theory of minority peoples derives from the Soviet experience. Both ethnic sensitivity and assimilation are correct in terms of orthodox communist ideology. The PRC has see-sawed between ethnic sensitivity and assimilation in Tibet for the past sixty years. Both approaches have failed because the theory is flawed.
The nationalities theory adopted by the PRC at its beginning was invented by Josef Stalin when he was Commissar of Nationalities early in his career and resulted in hideous human rights abuses. The nomads of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan were considered backward. He took their tents away and settled them in apartment buildings as this type of dwelling was considered “modern.” Rather than allowing their horses to be sent to the sausage factory, the nomads released their beautiful Akhal-Tekes, the famed Horse of Heaven, the ancestors of modern thoroughbreds, into the desert. They are a desert breed and they had a chance of survival if they were not turned into a meal. Communism was supposed to be scientific. The minority theory stated that ethnic identity was a product of bourgeois society, that when socialism had advanced to a significant degree, the nomads would no longer identify as ethnics, but would identify with their class, that of the proletarian.
The history of the twentieth century proves this to be a mistaken notion. After seventy years of Communist rule, Yugoslavia broke up along ethnic lines. Ethnic identity is a more powerful form of human identity than class identification. These traditions run deep and the state has been unable to eradicate them. It is as though the state has aligned itself against human nature.
The worst riots in decades erupted in 2008 in the months leading up to the Beijing Olympics. With its origins in Marx’s theory of labor, the central idea of Soviet minority theory was that with the triumph of socialism, ethnic differences would fade away. Workers would identify with the international proletariat. The theory has been dumped on the ash-heap of history. The twentieth century has taught that ethnicity is a far more enduring human trait than class—witness the former Yugoslavia.
China’s foreign policy traditionally focused more on its Inner Asian borders than on its maritime coast. With the American involvement in Afghanistan winding down, it is in the U. S. interest for China to emerge as the stabilizing force in the Central and South Asian region. Its failed policy in Tibet will be a hindrance.
The government’s investment of billions of yuan in China can only take it so far. China has adopted the Asian solution, that of putting social stability above individual rights.
Tibet has been conceived of as a multi-ethnic province of China, but the PRC’s unequal treatment of Tibetans has placed its center of protest in the monasteries, the only public space available for resistance to the top down regime. The ongoing protests cannot be snuffed out by assimilation. The idea of creating in Tibet a majority Han Chinese population has been built on the idea of destroying Tibetan culture, expressed and contained in the Buddhist religion.
At the time of the invasion, China did not yet have the atomic bomb—in a nuclear age, the principal reason for the invasion of Tibet has evaporated. The CIA estimates that if nuclear war breaks out anywhere in the world, the likelihood is that it will break out between India and Pakistan. With three nuclear powers in the region, China could emerge as a balancing force between India and Pakistan, much as it has in North Asia, serving as an interlocutor with North Korea.
This is a momentous time in South Asian history. It is rumored that in Beijing, behind the plum-colored walls of the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leadership does not know what to do about Tibet. The use of the network model to replace the old Soviet model and a return to “loose reins”, could be the way forward.
A review of nationalities policy might revive a historical model, one applied successfully for over a century by Chinggis Khan. Call it the “loose reins” model of the Mongol Empire. The greatest warlord in Asia required the paying of taxes and service in the army and public works labor. He placed a Mongol military governor in the region. He used local forms of taxation and administration. He built roads and maintained security. He never attempted social engineering, creating a new Tibetan. He maintained the peace, promoted trade and left the nationalities to their ethnicity and religion. Freedom of religion was the hallmark of the empire. It was a “render unto Caesar” solution. The locals knew best how to deal with local climate conditions, and in the high Himalaya, with the problem of the glaciers melting, glaciers that feed the five greatest rivers in Asia and provide the watershed for millions of people, the idea of local control, the protection of one of the world’s most diverse and fragile ecosystems, might be left to the locals.
A regional solution offers hope. Tibet could become a member of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), a common market organization that could counter-balance the proliferation of the trade in illegal arms, heroin trafficking and the export of jihadism in the region. (China is already an observer.)
The old lamaist system is gone. With a change of policy dictated by the simple longevity of the PRC, with a new minorities model, what would come is a new governmental form, one that could be tolerated within the Chinese system. Recent events in Hong Kong, where the promise of one country, two systems was tested, should be a red flag to the Chinese leadership.
The thorniest issue is what to do about the Dalai Lama. Even Chairman Mao believed that the Dalai Lama was the key to bringing Tibet into the empire. It was his original intent to leave the Dalai Lama in place. History got in the way. This is not the place to discuss events which are a sore point. A new language has to be invented to get past the present impasse in thinking. A new set of governmental forms and solutions, with flexibility, have to be invented to contain the present situation. Fortunately the historical model exists. It lasted for a hundred years and it was successful. That is the “loose reins” model. Fortunately it provides a solution to the most difficult problem, that of the government in exile.
The Dalai Lama should be repatriated as a religious figure. To Tibetans, he is an expression of their culture, rather than a political leader.
The way to the future would be to allow the Dalai Lama to repatriate as a private citizen and take up residence, as he says it is his intention, in a monastery. The greatest fear of the Chinese leadership is that of the empire breaking apart, because the empire has broken apart in Chinese history, more than once. The idea of social stability is paramount to the leadership, but present policies are leading to increasing unrest, not only in Tibet but also in Xinjiang, China’s far western province that had been, until the recent transfer of Han populations, a Muslim majority province. The “loose reins” model could also apply to Xinjiang. This would rid China of the headache of maintaining the gulag system and enforcing infringement of the law for the practice of religion in both cases.
This solution has the added advantage of a compromise, eliminating calls for total independence, those who genuinely advocate “splittism”, from some Tibetans in exile. The solution solves the hideous public relations problem that China’s ongoing abuse of human rights creates, an embarrassment before the global community, and one that the Chinese leadership sees as a negative. The thin skin and the paranoid admonishment not to interfere in Chinese internal affairs, the reminders of the Century of Humiliation are excuses that dim with time. The immolations and the protests continue. The gulag is a fact. It is as though China is saying, “We have the right to use abusive policies because we were wronged.” This is a stance unbecoming to an emerging regional power.
If the policy doesn’t work, no amount of guilt-mongering over past wrongs by colonial powers will solve the problem.
The PRC’s politburo’s relaxing of central planning in Tibet and devolving of control to a regional model would parallel the successful creation of the Special Economic Zones on the Chinese coast. The departure from Leninist theory on finance for the Special Economic Zones would have a parallel in the departure on the theory of nationalities for what could be termed a Special Ethnic, Trade and Ecological Zone (SETEZ).
Tibet, with its tradition of non-violence, is the perfect regional leader. Once the human rights questions are resolved by the new autonomy, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as private capital, would have the way cleared for participation in the Tibetan economy. This could then be diversified, in a sustainable fashion, along lines that would enable Tibet to export outward into the region, instead of internally, back to China.
Will the present Chinese leadership reconsider the hard line and realize that with the elimination of the old minority policy inherited from the USSR, a win-win solution in Tibet is possible? A faulty intellectual basis is the underpinning of the institutionalization of this policy. The Fifth Generation of Chinese leadership—the Gorbachev generation that came to power in 2012 has the chance to change the situation for the better, for it is clear that no good result can come of the present situation. The “loose reins” model is an Asian solution to an Asian problem and does not rely upon playing to domestic audiences for political gain. In fact, the materialistic generations that have emerged during China’s economic miracle have turned to Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism for spiritual sustenance. It is an ironic fact of history that this is the model that led previous Chinese emperors, from the Mongol Khans to the Ming and the Qing emperors, to practice the religion in what was clearly not a threat to the state. The real threat to the dynastic system came from the failure to modernize.
* Diane Wolff is the author of Tibet Unconquered: An Epic Struggle for Freedom, published by Palgrave MacMillan. She is also the author of two books on Chinese culture, one an award-winning book on Chinese calligraphy. She is widely published and has reviewed works on Chinese history and Tibetan literature, as well as software for Chinese language-learning.
