We got back yesterday and now I can use my Gmail and send this little opinion bit that might have caused me a problem if I had done it in China. I heard of a couple of instances of tourists sending critical emails and getting an early flight home so decided not to take the small risk.
Background.
When the Chinese army took over Tibet in 1950 it ended 50 years of sort of independence from China which before had been the overlords, to grossly simplify. In 1959 there was a big revolt against the Chinese because of land reform which is when the Dalia Lama and others went to India. At that time the only people with any education were the monks and the monasteries also owned a lot of land. These people had ruled Tibet as a theocracy just like the Ayatollahs in Iran and lead the revolt because not only was their land being taken but closure of the monasteries was starting. I think the peasants who did all the work were not too upset about the land reform but would not have liked the closures of monasteries. Between 2008-12 there were protests by the Tibetans about Chinese rule and the inflow of Han Chinese into Tibet which included over 100 people setting themselves on fire.
What I saw.
Probably the heaviest security presence of any place I have been. Police stations at every major intersection both in urban and rural areas; crowd control infrastructure every place of cultural significance; police checkpoints outside every town and village; controls at all petrol stations so it is hard to buy petrol to douse yourself with; police with fire extinguishers at all major cultural places and police, military, fire brigades and flinty-eyed guys in matching tracksuits and caps all over the place. And that is just the stuff you can see as a tourist. However all of this is just the short game to stop embarrassing things happening now. The long game is to make the native Tibetans a minority in their country and in doing so to ensure the troublesome culture gradually becomes not much more than a tourist attraction. Independent travellers are not encouraged and you cannot use local transport and you have to have an officially accepted guide. I organised my trip through an agency in Beijing and they told me not to include my Tibetan itinerary in my visa application and gave me one that was completely fictitious, and assured me no would know and I wouldn’t go to jail.
When you talk to Chinese about Tibet they are genuinely unable to understand why there is a problem. They have provided the infrastructure to take the place from being a feudal religious dictatorship reliant on subsistence agriculture, provided health care and education, put in amazing roading and railways and generally spent heaps on the place, so why are they unhappy ? When you try and explain that their culture is their religion and vice versa and that it is being gradually squeezed away you get a blank response of the “what is wrong with them” kind. All of the stuff being done by the Chinese that can be construed as good for the Tibetans is also good for allowing more and more Han Chinese to settle there and from what I glean there are certainly more Chinese than locals now with the gap continuing to grow. A knowledgeable Tibetan told me it was 10 to 1 which I think that is a big exaggeration but it indicates how it feels to him. If you want a job outside farm labouring you need to speak Mandarin and the education system is based on that language so in the longer term the language is under threat. The monasteries which are the guardians of the Tibetan culture have largely been rebuilt but are controlled as to the number of monks and what they can do – you never see or hear anything about the present Dalai Lama or the Panchin Lama. It is expected that the next generation of religious leaders will owe their existence to China. Nothing is possible without your identity card and apparently if you are a nuisance, but not jailable, your card can be cancelled and you have several problems one of which being that you will be fired from any job.
The Tibetan devotion to their exotic religion and the photogenic Dalai Lama seem to have fired a western sympathy for the Tibetan people in their fight against the Chinese and that is easy to understand. However I bet very few of the people who support the Dalai Lama and think Tibet should be free would be keen to live in a country where a bunch of monks are completely in control. One can have sympathy and all that but it is not going to change the reality which is that “Free Tibet” is never going to happen while the communists rule China and one suspects that is for a while yet. And even if some time in the future China does a bit of a USSR and bits fall off, Tibetans are going to be a small minority in their country (and they don’t have a treaty to fall back on).
The last thing I did in Tibet was an interesting metaphor for what is happening. It was a debate in a monastery that took place outside in a lovely old courtyard with a gravel surface and lots of leafy trees. There were about 40 maroon cloaked monks who drifted in and paired off, with one sitting on a stool and the other standing in front. The standing person seemed to be making the running, emphasising his points with emphatic claps which started like an overhead tennis serve. The one sitting replied quietly although a few got a bit heated. I gather that after an hour they changed sides and it was mostly an exercise in examination and education. The crowd watching was mostly Chinese tourists and locals, and included the guys in tracksuits who one would not want to have to talk to. Quite clearly one lot of the watchers thought it was really important and the other was wondering why would so much effort go into something that was a bunch of fairy tales and of no significance today.
Dennis.