Seat of Our Pants

I took this picture during the protests against the Beijing Olympics in San Francisco. The protests were to be a manifestation against Chinese oppression of Tibetans. Instead, thousands of Chinese showed up with their own flags, generally drowning out the noise of the Tibetan protesters. Gavin Newsom, the Mayor of San Francisco, decided to march the Oympic Torch down a sealed-off highway strip rather than a public street. This pretty much sums up how the struggle for a free Tibet is going: nowhere at all.

The Chinese will never let go of Tibet. They can’t. They don’t want to. First of all, whoever owns the Tibetan plateau has all the military advantages of the area. In strategical terms, if you own Tibet you can’t lose China. The Chinese know this. The Indians and the Russians certainly know this. The Chinese have invested billinos and billions of dollars into infrastructure in Tibet, and they feel that they have done a lot to pull the area out of the dark ages.

On the other hand, their human rights record in the area is appalling. The Dalai Lama recently referred to the Chinese conquest as an ‘ethnic genocide’. They keep policement in the monasteries to make sure that no meaningful activities ever take place there. They keep untold numbers of political prisoners, and they have a long-term plan to outnumber the Tibetans with Han Chinese immigrants (who gets all kinds of monetary incentives to move to the plateau). This is just what’s happening now – I won’t go into what happened during the Cultural Revolution, because it is too depressing for this forum.

As China now emerges as a superpower, thinking people areound the world are trying to broker a solution. The best deal, they say, is if China accepts the Dalai Lama in the same role as the Pope had during much of Europe’s history. He would reign supreme in all matters of religion, and would defer to Beijing in other matters. It is a solution that has worked before, as this was the way things worked between China and Tibet for many centuries before the upheavals of the 20th century.

While we talk about this, matters in Tibet continute to be dismal. The Olympics, and now the Communist Party’s 60th jubilee, has led the Chinese to clamp down on things even more severely than before. It is harder than ever to travel independently in Tibet. The Dalai Lama is backed into a corner here in Dharamsala, surrounded by refugees, backpackers and aid workers.

It’s all a pity, because things could really be so much better for everyone involved.

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