27.03.2008

Tibet: Modernisation does not excuse oppression

James Turley investigates the historical background and the response of the left in Britain

Tibet has become one stick among many with which celebrity liberals, new age romantics, the Labour and Tory front benches, social imperialists and anti-imperialists alike can unite, no matter how temporarily, in opposition to the ostensibly ‘communist’ People’s Republic of China.

Riots have hit Lhasa and elsewhere in the past week, and various reports of injuries and death have emerged from each side. While corroboration of such incidents is next to impossible there can be no doubt that many people have been killed. Tibet has certainly been flooded with Chinese police and army personnel. A bad time for Beijing, given the Olympics jamboree. On March 24, pro-Tibet demonstrators from Reporters Without Borders disrupted the Olympic flame ceremony in Greece and got global media coverage.

Tibet was formerly under Chinese sovereignty since at least the days of the Qing dynasty in the 18th century. Saying that confers no ‘historic rights’, however. After all, the same can be said at different times for Korea, Burma, Vietnam, etc. Certainly, as imperial power in the ‘heavenly kingdom’ waned, putative ruling classes in China’s ‘near abroad’ sought to break away. Only ultra-Chinese nationalists would today call for the reincorporation of Korea or Vietnam.

Tibet’s rulers exercised a de facto high degree of autonomy during the Qing dynasty. The Tibetan plateau is at exceedingly high altitude, inaccessible and agriculturally poor. Not for nothing is it called the roof of the world. Existing state structures - a feudal-theocratic despotism, not least the spiritual and political dictatorship of the Dalai Lama - were left intact by foreign invaders such as the Chinese and British.

Meanwhile the mass of Tibet’s population laboured as serfs and in grinding poverty at that. Without hospitals, sanitation and health services life expectancy was terribly short. Shangri-la was always a cruel myth, a travesty.

By the early 20th century imperial China was in an advanced state of decay. Numerous splits and divisions erupted within the ruling dynasty, along with revolts below. The 1911 Wunchang revolution marked the effective end of the Qing dynasty. China became a republic and Tibet’s elite seized their opportunity. Independence was declared. Though the British raj in India was eager to extend its sphere of influence to the north, neither Britain nor any of the other great powers extended diplomatic recognition. Nevertheless, the Dalai Lama regime effectivly ruled most of Tibet.

This changed in 1950-51, when the newly-formed People’s Republic under Mao Zedong invaded Tibet, and imposed the ‘17-point agreement’ on the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, asserting far more direct powers for Beijing. The old feudal state was subsequently destroyed, and land reforms similar to those in China itself carried out.

Since then, Tibet has been ruled in a fairly ordinary colonial fashion, with millions of settlers - mostly Han Chinese - moving in, particularly into Qinghai, the easternmost area, where they now constitute a large majority.

In the recent riots, those Han Chinese have been the main victims. The Wall Street Journal relates the eyewitness accounts of two such victims, with one claiming that the riots were “masterminded by the Dalai Lama and were aimed at disrupting the Beijing Olympics in August - an assertion repeatedly made by the Beijing government and denied by the Dalai Lama” (March 25).

CIA

Various Tibetan nationalist movements have resisted Chinese rule. In 1956, noblemen and monasteries led an insurrection, attempting to circumvent the land reform programmes. It enjoyed the support of the American CIA, but failed, and was stamped out by 1959, after tens of thousands of deaths.

The Dalai Lama government has, since then, existed in exile in India, consistently denouncing the Chinese as military occupiers. The Central Tibetan Administration, or CTA, received $1.7 million annually from the CIA, and also trained resistance fighters at a CIA base in Colorado. After 1972, however, the establishment of an effective anti-Soviet bloc by Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon put paid to such assistance, and support for Tibetan independence in the so-called ‘international community’ dried up.

Over the last decade the Dalai Lama has stopped demanding Tibetan independence, instead attempting to negotiate a settlement with Beijing that would leave Tibet with some measure of political autonomy, Hong Kong being the model.

Left

The left, as is frequently the case with the invariably complex circumstances surrounding national struggles, has produced a kaleidoscopic variety of responses.

Many have supported the Chinese - George Galloway claimed in his Daily Record column that “Tibet was always part of the Chinese motherland, and has been rescued from the mists of obscurantism under the demi-god Dalai Lama by the Chinese revolution” (February 18).

The same message is carried in a  Morning Star editorial, presumably written by John Haylett. The Chinese have brought modernisation to a benighted Tibet and the Dalai Lama should “seek an accommodation with Beijing” (March 18). One has to ask whether or not this is a case of the piper calling the tune. The Morning Star does after all have a long and dishonourable record of political prostitution.

Andy Newman, former SWPer and now a partisan of Respect Renewal, writing on his blog, comes to the same pro-Beijing conclusion by a different route: “No people can have self-determination if they cannot control their own culture and economy. Tibet is too marginal to the world economy and too poor to be genuinely independent and develop a national economy and high culture of its own. In reality it can only exist as either part of China or as a bankrupt client state of western imperialism” (www.socialistunity.com/?p=1934). Such stipulations would, of course, rule out self-determination for the bulk of today’s countries, including Scotland.

Then there are the social imperialists of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, which actually ran the headline “Free Tibet!” in Solidarity. “Self-determination means the withdrawal of Chinese forces from Tibet, real autonomy - and independence if a majority want it” (March 20) - but exactly how commensurate this is with the AWL’s line on Iraq is something of a conundrum. For once, however, the AWL is on the same side as Chris Bambery’s Socialist Worker, whose Charlie Hore offers a thoroughly enthusiastic write-up of the present rebellions, despite the prominent role of buddhist monks (March 22).

Galloway and the Morning Star are certainly correct in their descriptions of pre-1950s Tibetan society. The attempts by the CTA to claim the country was on the way to modernisation are basically laughable; for Marxists, a revolutionary transformation of that society would be necessary, even if this took the form of the theocratic-feudal ruling class voluntarily dissolving itself into a bourgeoisie. That form is not a common one, and it is not difficult to see the Dalai Lama vociferously opposing any revolution from below.

Nevertheless, to deny that the Tibetans have, by dint of the last extant political structure of their independent existence, any right to self-determination is deeply reactionary. The contortions that Newman has to impose on Lenin in order to ‘prove’ that self-determination does not apply to Tibet only prove the opposite (see the debate in the comment boxes). Galloway is up to his usual tricks, providing disgraceful apologetics for repressive regimes he deems to be opposed to imperialism (claiming such an opposition for China is a little travesty of its own).

This does not make self-determination a simple matter, however. There is the issue of the Han Chinese to consider. The CTA claims Qinghai as part of ‘historic Tibet’, but the scale of migration into that province has left the Han outnumbering Tibetans by over two to one. Yes, it is undoubtedly the case that these demographics have been skewed by basically colonial settlement, but there is nevertheless an undeniable ‘fact on the ground’ here.

It is not clear, either, that the Lhasa rioters represent unproblematically any kind of programme for self-determination. The main victims of the riots so far appear to be the Han Chinese settlers, who constitute a minority in the Tibetan capital, but often a better off one. Whether this amounts to a misguided outburst of chauvinism or a deflected assault on class privilege is frustratingly difficult to discern.

Communists

Communists defend the right of nations to self-determination. The pre-capitalist structure of Tibetan society prior to 1950 is irrelevant to its status as a nation. There exists a textbook national consciousness, and there is no indication - particularly as the Dalai Lama prostrates himself ever further before Beijing - that a successful nationalist campaign implies a return to that. In all probability the Chinese modernisations are irreversible.

We do not, however, as the AWL seems to in this case, favour the breaking up of states. Only in exceptional circumstances do we demand separation - we argue for working class solidarity across borders, not the erection of new ones. So, yes, we demand self-determination for Tibet - but call for that right to be exercised in favour of voluntary unity within China.