Tibet

16Mar08

This is a good post by James Fallows on the recent violence in Tibet and how China is reacting to it. However I don’t think the opening sentence here is supported by the rest of the post. (Emphasis added below)

1) In judging popular reaction in China to this episode, bear in that mind few ordinary Chinese people have even been exposed to the idea that Tibet’s place within their country is controversial in any way. In the ordinary course of going to school and reading newspapers or watching TV, they would hear that Tibet, much like the largely Islamic Xinjiang region and other frontier parts of China, is an ancient, inseparable, happily integrated part of the motherland, whose tranquility is threatened from time to time by hooligans or even terrorists. History books, TV series, museum displays, and of course newspaper articles like this one convey the message.

2) For a pop-culture presentation of the opposite perspective, consider Eliot Pattison’s “Inspector Shan Tao Yun” series of detective novels, which began in 2001 with The Skull Mantra. They’re set in Tibet and their leitmotif is political, cultural, economic, and personal relations between native Tibetans and Han Chinese. They are similar in some ways to Tony Hillerman’s novels set on Navajo reservations — for instance, the disjunction in spiritual awareness between the minority population and the ruling majority — but obviously with a different degree of political tension.

In that Chinese people are aware that Tibetans are a distinct ethnic group that live very far from were most Chinese people live I think they are aware that there is some controversial aspect of Tibet being part of China. I really doubt that there is any failure to understand that if Tibet had during the 20th century been a military power capable of winning a war against China then it would not today be part of China.

The nature of Chinese occupation and current Tibetan attitudes about being part of China might not be well known, but I don’t think any level of state media propaganda has obscured the fact that Tibetans are a distinct ethnic people, and that some of those people would like Tibet to be it’s own country.

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Tags: 2008 Olympics, Boycott of the Olympics, China, James Fallows, Summer Olympics, Tibet