Comments of Tibet

Im an angel! Honest! The horns are just there to keep the halo up straight!

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  Indeed the land of Tibet was beautiful. I was amazed and charmed by the mountains, rivers and lakes. The Tibetans were handsome and elegant. It was a dream land. The Tibetans loved to sing and dance. No wonder that it was called a ocean of songs and dances. The people was friendly. I had heard scary stories about the relations between Tibetan and Han. However, during my trip, there was no hostility except one minor event. I mingled freely with the crowd in Barkor street around Jokhang, and purchased several souvenirs there from Tibetans. Several Han workers were disillusioned after trying so many years to improve the local situations and prepared to leave. Some Han artists fell in love with Tibet, its land and people, and avowed to stay.

  As far as I can observe during my trip to Tibet in 1988, there are very few Han in Tibet. In fact, in Tibet (proper), there are only 2 millions people with some 70,000 non-Tibetan (including soldiers). There are at least 10 different subraces in the Greater Tibet (a term not commonly used, including Qinghai, parts of Szechuan and Yunnan, corresponding to Tibet Dynasty). Most of the subraces have been there for tens of centuries and probably were the natives of the land before the Tibetans immigrating to there. Out of a total population of some 13 millions, 3.8 millions (some western writters like to use a figure of 6 millions) are Tibetans , 2 % are Han (somewhere around 200,000 people including soldiers), the rest are Moslems, Mongolians, Turks, Tu, Baiyi, Yi etc. Some propagandists counted them as `Chinese migrations', and concluded wrongly that there were more `Chinese' than Tibetans in the land of Tibet. It was unreasonable to re-build Tibet Dynasty in today's world, just as to re-build a Serb dominating Yugoslavia. This was an irrationality of `Tibet Independent Movement' as proposed which includes Qinghai, parts of Szechuan and Yunnan.

   I would like to interrupt for a minute. After hearing so many arguments about China or Chinese, I found a lot of them were just semantics. What is the meaning of `Chinese'? Does it mean `citizen (or nationalities) of China' or just `Han'? In the first sense, anybody, independent of race, could theoretically become a Chinese. In the second sense, China probably should deserve a different English term. I do not mean that we should never use those terms. However, if any disagreement appears, then one should reflect and be careful.
An important problem arose from the above semantics: China as traditional known was never a racist state, therefore, it was irrational to equal China with the country of Han people. Not only Yuan (Mongolia) Dynasty and Ching (Manchu) Dynasty were recognized as Chinese Dynasties, there were many non-Han Dynasties which were treated exactly as any Han-Dynasty. Even Tang Dynasty which was no doubt a Han-Dynasty in many people's mind was really ambiguous. It was known that the matriarch of the royal family was a Turk, and the patriarch had no known family background of any kind. Furthermore, according to a famous Tang poet Dupu, the royal family had the characteristic of high nose! (Guo Di Tze Sun Jin Lon Dzun). Possibly non-Han. The government of Tang was full of non-Han including Tibetan. But who cared? The only thing one really cared was if the Chinese civilization was maintained, which meant if `Chung' (loyalty to the Emperor, to the civilization, to the state), `Hsiao' (to respect parents and elders), `Jie' (self-sacrifices, which were especially applied to females facing rapists), `Yee' (fraternity) had their positions. Almost all people in the past had no problem in recognizing a Han Emperor, a Turk Emperor, a Mongolia Emperor, a Manchu Emperor, or a Tibetan King of China. Anyone who took a revisionist and racist point of view about Chinese civilization was likely a racist oneself.

The high mountains and bad weathers make the area non-self-sufficient. There were material improvements for the daily life of Tibetans. For instance, there were wide spread electricity in Tibet, although limited. While I was in Nagqu (northern Tibet), there were only 4 hours supply of electricity daily, and most people had used cotton clothes, and vegetables (which traditional were considered to be weeds) etc. All those materials came from Han area, most likely under the costs. I saw the trains of trucks carrying materials to Tibet, and going back emptied. It would be hard for Tibetan to live in the old way, and the new way of life demanded substantial aids from somewhere else. Anyone who proposed a future plan for Tibet had to tell us where the aids (around $ 200 millions per year) would come from.

I observed that the highways from Qinghai, Szechuan, Yunnan, Xinkiang had been constructed. The army could reach Lhasa from there in 1 day. It was impossible to carry out a successive military action against PRC in Tibet.
Were there discriminations against Tibetans? It depended on your point of view. From the point of view of Maxists, since the policies in Tibet were not as `advanced' as in Han area, you might argue for the existences of discriminations. If you were a non-Maxist and a religious person, then you would think Han people was discriminated against.

There were substantial destructions of Buddhism which were loved by most Tibetans and a lot of other people in China. It was against the traditional way of governing China. I observed that most people, including communists and cadets, were Buddhists in Tibet. Some communists and cadets would recite some Buddhism scriptures, or simply `Om Ma Ni Pa Me Hum' before going to work.

Is the destruction of Buddhism inevitable as predicted by Buddha? The modern era is the dark age of religion. In Europe and Japan, the power of monasteries disappeared. In Japan, after Meiji reformation, most temples had only one monk, the Abbot, while hundreds or even thousands before. The Japanese Government simply forced them out. What is right? Why did Japanese succeed and PROC failed? I can not tell.
On the problem of cultures other than religion, I disliked the way of administration of the University in Tibet. They emphasized too much on literatures and liberal arts. I thought to develop Tibet, one should have experts on all subjects. Once I talked with some Tibetan writters in 1988, I wanted to know why they were writing in Han characters, were there too much Sinicization? They told me that only novels in Han character would have a huge market in Han land. Once I was inside `Tibet autonomous government', all signs were written in Tibetan only, I had a hard time finding my way around. It was a wishful thinking to develop all cultures, science, mathematics, archeology, etc, along every race line. In U.S.A., one could only encourage a bi-lingual education, and could not prohibit English for any minority race. It would do more harm for the said minority, if English was not allowed. With the present population of Tibet, I did not foresee the possibility and advantage of restricting the education only to Tibetan. Anyone who proposed this rule was only condescending on the completely unknown Han written civilization.

In the old time, there were a lot of cordial relations between Tibetan and Han people. Tibetans loved to talk about Princess Wen-Cheng, say, in the writting of the 5th Dalai Lama the great. Now, many Tibetans tried to avoid the topic. What a change! The danger is the vicious cycle of violences. The happiness of Tibetan is the most important issue. I foresaw a future Tibet in the traditional fashion. Hopefully, nothing bad and irrational would happen to them.

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