As someone who was brought up in Tibet, I found Slavoj Žižek’s regurgitation of the Chinese Communist Party line mind-boggling (Letters, 24 April). Žižek accuses the Western media of imposing ‘certain stories’ on the public but seems himself to have swallowed whole China’s version of the story of Tibet. Before 1949, he writes, Tibet was an ‘extremely harsh feudal society, poor . . . corrupt and fractured by civil wars’. China’s state publications on Tibet are full of this sort of language. Žižek’s letter reminded me of propaganda material we had to study at school in which Tibetans were described as ‘most barbaric, cruel, dark and backward’. We were told that our Chinese brethren came to Tibet to civilise us and bring us into the ‘modern world’. This is still one of the principal justifications used by the Chinese government to explain the invasion and continued occupation of Tibet. Admittedly, Sino-Tibetan history is complex. Neither Tibet nor China can be said to have exercised sovereignty in the modern sense over their respective territories. China was plagued by warlords, civil war and foreign aggression, and didn’t have a centralised government capable of enforcing law and order within the territories it claimed until the 1950s.
Also surprising is Žižek’s attempt to shift the blame for the destruction wreaked by the Cultural Revolution onto the Tibetans. The destruction of Tibetan monasteries and historical monuments began years before the Cultural Revolution. Monasteries in Kham and Amdo were the first to be ruined by the Chinese army when Tibetans rebelled against Chinese rule in the 1950s and the destruction spread to western and central Tibet. Farming villages and nomadic communities, towns and individual households were targeted as well as monasteries during the Cultural Revolution as a result of Mao’s explicit instruction to destroy the ‘Four Olds’. The campaign was spearheaded by Chinese cadres. Some Tibetans did take part, but faced with the alternatives – torture, starvation and death – what choice did they have?
Not only does Žižek rely on Chinese propaganda for his understanding of Tibet’s past, he also interprets the current tragedy through TV images selected and transmitted by the Chinese government. These images repeatedly show footage of riots, but not the peaceful protests whose brutal suppression triggered the uprising. The Chinese authorities haven’t produced any evidence to show that there was a programme of organised violence by Tibetans: the wave of human rights protests and demonstrations in support of the Dalai Lama was vociferous but predominantly peaceful. In the incredible pictures of nomadic protesters on horseback in Amdo Bora (Gannan in Chinese) captured by a Canadian TV crew, for example, not a single weapon is being brandished. These nomads have guns so that they can protect their cattle, and it is their custom to carry swords and knives. But because they support the Dalai Lama’s message of peace, on this occasion they left their weapons behind. Žižek tellingly remains silent about the gunning down of unarmed Tibetan protesters (more than two hundred were killed), the mass arrests, the flooding of the Tibetan plateau with Chinese paramilitaries, the lockdown of monasteries and schools and the barring of independent foreign journalists from the region.
Žižek implies what the Chinese authorities have explicitly stated, that Tibet should be grateful for Chinese investment in its economy and its education and health systems. The presumption that Tibet would have remained unchanged had it not been for the Chinese invasion and colonial tutelage is preposterous, but there is also a failure to acknowledge what China gains from Tibet. For decades it has been exploiting Tibet’s natural and mineral resources: there has been large-scale deforestation in Ngawa, and there is a seemingly inexhaustible gold mine in Machu. And the geostrategic benefit China accrues from its control of Tibet is incalculable.
