In the international press, China’s tensions with Tibet are often traced to the Chinese invasion of 1950 and Tibet’s failed uprising of 1959. But for the Chinese themselves, the story goes back much further—at least to the reign of Kangxi, the Qing Dynasty emperor, who ruled for sixty-one years (1661-1722) and, in the official Chinese view, incorporated many lands, including Tibet, into a glorious Chinese empire. One of the most important symbols of those events, moreover, lies not in Tibet but thousands of miles east in the city of Chengde, near Beijing. There, Kangxi built a hunting estate amid a cluster of lakes and jagged hills, and between 1767 and 1771, the emperor Qianlong, his grandson, built one of the more astonishing architectural monuments in China: a Tibetan Buddhist temple housed in a scrupulously detailed scale model of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, the seat of Tibetan cultural and spiritual power. This Little Potala, as it’s called, was intended as an architectural expression of the great unity of China under his rule.

In recent years, the tourist authorities have used Chengde to create a sort of national monument to Kangxi, and, through him, to advance China’s contemporary position on Tibet. The site doesn’t seem to attract many foreign visitors, but it teems with Chinese, who arrive in convoys of cars and buses from all over the country, fill up the city’s hotels, and stream through the entry turnstiles at the major sites. I visited over a weekend in July, and there were so many people that the wait for an open-air bus to tour the outer reaches of the hunting estate was two hours. The bus tour offers several impressive vantage points, one of them of the city of Chengde itself, which, like most Chinese cities, bristles with construction cranes. Standing on the estate’s stone boundary wall, you can see across the valley to the massive, oxblood rhomboid that is the main feature of Chengde’s Little Potala.

Little Potala in Chengde

One of the great rulers of China’s long imperial history, Kangxi consolidated the Manchus’ rule over China proper and, using a combination of clever diplomacy, conquest, and divide and rule tactics, extended the country’s borders to what the Qing called “the outer lands” – a process of unification and expansion that reached its apogee under Qianlong. Kangxi’s achievement is celebrated in Chengde in an ultra-high-tech theatrical extravaganza called the Kangxi Ceremony that plays nightly in a vast open-air amphitheater about ten miles outside the city. The show begins with several dozen uniformed horsemen galloping across the turf in front of the audience and taking up positions in the suddenly illuminated hills that surround a large circular stage. Amplified drums and a throaty male chorus fill up the night air as an actor playing Kangxi, dressed in lustrous robes of yellow brocade, gallops onto the scene, his horse rearing, cheered on by dozens of surrounding horsemen.

In one scene, accompanied by a revolving, luminous model of the solar system, Kangxi learns astronomy from the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci. In another scene, one of the show’s most lavishly produced, a huge procession of Tibetan lamas, marching to the music of rumbling bass horns and headed by the Dalai Lama, arrives to demonstrate their fealty to the Chinese emperor. Did these events actually take place?

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: history, Kangxi, propaganda, Tibet history
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It is really peculiar that this “Shangri-La”, which is being ridiculed by Chinese scholars as “Orientalism”, is in actual fact becoming reality right in front of their eyes. In 2001, Zhongdian, the capital city of Dechen Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan, officially changed its name to Shangri-La. Of course, this was a government move and it connotes authoritarian power. It is said that it was done to promote the development of tourism and attract tourists from home and abroad. But this corner of the eastern Tibetan Kham region, whose name is actually Gyalthang, has experienced numerous name changes along with the overall changing state of affairs. Half a century ago, it was named Zhongdian, and now it was simply changed into Shangri-La.

Indeed, these nice names are nothing but political ventures to cater to the fantasies and imaginations of the “other”. Professor Wang Hui is particularly disappointed about this and thinks that the West’s mystification of Tibet has already spread to and infected China. But does this mean that China usually demonises Tibet and has now started to cater to the West? Or does it mean that the West has finally managed to change China’s demonising stance towards Tibet?

I have previously written that Tibet is by no means the “Pure Land” that people imagine it to be. Tibet is just like any other place in the world, it is a place where people live. The only difference is that it has strong beliefs and is thus a place shining in maroon-red (the colour of the monks’ robes). In history, there have existed two stereotypical attitudes towards Tibet: demonisation and sanctification. The result, however, has always been the same: Tibet and its people have been distorted.

Source: “Who “Who Are the Real “Orientalists”?” By Woeser – High Peaks Pure Earth

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: academics, Shangri-la, Tibet, Tibet history
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The Chinese government proclaimed in January 2009 that a festival called “Serf Liberation Day” was to be celebrated in Tibet on March 28 every year to commemorate the “liberation” of Tibetans by the People’s Liberation Army. Woeser takes this festival as her starting point and in particular the replaying of the 1963 propaganda film “Serf” on Tibetan TV. Amongst Tibetans, the film is more commonly called “Jampa”, the name of the protagonist.

When the CCP propaganda film “Serf” pompously reappeared on Tibetan TV during the “Serf Liberation Day” celebrations, I felt like I was taken back to my childhood during which I had been forcefully brainwashed by the “red devil”. Indeed, I can only use “red devil” to describe this film and its content: for decades, the self-acclaimed “liberators” and “great benefactors” have in fact slowly swallowed up the entire Tibetan region. Deep hatred made me get up and leave; even though for a writer, this would have been an opportunity to study how those in power are rewriting history, but the harm I have experienced over the years made it impossible for me to endure these blatant lies.

In 2009, the International Campaign for Tibet published a collection of writings by Tibetan writers titled “Like Gold that Fears No Fire: New Writing from Tibet”. The genres ranged from poems, essays, and diary entries to critical art, and commentaries. The central theme is the protests that swept across Tibet in March 2008, but it also features writings about Tibetans being arrested, sentenced and persecuted. In my contribution to the volume [PDF] I wrote: “After half a century of mandatory brainwashing and education is not that the monasteries have all been destroyed, but that their memories have been erased or altered. Our duty now is to search for, recover and then amend our memories, and even to re-produce our history and reality.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: film, propaganda, Tibet history, Tibet protests
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For this is not the first time that the Dalai Lama of Tibet has issued a decree announcing that a younger, largely unknown man is to take over as the political leader of the Tibetan people. It happened before—in 1679. To explain why this detail of history matters to the Chinese government requires a little background.

Until the Chinese army took over his country in 1950, leading him to flee into exile nine years later, the current Dalai Lama, who is the fourteenth of his line, held political authority over Tibet. Historically, Dalai Lamas were not always recognized as having that power: the first four Dalai Lamas only had spiritual status as leading Buddhist teachers of their time. It was the Fifth Dalai Lama who was first given the authority to rule Tibet, following its invasion by a Mongol warlord who was a ferocious supporter of the Dalai Lama’s sect and so placed him on the throne, when he was twenty-five years old. That was in the Water-Horse year of the 11th Cycle, or 1642. The Fifth seems to have been extraordinarily capable, because under his rule, backed up by the Mongols’ army, Tibet expanded into a vast and unified state covering most of the Tibetan plateau, with an organized bureaucracy, tax, and census system.

Potala Palace, built by the Fifth Dalai Lama and his regent Sangye Gyatso in the late seventeenth century, Lhasa, Tibet

But it is the events at the end of the Fifth Dalai Lama’s reign that seem to be of particular concern to Chinese analysts at the moment. After 43 years of rule, the Fifth announced that he had appointed a young Tibetan as the Sde-ba or head of the government, a position similar to that of regent. He had appointed such officials before, but now he was near the end of his life and was returning to a contemplative existence as a meditator and a scholar (he wrote at least thirty works in his lifetime, including some on the art of government). In 1679, he issued a decree announcing the appointment of the official, called Sangye Gyatso, who later became one of Tibet’s most famous writers.

Because of its exceptional importance, the Fifth signed the decree not just with his name or seal, but with the full imprint of both his hands, dipped in gold and stamped upon the document. The decree was made into a scroll, 12 feet long, calligraphed on yellow silk with a painting of a curling dragon holding a wish-fulfilling jewel in its claws underneath the text, protector deities and snow-lions at its foot, and a portrait of the Dalai Lama at its head. It is one of the marks of Tibet’s national tragedy that this scroll, a pinnacle of Tibetan decorative art and political history, is no longer in Tibet: it is in exile too, in New York, having been carried out by a Tibetan family when they fled from Tibet fifty years ago.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Dalai Lama, Tibet history, tibet politics
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These days, Gyantse resembles other towns in central Tibet. Its dusty roads are lined with shops and restaurants run by ethnic Han migrants, whom many Tibetans see as the most recent wave of invaders.

But Chinese officials prefer to direct the world’s attention away from that and to the brutal events at Gyantse in 1904, which conveniently fit into their master narrative for Tibetan and Chinese history.

The Chinese government insists Tibet is an “inalienable” part of China, and it has appropriated the 1904 invasion as another chapter in the long history of imperialist efforts to dismantle China — what the Communist education system calls the “100 years of humiliation.”

In that Communist narrative of Gyantse, the Tibetans are a stand-in for the Chinese who were victimized by foreign powers during the Qing dynasty.

“The local people resisted the British there,” said Dechu, a Tibetan woman from the foreign affairs office in Lhasa who accompanied foreign journalists on a recent official tour of Tibet. “They put up a great resistance, so it’s called the City of Heroes.”

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Post tags: Gyantse, history, Tibet history, Tibet status
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There’s no doubt that Tibet’s traditional society was hierarchical and backwards, replete with aristocratic estates and a bound peasantry. And there’s no doubt that Tibetans, whether in exile or in Tibet voice no desire to restore such a society. Many Tibetans will readily admit that the social structure was highly inegalitarian. But it was hardly the cartoonish, cruel “Hell-on-Earth” that Chinese propaganda has portrayed it to be. Lost in most discussions is an understanding that Tibet’s demographic circumstances (a small population in a relatively large land area) served to mitigate the extent of exploitation. The situation was quite the reverse of China’s in the early 20th century, where far too little land for the large population allowed for severe exploitation by landowners. China’s categorization of Tibetan society as feudal (technically, a problematic characterization) obscures the fact that this socially backwards society, lacking the population pressures found elsewhere, simply didn’t break down as it ought to have and continued functioning smoothly into the 20th century. Inegalitarian? Yes. Sometimes harsh? Yes. But Hell-on-Earth for the vast majority of Tibetans? No. Traditional Tibetan society was not without its cruelties (the punishments visited on some political victims were indeed brutal), but seen proportionally, they paled in comparison to what transpired in China in the same period. In modern times mass flight from Tibet actually only happened after Tibet’s annexation to the People’s Republic of China.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 100 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Tibet, Tibet history
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Tibetans widely resent Chinese rule, and Chinese leaders fear that Tibetans could seize on this month, the 50th anniversary of a failed uprising, to carry out a wave of protests, similar to what took place a year ago. Part of the mission of the security forces is to evict foreigners so that whatever occurs will be kept hidden from the world.

That, of course, has always been part of the problem with Tibet. China’s lockdown this month is only the latest episode in a long history of both Tibetans and Chinese trying to keep the mountain kingdom closed to the outside world. News of Tibet has always been difficult to obtain because much of the region lies on a remote plateau above 15,000 feet that is ringed by mountains. Information becomes that much harder to get when governments padlock the gate.

Drawing a veil over Tibet has only encouraged outsiders to project their own imaginings and desires onto the hidden land, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Tibet, Tibet history
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Did the Tibetan people enjoy democracy and freedom when the region was ruled by Dalai Lamas? Is it true, what some say, that China carries out “cultural genocide” in Tibet? Does Tibet need to develop and realize modernization?

In the past, in China, such questions were seldom discussed in public forums. Recently, however, hosted by the Tsinghua International Center for Communication Studies (TICCS) in Beijing, an in-depth discussion on issues concerning Tibet’s politics, history, religion, economy and culture was carried out among Tibetan scholars and Western journalists at an academic workshop entitled “An Intellectual Dialogue on Tibet: Present and Past.” The viewpoints exchanged during the academic workshop tangibly represent a real dialogue among Chinese and Western media, as well as a positive discourse within academic circles. Such forums will present to the world a more complete picture of Tibet issues, so as to settle disputes and strengthen mutual understanding.

In Foreign Policy Magazine, in an article titled “China’s West Bank?”, Alex Pasternack writes about ethnic tensions between Tibetans and Han Chinese, and acknowledges a subtle shift in tone on the issue from the Tibet government:

Last week, as Chinese police fanned out across the Tibetan plateau, the chairman of Tibet’s government made a hushed departure from the official line on the unrest that erupted into violence there last year.

“There were all kinds of people, some of whom weren’t satisfied with our policies, or had opinions about them, or because our government work hadn’t been fully completed,” Qiangba Puncog told reporters at the National People’s Congress annual meeting in Beijing, veering from the government’s oft cited condemnation of the Dalai Lama and his “splittist” clique. “Not everyone was a splittist.”

If it was the conference’s most obvious and extreme understatement, it was also a rare public sign that Beijing grasps some of the complexity of its Tibetan quagmire.

But this brief burst of enlightenment may not amount to much. Against the backdrop of the 50th anniversary of a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule — and as a raft of other ominous anniversaries loom in a year of economic hardship — government officials are marching on a tightrope that could snap at any moment.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Tibet history, Tibet protests, Tibet status
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A holiday to mark the “emancipation of millions of serfs and slaves” in Tibet will be decided on during a meeting of the region’s legislature starting Wednesday, Xinhua News Agency said.

The entry of Chinese forces into Tibet in 1949 was followed by efforts to transform the Buddhist, feudal order into a socialist, secular society. Tibetans rebelled on March 10, 1959, to try an oust the Chinese, but the uprising ended after 20 days with the flight of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, into exile in India.

A bill to decide on a holiday marking those events will be presented during the second annual session of the ninth Tibet Regional People’s Congress, Xinhua said.

The bill is aimed at “reminding all the Chinese people, including Tibetans, of the landmark democratic reform initiated 50 years ago,” Pang Boyong, deputy secretary general of the Tibetan regional congress standing committee, said Saturday, according to the report.

Meanwhile, McClatchy profiles Gyalwang Karmapa, the third-highest lama in the Tibetan religious order, who has been mentioned as a possible transition leader after the death of the Dalai Lama:

The Karmapa is the first Tibetan Buddhist reincarnation to be recognized by both the Dalai Lama and Communist Party authorities of China. He made headlines in January 2000, at age 14, with his flight from Chinese-ruled Tibet into exile, traveling by foot and horseback, then by jeep and helicopter to India. Allegations of espionage, intrigue involving a forgotten amulet and squabbling within a monastery marked his early years in India.

Exuding self-assuredness, the solidly built, 6-foot-tall Karmapa received several foreign journalists in a rare interview over the weekend at the university that’s his temporary home near the mountain headquarters of the Dalai Lama. The Karmapa talked of his love of music, his future role for Tibetan Buddhists and the lack of human rights in China.

He criticized the Chinese government, which he said wanted “to create this ethnic conflict” that exploded in deadly rioting in Tibet in March. However, he spoke tenderly of the Chinese.

“Since I am born as a Tibetan, I really care about the Tibetan people and Tibetan community. At the same time, I also love the Chinese,” he said.

Read about the controversy over the selection of the Karmapa via Wikipedia. See also CDT’s coverage of last year’s riots in Tibet.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Karmapa, March 10, Tibet history, tibet politics
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For many Tibetans, the case for the historical independence of their land is unequivocal. They assert that Tibet has always been and by rights now ought to be an independent country. China’s assertions are equally unequivocal: Tibet became a part of China during Mongol rule and its status as a part of China has never changed. Both of these assertions are at odds with Tibet’s history.

The Tibetan view holds that Tibet was never subject to foreign rule after it emerged in the mid-seventh century as a dynamic power holding sway over an Inner Asian empire. These Tibetans say the appearance of subjugation to the Mongol rulers of the Yuan Dynasty in the 13th and 14th centuries, and to the Manchu rulers of China’s Qing Dynasty from the 18th century until the 20th century, is due to a modern, largely Western misunderstanding of the personal relations among the Yuan and Qing emperors and the pre-eminent lamas of Tibet. In this view, the lamas simply served as spiritual mentors to the emperors, with no compromise of Tibet’s independent status.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: history, Tibet history
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