When American journalist Barbara Demick visited Aba County in China’s Sichuan Province for the first Time in 2013, she was so amazed by the security cameras in every temple and the ubiquitous army and police in the town that she was almost afraid to get out of her car. The American journalist, who has been to North Korea, writes in her book “Devouring the Buddha: The Catastrophe and Survival of Aba” that here, people are no less afraid than in North Korea.
Tibetan Life
With a population of about 80,000 and over 94 percent Tibetans, Aba County, Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, became a prime location for Demick’s writing as Western journalists have relatively free rein here compared to the Tibet Autonomous Region.
Demick has been the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times since 2001, and his major works include Logwina Street: A Life and Death in Sarajevo and We Are the Happiest: The Ordinary Lives of North Koreans, which was nominated for the George Polka Journalism Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the 2010 U.S. National Book Award.
A resident of China since 2007, Demick became interested in Tibet after the frequent self-immolations of Tibetans in 2009, and visited Aba three times in 2013, 2014 and 2015. The book Eating the Buddha is centered on the Aba region, interspersed with the stories of nearly a dozen Aba Tibetans in exile in India, and tells the story of the Chinese Communist Party‘s oppression of the local Tibetans from the perspective of three generations, spanning more than 70 years.
The New York Times commented, “Demick covers an awe-inspiring breadth of history: from the heyday of the Tibetan empire, when it could rival the Turks and Arabs, to the present day, when Tibet’s quest for independence has suffered setbacks and transformed into a search for cultural and spiritual survival.” The Financial Times said, “This book is not just a description of contemporary Tibet, but an account of the terrible period China is currently going through.” For its part, the Daily Mail noted, “This is an impressive book that offers a unique perspective on the suffering of Tibetans and gives readers an insight into what it means to live a life devastated by a political storm.”
Demick told Voice of America that she wanted to portray the multitudes of Tibetans, especially their suffering and Dreams. I think there are very few books in English, or even in Tibetan, about the lives of Tibetans in the 21st century,” she said. There are a lot of books about geopolitics, like the Dalai Lama’s plight, the Chinese Communist Party, and the strategic significance of rivers, but it’s hard for you to get a sense of the lives of Tibetans. Tibetans are always portrayed in the media in a static way, like they are hardy nomads, and those mysterious caves. I don’t think there has been a book that tells the story of contemporary Tibetans.”
Eating the Buddha
Demick told Voice of America that she chose Aba as the center of her narrative because it was the first Tibetan settlement in history to experience massive destruction by the Chinese Communist army.
When I started reading about Aba, I found this historical account of the Red Army’s Long March and Aba,” Demick said. Aba is where the Red Army and Tibetan areas first encountered each other. In the 1930s, the Red Army entered the Tibetan Plateau from here and did not have enough Food and supplies, so they started looting food from Tibetan homes and, as I mentioned in my book, they started eating Buddha statues from the temples. These statues were made of barley flour and ghee, giving the impression that they were ‘eating the Buddha’. This account is from the Memoirs of Wu Fa Xian.”
The hungry Red Army used the Buddha statues as rations, which is the origin of the book’s title, “Eating the Buddha.” In addition to destroying the statues, the Red Army also destroyed valuable scriptures and killed monks in the monastery, and the largest temple in Aba County, Gelden Temple, was once commandeered to house the Red Army headquarters, where Zhu De took care of business. This tragic history seems to have laid the groundwork for Aba to become the “capital of self-immolation” more than 70 years later.
A tragedy of three generations
The destruction of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party did not stop with the Long March, but began with it. In Demick’s book, a number of Tibetans from three different generations look back on a pivotal moment in history: 1958, which Demick calls the year when “time collapsed” in Tibetan history. The Communist Party was pushing “collectivization,” “people’s communes” and the “Great Leap Forward” in Tibet, and atheist propaganda and harassment of monks were at their peak. The 14th Dalai Lama went into exile in India and established the Tibetan government-in-exile. Immediately afterwards, the “Cultural Revolution” further destroyed the ancient Tibetan Buddhist Culture. One of the main characters in the book, Gonpo, was born in 1951, the last princess of the pre-1949 Aba region of the Pelagoda Kingdom. Her Parents were killed during the Cultural Revolution, and she herself experienced deportation and years of injustice.
By the 1980s, under Hu Yaobang’s leadership, the Communist authorities seemed to relax some of their oppressive policies, and Tsegyam (born 1964), then a teacher at a Tibetan school, was able to secretly teach her students some Tibetan culture and language. But it didn’t last long, and by 1998, the CCP imposed a patriotic Education campaign in Aba’s monasteries and twice, in 2003 and 2008, shut down a school affiliated with the largest Tibetan Buddhist Gelug monastery in the area, Gurdwara During this period, other Tibetan-run schools were taken over and Chinese language instruction was introduced.
This series of heavy-handed policies culminated in the mass protests in Aba County in March 2008, sparked by an earlier protest in Lhasa in mid-March, when hundreds of people led by Gelugden Monastery monks took to the streets on March 16 in a peaceful demonstration in response to Lhasa, which was subsequently suppressed by the authorities by force. In testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2011, Gurdwara Rinpoche, the highest teacher at Gurdwara, noted that nearly 23 Tibetans were killed in the crackdown.
The Tibetans chose to protest in a tragic and tragic way – by setting themselves on fire, and on February 27, 2009, Za Bai, a monk at Gölden Monastery, doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire, marking the beginning of the tragedy for the third generation of Tibetans in Aba. One of the main characters, Tongtuk, was born in the late 1980s and is a close friend of the monk who set himself on fire in 2011, Lobsang Phuntsok, who posted signs calling for Tibetan protests after the tragedy. To avoid arrest by the authorities, his mother Sonam decided to send him to India.
In his 2011 testimony, Gurden Rinpoche also mentioned that Tibetans in the Aba region have suffered particularly brutal Communist oppression and that three generations of Tibetans have lived in darkness as a result. From 2008 to 2011, 34 Tibetans in Aba died as a result of government persecution or self-immolation, and 619 others were arrested.
The Capital of Self-Immolation
From 2009 to the present, nearly 160 Tibetans have set themselves on fire, with up to one-third of them in Aba, concentrated between 2011 and 2013. Gurden Rinpoche noted, “The Dalai Lama and Tibetans demonstrating peacefully have repeatedly called on the Chinese Communist Party to stop the crackdown and to open negotiations with the Tibetan regime in exile, but instead of heeding the advice, the Communist Party has intensified its persecution of Tibetans in Aba, which is the main reason for the continued self-immolations of Tibetans.”
Demick told VOA that during the time she was writing, Chinese Communist Party officials had recognized the discontent of the Tibetans in Aba. She said, “The local government and the entire Chinese Communist Party care about saving face. Chinese political propaganda claims that the Tibetan people are happy, that they are happy under Communist rule, that they sing and dance to celebrate Million Serfs Liberation Day. So the self-immolations were humiliating for the Tibetan government because the Tibetans said: we are not happy.”
Demick said, “They wanted to send a very strong message that they were unhappy with the Chinese Communist Party. Self-immolation is almost the saddest declaration they can make. This behavior is also related to their belief in nonviolence. Many Tibetans, including those in Aba, told me that they did not hurt anyone, nor did they target civilians or police, they just sacrificed their lives to make a declaration. They are Buddhists, and they believe they cannot commit violence against others.”
Communist officials and Chinese official media have repeatedly called the self-immolations of Tibetans “terrorism in disguise” and “separatism.” Bhuchung K. Tsering, vice president of the International Campaign for Tibet, told Voice of America that the Chinese Communist Party criminalizes any dissenting voice. If they really want to commit what the Chinese government calls “terrorism,” they will choose places where there are more people, or try to harm others,” he said. Almost all self-immolations happen in remote and deserted places, sometimes without other Tibetans present, so it’s not terrorism.”
In Demick’s writing, not all Tibetans fully approve of the practice of self-immolation. Tangta, for example, whose good friend Lobsang Phuntsok and his cousin Rinchen Gyal set themselves on fire before and after, tells Demick, “There must be some better way to express discontent.” But Thangta also deeply understood the choices of his compatriots, believing that they were motivated by “a great sense of powerlessness” and “frustration at not being able to speak out.
The future is uncertain
One thing that Demick’s interviewees have in common is that they left Tibet and moved to Dharamsala, the Tibetan capital in exile in India. Gompo Tso went through the Cultural Revolution and deportation, eventually leaving for India in 1989 to help build the government-in-exile, for which she was separated from her husband and young daughter for more than 30 years, making Family reunification extremely difficult; also in 1989, after helping to create pro-Tibetan banners and informing students that the Dalai Lama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, Tshega was accused of “counter-revolutionary propaganda “In 1992, he went into exile in Dharamsala to work for the Dalai Lama; Tsepey, a young man, was chased by police for four years for his involvement in the 2008 protests in Aba and eventually moved to Dharamsala; and Thangta made three attempts to travel to Dharamsala between 2011 and 2012, but his first two attempts failed. His first two attempts failed, and finally, a route through Nepal helped him reach India.
Demick told VOA that her protagonists, and some of the other Tibetans she spoke with, more or less agree with the Communist Party’s contribution to improving the Tibetan economy and Tibetans’ standard of living, but to their despair, it is difficult for them to have the same equal treatment as the Chinese, especially in terms of basic rights to personal freedom. I found that in Aba and elsewhere, many Tibetans feel that their standard of living has improved under the CCP, and they appreciate that,” Demick said. But that’s not the subject of this book. Tibetans want a certain level of dignity and freedom, not necessarily the freedom of a so-called Western, democratic system, but simply the rights that other Chinese citizens enjoy. For example, the ability to speak their own language, the ability to practice their religion freely in their homes, the ability to travel freely. The freedom to travel is important to Tibetans. They see other Chinese being able to go to places like Europe and Thailand, being able to send their children abroad to study. But Tibetans can’t travel freely, and for them, the whole country becomes a prison.”
A 2015 report by the international NGO Human Rights Watch noted that residents of religious minorities, including Tibetans and Uighurs, wait up to five years for passports, and are sometimes denied passports outright without any legal justification; and that additional regulations imposed in the Tibet Autonomous Region since 2012 have resulted in The additional regulations imposed in the TAR since 2012 have resulted in an almost total ban on travel abroad for residents of the region. The International Campaign for Tibet also reported in June 2020 that Tibetans in China face unprecedented restrictions on movement, with very few Tibetans having passports or access to scholarships abroad; in addition, Tibetans in exile in Europe have been denied the right to visit their families still living in Tibet by the authorities.
At the same time, the Chinese Communist government has escalated its massive surveillance campaign in Tibet. The Congressional and Executive Commission on China (CECC) released its 2020 Annual Report on Human Rights and the Rule of Law in China in early January, stating that the Chinese Communist authorities have expanded their heavy-handed policies on areas under their rule, including Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Tibet. Human Rights Watch’s 2020 annual report also noted that increasingly harsh surveillance and intimidation have suppressed protests in Tibetan communities, workplaces and homes, a goal repeatedly emphasized by top Communist Party officials.
Demick told Voice of America, “There were already a lot of surveillance cameras at that time (when I went), like in the monasteries, and on the way to the monasteries, there were cameras that filmed people coming into the monasteries. Gradually you get the feeling that you’re being watched by cameras all the time.”
For his part, Bhujung Tsering pointed out that the CCP has no confidence in the loyalty of Tibetans. He said, “Even though the CCP says that the Tibetan people are happy and are doing well under their rule for the past 60 years or so. But they also know that Tibetans reverence their religious traditions from the bottom of their hearts and revere the Dalai Lama.”
Demick notes that China is becoming what Oxford sociology professor Stein Ringen calls a “perfect dictatorship”: a government whose control is so comprehensive, whose surveillance of online information is so thorough, whose surveillance cameras are so ubiquitous, and whose biometric tracking of citizens is so advanced, that they can maintain their rule without a drop in the bucket.
At the end of the book “Eating the Buddha,” these Tibetans in exile still do not know where they are going, and they are still looking for hope for the future. The Tibetans who remain in Aba are also very confused: the local economy has grown significantly, with Aba’s gross regional product increasing from 0.24 billion yuan in 1952 to 39.008 billion yuan in 2019, and the official declaration of poverty eradication in 2020; at the same time, the transmission of Tibetan culture, language, religion, and history is under serious threat. In the last chapter of his book, Demick quotes a Tibetan businessman, “I seem to have everything, money and a good life, but I have no freedom.”
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