May 23rd marks the 70th anniversary of the “peaceful liberation of Tibet”, as the Chinese government calls it. However, in the view of many Tibetans, the arrival of the Chinese government in Tibet seventy years ago was not liberation, but rather brought about oppression and cultural crisis. At the same time, despite the long period of suppression, Tibetan culture is still alive and well in the world. Listen to our reporter Wang Yun’s series on a seventy-year retrospective of Tibetan culture. Today’s episode: The Evolution of Cultural Repression.
Spring is too short and winter is too long
It was only in 1987, when Kelsang Khensen, who was in his early twenties, went to Chengdu to study Chinese in depth, that he came across the hidden part of modern Tibetan history, “It was at Sichuan University that I started to pay attention to these protests happening in Lhasa and realized that we had suffered so much, our leader, the Dalai Lama, going out into exile in ’59, and the current struggle for our national freedom in Lhasa The protests.”
Kelsang Gyantsen went to Sichuan University to study Chinese, thanks to the relaxed environment of the time, when the Chinese government relaxed its repressive policies toward Tibet during Hu Yaobang’s tenure as general secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee in the 1980s, in the context of reform and opening up.
“It implemented a so-called ‘breathing policy’ that reduced taxes for farmers and placed a little emphasis on minority languages, the language of Tibetans,” Gongga Zhaxi described.
In 1983, the Chinese government also supported the opening of the Tibetan Buddhist Institute. But the Tibetan nation’s brief spring came to a grinding halt in 1989. The peaceful demonstrations by Tibetans in Lhasa led to clashes between the police and the people (some outside reports said they were riots) that stretched from 1987 to 1989, when Hu Jintao, then secretary of the Tibetan Party Committee, initiated the first martial law measures in Tibetan history. A major shift in Chinese government policy toward Tibet followed.
“Starting in the 1990s, a new policy was implemented in Tibet, the so-called patriotic education, and all the monasteries studied this. Patriotic education means to support the party, to support the state’s policies, and not to talk about what’s wrong with Tibet,” Gongga Zhaxi noted.
Tibetan Buddhism is further controlled by the Chinese government, and in 1995, the Dalai Lama identified Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the reincarnated spiritual child of the Panchen Lama, only to have the boy and his family taken away by the Chinese government three days later, and he has been missing for 26 years. The atheist Chinese government chose another boy as the Panchen Lama, who has not been embraced by Tibetans.
Meanwhile, Tibetan Buddhist monasteries continue to be destroyed. Tibetan artifacts, represented by valuable historical Buddha statues, have been shipped in large numbers to mainland China. According to the 2000 Annual Report on Human Rights in Tibet by the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, a human rights organization, as many as 600 tons of precious metal statues of Tibetan Buddhas were shipped to the vicinity of Beijing alone.
Prolonged religious repression led to Tibet-wide protests and demonstrations against the Chinese government in 2008, and to police and civilian standoffs in Lhasa and other places.
More tragically, beginning in 2009, there was a spate of self-immolations in Tibet, with over one hundred and fifty monks, nuns or ordinary farmers and herdsmen setting their flesh on fire one after another to protest the Chinese government’s religious oppression and authoritarian rule by the end of 2017.
But resistance led to further oppression. Since then the Chinese government has intensified its so-called patriotic education campaign in the Tibetan region. In recent years, the Tibetan government has also invested heavily in a surveillance network called the “Snowlight Project,” with monasteries being the focus of surveillance.
Tibetan Exiles Protest 62nd Anniversary of China’s Crackdown on Freedom and Resistance (Voice of Tibet)
“Repression without weapons”
Gongga Zhaxi’s observation about the Chinese government’s Tibetan policy in recent years is that “the situation in Tibet now is what I usually call ‘repression without weapons.’ That is, it uses what is now called rule by law. So, a lot of new policies and new regulations have been adopted in various parts of Tibet to enforce (control) and to monitor Tibetans by using scientific and technological methods.”
What is clear is that the Chinese government’s restrictions on minority languages, including Tibetan, are intensifying.
In January, Shen Chunyao, director of the Legal Affairs Commission of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC), told a meeting of the NPC Standing Committee that some local regulations stipulating that ethnic schools at all levels should teach in their own or common languages were not in line with the constitutional provision promoting Mandarin, and that the NPC’s Legal Affairs Commission had asked the relevant departments to amend them.
The statement caused shock and panic among ethnic minority groups when it was released. Last year, the Mongolian population in Inner Mongolia still remembers the revolt against the unified textbooks for primary and secondary schools that use Mandarin as the language.
According to Teng Biao, a U.S.-based Chinese rights lawyer, Shen Chunyao’s argument has no legal basis; the Constitution also stipulates that “all ethnic groups have the freedom to use and develop their own languages and scripts,” which is not inconsistent with the “promotion of Mandarin. “This policy guiding and general statement cannot override and cancel other more specific statements.”
He emphasizes the danger of the NPC’s Law Commission stepping in to make such a representation, as it poses a threat to the cultural heritage and identity of all ethnic groups.
Tibetans celebrate the Tibetan New Year (known as Losar in Tibetan) (Photo from Tibet)
The “dead-end” policy
But the importance of the national language and religion to the Tibetan people does not seem to be on the horizon of the Chinese government.
A language, which is more than simple vocabulary and grammar, is the light of the human spirit, a ship that carries the spirit and soul of culture into the material world,” said Chinese writer Zhu Rui, who was a longtime editor of Tibetan Literature, borrowing from Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis’s article “The Dead End of Humanity. “
Wade Davis has traveled deep into Tibetan areas to produce The Buddhist Science of the Mind, a documentary film on Tibetan Buddhism. In his analysis of the world’s many threatened non-mainstream cultures and religions, he warns that “the pattern of human society is not absolute. Every fading view of the world, every disappearing culture, is shrinking the space in which we can live. (Cut off in the middle) There is nothing more frightening than to have the entire human imagination imprisoned in a single intellect and ideology.”
The Chinese government has also given Tibetan areas many preferential policies over the past seven decades. The Potala Palace has been overhauled twice, and the central government has invested nearly 300 million yuan. When talking about these seventy years, Chinese official media also repeatedly emphasize that the Chinese government has been credited with developing the Tibetan economy, making it possible for Tibetan areas to build a moderately prosperous society at the same time as the whole country.
But while the Chinese government emphasizes Tibet’s economic development, Tibetans feel more strongly that the Potala Palace is empty without the Dalai Lama.
“The Tibetan nation is a nation that believes in Buddhism 99% of the time. Whether a place is civilized and happy depends mainly on its spiritual realm, not the material realm. The (Tibetan) spiritual sphere is now under great oppression, so its claim to bring happiness is totally untrue,” Gonga Zhaxi said in this analysis.
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