Did you see that footage of the Tiananmen Square demonstrators?
Singing The Internationale.
You don't have to be a supporter of liberal democracy to be an opponent of the regime in China. You don't today. And you didn't in 1989.
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No, you didn't have to be a supporter of liberal democracy to oppose the Chinese regime in 1989, and not all of the protesters were. Even those that were were often naive. But they weren't wrong to be protesting a government that is and remain oppressive, even if their motives were sometimes questionable. As for your comment about "unpleasant separatist tendencies", you need to learn some more of the region's history. Tibet was an independent country before the Chinese invaded in the 1950s, and whatever "benefits" the Chinese may have brought (most of which have gone to Chinese immigrants to Tibet in any case), they have done their best to destroy the Tibetans' culture. As for East Turkestan ("Xinjiang"), that is likewise an area that historically was not part of China and is inhabited by people compeletely distinct from the Han people of China. These territories are no more than colonies of the Chinese empire, and to claim China has some sort of right to them is like claiming that Britain had a right to places like India and Nigeria (but then maybe you believe it did).
ReplyDelete"East Turkestan" is an Islamist fiction. Like Tibet, Xinjiang has always been part of China.
ReplyDeleteBefore 1959, Tibet was certainly ruled by the Dalai Lama, by the lamas generally, and by the feudal landlord class from which the lamas were drawn. ("Dalai" is a family name - only a member of the House of Dalai can be the Dalai Lama.) Well over ninety per cent of the population was made up of serfs, the background from which the present rulers of Tibet are drawn.
That system was unique in China, and existed only because successive Emperors of China had granted the Tibetan ruling clique exactly the "autonomy" for which it still campaigns from "exile". Life expectancy in Tibet was half what it is today.
There has never been an independent state of Tibet, the Tibetans themselves migrated there from further east in China, huge numbers of them never did and never have done (the Dalai Lama himself was born hundreds of miles outside Tibet), and, likewise, the presence of large numbers of Han (ethnic Chinese in the ordinary sense) and other Chinese ethnic groups in Tibet is nothing remotely new.
The one child policy does not apply in Tibet, so the Han majority there is the ethnic Tibetans' own fault, if they even see it as a problem. It is totally false to describe the Dalai Lama as their spiritual leader; few are those who would view him as such, and even fewer are, or ever have been, those of that mind inside Tibet.
But why let the facts get in the way of reliving the glory days of flower power and Cold War Trotskyism?
I don't know where you got your information (a history book published in the PRC, perhaps?), but it is almost all incorrect. Prior to the PRC, the only two periods when the same governemnt ruled China and Tibet were the Mongol Yuan dynasty and the Manchu Qing dynasty. Tibet was outside of Chinese control in all other periods. As for Turkestan, other than these two dynasties, the Chinese only had indirect authority over these regions in the Han and Tang dynasty. During the Tang dynasty, the Tibetans had their own empire which fought the Chinese (and the Arabs on the western frontier) for dominance of the Tarim region (Turkestan) and often won. They even briefly occupied the Chinese capital Chang'an in 765. Tibetan culture is completely distinct from Chinese culture, and while the peoples are related, they are no more the same than Swedes and English are the same. The first Dalai Lama (excluding two named retroactively) was given the title by the Mongol ruler Altan Khan. "Dalai" (meaning "ocean") was a translation of his name, but while the Tibetan original "Gyatso" is given to all Dalai Lamas, it is not a family name as they are not actually related. The current Dalai Lama was born "Lhamo Döndrub". Turkestan was never a unified nation, but even when the Chinese dominated it, each city had its own rulers and laws; the Chinese just ensured that the rulers were pro-Chinese. But as I stated before, for much of history this area was completely indpendent or dominated by some other power, such as the Xiongnu, the Mongols or the Tibetans. And today, if they were given a free choice, the majority of the native peoples of these regions would vote to be free of China, even if their only other choice was "feudal serfdom" (which in fact was invented by the Chinese, as most of the Tibetans were and remain nomads).
ReplyDeleteAnother couple of points. The current Dalai Lama was born in Amdo, which was traditionally part of Tibet. The Chinese included it in their province of Qinghai, just as they included Kham in western Sichuan. The claim that these areas are not Tibet is a Chinese fabrication. They were inhabited by Tibetans for centuries, dating back to the Tibetan empire of the eighth and ninth centuries. In fact the Tibetan rebellion against Chinese rule in the 1950s began in the Tibetan part of Sichuan. There is still not a Han majority in Tibet, but the large Han minority is due to the Chinese government's active encouragement of Han settlement in Tibet. The same thing is happening in Turkestan. Do you really think the Han would choose to live in places like that without any encouragement? As it is, some go there with the intention of returning to China in the future. However enough stay to create a growing Han population. The Tibetans and other minority groups can't possibly keep up with Han immigration on the scale it's been taking place unless they have half a dozen children each or more. There are well over a billion Han Chinese, and the Uighurs, Tibetans and Mongols number only in the millions (the Mongols are already a minority in Inner Mongolia). Again, I suggest you get your information from a source other than the Chinese (try the Cambridge Histories of China or the Cultural Atlas of China for a start).
ReplyDeleteOn and on you go about how these places were somehow in China but not. They were in China, but a long way from the centre in the days before easy travel or communication. But they were still in China. China has been pretty much where she is now since time immemorial.
ReplyDeleteAs for who is or is not "indigineous", not merely black and white Americans, or white Australians, but Anglo-Saxons and even Celts in these islands, Franks and even Gauls in France, and so on, would fall foul by whatever criterion you are using if, for example, the Han, the Hwe and others are not "indigineous" to Tibet.
Or, indeed, the Tibetans are not "indigineous" to the areas further east whence they migrated. You write that "The claim that these areas are not Tibet is a Chinese fabrication". I do not dispute that they are inhabited by ethnic Tibetans (among other people), just as, say, Lhasa is inhabited by ethnic Han (among other people).
Not even the Dalai Lama is in favour of independence, which would not be recognised by anywhere else on earth. And which would be extremely bad for most ethnic Tibetans in Tibet, who would be condemned to life expectancy half what it is today, for so it was when the lamas and their landowning class were permitted to run that part of China as they saw fit.
The sheer scale of the population transfers that would be necessary to partition multiethnic China into a Tibetan homeland and a Han homeland, plus at least 54 others, is practically impossible to imagine. The whole thing would make the partition of India look like the resolution of a Parish Council boundary dispute.