Tibet and China: Self-determination for the Tibetan people - PR9

“To quell the protests . . . in Lhasa and Sangchu County, Chinese security forces responded by beating protesters, firing live ammunition, surrounding Ganden, Drepung and Sera monasteries, and cutting phone lines into the monasteries”

The Tibetan protests started on 10 March, National Uprising Day, commemorating the revolt against Chinese repression in 1959. Finally subdued after several weeks, approximately 50,000 Tibetans fled to India along with the Dalai Llama. Dozens or hundreds were killed.

Following the Chinese clampdown this March the trials of 30 Tibetans accused of being involved in violent disturbances have taken place. According to Human Rights Watch, they were tried on secret evidence . . . behind closed doors and without the benefit of a meaningful defence by lawyers they had chosen. If you were picked up on the streets, whatever you were doing, your fate was sealed. Two protestors have been sentenced to death.

The result, as the entire world knows, is that China’s Olympic Year has been plagued with renewed controversy over its human rights record in Tibet. The Olympic torch procession has been disrupted, campaigners (although not the Dalai Llama) have called for a boycott of the games. While not going as far, leaders of the world’s democracies have used the occasion to lecture the Chinese government on its poor human rights record (while staying silent on the equally appalling record of numerous Middle East and Zionist allies).

The recent unrest in Tibet, particularly in the towns and cities, is a struggle against national oppression. It draws in the poor and urban working class, even if the leadership of it was the local monks. However, the Dalai Llama and his government in exile sought to separate themselves from the protestors.

Undeniably, the uprising included violent actions against Han Chinese living in Tibet, partly a reaction to the deliberate policy of the Chinese government to colonise Tibet, ensuring that sections of the Han population enjoy considerable material and political privileges.

Search the net and you can quickly find a wide variety of views on Tibetan nationalism, with even nominally leftist commentators extolling the virtues of the Chinese Communist Party’s developmental model for Tibet and China’s territorial integrity, to the point where some even come close to arguing that Tibetan nationalism and indeed Tibet itself, doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense.

Those that argue the Tibetans have never had it so good since the invasion of Tibet by the People’s Liberation Army in 1951 point to certain facts. According to the UN, the mortality rate in Tibet declined sharply after the Chinese take over, from 28 per 1,000 in the 1950s to 6.6 per 1,000 in 2000. Life expectancy, which had been around 35 years in 1951, was up to 59.64 by 1990.

However, official Chinese figures demonstrate that Tibet, despite some advances in the last 50 years, lags behind China in many ways. For example, literacy in 1990 was 56% compared to China’s 74% and per capita GDP is about half that of China.

But does the undoubted development of Tibet in some areas mean that socialists should bow down before the Chinese Stalinists? Does this progress justify the denial of self-determination of Tibet? After all, in a previous time, another set of colonialists, the British, similarly built thousands of miles of railways in India, developed a national bureaucracy, and an educational system. But none of this justified an idea that India was better off being ruled from London.

Other commentators point out the feudal nature of the pre-Chinese Tibetan social order. The current Dalai Llama himself (Tenzin Gyatso) was conveniently reincarnated into a wealthy landowning family whose estate was farmed by serfs. Tibetan serfdom was akin to the conditions of medieval European peasants. They worked the land on behalf of the lord of the manor, paid him tithes and handed over the bulk of the produce.

They could marry only with the lord’s permission and, with their children, were regularly forced into domestic slavery with all the sexual and physical abuse this habitually entailed. Other peasant children would be snatched or bought for service by the rich, powerful and competing monasteries to be monks or nuns for life or used as servants.

The Chinese government ripped apart the old feudal system (the so-called Democratic Reform) in the 1960s. While the results viewed in isolation and in retrospect may be labelled progressive, it was done in a dictatorial and reactionary manner, relying on the People’s Liberation Army and Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy to carry out the reforms, preventing any self-organised actions by peasants and town workers.

Laying bare the reality of life in old Tibet is a necessary counter to the idealised notion of Tibet as an unsullied and spiritually pure Shangri La, an idea lapped up by western liberals. But it is wholly unnecessary to slip over into reverence for the new Tibet, ruled by the Chinese and there is certainly no excuse for refusing to stand against the national oppression of Tibetans.

Another supposedly left wing argument against self-determination is that the leadership of the Tibetans, especially the Dalai Llama, is thoroughly reactionary and in league with the imperialists. As with all religions, Tibetan Buddhism protected private property to the maximum and promoted its theology using notions of traditional culture that sanctified its wealth and power.

Dissent was taken as proof of satanic influence, landlords were rich because they were righteous whereas the lowly poor clearly deserved their lot (wrapped up in karmic mystifications about vice and virtue accruing from past lives).

While there is support for the Dalai Llama both within Tibet and in exiled communities in Asia and beyond, few Tibetans would want a return to the social order of the 1950s. The Dalai Llama himself has been forced to move with the times and pays lip service to the idea of a Tibet with democratic structures, embracing some of the infrastructure of a modern state – roads, schools – with no return to the religious serfdom that marked the old Tibet.

But these promises ring hollow given the rampant nepotism and lack of transparency in the Tibetan government in exile; three of the six cabinet members are members of the Dalai Llama’s own family.

Throughout the 1960s and well into the 1970s the government in exile secretly received around $17 million dollars a year from the CIA, much of which was used to fund guerrilla operations against the Chinese occupation, orchestrated by the Dalai Llama, now of course a Nobel Peace Prize winner. The Dalai Llama received a handsome salary of around $180,000 a year that was used to fund offices in New York and Geneva. Funds are still channelled to the Tibetan exiles via the Tibet Fund of the US State department – around $2 million dollars a year – and George Soros is a major private donor.

The fact that the leaders of the Tibetan nationalists are members of a ruling class linked by a thousand threads to the imperialist powers, does not excuse those socialists who would use this as a get-out clause to deny the Tibetans their right to self-determination.

Struggles for national liberation have regularly drawn their support from the exploiting classes. Wasn’t this the case in India where the struggle for independence from the British Empire was led by the bourgeois nationalist Indian National Congress?

Some socialists argue that there is no real basis for Tibetan self-determination as it is not really a nation and, in any case, Tibet could not really survive as a viable independent state.

One typical left commentator’s argument goes: Tibet’s tangled history proves there is no progressive nationalism in the country and therefore the Tibetan people do not have a valid claim to self-determination.1

In reality this just saying that unless and until nationalist movements are led by internationalists and socialists then they cannot be supported against oppressors. This means that socialists could never support
a national liberation movement. And it would have meant that in the past socialists never supported the struggle of the oppressed against their colonial masters.

The argument continues: “Tibet . . . can only exist as either part of China or as a bankrupt client state of western imperialism.”2 These are old arguments that occurred in the Socialist International before and during the First World War. Lenin was scathing about those that made them, saying that they wanted to drop the political question of national self-determination. He dubbed them imperialist economists.

Of course as socialists we are not in favour of dividing up the world into ever greater numbers of countries. We want the working class to unite across nations, but we know that this cannot happen as long as there is national oppression. Lenin didn’t say socialists can only support national liberation struggles if led by progressive leaders, or if these nations have a valid claim to be a nation because of their history according to socialists. Nor did he say that nations could only have independence if there was a guarantee those new states would be economically viable.

He insisted that socialists supported the right of self-determination. This included the right for those nations to form independent states if that is what the majority of the population wanted to do, provided that in so doing they did not oppress others or claim privileges over another part of the population.

Tibet’s working class has grown, along with an indigenous intelligentsia, and is able to express its anger at its poverty and national oppression. Socialists should support Tibetan self-determination now. Only by doing so will we help the working class gain the confidence to move beyond pure nationalism, based on idealised notions of the past, and begin to organise as a class against the state capitalist Chinese bureaucracy.

It’s important to remember that the last significant wave of protests in Tibet was in 1989 just before the Tiananmen Square massacre of mostly Han Chinese.

Tibetans currently suffer racism from Han settlers and the wider Chinese population but at root their problems have the same cause. Only when the Tibetans feel they can fight as equals with the Chinese masses will there be true unity in the struggle against the Chinese dictatorship.

1. China and the Riddle of Tibet, Socialist Unity, 19 March 2008

Sat 04, October 2008 @ 13:05