Chinese rule in Tibet

...In 1985, almost the entire Tibetan residential area around the Jokang was torn down and redone, the Barkhor Plaza completely renovated, and a fullservice luxury accommodation, the Lhasa Hotel, built in six months...

...This is no accident, as Chinese have all the requisite political contacts for licenses and loans...

...Nearly four decades after signing with China the fateful "17-Point Agreement on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet," which guaranteed its autonomy, Tibet is close to extinction as a meaningful demographic and cultural entity...

...About the Jokang's recent history as a killing ground, for example, and the continuing nocturnal abduction, torture, and imprisonment of suspected activists...

...About the exorbitant fees tourists pay for photos inside temples and monasteries, which officially go toward restoration but in reality are diligently collected each evening by the government's "democratic management committees" —along with the money offerings from Tibetan pilgrims—and deposited into government-controlled bank accounts...

...An accompanying guide recited the histories of the magnificent thangka paintings adorning the walls and massive Buddhas and buddhisattvas seated in gilded repose within candlelit chapels...

...Billions of dollars in potential trade revenues can make a lot of civilized countries forgetful of human rights...

...The stakes of confronting Beijing on its behavior in Tibet are not to be underestimated...

...In 1964, he disappeared from view after refusing Chinese demands to publicly denounce the Dalai Lama and reappeared only after spending fourteen years incommunicado in Qin Cheng Prison No...

...One is tempted to conclude that, like the scarcity of good Tibetan hotels, restaurants and retail stores, the absence of Tibetan guides is no accident...

...There is one very obvious exception to the Nepalese cartel...

...The report hastened to add that, although China continues to dismiss such abuses as aberrations of the Cultural Revolution, most aspects of Tibet's cultural and religious defilement have been standing policy before, during, and after that chaotic reign...

...As much as $240 million has reportedly been invested in tourism facilities and infrastructure...

...China continues to violate these pledges...

...The solitude evidently gave him time to rethink his position: "For a period of time I discarded the banner of patriotism and committed a crime," he told the New China News Agency after his release in 1978...

...A herd of some forty congressmen passed through Lhasa for a few days in April 1988 for a quick look...

...other major towns like Shigatse, Chamdo, and Gyantse are suffering similar transformations under a flood of resettled Chinese...

...But the permanent indoor shops with expensive durable goods are the province of Nepalese merchants, whose traditional privileges in Tibet have been converted under the Chinese into a virtual monopoly of South Asian trade by the severe travel restrictions on Tibetans...

...When I finally did manage to arrange for a Tibetan guide, I was given some very "unpatriotic" impressions...

...recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, and remain passive while Chinese police continue a sweeping crackdown on unarmed Tibetan dissidents...

...1, just outside Beijing...

...As a result of his new thinking, his Tibet-China Corporation operates enterprises that include the Barkhor stores, hostels, and restaurants, and uses the proceeds to support Tashilhunpo Monastery in Shigatse, his ancestral seat...

...He has also deconsecrated himself as a lama by breaking his vows of celibacy and taking a Chinese wife, and now wears only the layman's chuba in public...

...The 'nine-points' for Taiwan cannot be applied to Tibet...

...Why can't they be...

...A February 1988 report by Asia Watch likewise found that "the prevalence of serious human rights abuses in Tibet is beyond dispute," including the mass imprisonment and routine torture of political dissidents, discrimination in employment, education and housing, forced sterilizations, and a stage-managed renaissance of Buddhism in which "the role of tourism . . . is undeniable...

...When another figure approached, the guide resumed lecturing and showed a fist to the tourist with the small finger pointed downward, the Tibetan gesture for a Chinese informant...

...On a busy day a tourist can see that many Chinese just in the streets of Lhasa—mending shoes, repairing bicycles, laying bricks, serving meals and performing other essential tasks that, after forty years of "advancement," Tibetans strangely are said to be still incapable of doing themselves...

...Outside around the temple on the cobbled path known as the Barkhor, hidden cameras were primed to record any future public disturbances and roaming plainclothed police had orders to shoot would-be instigators on sight...

...Nearly half its territory was long ago carved up and auctioned off to contiguous Chinese provinces...

...The most frequented area for tourists is the Barkhor, where Tibetans sell turquoise jewelry, cheap brassware, and $10 Khampa knives 22 • DISSENT Report from Abroad from street stands...

...Hundreds more monks and lay Tibetans, including several friends of the guide, were arrested and taken away to local prisons in Lhasa, where they endured days of savage beatings with sticks, truncheons, and fists and where many languished still...

...And despite overwhelming evidence of the deaths of up to one million Tibetans over the past thirty years from famine, internment in labor camps, "struggle sessions," and counterinsurgency operations, China steadfastly continues to deny all such charges with census statistics and voodoo mathematics...

...Tibet is an autonomous region under the unified leadership of the central government," the officials replied...

...WINTER • 1989 • 21 Report from Abroad brought under serious international scrutiny: in 1959, when the Dalai Lama fled the country and again in 1987 when anti-Chinese riots rocked Lhasa during a rarely permitted visit by Western news personnel...

...The 17-Point Agreement of 1951 pledged China to leave Tibet's existing political system intact, preserve freedom of religion, develop the Tibetan language and culture, allow the local government to carry out reforms of its own accord, and abstain from plunder...

...Tibet, however, entails not just a provocative argument about Communist China's moral fiber but its legal attitude toward the question of autonomy and thus casts a shadow over discussions on Hong Kong and Taiwan...

...On a recent morning in Lhasa a lone Western tourist was strolling through the dim, centuries-old corridors of Jokang Temple, the holiest shrine of contemporary Tibetan Buddhism...

...But people need money...

...Maroon-robed monks murmured prayers while tending to butterlamps and Tibetan pilgrims performed trance-like prostrations to the drone of chanted mantras and the scraping of their makeshift cardboard handguards on the paving stones...

...When unnamed officials of Beijing's State Nationalities Affairs Commission were questioned by Beijing Review earlier this year about the parallels between autonomy in Tibet and Taiwan, the answers were equally evasive...

...There certainly is a familiar ring to them...

...congressional hearings on Tibet produced enough convincing testimony to spur resolutions by both houses condemning China's policies...

...Guided by Chairman Mao's revolutionary line, I have corrected my errors...

...That is the chain of stores operated on the Barkhor by the Panchen Lama, the second highest official in Tibetan Buddhism, who serves as an apt model for what it takes to get ahead under the current system...

...Perhaps the most striking aspect of tourism is the almost total absence of Tibetan tour guides...

...Bernt Carlsson 1937-1988 WINTER • 1989 • 23...

...Several months earlier, on March 5, the guide said, hundreds of Chinese police had rampaged through these same sacred corridors, clubbing and shooting to death some thirty monks in retaliation for an unarmed, pro-independence demonstration...

...In Tibet it is considered not good to sell such things," said one smuggler sheepishly...

...As recently as March 1988 Beijing admitted to a total resident population of 73,000 Han Chinese in the entire Tibet Autonomous Region, who were there only "to help develop the local economy and stimulate scientific, educational and cultural advancement...

...Lhasa, whose spiritual and architectural character was for centuries a source of wonderment, is now a drab Chinese factory town with a few impressive Tibetan monuments...

...Last year's U.S...

...Until genuine autonomy for Tibet is granted—and the Dalai Lama permitted to return as a guarantor—all bets on Hong Kong and Taiwan should remain off...

...The response of the Reagan administration has been to shoot the messengers of this bad news, restate U.S...

...About the Tibet Art Gallery, which plays the public role of benefactor for Tibetan artists but whose proceeds go to a high-ranking CITS apparatchik (an observation later confirmed by an indignant Chinese tour guide...

...As first made public in September 1981 by Ye Jianying, the late chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China proposes to convert Taiwan into a "special administrative area enjoying a high degree of autonomy" and "to retain the existing school and economic systems [and] way of life...

...My own group was led by a very attractive young woman from Shanghai who had been in Tibet less than a week, spoke no Tibetan, and knew nothing whatever about Tibetan culture or Buddhism...

...The annual number of tourists has increased rapidly, from 15,000 in 1985 to 40,000 in 1987...

...The top-dollar tourists stay at the Lhasa Hotel and its annex, the Tibet Guest House, which are operated by Holiday Inn on contract with the Tibet Tourism Corporation...

...The Dalai Lama has spent the 1980s trying to persuade Beijing to honor the agreement as a precondition for his return, but to no avail...

...Beijing has placed a high premium on tourism there as a source of foreign exchange and a self-financing alternative to massive subsidization from the central government, which amounted to 98 percent of Tibet's budget in 1986...

...Meanwhile, he remains a pathetic hostage of the Chinese in Beijing and is hauled into public view whenever useful statements need to be made, such as a denunciation of the 1987 riots...

...I approached Lhasa Travel Service, a CITS subsid iary, and waited for three days for a Tibetan guide without success...

...Only on two occasions has the case of Tibet been...

...For the tourist, it was a spellbinding scene of ancient tradition and religious devotion...

...Tibetans compete with locally hired Chinese to serve meals and clean rooms...

...But the guide suddenly interrupted his lecture, looked cautiously about and, seeing they were alone, proceeded to break the spell with an altogether different, unauthorized version of the Jokang's history...

...An odor of rancid yak butter permeated the musty air...

...Tourism is a risky venture for the Chinese in Tibet because improper management can lead to information leakage...

...There are five hostels run by Tibetans, whose combined room capacity is only 70 percent of the Hotel Lhasa's alone and whose nightly rates, fixed by the government, are a tenth of the Lhasa' s . The overwhelming number of restaurants in town are run by Szechuanese, and it is to these that tourists gravitate...

...Meanwhile, events like the Jokang massacre—which was confirmed by numerous local sources, including a policeman who was inside the temple during the mayhem—are swallowed up in the same silence that has shrouded Tibet's fate since its occupation by the People's Liberation Army in 1950...

...The world reads almost daily about the good things happening in China—its market economics, productive growth rate, happy peasants-cummillionaires— and thus seems to have accommodated the idea of Hong Kong and even Taiwan being reunited with the motherland...

...A useful way to examine the Chinese view of "autonomy" is to visit Tibet as a tourist, as I did for two weeks in July...

...Positions in management, public relations, staff supervision, and reception are filled by Westerners, Hong Kong Chinese brought in by Holiday Inn, and cadres from Beijing and Shanghai who are in training to eventually assume control...

...China annually extracts enormous amounts of mineral wealth from Tibet that simply aren't counted as local revenue...

...As opposed to being saved from imperialism by the occupation (at a time when there was a total of six Europeans in Tibet), the country today looks more like the victim of a liquidation sale after an unfriendly corporate takeover...

...But Tibet has been resolutely consigned by the administration to its familiar cemetery of silence...

...About the voracious smuggling of the Tibetan Khampas, who buy for a song the sacred religious icons of desperate Tibetan families and peddle them on the international market...

...One night many Chinese come this monastery, do like this to the abbot," a small boy-monk said excitedly, placing his hands together as though handcuffed and mimicking the whipping action of rifle butts...

...This shouldn't, however, leave the misleading impression that Tibet is a fiscal liability...

...Tibetans mainly run cheap chang joints for fellow Tibetans...

...Only a tiny percentage of these expenditures has gone into Tibetan pockets...

...What the People's Republic of China calls autonomy is a euphemism for nineteenth-century colonialism wedded to trickle-down economics...