Tibet as ‘Hell on Earth’by Elliot Sperling27 March 2009
The month of
March has turned into a field of contention in a struggle for the
ownership of Tibet’s historical memory. Tibetans claim March 10, the
day the 1959 Tibetan uprising erupted in Lhasa, as a national day, and
this year China has been forced to take drastic measures to contain any
hint of it. At the same time, China has staked out a new holiday in
order to commemorate the suppression of that same uprising: March 28 is
henceforth to be “Serfs Emancipation Day.” There is nothing subtle
about all this—China is quite determined to dominate the Tibetan
historical view, whether or not coercion or even force is necessary. On
one level, the new holiday symbolizes the return of 1959 and the
Tibetan uprising. In 1981, when discussions between the Dalai Lama’s
representatives and the Chinese government were only beginning, no less
a figure than Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang asserted to
the Dalai Lama’s brother, Gyalo Thondup, that “There should be no more
quibbling about past history, namely the events of 1959. Let us
disregard and forget this.” Subsequently, China did take 1959 off the
table in talks with the Dalai Lama’s representatives. But now, in the
clearest indication yet that those talks are at a dead-end—the last
round, in November, ended humiliatingly for the Tibetans—China has
brought 1959 back into play on its terms. Hence the renewed emphasis on
marking 1959 as the year of liberation for Tibet’s brutally oppressed
serfs.There’s no doubt that Tibet’s traditional society was
hierarchical and backwards, replete with aristocratic estates and a
bound peasantry. And there’s no doubt that Tibetans, whether in exile
or in Tibet voice no desire to restore such a society. Many Tibetans
will readily admit that the social structure was highly inegalitarian.
But it was hardly the cartoonish, cruel “Hell-on-Earth” that Chinese
propaganda has portrayed it to be. Lost in most discussions is an
understanding that Tibet’s demographic circumstances (a small
population in a relatively large land area) served to mitigate the
extent of exploitation. The situation was quite the reverse of China’s
in the early 20th century, where far too little land for the large
population allowed for severe exploitation by landowners. China’s
categorization of Tibetan society as feudal (technically, a problematic
characterization) obscures the fact that this socially backwards
society, lacking the population pressures found elsewhere, simply
didn’t break down as it ought to have and continued functioning
smoothly into the 20th century. Inegalitarian? Yes. Sometimes harsh?
Yes. But Hell-on-Earth for the vast majority of Tibetans? No.
Traditional Tibetan society was not without its cruelties (the
punishments visited on some political victims were indeed brutal), but
seen proportionally, they paled in comparison to what transpired in
China in the same period. In modern times mass flight from Tibet
actually only happened after Tibet’s annexation to the People’s
Republic of China.Tellingly, China often illustrates its
Hell-on-Earth thesis with photographs and anecdotes derived from rather
biased British imperial accounts of Tibet. That one might use such
materials to create a similar narrative of decadent Chinese barbarism
is no small irony; and such assertions can indeed be found in
literature from the age of imperialism. A further irony is that for
Tibetans today there is probably no period that registers in the
historical memory as cruelly and as savagely as the one that started
with democratic reforms in the 1950s (outside the present TAR) and
continued through the depths of the Cultural Revolution. When the Dalai
Lama’s first representatives returned to tour Tibet in 1979 cadres in
Lhasa, believing their own propaganda, lectured the city’s residents
about not venting anger at the visiting representatives of the cruel
feudal past. What actually transpired was caught on film by the
delegation and is still striking to watch: thousands of Tibetans
descended on them in the center of Lhasa, recounting amidst tears how
awful their lives had become in the intervening 20 years. These scenes
stunned China’s leadership and for some, at least, made clear the
depths to which Tibetan society had sunk since the era of “Feudal
Serfdom.”It’s hardly likely that most Tibetans, after all these
decades, are ready to buy into the government-enforced description of
their past; such ham-handed actions may well make many view the past as
far rosier than it actually was. It is also unlikely to win over large
foreign audiences beyond those who already are, or would like to be,
convinced. Most likely, it will simply reinforce a Chinese sense of a
mission civilatrice in Tibet. The colonial thinking and arrogance
inherent in such missions when entertained by European powers in the
past is obvious. And it is precisely the kind of attitude that will
likely exacerbate friction in Tibet and—justifiably—lead Tibetans to
view China’s presence in their land as of a sort with the colonialism
of other nations.–A longer version of this article will
appear in the Far Eastern Economic Review’s April issue. Elliot
Sperling is the director of the Tibetan Studies program at Indiana
University’s department of Central Eurasia Studies and the author of
“The Tibet-China Conflict: History and Polemics.”
