Two sets of images have already come to dominate outsiders’ understanding of this month’s events in Tibet, where a pro-independence movement has seen some 40 protests of greater intensity and extent than in some four decades.
One image is the video footage of Tibetan rioters savagely beating Chinese migrants in Lhasa on March 14, when 16 people are said to have been killed or burned to death by the mobs. These scenes, shown repeatedly on CNN and other networks (not always with clear indications that the Chinese government supplied them), are immensely troubling, and challenge any remaining Western image of the pacific, spiritual Tibetan.
The other image is conveyed by a series of photographs showing Tibetans shot dead in pro-independence protests in Ngaba, far to the east of Lhasa, reportedly by riot police. The blood-streaked and bullet-ridden bodies, too gruesome to show in public media, have been posted on the Web.
The video footage of the Lhasa riots – hardly representative, since no attacks on Chinese civilians have been reported in any of the 40 other protests – are in one view taken as a sign that economic marginalization has seeded envy of the commercial success of Chinese migrants in Tibet and hardened into ethnic hatred. A similar school, strongly held by Chinese leaders, accuses the exile Tibetan leadership of inciting the unrest, seeking to undermine China’s Olympic Games to be held there this summer.
For others, the Ngaba photographs are emblematic of the resistance of oppressed Tibetans to Chinese domination. Terms like uprising or intifada are used, and the deaths are seen as the inevitable price of the fight for freedom.
Neither view is wrong, though they are barely compatible. If the polarizing images are to bring outsiders closer to understanding what is happening in Tibet and why, we need to recognize the historical basis for both interpretations.
China takes a statist position: that, to modernize, all cultures need to give up something of their distinct identities, and all states limit citizens’ rights when they threaten national interests. The British had a similar view when they invaded Tibet in 1903-4, arguing that Tibet was outdated theocracy with a corrupt religion that would be brought to its senses by a taste of modern military efficiency. When Mao Zedong sent his army to integrate Tibet into the new People’s Republic in 1950, it was said that a weak Tibet needed liberating from Western imperialists. Nine years later, when a failed uprising against Chinese rule led the Dalai Lama to flee with 80,000 other Tibetans to India, the Chinese said Tibetans needed to be liberated from feudal oppression. In the 1980s, the explanation changed to one in which China offered social and economic development to free Tibetans from material backwardness. In all such views, Tibet and Tibetans are seen as something incomplete and in need of fulfillment from an outside source, whether a civilization, a state or the forces of modernization.
Claims this week that Tibetan protesters were stirred up by the exiled Dalai Lama, reflect a historical view of people not as thinking individuals with concerns, but as captives of a powerful ideology, be it religion, feudal bondage, traditional customs or inefficient economic practices like nomadic herding.
Thus the fact that Tibetan monks arranged a protest to coincide with a similar event in India is seen as evidence that they were controlled by exile groups in India. The protesters’ calculation that the security forces would be reluctant to shoot them in the run-up to the summer Olympics is seen as a political conspiracy rather than an intelligent wish to remain alive.
On the Tibetan side, the events are seen in terms of national identity — a distinct population and culture, with features shared by all its members, a sense of common purpose and a broad agreement about the story of its past.
The historical high points are the eighth century, when Tibet was a major empire; the year 1642 when the fifth Dalai Lama began to form Tibet into a single nation; the declaration of independence in 1913 by the 13th Dalai Lama, and the 1959 uprising against Chinese rule. In this record, outsiders have taken something away from what was otherwise whole. China has deprived the nation of its culture, the Tibetan people have been denied freedom, their language has been whittled away, and their economic resources have been appropriated by others.
Will new views result from what has happened in Tibet this month? Few people will continue to see Tibetans as figments of spiritual fantasies, or simply as victims of oppression or as subjects for our sympathy. We are more likely to see them now as complex, passionate figures making very political and sometimes brutal decisions in the difficult effort to become again the authors of their own destinies.
No one of good will is likely not to feel for those Chinese who are pained deeply by the images of horrific ethnic violence, even if they and their leaders had been warned of explosive tensions many times, sympathy that will be squandered if executions and summary justice ensues. In either case, the deaths on both sides show that Tibet is after all a deeply serious issue, resolvable only through political means, one in which we all will need to develop more complex views needed to understand the new realities created by Tibetan protesters inside Tibet.
Robert Barnett is director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of “Lhasa: Streets With Memories” (Columbia University Press, 2006).