TIBET - A REALITY CHECK 2
lovechina
A major theme in the 'independence for Tibet' campaign is that
China's role in Tibet is that of a 'colonial' power exploiting the
occupied land's wealth and resources, subjugating its people, and
suppressing its freedom. Part of this theme is the assertion that
even for the post-1979 period, when some economic improvements took
place, official statistics and ''the Chinese Government's claims''
of social and economic development in Tibet ''cannot be taken at
face value''; and that in any case ''it is not the Tibetans who
benefit from the economic development of Tibet'' but ''Chinese
settlers in Tibet, their Government and military, and their business
enterprises.''
This theme links up opportunistically with a long-observed tendency
in colonial and post-colonial western attitudes towards Tibet.
Idealising Tibet's far-from-the-madding-crowd isolation, primitive
impenetrability, frozen-in-time traditions and Lama-led spirituality
and treating its denizens as chosen people holding the key to
happiness, peace and spiritual liberation (at least until the
Chinese arrived) is one side of this tendency. The other side is
hostility, mostly of the patronising kind, vented both against
unification with China and the process of modernisation that you see
at work everywhere in Tibet.
Aside from the fact that this first major theme of the 'independence
for Tibet' campaign is identical to one of the core arguments of the
Pakistan-supported extremist secessionist movement in Kashmir,
reality testing for Tibet on the set of issues addres sed by this
kind of argument can be on its own merits, sui generis so to speak.
Observed Reality
Flying into Gongkar airport, Tibet's major airport located in
Shannan Prefecture, is a novel as well as sobering experience.
Towards the end of a three-hour flight originating in Xian, China's
ancient capital (which used to be known as Changan), you catch a
spectacular glimpse of topographies and landforms that seem straight
out of Browning's strangest poems. Nothing you have read or seen in
photographs prepares you for the vastness, the remoteness, the
unnatural natural beauty, the flat-versus-mountain ous,
dry-versus-riverine, fertile-versus-barren singularity of this
once-great sea that has become a high altitude plateau averaging
4,000 metres, the 'roof of the world'. Tibet has less oxygen, more
sunlight, longer hours of daylight, lower temperatures , less
precipitation, more changeable weather, more great mountains and
rivers, a larger collection of lakes and nature reserves, and a
lower density of population than most people are used to.
But it is equally true that those who warn you about Tibet - against
breathing difficulty, against altitude sickness, and against any
kind of physical exertion upon landing - exaggerate for the most
part. Unless specific health problems (even a transient problem like
a bad cold) contra-indicate a flying visit to Tibet, acclimatisation
is hardly the arduous challenge that anecdotal evidence and some
guidebooks make it out to be. Further, you discover soon enough that
geographically, physically, climatically, socio-economically,
culturally and politically, the Tibet Autonomous Region of China is
far from being a world apart - far-away, impenetrable, and
inscrutable - that Hollywood's fantasising about Shangri-la, 'Seven
Years in Tibet', 'Kundun', and Lam aic Buddhism suggests.
Tibet is on the move. This becomes clear as soon as you are on the
road, either to Lhasa, a smooth, asphalted 95 km northward drive
from Gongkar, or to Tsetang, a somewhat longer drive to the east
that we took straight from the airport. As you speed along the
highway, you are offered rapid frame alternations of the new and the
old, the modern and the traditional, in what can be a heady brew of
first impressions. In Tibet, as in most parts of the world, you can
end up seeing and feeling, more or l ess, what you are pre-disposed
to seeing and feeling. And much of this pre-disposition in the West,
especially in the United States, is the outcome of prolonged
exposure to the 'independence for Tibet' propaganda campaign
orchestrated by the Dalai Lama, aided and abetted by Hollywood, by a
certain genre of highly subjective travel writing, and, at a more
sophisticated level, by 'manufacture of consent' in the media
passing off as professional reportage and analysis.
Discrediting modernisation through selective, tendentious
description has become a favourite device in recent first-hand
western writing on Tibet. Whether it is ''Tibetan Tragedy,'' a Time
magazine cover story written by Anthony Spaeth (issue of July 17,
2000), or a more pretentious two-part essay by Ian Baruma in The New
York Review of Books (''Found Horizon'' in the issue of June 29,
2000 and ''Tibet Disenchanted'' in the issue of July 20, 2000),
discos, karaoke bars, brothels, gambling casinos and so forth loom
large in the reportage and analysis. It is as though these are the
distinguishing features of the modernising process that is on in
Tibet, as part of China's gigantic, Deng Xiaoping-led post-1979
economic transformation. In Baruma's evocative account, the dominant
image of modernising Tibet under China's 'colonial' rule is sleaze
associated with wild frontier 'Chinese-style capitalism': ''Chinese
carpet-baggers, hucksters, hookers, gamblers, hoodlums, corrupt
officials, and other desperadoes lusting after quick cash.''
Unless the visitor chooses to get obsessively trapped in such images
that are a small part of the reality, what he or she sees is a
different kind of modernisation. New or improved schools, a system
of compulsory schooling for nine or six or three years (depending on
the area and the stage of objective development), and quite
competitive higher educational institutions. A bewildering range of
consumer goods and shops. Modern blue-tinted office buildings, new
residential complexes, and a great deal of construction activity in
town and country. Hospitals and health centres dispensing both
modern and a flourishing Tibetan indigenous medicine. Surplus grain
production, new agricultural methods and practices, tractors,
surplus-producing peasants, commoditis ed agriculture, water
conservancy, irrigation, hydroelectric, geothermal, horticulture,
and animal husbandry projects. Small and medium-sized industries and
businesses. Ambitious infrastructure projects. A sustained economic
growth rate close to 10 per cent per year. Nascent scientific
research, surveys, and social science activity. A substantial
Tibetan Archives, active promotion and use of the Tibetan language
(written and spoken), and big projects, funded largely by the
Central Government, to record, collate, edit and publish Tibetan
literary classics, such as King Gesar, and Buddhist sacred texts.
Extensive repair, renovation, restoration and protection of cultural
treasures under a strict and elaborate cultural protection regime. A
splendid Tibet Autonomous Region Museum in Lhasa, with a floor space
of 21,000 square metres, constructed during 1994-97 at a cost of $12
million. Environmental consciousness and concerns expressed in
strict regulations, policies, an Environmental Protection Bur eau,
afforestation, greening. New roads, highways, cars, two-wheelers,
tractors, speeding trucks and every kind of modern vehicle.
Newspapers, radio, television, mobile phones, twenty-first century
telecom, even a few Internet bars. A nascent interest in
biotechnology. Hotels for various budgets, organised tourism, and a
host of other modern tertiary activities.
This is not surprising given the post-1979 policies of reform and
opening up, which have brought enormous economic changes across
China. Under the impact of these policies, over the past six years
the economy of the Tibet Autonomous Region has grown at an annual
rate close to 10 per cent, which is above the national average. Last
year, the Region's GDP grew at 9.6 per cent. Recently released data
on GDP growth for the first half of 2000 revealed that Tibet's 8.9
per cent was again above the national average (8.2 per cent).
Economic growth during the second half of the year is expected to be
higher.
At the same time, the traditional is very much on view in town and
country. As you speed along the highway to Tsetang, you catch a
glimpse of how the bulk of Tibetans live, in mud and stone houses,
cultivating small plots and tending livestock; prayer flags
fluttering; primitive farming and nomadic practices; poor living
conditions; colourful long skirts, striped aprons and beads; people
squatting road-side; children working at home, in the fields, or
tending livestock. This reflects the truth that the level of
economic development, the development of productive forces, and the
living standards of the people in the Tibet Autonomous Region are
visibly lower than the Chinese average.
Tibet is clearly at a preliminary stage of modernisation. To ask it
to remain frozen in its traditions, as romantic disillusionment with
the process of modernisation demands, is to be unrealistic as well
as unfair to the mass of Tibetan people. For all t heir observable
religiosity, they are as keen as people anywhere else to solve basic
problems of food, clothing, shelter, transport, education, health,
and decent work, and to improve living standards as quickly as
possible.
A VISIT to a surplus-producing peasant family on the outskirts of
Tsetang in Shannan Prefecture makes clear these aspirations. The
head of the ten-member family, seven of whose members still live in
this unpretentious but spacious and traditionally decorated house,
is 56-year-old Lhodru. He and his wife are illiterate, but four of
the five children have been to school. (The girl is the exception.)
In the 1950s, the family had no land of its own and subsisted on
raising donkeys and some cattle, although, as Lhodru noted, it was
not a family of serfs and did not belong to the poorest of the poor.
The family acquired some land after the Democratic Reform in 1959,
but until the late 1970s it produced just enough to keep its head
above water.
Today, Lhodru's family owns 22 mu of land, that is 1.46 hectares,
operates a tractor bought with a bank loan, owns six pigs and five
heads of cattle, and sells grain as well as milk in the market. The
proof of its improving living standards can be seen in the main
living room, in the elaborately decorated furniture and a range of
consumer goods. According to Lhodru, electrification arrived here
around 1979 and the basic improvements came after the whole village
was shifted to this location at the end of the 1970s. Of the five
children, three, including the young woman, live with the parents.
The youngest member of the family, a boy, is in high school; the
young woman has a job in the country administration; and of the
three remaining sons, one works in the fields, another is a
tractor-driver, and the third makes a living riding a rickshaw in
the local market. Lhodru observes that as living standards improve
and the market economy develops, attitudes, beliefs and aspirations
undergo a significant change, especially among the young. Secondly,
he notes, how specific families fare in the new situation depends
very much on capabilities within the family, which vary
considerably; his family has done quite well in response to the new
economic opportunities, benefited from the Central Government's
preferential policies towards Tibet, and lifted itself above a
subsistence status, but it is by no means a rich family.
In Lhasa, the transforming effects of modernisation are much more
visible, whether you visit a factory, the main bazaar or a large
department store or a high school or a hospital, or simply look
around and observe the new office buildings, the new-style
residential blocks, and the extensive construction in progress.
These realities are profoundly different from those that used to
prevail in old Tibet. One of the recurrent complaints of the
'independence for Tibet' campaign is that the Chinese Government has
sought to 'justify its policy on Tibet' by 'painting the darkest
picture of traditional Tibetan society.' But the facts are
indisputable.
Historical and social records and the accounts of foreign visitors
show that before the 1959 Democratic Reform, which might have
actually come later had there not been an armed uprising and had the
Dalai Lama not fled to India, Tibet was a feudal serfdom. Land as
well as most means of production were in the hands of the three
categories of estate-owners - government officials, nobles, and
upper class Lamas - who comprised merely 5 per cent of the
population. The mass of the population, serfs and slaves, lived in
extreme poverty, as appendages to estates owned by their masters,
lacking education, health care, personal freedom, any kind of
entitlement, obliged to provide unpaid labour services or ulag, an
expansive Tibetan term for extortionate taxes, corvee and
parasitical land rent. Agriculture was largely of the slash-and-burn
kind, modern industry was virtually non-existent, and transportation
was chiefly on animal or human back. Life in general was brutish and
short, with diseases rampant, the population stagnant, and life
expectancy at birth hovering around 36. At the top of this
profoundly inequitable and oppressive system sat the institution and
person of the Dalai Lama (whatever be the 'reformist' fourteenth
Dalai Lama's subjective claims and feelings on this state of
affairs).
As against these basic realities, the 'independence for Tibet'
campaign advances the argument that there was plenty of Buddhist
kindness, compassion, and caring in old Tibet. While this may be
true, there is only so much that kindness, compassion, and caring
can achieve in the face of overpowering objective realities in a
feudal serf-owning society and an extremely backward economy, where
95 per cent of the population was illiterate and the overwhelming
majority lacked the ways and means to meet basic - even subsistence
- needs.
Since Liberation in 1949, China's economic, political and social
policies have gone through some sharp swings, twists, and turns.
Such volatility has taken a considerable toll of the economic and
social development effort, with the decade of the Cultural
Revolution bringing nothing short of all-round calamity.
Nevertheless, the record of four decades of democratic reform in the
economic field in the Tibet Autonomous Region has been solid. Basic
needs have been met to a substantial extent; social and human
development indicators have risen impressively; poverty has been
reduced; Tibet has acquired the fundamentals of a modern economy
with briskly growing primary, industrial, and tertiary sectors;
infrastructure, especially roads, highways, the energy sector, and
telecommunications, have been developed on an ambitious scale; free
medicare has been provided to a large proportion of the population;
and Tibetan society, which is, in its composition, younger than most
other parts of China, has become a learning society.
According to an official publication, there have been four waves of
accelerated economic development since the early 1950s.
The first wave, which came in the 1950s, saw large-scale
infrastructure construction especially in the field of transport;
this wave saw the rapid completion of three major highways linking
Tibet to Sichuan, Qinghai and Nepal, and the Gongkar airport, which
helped end the isolation of Tibet.
The second wave came in the mid-1980s, triggered by two National
Conferences on Work in Tibet held in 1980 and 1984 jointly by the
Communist Party of China and the State Council. In 1980, the Central
Government decided on two policies towards Tibet that would not be
changed for a long time to come -''the land will be used by
households, and will be managed by them on their own'' and
''livestock will be owned, raised and managed by households on their
own.'' These policies have been extremely popular among farmers and
herdsmen who make up four-fifths of TAR's population and have led to
an upsurge in agricultural production. In 1984, the Central
Government mobilised manpower and material resources from nine
provinces and municipalities to help Tibet build 43 projects as part
of the 'Golden Keys Programme'. The total investment involved was
about 480 million yuan.
The third wave came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the
state invested more than 3.2 billion yuan in huge infrastructure
projects focussed on energy and transportation. Among other things,
this has brought a comprehensive development project in the Three
River Area, that is, the area around the Yarlung Zangbo, Lhasa, and
Nyang Rivers encompassing agriculture, water conservancy, and
afforestation. The ambitious project is expected to benefit more
than 45 per cent of TAR's cultivated land, 18 counties and a
population of 830,000, to lead to the development of a new base of
commercial agriculture and light industry, and to spur development
in the rest of Tibet.
The fourth wave, initiated at the Third National Conference on Work
in Tibet held in July 1994, has been by far the most ambitious in
the series. It has meant more investment, more projects, wider
coverage of areas, and a greater emphasis on quality and
accountability. The Third Forum set an annual growth target of 10
per cent for Tibet's economy over the medium term and decided that
the Central Government together with 29 provinces, autonomous
regions and municipalities would help TAR construct 62 projects
''without compensation,'' involving a total investment of more than
four billion yuan. Virtually all these projects have been completed
ahead of schedule. The target of quadrupling the 1980 GDP by 2000
was actually fulfilled two years ahead of sched ule.
A new wave of economic development in Tibet is expected to be
generated once China's Western Development campaign, a strategic
push for large-scale development of the western region during the
Tenth Five Year Plan (2001-2005), gets into full swing. For a year,
Tibet's Development and Planning Commission has been working on a
detailed plan to fit into this strategy. The plan is expected to be
ready in early 2001. It will then go to the CPC Central Committee
and to the TAR government for approval.
Colonialism, invariably, involves a huge drain of resources and
wealth from the colony or semi-colony. In the case of Tibet, between
1950 and 1998, the Central Government invested an estimated 40
billion yuan, provided major financial subsidies, and transported
vast quantities of material. Particularly after some stock-taking in
the early 1980s by the Communist Party of China, which came to the
conclusion that conditions in Tibet were unacceptably poor and
backward and the level of development in Tibet was unacceptably low,
the stepping up of assistance to TAR from the Central Government and
provinces and municipalities has made all the difference,
quantitatively as well as qualitatively, to TAR's economic
performance.
Tibet, like other autonomous regions, is a major beneficiary of
preferential policies that have been in operation since the
mid-1960s and been firmed up by the Central Government over the past
two decades. Among other things, this involves a low tax policy, a
no-ceiling policy for loans given to the region, preferential
interest rates, and a 100 per cent retention rate for the region's
export earnings.
The results, gleaned from the China Statistical Yearbook, 1999
(published by China Statistics Press, Beijing), are revealing.
Tibet's GDP at the end of 1998 was 9.12 billion yuan, with the
primary, secondary and tertiary sectors contributing 34.3 per cent,
22.2 per cent and 43.5 per cent respectively. The region's per
capita GDP was a creditable 3,716 yuan. Per capita income in rural
households was 1,232 yuan, which was 57 per cent of the comparable
national average. Tibetan rural households spent significantly more
of their living expenditure on food and clothing, and significantly
less on education, culture and recreational articles and services,
than the comparable national average. Rural Tibetans consumed more
or less the same quantity of grain per capita as other Chinese, but
significantly less vegetables, poultry, eggs, aquatic products, and
liquor. They had a lower consumption of almost all consumer goods,
including bicycles, sewing machines, watches, washing machines,
refrigerators and TV sets , but scored higher with respect to radio
sets and radio-cassette players.
The statistics suggest that people in urban Tibet are quite
advantageously placed. They have greater per capita gross living
space than the national average. About 73 per cent of them have
access to piped water. Access to public transportation, paved roads,
public green areas and other civic amenities is, in per capita
terms, better than the national average.
BEFORE 1951, Tibet had nothing like a modern educational system.
Monastic education, going back a thousand years and focussing on the
study of Buddhist scriptures and to some extent the Tibetan
language, was the leading form of education. In addition, about 20
schools run by local governments and some 100 small-scale private
schools together catered to a total student body of less than 1,000
in Tibet. These schools outside the monastic system were meant for
the training of lay and monk officials or for imparting a modicum of
basic education - reading, writing and arithmetic besides the
recitation of Buddhist scriptures - to the children of aristocratic,
wealthy, and business families.
After the Revolution of 1911 put an end to the Qing dynasty in
China, the thirteenth Dalai Lama decreed the establishment of a
Tibetan language primary school in every county in Tibet,
stipulating that "all children aged 7 to 15 must attend
government-run schools." This experiment led to the setting up of
several Tibetan language primary schools but on account of local
government corruption and opposition from reactionaries, the schools
were closed and the programme was abandoned. Prior to peaceful
liberation in 1951, a pathetic two per cent of school-age Tibetan
children were in school and the illiteracy rate was an estimated 95
per cent.
Modern education made progress in Tibet after peaceful liberation,
but the Cultural Revolution represented a major setback. Over the
past two decades, developing education in Tibet has been identified
at the highest political level as a strategic task.
According to official educational statistics, in 1999 the Tibet
Autonomous Region had 820 primary schools, 101 middle schools, and
3,033 teaching centres with a combined enrolment of 354,644
students. A comprehensive modern educational system going up from
kindergarten to university level and including technical and
vocational secondary schools had taken initial shape. A teaching and
administrative staff of more than 22,279, including 19,276 full-time
teachers, represented the backbone of the school system. Of this
staff, 80 per cent was drawn from ethnic nationalities, chiefly the
Tibetan nationality. There were four institutions of higher learning
(Tibet University, the Tibet Ethnic Institute, the Tibet Institute
of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, and the Tibet College of
Tibetan Medicine) with a combined enrolment of 5,249 students. Since
the end of the Cultural Revolution, more than 20,000 students have
graduated from Tibet's higher educational institutions and over
23,000 from its secondary vocational schools; and the overwhelming
proportion of this qualified workforce has been Tibetan, contrary to
what is alleged by the Dalai Lama-led campaign.