The Dalai Lama Dilemma

I can't figure out this Tibet stuff.

I mean, yes, the Chinese were awful and brutal in the 1950s that led to large-scale ethnic cleansing of sorts with the Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of his followers fleeing Lhasa and its vicinity.  And, yes, the suppression of a basic freedom to believe in whatever one wants to is a gross violation of human rights.  I written about these (like this one) and have blogged a lot as well.

But, on the other hand, I have always wondered whether we are idealizing Tibet, the Tibetan life, and overly glorifying the Dalai Lama.  After all, there is a long track record of Western countries celebrating the simple lifestyles of the poor, when many of that same poor would way prefer not to be poor and starving and ill and illiterate ....

The ever contrarian Spiked makes it all the more difficult to figure this out:

The first sounds that greet me as I arrive in Lhasa are the incandescent honking of horns as car-drivers and motorcyclists (some with three to a bike) negotiate the roads. My own Tibetan driver is wearing a Playboy jacket. Maybe he bought it in the Playboy shop that I later see in the centre of Lhasa. It’s near the Tibet Steak House (‘juicy meat for you!’) and the Lhasa casino, in which Tibetan men in leather jackets pile coins into slot machines. On the streets young men in Kappa and Nike sweatshirts (fakes, I’m guessing), with hair by Topman, flirt with casually dressed young women, one of whom is sporting hotpants that even Kylie would consider too risqué. How can they dress like this in the freezing kingdom of snow and Yetis, as made famous by Tintin in Tibet? Because that’s another myth of Tibet, at least in July, and at least here in Lhasa: I might be 3,650 metres above sea level, inside a mountain range and with the clouds so close by I almost feel I could touch them, but it’s so hot that I get sunburnt.

Of course, one could argue that the dreaded hotpants would not have been there, and the Shangri-La would have continued, had the Chinese government not interfered in Tibet the way it did and continues to do.  But, what if all that Shangri-La talk itself is a myth?

it is during that period of the self-serving Orientalism of British rule in Tibet that the popular modern image of Tibet as a mystical, cut-off entity takes shape - most notably in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933), which invented the idea of ‘Shangri La’. As McKay points out, the writings of the British imperialists, and of their sympathisers, are still regularly cited in the propaganda produced by the Dalai Lama’s people, which is designed to prove that Tibet is a unique and special place that only they can and should govern. Some of those old Orientalist writings were available at that hippy-fest in Lambeth, too - British imperial paternalism recycled as anthropological New Age ‘at-oneness’. What connects the old imperialists with the new Tibetophiles is their desire to have Tibet as a ‘buffer state’ – only where the imperialists wanted to use Tibet to protect their material interests against China and Russia, the new lot want to use it to protect their emotional interests, to preserve an idea of innocent, childlike humanity so far uncorrupted by modernity.

Reminds me of that controversial book on Orientalism from my graduate school days.  Speaking of which, Rongsheng, who was a fellow graduate student, always argued that the Chinese government was trying to get rid of feudal traditions and ignorance in Tibet, and that the West was keen on maintaining those horrible systems that do not help the Tibetans themselves.

I suppose the only way I can figure this out for myself is to travel in and around Tibet.  Will you, the reader, please pay for this important educational trip? Please? :)

Meanwhile, the Economist dryly notes that:

China seems to calculate that the eventual death of the Dalai Lama, a charismatic and internationally popular figure, will make its job in Tibet easier. Each passing birthday brings that day closer. But it also offers supporters of the Dalai Lama and his cause a chance to sing his praises.

That is some realpolitik, eh.