China says its five decades of occupation have taken socialist Tibet `from backwardness to progress’
By MARTIN REGG COHN
LHASA—Young Tibetans in traditional robes shuffle past Buddhist deities and prayer flags in the dimly lit hall.
The faux monastic décor might seem out of place in most nightclubs, but not in Tibet. Here, the Buddhist beat holds enduring appeal.
Long past prayer time, it’s show time at K.V.’s nangma nightclub — Lhasa’s hottest, hippest nightspot.
On cue, a long-haired male singer in black boots and flared tunic takes centre stage. Female dancers, dressed modestly in sheepskin hats and flowing red skirts, provide backup vocals for a pastoral ballad praising their homeland. Stirred by the lyrics, women admirers drape a ceremonial white katak scarf over the handsome lead singer. From the back of the smoke-filled hall, male fans raise their beer glasses approvingly.
Until recently, such scenes of cultural pride were unfathomable in Tibet’s tightly controlled police state. Awash with discotheques and karaoke parlours catering to crowds of Chinese settlers and soldiers, the once-isolated Tibetan capital was drowning in a tidal wave of foreign kitsch and Communist cant.
Yet five decades after the People’s Liberation Army conquered Tibet’s centuries-old Buddhist civilization, the soldiers are keeping a low profile and Lhasa is slowly coming back to life. The nightly celebration of nangma — a traditional form of music and dance — offers a glimpse into how Tibet’s culture is reincarnating itself after being given up for dead.
Young people know from their elders that street protests would only land them in a jail or morgue. Rather than throw their lives away, they dance the nights away to inoculate themselves against the spectre of assimilation.
After all these years, there is little else left to do. The security services are everywhere and nowhere — all-seeing but out of sight.
Closed-circuit surveillance cameras record movements on city streets. Spies search for banned audiotapes of the exiled Dalai Lama in monasteries. Snitches turn in civil servants who dare to pray in public.
Police come knocking at night, leaving behind hundreds of unexplained disappearances. Convoys of military trucks snake past yellowing fields of barley, pushing aside tractors and donkey carts in their way.
Yet Tibetans are still testing the limits of Beijing’s rule.
In closely guarded temples, tour guides whisper seditious words of support for the Dalai Lama.
Monks hide banned portraits of Tibet’s god-king in their monastery dorms. Aging pilgrims twirl prayer wheels and ignore the police presence while circumambulating the Potala Palace that once housed their spiritual leader.
Today’s threat is dramatically different from what it was when Communist cadres and soldiers marched into Tibet in 1951. An estimated 200,000 troops are still deployed in military bases encircling Lhasa, but with no protesters in sight, they remain confined to barracks.
In the early years of Communist rule, power flowed from the barrel of a gun; more recently, gunfire has been displaced by the din of an economic boom that underpins China’s dominance. With the military conquest a fait accompli, economic colonization is transforming the Tibetan Autonomous Region for all time.
Never mind the army. A new invading force of Chinese workers is streaming in from neighbouring Sichuan. Migrants from the overpopulated province work long hours for low wages in restaurants or on road gangs, displacing unskilled young Tibetans from the labour force.
Forget the tanks. Bulldozers are razing Tibet’s architectural heritage faster than any blitzkrieg.
Whitewashed stone buildings with colourful wooden storefronts are crumbling under the assault of cement-block, cookie-cutter office buildings. Lhasa has the look of any inland Chinese cityscape, blighted by brown marble monoliths and white tile structures with tinted blue windows. Garish hair salons front for brothels.
The threat comes not only from Chinese migration but an exodus of Tibetan youth to neighbouring Nepal and India. A government official acknowledged last year that roughly half of Lhasa’s population of 240,000 is Chinese; many believe the foreigners now form the majority.
The implications are stark.
Chinese communism devastated traditional Buddhist society early on, but at least Beijing’s iron-fisted rule had the effect of isolating Tibet from outside forces now intruding on its culture: despite the silent “cultural genocide” claimed by the Dalai Lama, Lhasa looked little changed until the 1990s.
Today, the menace comes from consumerism more than communism, from assimilation as much as atheism.
The Dalai Lama would barely recognize the Lhasa he left for exile in 1959, eight years after the Chinese came. But while the Living Buddha of Compassion is away, the youth of Tibet must play.
Back at K.V.’s nangma nightclub, fake mist rises from the dry ice below stage, mingling with swirls of cigarette smoke from the regulars. The thick air stings the lungs like the residue of butter oil lamps in a monastery, but any resemblance to a Buddhist temple ends when the red laser beams slice through the fog and strobe lights bounce off the religious iconography.
Nangma’s roots are pastoral, but it is a pastiche of Tibetan folklore, Chinese rock and Hindi-pop influences from neighbouring India. The dance that was once performed for nobility has been embraced by the common people.
Now, nangma nightclubs are not only a place to see and be seen; they are a place to see Tibetans, and be seen to be Tibetan.
“There’s a lot going on with nangma and you have to decode it,” says Ron Schwartz, a sociologist from Memorial University in Newfoundland who has studied the remarkable rise of nangma. “It grew up as a reaction to the bland form of Chinese disco that spread to Tibet a few years ago.”
Disco is dead and karaoke parlours are passé — beaten back by a homegrown cultural revival that can be seen and heard in the nangma nightclubs of the Tibetan plateau, 4,000 metres above sea level. Nangma shows that reports on the death of Tibetan culture are premature.
Many young Buddhists think they are reinventing their way of life here as surely as they believe in reincarnation. Yet for all its popularity, traditionalists worry that the latest nightclub craze merely parodies Tibetan folklore, transforming it into fake-lore rather than protecting it from Chinese commercialization.
At K.V.’s nightclub, the contradictions quickly become apparent. Perky beer girls in short skirts and heavy makeup glide between tables proffering Pabst and Budweiser beer by the can. They pour the foamy brew with a smile, preening for tips from the heavy drinkers.
Onstage, the traditional dances are giving way to raunchier music and skimpier costumes.
“Make your body move,” the nubile singers chorus in heavily accented English, their now-bare midriffs swaying suggestively to the beat. Tradition goes only so far on a Friday night.
Moments later, another confusing cross-cultural shift: a song about the virtues of sheep’s wool belted out with Chinese lyrics for the mostly Tibetan audience. The language shift is jarring.
Nangma impresario Tsultirum Gyaltso, 26, makes no apologies for the linguistic concessions that keep the authorities onside. Nangma’s indigenous content must adapt to political realities, blending in a few token songs for the Chinese-speaking ruling classes.
As owner of the popular Lhamo Lhatso nightclub in Shigatse, Tibet’s second-largest city, he says nangma is saving Tibetans from assimilation through television and Chinese pop.
“Without nangma, our culture would be lost,” insists Gyaltso, who sets fashion trends with his heavy necklace and shiny earrings.
But what truly sets him apart from his customers is that he is a teetotaller. Not for him the endless glasses of beer that leave so many drunken nangma fans staggering home or getting caught up in knife fights. Indeed, Gyaltso concedes that most of the cash flow for nangma owners comes from the vast quantities of alcohol consumed on the premises.
“This is much better than disco — it’s our culture,” explains Pupu Samjeh, an office worker who is a regular on the nangma scene. “This is a place where I can be happy, and also drink.”
For all the stereotypes of soft-spoken Buddhists who wouldn’t hurt a fly, domestic violence and barroom brawls are endemic. Many believe they have good reason not only to dance the nights away, but also drink their problems away.
Tibetans are still paying the price, in drink and depression, for centuries of theocratic isolation and feudal misrule culminating with the Communist takeover in 1951. Though the West idealized Tibet as a mythical Shangri-La, its infrastructure was threadbare, literacy was minimal and disease was rampant.
This was one of the poorest places on the planet. Now, five decades of occupation and billions of dollars in financial transfers have stimulated the moribund economy and dramatically improved public health.
But the shock treatment also sapped Tibet of its Buddhist lifeblood, bypassing the people who need help most. Old-style central planning and new forms of corruption tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer — the Chinese gain while Tibetans feel the pain.
Bereft of oil and precious minerals, this barren plateau has but one renewable resource in abundance: its spirituality.
More than anywhere else on Earth, Tibetans spend their days praying in temples, prostrating themselves and making pilgrimages.
From its remote perch in the Himalayas, Tibet has long been a beacon for believers seeking enlightenment. Now, Buddhism has become a marketable commodity for hordes of cultural tourists seeking paradise lost.
Cashing in on the demand, China’s atheistic government has coined a seductive new advertising slogan: “Come visit the Holy Land.”
More than 720,000 Chinese tourists visited Tibet last year — an increase of nearly 30 per cent — in addition to 130,000 foreign visitors. With the completion of a new railway in 2007, more than 1 million tourists a year will visit the Tibetan Autonomous Region, population 2.6 million.
But the selling of Tibet remains a murky business.
At the Eight Auspicious Handicraft Shop, across from the fabled Jokhang Temple in Lhasa’s old quarter, a bus disgorges its load of Chinese tourists for their allotted 15 minutes of shopping before the next stop. The sales clerks move into high gear and the tour guide collects her commission.
Tourism is the biggest local industry, yet little of the cash flow at this shop wends its way to Tibetans. Most of the religious paraphernalia — from brass prayer wheels to brightly coloured prayer flags with Buddhist scriptures — is imported from workshops in neighbouring Nepal.
The sales staff is predominantly Chinese, as are the owner, the artists and the bus driver. And in a bizarre new twist, even the guides for these Tibet tours must now be Chinese.
This year, Beijing barred hundreds of qualified, English-speaking Tibetan guides from working with travel agencies — blacklisting anyone who had ever visited India, where the Dalai Lama lives in exile. The government brought in hundreds of new guides from across China, many of whom had never before set foot in Tibet.
It was the unkindest cut of all.
“It’s the bloody Communists,” complains one former tour guide bitterly. “Now, they have installed their own people to spout the official line, yet they know nothing about our heritage.”
The decision goes beyond cultural appropriation or job discrimination. It is the final indignity for a people who have been frozen out of virtually every other sector of economic activity.
While decimating the ranks of tour guides, the government is eagerly claiming credit for restoring cultural sites. In fact, Beijing is undoing the damage of an earlier era, when overzealous Red Guard revolutionaries desecrated Buddhist monuments.
The government points proudly to the ornate Potala Palace, the 13-storey, 1,000-room edifice that dominates Lhasa’s skyline and remains its best-known religious landmark. The palace is undergoing a multi-million-dollar facelift to restore the one-time residence of the Dalai Lama to its former glory.
But with Tibet’s spiritual leader still in exile, the palace is a desolate showpiece for tourists shuffling through its cavernous halls, oblivious to the Buddhist scriptures on display. It is a dispiriting daily procession, watched over by hunched men in the halls who serve as palace caretakers.
Left behind by history, many of these men are old monks who would rather forget what they have seen. One of them — we’ll call him Dorji — describes the indignity of watching Chinese visitors traipse through the palace where His Holiness once gave blessings to believing Buddhists.
“We are losing our culture, slowly, slowly,” Dorji says cautiously, eyes darting to ensure no spies from the Public Security Bureau come within earshot.
He is used to their tricks. The Dalai Lama’s possessions are on display in his erstwhile palace, but his image is banned — forcing Dorji to play a cat and mouse game of keeping his glossy photo of the god-king hidden from view.
“He is away from the palace, but he is still in our hearts,” Dorji whispers before breaking off the conversation at the approach of a tour group.
The tourists trudge to the sitting room of the Red Palace, a hallowed place once reserved for devout Buddhists making offerings. Now, the sign describes it as “an ideal place for you to have a rest as well as to do some shopping” and admire calligraphy by former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.
The Potala is also a popular sightseeing stop for People’s Liberation Army troops who pose for group snapshots on the palace roof. From this famous lookout, the soldiers can behold another impressive sight below: an old fighter jet parked incongruously in the main Potala square, a pointed reminder of Beijing’s military might.
This is where protesters who clashed with police were mowed down in the late 1980s. Today, only a few sunburned pilgrims peer quizzically at the MiG jet before resuming their prostrations at the Dalai Lama’s old palace.
A nearby police post keeps watch over the plane, the pilgrims and the prayer wheels.
Chinese visitors seeking any further reaffirmation of their suzerainty need only visit the new Tibet Museum, a gleaming $16 million testament to socialist progress. The glass display cases include a copy of the 17-point agreement signed in 1951 acquiescing to the “peaceful liberation of Tibet.”
The curatorial tone is triumphalist, the history tendentious: Buddhism was merely a historical phase on the road to “more brilliant achievements under the socialist system.”
The museum styles itself a storehouse of Buddhist culture, yet one of its brochures boasts that the Communists “did away with superstitions, collected and spread more manure, got rid of insects and harmful animals.”
They also got rid of people who got in the way. Shortly before the tanks were sent in against Beijing students in the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, Lhasa experienced its own tumult when monks and nuns staged non-violent protests.
“The police came across the square with guns and started spraying everyone,” recalls eyewitness Ron Schwartz, the Memorial University sociologist. “The crowds responded by throwing rocks and smashing windows.”
As the riots escalated into a political embarrassment, Tibet’s little-known Communist party boss put an end to the disturbances by declaring martial law. His name was Hu Jintao and he is now China’s president.
Many in the West find the mild-mannered apparatchik inscrutable, but Hu is well remembered in Tibet as a fearless enforcer. Hundreds of Tibetans were killed in the clashes, while Hu ended up on the fast track to the party leadership.
There is little sign that he has changed his thinking. Visiting Lhasa in 2001 to mark the 50th anniversary of the “peaceful liberation,” he asserted that Tibet had moved “from darkness to light, from backwardness to progress.”
In the aftermath of Hu’s crackdown, underground protesters went into exile or just gave up.
“Things have changed so much since then,” says Schwartz, who wrote a book on the protests and remains a regular visitor to Tibet. “There has been a sort of generational shift and you really don’t have those kinds of street protests any more.”
Those who persist pay a heavy price. There are no public firing squads, merely secret trials and unexplained deaths in confinement.
“For Tibetans in detention, little is known about the charges against them, where they are held, the length of their sentences, the conditions of their confinement or their health,” Human Rights Watch reported this year.
Some monks are imprisoned, but many more are merely purged.
To survive in a monastery, a monk must denounce the Dalai Lama and submit to re-education campaigns, patriotic study sessions and vettings by the government-controlled Democratic Management Committee.
Such repression and regulation have failed to crush Buddhist sentiment, but a more insidious weapon — the Chinese language — is proving more efficient. As the steady decline of Tibetan culture shows, words can kill.
Increasingly, the business of Tibetans is transacted in Chinese and their mother tongue is barely taught in the schools and universities of the region. What began as blatant social engineering to assimilate Tibetans has become an economic fact of life. Job opportunities go to those who have mastered Chinese, while unilingual Tibetans are consigned to low-wage ghettoes or unemployment.
“No Chinese, no job,” grumbles Tsering, a young tourism worker who has watched migrants profit from the boom. “To work at a post office or bank or department store, you’ve got to speak Chinese.”
Chinese migrants demand to be served at shops in their own language. Taxi drivers who have settled here never bother to master the local language, forcing locals to make themselves understood in Chinese.
Tibetans are slowly becoming strangers in their own land.
Zhon Shao Gong waits patiently by the riverbank for the ferry that will take him across to Samye Monastery, 150 kilometres east of Lhasa. He is not a Tibetan pilgrim but a Chinese backpacker, a peripatetic soul seeking out Buddhist spirituality.
Zhon, 27, defies the local stereotype of Chinese visitors as swaggering soldiers or supercilious tourists who treat Tibet like a giant theme park. Skinny and softspoken, he quit his telemarketing job in the southern city of Shenzhen to escape the urban rat race, embarking on a three-month personal journey to the Tibetan plateau.
We share a rickety one-hour ferry ride to the monastery, braced against the chill wind, clutching our sunhats and exchanging impressions of Tibet. He revels in its pristine, pastoral setting, brimming with religion and compassion.
“This is my dream,” he says, breathing in the unpolluted air as our long-hulled boat crashes against the waves.
He’d heard about Tibet from his mother, who had Buddhist inclinations, and from a soldier who served here in the Chinese military. The soldier hadn’t spoken well of his posting, but that didn’t deter Zhon.
“He didn’t like it here, didn’t care for the people — thought it was the end of the Earth — but I’m interested in Buddhism,” Zhon says breathlessly. “I’ve studied books on Tibet and I think it’s my favourite part of China.”
We are alone at the front of the ferry, so I can’t help asking him about what he has just said: whether he really thinks Tibet belongs to the motherland. Does he know that most of the Tibetan Buddhists with whom he seems so enamoured want the Chinese to leave?
He is utterly at a loss for words.
“That’s a political question,” he says cautiously. “I have no opinion about that.”
We resume the bumpy journey overland. There are police checkpoints along the road and a Public Security Bureau post, red flag fluttering, built on the perimeter to watch over the monks.
At last we arrive at Samye, the first monastery ever built in Tibet. Foreigners must register with the police and show their special government permit. As a Chinese citizen, however, Zhon is unencumbered by such bureaucratic exigencies.
He sets off with his Chinese friends on a hike in the mountains to enjoy Tibet’s fresh air, leaving behind the delicate political questions that haunt the monks. We never talk again.
At dawn, the walled monastery is cloaked in morning mists. The compound is shaped like a mandala, a religious symbol representing the Buddhist universe. Even without the cosmic overlay, a visitor has no doubt that he is entering another world.
With no flush toilets and only a hand pump for water, morning ablutions are an uncomplicated affair. After an hour of reading scriptures, sleepy-eyed young monks, their heads freshly shaved, shuffle in their burgundy robes toward the utse, a colourful six-storey wood and stone temple with metre-thick walls.
In 1959, more than 110,000 monks inhabited some 6,000 Tibetan monasteries and temples. Today, about 1,400 monasteries survive by official count, with 46,000 monks and nuns in residence.
The historic decline shows. Deprived of their former student population, most religious sites look forlorn and desolate after the last tourist bus of the day has pulled away.
“Preserving our Buddhist culture is the most important thing,” whispers Sonam, a 23-year-old monk who took his vows six years ago after being vetted by local government officials. “I became a monk to study knowledge about life, and to learn about our next lives.”
It is time for the young monks to take their places on the hard wooden benches, lined with filthy red felt, and prepare for meditation. Around them are painted thangka scrolls blackened by burning candles and yellowing piles of scriptures wrapped in silk.
The chief monk, his high office signified by the broad shoulder padding tucked under his maroon cloak, leads a procession to his elevated pedestal. The monks chant sutras — Buddhist holy texts — in a low nasal monotone for the next four hours, the rhythmic incantations punctuated every few minutes by the delicate clanging of cymbals.
Plump rats scurry underfoot. The vermin are dimly illuminated by butter candles and the flicker of a fluorescent bulb, but they are safeguarded by the Buddhist injunction against killing living creatures.
The chanting falls to a low pitch, like a turntable losing power, until silence descends on the chapel. Emboldened, the rats feast on crumbs of barley flour while the monks meditate over the six realms of existence — animals, humans, hungry ghosts, demi-gods, heavenly beings and those consigned to hell.
Horns sound and at last it is the monks’ turn to eat. They dig into their plates of tsampa (roasted barley flour) with their fingers and slurp cups of strong tea brewed with salted yak butter to ward off the morning chill. The food gives off a pungent aroma that blends with the fragrant incense wafting across the hall.
A pilgrim interrupts the meal to present an offering for the chief monk’s blessings: a wad of Chinese banknotes bearing the portrait of modern China’s founder — and Tibet’s conqueror — Mao Zedong. It might seem sacrilegious, but the monks need the money.
Tashe Wangdu is only 30 — young for a chief monk at such an historic monastery. But with 13 years of dedicated service and no blots on his record, he impressed the local Communist authorities as a worthy candidate.
Wangdu supervises the morning meditations and metes out discipline to unruly young monks. Enforcing order within the walls of the monastery pales beside the challenge of co-existing with the Chinese officials beyond its precincts.
Over cups of orange soda served in delicate teacups in his small bedroom, Wangdu explains that he has only 136 monks — slightly more than the government-approved limit of 112 but still far below the one-time level of several hundred. Wangdu wants every monk he can get. And for that he needs the co-operation of the Orwellian-sounding Democratic Management Committee, set up by local officials for liaison with the Public Security Bureau.
“We don’t have enough monks for our spiritual needs or to maintain the temple,” he says, blinking nervously.
The monks are rebuilding structures desecrated by Red Guards who targeted any trace of Buddhist history in the monastery. The young monks are quick to lay new bricks and mortar, but preserving the old rites and rituals is proving more difficult.
“The older monks have experience of our traditions from before the Cultural Revolution, but most of them are gone and it is getting hard to replace them,” Wangdu says ruefully.
He doesn’t go into detail, but the reason monks are hard to replace is that so many of them have been hounded out of the monasteries. Many have been forced to sign public denunciations of the Dalai Lama against their will in political study sessions or have been jailed for refusing to turn in their colleagues.
The elder monks who stayed behind have paid a heavy price, as I learn from Lobsang — a monk who is too anxious to give his real name but too old to hold his tongue. He twitches uncontrollably as we speak in the shadows of a rarely visited temple in the Samye compound.
“This is a grand vocation,” he says. “But who will instruct the next generation? Most of the high lamas have left. I only wish they would return to pass on the best of Buddhist teachings.”
I ask in a whisper if he also hopes for the Dalai Lama’s return.
“Oh, yes, of course,” he shoots back, blinking rapidly.
Do you consider him a living Buddha?
“Oh, yes, he is everything. And anyone who does not consider him the Buddha of Compassion cannot be a real Buddhist.”
The old monk is like a man possessed — by both fear and fealty. On this day, army commanders have come to inspect the monastery, and he falls silent.
Most monks who fled for their lives are in no position to risk a return.
Lochoe, 34, was jailed for six months because of his “subversive” actions in a monastery in the eastern region of Kham. When local officials ordered the monks to denounce the Dalai Lama, he refused.
“Every monk has at least one photo of His Holiness in his room, but when the officials come we have to just hide it,” Lochoe says.
He fingers his prayer beads nervously as he recalls the beatings of his interrogators. Lochoe’s oversized eyeglasses accentuate his gaunt look.
Still, he doesn’t blame the prison wardens for his mistreatment. He faults his fellow monks who informed on him.
“There are some monks whom you cannot trust,” he says. “It’s very obvious, because whenever there are religious activities in the monastery, the Chinese officials always know what’s been going on.”
Lochoe tells me his story during an interview in Dharamsala, India, where he sought refuge only a few months ago. Were he still across the border in Tibet, such a candid conversation would be impossible.
Indeed, the self-censorship becomes readily apparent on my last day at Tibet’s oldest monastery.
Toward sunset, I hear a loud commotion emanating from one of the dormitories.
In the courtyard, dozens of fresh-faced monks — not yet scarred by prison beatings — are furiously debating Buddhist doctrine.
The monks gesture wildly and smack their hands together. They shout menacingly, badgering their interlocutors by force of logic and leaps of faith. When they finally fall silent, exhausted, the monks explain the importance of dialogue in Buddhist theology.
“Debate is essential to seek the truth,” one monk says with great passion. “We must debate every topic if we are to attain a higher understanding.”
Taking them at their word, I ask about the nature of debate and truth-seeking: What topics are off limits, which taboos cannot be transgressed in Tibet?
The monks sit cross-legged around me as they wait patiently for the translation of my question, then jump in with their replies. They cheerfully rattle off the seemingly limitless subjects under discussion: Buddha’s compassion, the nature of reincarnation, the mysteries of astronomy, the battle between good and evil.
But they have not answered my question. What can they not discuss? What about the Dalai Lama?
A monastic silence falls over the crowd. No one wants to speak first, but at last an older monk finds a way to explain the inexplicable.
“No, no. We do not debate this because we have already studied Chinese politics. There is no need to debate this matter.”
Our little talk has come to an end. The young monks have nothing more to say on the matter.
Silence descends on the monastery. The sun is setting and the courtyard soon will be cloaked in darkness.
Day or night, there is no debating the Dalai Lama, or the future of Tibet, within its walls.
