By Elliot Sperling

Lobsang Sangay's rejoinder to my op-ed from the Times of India actually makes my primary point rather neatly, even if he himself never gets around to engaging with it in his rush to make the distracting charges that I am both what he calls an "Orientalist" and at the same time someone who's afraid to criticize China. Apart from the silliness of these charges (he must assume Phayul readers have never read anything by me on China) might one not suppose them to be, perhaps, mutually exclusive? Actually, Lobsang Sangay is really complaining about the act of a Westerner (me) criticizing the TGIE, rather than about the content of that criticism. And such complaints favor incompetent people who pursue ineffective policies. They do nothing to advance the ability of Tibetans to gain full control over their national destiny; indeed, they obstruct it.

The main point of my op-ed was that the TGIE-including its experts and representatives-is oblivious to the importance of direct knowledge of the body of interpretive literature surrounding China's regional nationality laws. In that regard I pointed specifically to Ma Rong's April piece on the issue, which Lobsang Sangay brushes aside, saying "an English version of his article was published in 2007." As should have been obvious from the brief
reference I gave to its contents in my op-ed-as well as from Woeser's
posting of the essay (one may see also
http://www.sociologyol.org/yanjiubankuai/xuejierenwu/marong/2009-04-19/7778.
html for the final version, released April 19, 2009) the piece is informed by (among other things) the Tibetan risings of 2008 and developments in the U.S., specifically the election of Barack Obama in November of that year, and culminates with a particularly strong call for scrapping nationality autonomous regions altogether. This 2009 (and definitely not 2007) Chinese-language essay reflects, as Woeser pointed out in her post, very important recent developments in Chinese thinking on the whole question of regional nationality autonomy. To get the whole gist of it, one would need to have read it. Lobsang Sangay apparently has not, and his dismissal of a need to do so by reference to an English-language article exemplifies the whole problem, which is not just a question of one or another article. It's a question of the TGIE being unwilling to see the need for access to the full body of available, relevant Chinese-language documents in print and on the web. And that access, it goes without saying, also requires the ability to read said documents.

Lobsang Sangay responds to this basic point with silence, as if he were unaware of the issue raised. He doesn't assert that Dharamsala actually has the requisite databases and books, or that the people in question can read them. Neither does he deny that the databases and books, as well as language competence, are vitally necessary for dealings with China. My guess-and it's only a guess-is that he doesn't want to face the embarrassment of stating the former, or the ridicule that would greet an assertion of the latter.

So he tries to change the subject with bluster and thrashing. I do indeed have no expertise whatsoever in jurisprudence-one of the straws he grasps at-but then again I have no expertise in chemistry either. Still, I can tell when a school has no science laboratories and the faculty is ignorant of the periodic table. He mentions his broad theoretical legal research, which may be all well and good, but it's irrelevant to the issue at hand if it ignores the large body of Chinese writing on nationality autonomy.

If one can imagine a Western dharma student who, having read the biography of Milarepa and some related works in English, pays a call on a particularly learned Tibetan monk and then begins, oblivious of the sea of Tibetan religious literature but with great self-assuredness, expounding the dharma to the monk, one may start to see what I'm getting at (and what Lobsang Sangay seems not to have understood).

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