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Actor Richard Gere, centre, speaks with Tibetan monks prior to the 5th World Parliamentarians' Convention on Tibet, outside the Italian Lower Chamber of Parliament, in Rome, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2009, also attended by the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama says there will be a 'setback'' in the Tibetan cause when he dies. The 74-year-old spiritual leader said that when he dies, 'there will be a setback, there's no doubt,'' but added that a very healthy, cultivated new generation is rising with the potential to lead. (AP Photo/Samantha Zucchi)
Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama (R) is presented with a team scarf of soccer club Barcelona at the end of a news conference in Rome November 18, 2009.
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Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, center, arrives for a preaching session at Itanagar, India, Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009. The Dalai Lama, who leads a self-declared government-in-exile in India, says he seeks only a high level of autonomy for Tibet within the constitutional framework of the People's Republic of China, something he terms 'the Middle Way.'
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A Response to Lobsang Sangay -Elliot Sperling
By Email[Monday, August 03, 2009 16:30]
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).

The views expressed in this piece are that of the author and the publication of the piece on this website does not necessarily reflect their endorsement by the website.
This story has been read 8528 times.
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 Related Stories
Lobsang Sangay's response to Elliot Sperling (2)
Rejoinder to "Autonomy? Think Again" - Lobsang Sangay
Autonomy? Think Again
  Readers' Comments »
see your point, Elliot (cstm)
We need to think out of the Box (DenpyNetsul)
Thanks both of you! (Mind)
Criticism and allegations (Kowa)
Response to Lobsang Sangay-Elliot Sperling (pedhma)
Your Comments

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