Tibetans Cling to Icon as China Restricts Religious, Cultural Freedom
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
SHIGATSE – His picture is as common in Tibet as Mao Zedong’s is in other parts of China. His broad, square face, often wearing a slight, mysterious smile, looks down from the walls of teahouses and temples, shops and restaurants, even nightclubs.
To the Chinese government, these portraits of Choekyi Gyaltsen are signs of patriotism. He was the 10th incarnation of the Panchen Lama, the second-holiest figure in Tibetan Buddhism. But more important, officials say, the highly ranked monk who defended China’s right to rule Tibet after the Dalai Lama fled into exile was a loyal servant of the Communist Party.
Many Tibetans honor the Panchen Lama for a different reason. Though some once considered him a traitor, they now remember him as a leader who made the best of a difficult situation, went to prison for challenging Mao’s policies and continued fighting to preserve Tibetan language, culture and religion even after he was released.
To them, putting up the Panchen Lama’s picture is a subtle protest against the restrictive cultural policies that China adopted in Tibet after his death in 1989.
“We love him because he wasn’t afraid to stand up and speak out for the Tibetan people,” said Basang, 61, who runs a small grocery store in Shigatse, Tibet’s second-largest city and the traditional home of the Panchen Lama. “While he was alive, we had hope. But there’s no one like him now. Everyone is too afraid.”
Today, almost all of the policies he advocated have been dismantled or abandoned.
Instead, the Chinese government is engaged in a campaign to weaken the influence of Tibetan Buddhism and silence those who believe Tibet should preserve a cultural identity separate from China’s. The crackdown complements its efforts to tie Tibet more closely to the rest of the country by lifting limits on Chinese migration and pouring billions of dollars into the region.
Dozens of interviews conducted during an eight-day trip across Tibet provided a glimpse of the government’s strategy. Adopted in the early 1990s, it reflects a conclusion by the Communist Party that liberal cultural policies such as those supported by the Panchen Lama fueled ethnic nationalism and resulted in a wave of pro-independence protests in Tibet in the late 1980s.
China’s current policies are based on the assumption that the best way to fight Tibetan nationalism is to limit expressions of its culture, particularly religion. The government maintains tight control of Tibet’s monasteries, restricting the number of monks and nuns who can worship. It has banned religious teachings considered politically sensitive and has suspended various tests that would allow monks to advance in their studies.
It has also established Democratic Management Committees to run every monastery, though the monks who serve on these committees acknowledge that they are no longer elected by their peers.
“We don’t regard it as democratic; the committee represents the government,” said Nyima Tsering, deputy director at the Jokhang Temple, Lhasa’s holiest shrine. He said the government appointed him and six other monks to the committee after evaluating their patriotism. Two government officials also sit on the committee and have the final say in any decisions, he said.
In the late 1990s, China sent teams of officials to purge every temple of monks and nuns who refused to denounce the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. Hundreds of monks and nuns fled to India or were defrocked, and several were imprisoned, leaving the monasteries under more pliable leadership.
“We have enough to eat and enough clothes, but our spirits are heavy,” whispered one monk at the sprawling Tashilunpo monastery, the traditional seat of the Panchen Lama, where more than 40 monks were ousted. “There are political education classes every Tuesday and Friday now, and everyone is scared. We can’t even trust our senior monks.”
At Tibet University in Lhasa, officials said students are prohibited from praying at temples or taking part in other religious activities, and face expulsion if they do. Even in high schools and middle schools, students are often told not to practice religion, residents said.
The government is also trying to end the rural tradition of sending children to study in the monasteries, arguing that they should attend secular schools. “In the monasteries, they only learn Tibetan and the sutras,” said Deji, the top government official in Lhoka prefecture, who like many Tibetans has only one name. “They won’t be well-educated because they won’t have physics or chemistry or other modern subjects.”
Asked whether children were permitted to begin monastic studies after completing the nine years of schooling required by Chinese law, she smiled and replied: “No, because after nine years of school, they won’t want to be monks anymore.”
The government has also scaled back efforts to expand the use of the Tibetan language, closing down experimental high school classes taught in Tibetan despite promising results and requiring the translation into Tibetan of only a fraction of government documents.
Though elementary schools still teach in Tibetan, children begin learning Chinese by the third grade; when they reach middle school, Chinese becomes the main language of instruction. There is little incentive for students to concentrate on Tibetan because it is Chinese that will win them admission to college or good jobs in government.
“I use Tibetan at home, but I use Chinese with my friends. My teacher said that’s the best way,” said Qiangjiu, a skinny 17-year-old in Tsetang, Tibet’s third-largest city. “Now my Chinese is better than my Tibetan. That’s the future.”
The only jump in Tibetan studies may be at Tibet University, where young Chinese in special classes are being trained in Tibetan to prepare for government assignments in the countryside. Analysts said the classes represented a new push to ensure that at least some Chinese officials are stationed in even the most remote corners of Tibet.
Though Tibetans make up more than two-thirds of government employees in Tibet, Chinese officials hold the most influential positions, and the government has never appointed a Tibetan as the region’s Communist Party chief.
None of the Tibetans in senior positions today has the clout the 10th Panchen Lama enjoyed, and the boy selected by China as his reincarnation is widely rejected by the Tibetan people. Meanwhile, the boy chosen by Tibetan clerics and approved by the Dalai Lama has been detained, and his whereabouts are unknown.
Several retired officials, who asked not to be identified by name, said even senior Tibetan officials are viewed with some suspicion by the Chinese government. The political atmosphere is so tense, they said, that most Tibetan officials are afraid to advocate policies protective of their language and culture for fear of being labeled ethnic separatists and punished or demoted.
“A Han official can argue for these policies,” said one retired Tibetan official, referring to China’s main ethnic group, “but it’s dangerous for a Tibetan to say the same thing.”
In early June, an elderly Tibetan official and two university students in Lhasa were arrested on charges of “splitting the motherland and undermining the unity of nationalities.” The city’s deputy mayor, Tajie, said the students were later released but Yeshe Gyatso, 72, remains in custody. He declined to provide further details.
In many ways, the Communist Party plays a more intrusive role in the lives of Tibetans than it does in those of residents elsewhere in China, in part because most urban residents in Tibet work for government agencies and state enterprises. The party routinely uses this leverage to ensure that residents toe its line. Every March, it orders government work units to make sure employees do not celebrate the Dalai Lama’s birthday, threatening officials with dismissal if police catch any of their subordinates doing so. The party has also banned all government employees from displaying photos of the Dalai Lama at home and has even tried to force them to take down Buddhist statues.
These policies were softened somewhat after the central government replaced Chen Kuiyuan, the hard-line Communist Party chief who ran Tibet from 1992 to 2000. The government rarely searches houses now for photos of the Dalai Lama, for example. But its basic policies in Tibet have not changed.
Some analysts argue that the government’s policies may exacerbate the bad feelings that many Tibetans still harbor over the Cultural Revolution, the 10-year campaign unleashed by Mao in 1966 during which monks were persecuted, religion was outlawed and young Tibetans and Chinese destroyed hundreds of ancient temples.
“The government thinks its policies are working, but it is shortsighted,” said Wang Lixiong, an author in Beijing who has written extensively on Tibet despite a government ban on his work. “In the long term, all these restrictions on religion, culture and language, and the increasing interaction between Han and Tibetans, will mean more resentment and more conflict.”
