Tibetans in China: Separate and Afraid
For Caidan, a 40-year-old farmer whose life here in this traditionally Tibetan area of Qinghai Province centers around its Buddhist temple, the aluminum smelter that belches gray smoke in the distance is not a symbol of material progress, but rather a daily reminder of Chinese disregard and discrimination.
"Look at the walls of our temple, they have all gone grimy with the smoke that pollutes our air," said Caidan, who, like many Tibetans, goes by a single name.
Asked if Tibetans here had not benefited from jobs at the factory, a man sitting with a cluster of villagers nearby shook his head and launched into a litany about preferential treatment that he said was systematically given to members of the country’s Han Chinese majority.
"Tibetans get the low-income and the hard-labor jobs, and although there are some Han who make the same as us, most of those who were brought in by the boss make twice as much money," the man said. "They’re all paid as technicians, even though some of them really don’t know anything."
Asked how the situation could be remedied, Caidan said there was only one solution: allowing the return from exile in India of the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. "We are unhappy that the state suppresses us, and as long as the Dalai isn’t allowed to return, we will remain unhappy," he said. "Tibet is the Dalai’s home."
After decades of heavily financed Chinese efforts to strengthen its control over Tibet, and more generally to tame the country’s far west through gigantic infrastructure investments and resettlement of Han Chinese from the east, the riots and fierce crackdown in Tibet and in many ethnic Tibetan areas outside Tibet proper have laid bare a harsh reality of policy failure.
In Tibet and in neighboring provinces, like Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan, where Tibetans and other minorities live in large numbers, Tibetans and Han may live in closer proximity than ever before, but they could hardly occupy more separate worlds. Relations between the two groups are typically marked by stark disdain or distrust, by stereotyping and prejudice and, among Tibetans, by deep feelings of subjugation, repression and fear.
To be sure, there is no legalized ethnic discrimination, but privilege and power are overwhelmingly the preserve of the Han, while Tibetans live largely confined to segregated urban ghettos and poor villages in their own ancestral lands.
Even Chinese news programs of the events in Lhasa have seemingly inadvertently reinforced an impression of two separate universes that scarcely intersect – one Han and one Tibetan. Although their intent as propaganda to assess blame was clear, the programs may have served only to harden attitudes on both sides. Over and over, television broadcasts have repeated the same footage of rampaging Tibetans smashing shop windows and of injured, hospitalized Han, while making no mention of the widely reported deaths among Tibetans during the police crackdown that followed the protests, nor of the grievances of Tibetans.
In the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, almost 2,100 kilometers, or 1,300 miles, to the southwest of this village, Han shopkeepers, hostel owners and others who are picking up the pieces of their lives after riots that destroyed many Chinese-owned business there spoke with scarcely concealed condescension, and often with outright hostility and contempt, of Tibetans whom they described as lazy and ungrateful for the economic development they have brought to the area.
"Our government has wasted our money in helping those white-eyed wolves," said Wang Zhongyong, a Han manager of Lhasa handicraft shops that sell Tibetan-themed trinkets to tourists, one of which was smashed and burned in the riots. "Just think of how much we’ve invested in relief funds for monks and for unemployed Tibetans. Is this what we deserve?"
Among Han in Lhasa, comments like these stood out for their mildness, with many others speaking in frankly racist terms.
"The relationship between Han and Tibetan is irreconcilable," said Yuan Qinghai, a Lhasa taxi driver, in an interview. "We don’t have a good impression of them, as they are lazy and they hate us, for, as they say, taking away what belongs to them. In their mind showering once or twice in their life is sacred, but to Han it is filthy and unacceptable.
"We believe in working hard and making money to support one’s family, but they might think we’re greedy and have no faith."
One after another, even among long-term residents, Han Chinese in Lhasa said they had made no Tibetan friends and confessed that they tended to avoid Tibetans as much as possible, even well before the disturbances.
"There’s been this hatred for a long time," said Tang Xuejun, a Han resident of Lhasa for the last 10 years. "Sometimes you would even wonder how we had avoided open confrontation for so many years. This is a hatred that cannot be solved by arresting a few people. All of my friends are Han and very few of them have Tibetan friends either. We don’t like them, for they’re lazy and dirty, and they hate us for making money in their land."
Tibetans, meanwhile, complain that they have been relegated to second-class citizenship, that their culture is being destroyed through forced assimilation, that their religious freedoms have been trampled upon and that friendships with Han are exceedingly rare.
A Tibetan university student in her early 20s who declined to give her name explained relations this way. "I really don’t want to talk about politics, saying whether or not Tibet is part of China. The reality is that we are controlled by Chinese, by the Han people. We don’t have any say, so in my family we don’t even talk about it. We just live with the status quo."
Although the young woman said that her family was relatively well off and that she was receiving a good education, the future was bleak here even for someone like her because the system favors the Han.
"I’m not even sure I can get a job after graduation," she said. "For rich Tibetans and for officials, they send their children out to Chengdu or Beijing."
A sense of the fear many Tibetans live with could be heard in the comments of a religious leader in Aba Prefecture in Sichuan Province, the site of a protest by monks and others earlier this week in sympathy with the Lhasa demonstrations, and the scene of a subsequent fierce crackdown.
"I only know that the Communist Party is good, that they good to us," said the religious leader, Ewangdanzhen, when asked about official explanations that have blamed the Dalai Lama for the protests. "I don’t know. I know nothing. I only believe in the Communist Party. Splitting is bad. We want unity and harmony. We come to work in office every day. We don’t have any contacts with him and we don’t need to contact him."
Far from giving up on their way of life, though, or renouncing their attachment to the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader the Chinese government has long vilified as a separatist, or "splittist," most Tibetans – interviewed while dodging heavy police checks during a 725-kilometer road trip in search of Tibetan areas in Gansu and Qinghai provinces – professed near-universal devotion to the Dalai Lama, and vowed to continue resisting government attempts to control their faith.
"All Tibetans are the same: 100 percent of us adore the Dalai Lama," said Suonanrenqing, a 40-year-old resident of a Tibetan village in Jianzha County in Qinghai Province. Asked about the Chinese government’s appointment of a Panchen Lama, the second- highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, in 1995, and the implications for the future after the current Dalai Lama, who is 72, dies, Suonanrenqing’s response suggested indefinite tensions between Chinese and Tibetans.
"We’re not sure if it’s true that the Panchen was appointed by the government, but if it is true, we cannot support him," he said. "We wouldn’t support a Dalai Lama appointed by the government either. These people should be chosen by monasteries, otherwise they would be different."
Although Suonanrenqing spoke candidly, worrying only at the end of a lengthy conversation if his comments could bring him trouble, many conversations with Tibetans began with nervous denials that they knew anything at all of the events of Lhasa. Their wariness was warranted by a severe security crackdown in clear evidence wherever Tibetans live in large numbers.
After dodging one police roadblock, a reporter making his way late at night toward a village in Gansu Province where Tibetans had protested in sympathy with the Lhasa demonstrators the day before was set upon by plainclothes police officers at a highway tollbooth and forced into a nearby building for questioning before being turned away.
The following day, when visiting Taersi, an important Tibetan monastery in Qinghai Province, the reporter was closely tailed by plainclothes police officers who were seen videotaping his conversations with local monks.
"I have no idea what’s happening in Lhasa," said one 32-year-old- monk, who agreed to sit and chat in a small restaurant with a foreign visitor but apparently felt the topic was too dangerous to touch upon. "We don’t have anything to do with that."
Asked if the foreigner could visit the monk’s home on the grounds of the monastery, the monk’s expression suddenly became serious as he said, "Oh, that wouldn’t be convenient."
Later, an unmarked police car followed the reporter for 32 kilometers back to his hotel in the provincial capital, Xining.
That evening, the Tibetan driver of the vehicle he had hired received calls from the police questioning him and warning the driver not to accompany the reporter on another foray into Tibetan areas. The following morning, the hotel lobby was full of plainclothes police officers, who appeared to have been thrown off by the reporter’s visit to a busy downtown commercial district and a change of vehicles.
During a long drive later that morning through the Lijiaxia Valley, a starkly beautiful area dominated by the Yellow River with craggy, desiccated mountains and windswept farmland, Tibetan villages were easy to spot by the colorful prayer flags that flew from roofs and hilltops.
Here, while many initially claimed to know nothing of the events in Lhasa, they quickly dropped this cautious pose and readily exchanged views. One poor villager, who rolled homemade cigarettes using old newspaper, was aware that Chinese news broadcasts were showing footage of Tibetans rioting in Lhasa.
"Have there been any pictures of Tibetans getting killed?" he asked. When told no, he nodded his head and said "of course not."
Moments later the man led a visitor into the village temple, unlocking its large wooden doors and proudly pointing to an image above the altar. "That’s our Dalai Lama," he said, smiling broadly.
A similar conversation in a nearby village ended with a young Tibetan man saying: "Yesterday, we prayed that the Tibetan rioters would be safe. We prayed for the souls of those killed in the riot, Tibetan or Han.
"We also prayed that the Dalai would return."