Today on a Fox News live feed I saw some people littering up the Golden Gate bridge with some unreadable banners about Tibet. In the same news cycle I read about protesters “for Tibet” in London and France mucking up the running of the Olympic torch. In France it appears that they even decided to take it up with a person in a wheelchair who was probably living out some sort of dream by moving the torch. Nice.
To this very simple blogger it seems that all of the Beastie Boys front row seats, bridge scaling and Richard Gere speeches are doing exactly zero for the people of Tibet.
I would have to assume that the only real solution is a dirty one for those who want to “free Tibet”. Two words: Send Guns.
I suppose nobody who is doing all of this protesting, bridge scaling and other nonsense is interested in the real solution, but are more interested in making a statement and feeling good.
I dunno. I’m not so entirely unhappy with the PR disaster this is turning out to be for the Chinese. Good for those types to see what free peoples can get up to, you know?
MD – I agree, any bad PR for the Chinese is OK with me as well, but I just don’t see any help for the Tibetans in all of this.
DM–
You are correct. Nothing will free Tibet that doesn’t involve fighting the occupiers. But a world-wide effort that ramps up the attention paid to the problem might make it easier for the Tibetans to free themselves.
That it cannot be effectively addressed, yet continues to tug at the heart strings, is what makes it so attractive to that sort; the international version of poverty.
Daniel – “But a world-wide effort that ramps up the attention paid to the problem might make it easier for the Tibetans to free themselves.”
The attention of the sort like I described such as tying up traffic on the Golden Gate bridge or assaulting people in wheelchairs disgusts me, and makes me care LESS about whatever they are protesting FOR. When the torch comes to San Francisco on Wednesday I predict a riot with damage to private property – that stuff gets under my skin.
If they want to apply for a permit and have a parade, assembly or whatever – great, but disruption of people’s daily lives is to me, unacceptable.
This is humiliating and enfuriating for the Chicoms who wanted this Olympics to be their “coming out party” as a succesful and business-friendly dictatorship and legitimate member of the community of civilized nations. The many western corporate sponsors of the dictatorship and its low cost labor force cannot be happy about this, either. China is the model they would like to see worldwide. Anything that derails all that is good. If a bunch of Lefties have their knickers in a twist over Tibet, and are out in the the street raising Hell about the Olympics, that is just groovy with me. Tackle the torch, baby, knock it into the gutter. Tibet is only one of a dozen reasons to do it.
Too bad no one was doing this in 1936.
But send guns too.
The one thing that hurst China more than anything is losing face. so I say bring it on! Bring on the humiliation! PutCchina where it deserves to be; a backward third world nation that dares not stand up to the rightful and true powers on the planet. China’s ambition and desire for hegemony over Asia must be strangled mercilessly in the crib.
DM,
While in most cases I would agree with you about moron lefty law-breakers, in this case the disruption of a media event staged by the PRC is a good thing. Make it as hot as possible for the dictators who want this mockery to go off without a hitch! And even hotter for the corporations who support the PRC.
But Jonathan is correct too. Send guns, and lots of ’em.
The Dalai Lama himself said that he only wants greater autonomy for Tibet within China, not full independence. So I don’t quite understand what the protesters are protesting. Stop the riots and you get more autonomy. Continue the riots and you get stricter martial law.
At the risk of bursting any hope-filled bubbles, this about the riots. The whacks want riots. Tibet is secondary or less.
Tibet will only be independent when the citizens of China are confident and secure enough that the loss of the territory of Tibet will not be detrimental to their long term interests. In other words, enjoy the wait.
Also it should be noted that the Communist Party has a passive aggressive streak a mile wide and just as deep. Embarassing China is one thing, hoping to use that embarassment to effect the desired change is something else, particularly in an area in which it views it’s core interest is at stake.
“Tibet will only be independent when the citizens of China are confident and secure enough that the loss of the territory of Tibet will not be detrimental to their long term interests”
Close. Tibet will be independent when the citizens of China realize that trying to hold on to Tibet is detrimental to their long term interests. Right now, the cost for Beijing’s colonial rule is affordable, especially in light of the fear of centrifugal disintegration to which Jing alluded; tomorrow, maybe the Chinese will quit Tibet the way the British left India or the Russians Eastern Europe and for the same reasons.
Tibetans are not Chinese and prior to the advent of Yellow Church Lamaist Buddhism, they were particularly ferocious barbarians who harried Chinese dynasties with war. While Tibet had been a tributary vassal state of the Chinese Empire on and off throughout history, it was never part of China proper any more than polyglot Kashgar in northern Xinjiang (East Turkestan) was “Chinese”. It’s not unlike calling Normandy or Ireland “British”.
This is where you err Zenpundit. Britain had no hope of inundating India with British citizens (they did manage Northern Ireland) nor Russian with Eastern Europe. The 2.4 million or so Tibetans in the TAR are in a much more precarious position.
Jing – I agree, that’s exactly what China hopes to do, and it’s why they built that new railway that takes so many PRC guards it looks like the old Manchurian railaways maintained by Japan and Russia:
“At one-kilometer intervals, security forces stood guard along the tracks. “The People’s Armed Police are determined to protect the railway and make the running safe and smooth,” a banner at Nagqu station read.”
Give another 50 years and Tibet will be Sinified just like the KMT Sinified the Taiwanese / Fujianese on Formosa. Give another 50 years and there might be a resurgance of Tibetan nationalism a la the Greens in Taiwan, but the Taiwanese are a lot more numerous relative to the KMT Chinese than the Tibetans will be in a Sinified Tibet.
Atlas – “Stop the riots and you get more autonomy. Continue the riots and you get stricter martial law.”
You’ve got to be kidding, right? Tibet is never going to get a Tibetan provincial governor under the Chicoms. The Chinese give autonomy in relative proportion to the number of AK-47s owned by the locals, so the only people with any kind of autonomy in China are the Uyghurs, and even they are having a tough time of it.
The Chinese do not want to live in Tibet so the only way to get them there is to subsidize them the way the Soviets subsidized Russian settlement in ethnic Republics. That’s a cost. Security is a cost. holding down Tibetan minorities in adjacent provinces is a cost. Friction with foreign opinion is a cost ( just ask South Africa, Israel, North Korea etc.).
Today these are affordable costs. Tomorrow, maybe a Chinese DeGaulle decides otherwise.
Zen – the relative populations make migration less costly per capita for the Chinese tahn in other examples – it doesn’t take much of a Chinese migration to overwhelm 2.4 million Tibetans.
I think that the future of Tibet will look like Estonia – Russian migration to the Baltics made the Estonians a slight minority in their own country. There are a lot of poor Chinese who would not need much subsidy to move to Tibet. Granted migration to Tibet is harder – the train has oxygen masks! But there are a lot more Chiense than there are Russians. It’s not hard to find a few million willing to move.
China’s too big for foreign relations friction to cost them much.
Estonia is a pretty pleasant place to live. It is also ( and has always been, even as a Soviet Republic)economically vibrant relative to Russia.
Tibet is neither, relative to China, or Han Chinese would have inundated Tibet voluntarily long ago. Conditions are hard, opportunities are few and the safety net is scanty. Which means Chinese settlement will have to either be directly subsidized and sustained by the state or Beijing will have to enact policies that make Tibet more prosperous or attractive, something Beijing demonstrates no willingness to entertain as it involves loosening control over the local population.
Zen – I also doubt Tibet will be heavily developed by the PRC, but the Soviets populated some pretty harsh parts of Siberia by using bribery – wages in the gold mines were triple to quadruple what miners got in other areas. I could see the Chinese trying something like that. Although I take your point that there isn’t anything in Tibet like a gold mining industry,
The Chicoms can’t pull a dump strategy on Tibet because moving disaffected lumpenproletariat to Tibet could create a Han class that finds common ground with the Tibetans. But getting educated Hans to move there will be hard. There is a lot of predjudice among the Hans against Tibetans, and affirmative action programs in the Universities are resented.
But despite the obstacles, Han relocation is a viable strategy. I’m pretty asure that the strategy was a big reason why the railway was built. The question is, can it be executed before the PRC government collapses (which I see as inevitable). I think it will take 20 – 30 years to get enough Hans in Tibet to equal the local population.
I give the PRC government about that long to live.
It will be an interesting race.
The reason why Tibet was not overwhelming populated by Han long ago is because Tibet’s economy up until little more than a decade ago was overwhelmingly focused in agriculture, it still is population wise but the urban sector of the economy is growing. The Tibetan plateau is simply not conducive for widespread agriculture, but with increasing urbanization in Tibet will come increasing numbers of Chinese migrants. There is already a significantly large Chinese population on the Tibetan plateau so the high altitude itself is not really keeping anyone away, but rather the lack of jobs other than yak tending. The new railroads primary purpose is to link the TAR with the rest of China creating more economic opportunities which will invariably attract more more Han economic migrants as the urban centers grow.
Beijing is enacting developmental policies to make Tibet more attractive, it just doesn’t neccessarily have to include Tibetans. There are 80 million people in neighbouring Sichuan alone (another 40 million in Yunnan) and the vast majority of them rural. The Communists do not have to loosen control one iota because there is a harder working and more educated population that it can just import right next door. Lhasa’s population is about 250,000 and majority Han. Who is to say 10 or 20 years from now it isn’t 2,500,000 and majority Han. If there is anything that China has proven itself capable in, it is growing cities from scratch.