THE SNOW LION NEWSLETTER

"Real Tibet" disappoints visiting journalists
by Pema Thinley

Chinese leaders may have welcomed foreigners, especially the media, to visit Tibet, and to see and report on the conditions there. But it is not the real Tibet, it seems, that they had in mind. After talking only with officials and nothing much else for four long days in Lhasa, a group of 32 Beijing and Shanghai-based foreign journalists were finally taken to see what was claimed to be a real Tibetan village. But it turned out to be a Disneyland sort of a village that was especially designed and crafted to con­vey a particular image in the minds of the visitors.

To Robert Marquand of the Christian Science Monitor, the virtual fakery was too obvious to be missed and he let it all be known, in his story in the Aug 27 edition of the newspaper. He said that Gongzhong village, located some eight hours by bus from Lhasa, did not re­semble a Tibetan village in Tibet. "It is a Tibet village more from Epcot Center in Walt Disney World: Small streamlets gurgle across flowered, manicured lawns. Houses are gingerbread vi­sions like those depicted by commer­cial artist Thomas Kinkade. Wood piles are perfectly stacked. Tibetan prayer wheels are in high polish, but inert. In the barnyard, where dirt and hay never seem to mix, local beauties in ethnic costume practice traditional folk danc­ing. It is a happily-ever-after world, but one missing the pleasant bustle of or­dinary life."

An yet, village chief Nyima Tsering had no qualm in saying, "This is a place to see the daily life of Tibetan people." He proceeded to show the visitors the Tibet the Chinese govern­ment wanted them to see. The home of the village communist chief Tsering Dorje whose wife, in traditional cos­tume, poured tea for the visitors be­neath a photograph of Chairman Mao. Asked if he had ever been a Buddhist, the party chief replies, "I can't remem­ber." Not having any real Tibet to shoot, ABC producer Mark Litke, a 20-year veteran in Asia, tells his cameraman to shoot the media confrontation with of­ficials over the attempted deception. "It has been awhile since we've been taken to a so-called 'model village' from the 1970s. We've gotten used to more and more freedom in China. It goes to show you how sensitive Tibet still is," Mr Litke was quoted to have com­mented later. "This place is a Han [ethnic Chinese] idea of what a Tibetan village should be like, "one ethnic Chinese reporter for an overseas firm was quoted as saying. The group's efforts to locate some Tibetans for casual conversation were fruitless. Marquand found Nyima to be typical. He told the group that in Gongzhong, as in the rest of Tibet, "Believing in Bud­dhism is allowed, but believing in the Dalai Lama is not. Dalai Lama wears the clothes of a Buddhist, but he is a splittist wolf who doesn't love the moth­erland."

Many of the visiting journalists found Tibet's capital Lhasa fast transforming into a Chinese city. With the kind of thoughtless modernization drive en­croaching upon Lhasa, it will be a mat­ter of time before it turns into a theme park with the Potala Palace as its Disneyland and Tibetan culture and monks as its star attractions, if not al­ready so, said a story in The Straits Times (Singapore) Sep 7. It said, "(I)n places like Tibet and Xinjiang, there is a debate on whether modernization means Sinicisation."

Lack of Tibetan participation in Tibet's modernization and develop­ment was obvious. Louisa Lim writing in BBC Online Sep 6, said there was no Tibetan face at the site of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway construction project. "Everybody is coming here to build Tibet," she quoted a Chinese immigrant named Fan Zhengjiu from the south-western city of Chongqing and running a mobile phone shop in Lhasa, as saying. She writes that Yu Heping, Deputy Director of the Devel­opment and Reform Commission of Tibet, justifies the Chinese immigra­tion by saying, "The Tibetan Autono­mous Region lacks the skilled work­ers for its modernization drive. So in its economic construction, it is only normal that we have some technicians and skilled workers coming here to help us with the construction."

Luis Ramirez, writing in the Voice of America Online Sep 1, found China employing its rising economic power as a tool to further consolidate control over Tibet. The reporter found Tibetans everywhere elbowed out by an influx of Chinese business people and immi­grants. Fashionable upmarket shops dominating the cities and midtown had no Tibetan workers or shoppers. But the Chinese were everywhere. "Al­though government officials say Bayi's population is 54 percent Tibetan, one look around the city indicates an over­whelming majority are Han," the re­porter writes.

Writing in The Scotsman Aug 30, Eve Johnson says officials called the trend natural, tersely dismissing sugges­tions that it is a result of an official strat­egy to dilute the Tibetan population. She quotes Yu Heping, deputy director gen­eral of the Tibetan Autonomous Region's Development and Reform Committee as saying, "I want to say that the ethnic Chinese migration does not exist. China is a unified economic body, movement around the country has no restrictions, movement is ruled by the nation's market economy."

While officials told here that nearly 90 per cent of the population of Lhasa were ethnic Tibetans, a walk down the city's streets - lined with karaoke bars and restaurants serving spicy Sichuan food packed with new-rich Chinese businessmen - told a different story. Almost every taxi driver was Chinese. A Tibetan roadside hawker told her that Tibetans were more likely to be only 50 percent of Lhasa's population. A Chi­nese businessman who had run his business in Lhasa for the last 15 years told her that both he and his 90 em­ployees were officially registered as residents in their homes in China, which means they don't figures as Ti­bet residents in official records.

China says Tibet enjoys special pref­erential polices, creating the impres­sion that Tibetans are favored. But when pressed to elaborate, Wu Jilie, the vice-minister of the Tibetan Autono­mous Region government, told her, "Ethnic Chinese, Tibetan and all other minority groups enjoy the same ben­efits of the preferential policies."

Asked why Tibetans had not jumped at the new opportunities created by the development and modernization policy, a Chinese businessman told her, "They are better at doing things that involve their traditional culture." The truth, however is, as John Powers, a Tibet expert at the Australian National University in Canberra, told her, "The government money coming in is going to Han Chinese and not to Tibetans."

The level of Chinese immigration is so high that they compete, unfairly, with Tibetans even as roadside hawkers. She found that a Tibetan running a rick­ety stall on the Bhakor was paying half of her monthly earning of 1,500 yuan to her Chinese landlord. And tourist guides, now overwhelmingly Chinese from the mainland, thanks to a policy initiated by Beijing, ignore Tibetan shops and take the tourists to Chinese shops and stalls where they get a fat "un­der-the-table" commission. "They tell the tourists that my things are all fake," the Tibetan complained to her.

[Reprinted from Tibetan Review, October 2004 ]