Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  Later that evening, the Buddhist and I repaired to a Tibetan nightclub. These are good places to talk. They are noisy, and there are few Han Chinese around. The decor looked vaguely Tibetan, with white curtains lined with blue, green, and red stripes, and the singers, some in traditional dress, sang Tibetan as well as Chinese songs. There are rules about this: The number of Tibetan songs and their content are strictly controlled, so as not to provoke unwelcome outbursts of nationalism. Video screens showed clips from Hollywood movies. I saw bits of Titanic and the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind, as well as stock images of Tibet, copied perhaps from videos promoting tourism: the Potala, country dances, yaks grazing, monks blowing horns, and horse fairs. A reproduction of the Mona Lisa hung on the wall next to the plastic head of a bodhisattva.

  I asked my friend what went through his mind when he saw the representations of Tibetan folklore at official celebrations in Beijing, those pumped-up occasions for endless parades past Tiananmen Square, where, between the tanks and the missile launchers and the adoring schoolchildren, the fifty-six official minorities dance in colorful costumes for the Chinese leaders who wave from their platform in front of Chairman Mao’s portrait. He said it was both ridiculous, because many details were wrong, and outrageous, because it was so patronizing.

  Despite the noise from the stage, where a woman in a red ball gown was singing a Chinese song in praise of the Tibetan mountains, my friend lowered his voice and studied his knees. The trouble, he murmured, was that it had become almost impossible to study Tibetan culture seriously, especially religious culture. And without the latter, you could not possibly understand Tibet. To take a serious interest in religion invited suspicion of political subversion. You might be denounced as a “splittist,” a promoter of Tibetan independence, splitting the country from the “motherland.” And the monasteries were no good anyway, because the monks were government employees who knew little about religion. Yet my friend wanted to know about his own culture and be more literate in Tibetan as well. He spoke of his shame at not mastering his mother tongue. The fact that he was compelled, through his own education, to read about Tibetan Buddhism in Chinese made his situation even more galling. The Tibetan-language textbooks he had read at school were all about the glories of Chinese communism, and the few books he had studied about Tibet were written by Chinese. I glanced at the video monitor with its tourist images of yaks, horse fairs, and white mountains, and wondered whether in the end Tibetan culture would be reduced to this: the commercial equivalent of the folk dancers in Tiananmen Square.

  On another night, at a similar nightclub in Lhasa, this one with a small dance floor lit by a revolving ball splashing the dancers with specks of blue light, I had another discussion about the Tibetan identity. There were video screens showing the same stock images of Tibet that had been shown at the other place. A rather fey young man, dressed as a Tibetan herdsman, sang a folk song, prompting a female admirer to wrap a silk scarf around his neck in the traditional Tibetan manner of showing respect. After his act, he came up to me and told me in English that he was an art student. He sat down, and I asked him what kind of art. Any kind, he said—oil painting, Western art, any kind. What about Tibetan art? He hesitated. Yes, he finally said, Tibetan art too. But he wanted to go to the United States, to work with computers. What about his art? I asked. He shrugged and said he couldn’t express himself in art. I asked him why not. He drew closer and whispered in my ear: “Politics.” He wanted to do Tibetan painting but was not allowed to study religious art, and without that, Tibetan painting made no sense.

  After the singer had gone back to the stage, to do a comedy routine in Tibetan, which failed to provoke much laughter, I sat awhile nursing my glass of beer. Couples were dancing under the revolving ball, men with women, women with women, men with men, some of them going through the well-practiced moves of Western ballroom dancing. I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Where you from?” asked a neatly dressed man of about thirty. He looked Han Chinese, which was indeed what he turned out to be. He had been living in Lhasa for three years and was almost due to go home. He wanted to know what I thought of the Tibetan situation. Not knowing who he was, I made a banal remark about every place having its problems. He nodded gravely. Then he asked what I thought of human rights in China. Again, I erred on the safe side. And what about democracy? Well, living in a democracy myself, I had to say I was rather in favor of it. He nodded, and said the one-party state was no good. There was too much corruption and abuse of power. China needed more political parties.

  I was surprised to hear this, especially when he told me he was a Communist Party member and had been sent to Tibet by the government. But nothing had prepared me for the next question. Did I think Tibet was like Kosovo? I gulped, took a long sip of beer, recalled the nationalist fervor in China after the bombing in Belgrade, and asked him whether he meant China was like Serbia. He looked me in the eye and nodded quickly. Living in Lhasa had opened his eyes to many problems, he said, problems of nationality and human rights. “In the West,” he said, “people are allowed to choose their own governments. Here in Tibet, the government chooses its people.”

  A thin, dark-skinned man, sitting on my other side, was straining to hear what was being said. He turned out to be a Tibetan friend of the Chinese cadre. Now it was his turn to talk. He cupped his hands around my ear and said in perfect Chinese that he was working for a Tibetan company. What did I think of human rights in Tibet? Once more, I played it safe: Human rights were important everywhere, in the rest of China as much as in Tibet. “No, no,” he said. “We have a special problem in Tibet. We are losing our language, our religion is controlled, our culture is disappearing. You see, the forces of economic modernization are directly opposed to our own traditions.” Still trying to be as bland as I could, I mumbled something about national traditions having survived modernization in other countries. This agitated him. Surely all foreigners understood, he said, that Tibet was special: “As long as we are part of China, we cannot survive. We are like a man who is thrown into a lake but can’t swim. We are drowning. You foreigners must help us.”

  There was nothing much I could say. All three of us drank in silence. Perhaps they were government agents. I thought not, but I could not be sure. The Chinese cadre had told me that others in the Party shared his views, but they lacked the power to act on them, or even to mention them in public. His friend merely repeated that I should let the world know about Tibet. The world should come to the rescue. And I knew that the world would do no such thing.

  The impression I got from these limited conversations in Lhasa was that the Tibetans who suffered most from Chinese cultural imperialism were the most educated, the ones who benefited from economic modernization. The better you were able to function in Chinese, the more successful you were bound to be. Without Chinese, you were cut off from the urban economy. The man in the nightclub was right: Chinese-style modernization, with its eradication of the past, its official atheism, its consequent intolerance toward organized religion, and its emphasis, politically, philosophically, and economically, on materialism, is opposed to the Tibetan tradition. This does not mean that the Chinese-educated Tibetans all yearn for the revival of a Buddhist theocracy. Few, if any, want that. But to survive in the Chinese economy, Tibetans are forced to blot out their own cultural identity, and that leaves a sense of deep colonial humiliation.

  The only Tibetan I spoke to who did not seem to care about the gradual replacement of the Tibetan language by Chinese or the new dominance in urban areas of Chinese low life and pop culture was the Muslim. He spoke like a true modernist. It was inevitable, he said, that traditions were hollowed out by modern life. It happened everywhere, in Europe and Japan as much as in Tibet. And if Chinese was more practical than Tibetan, why then people would speak Chinese or English or whatever. It was surely a waste of time to regret the past. After all, things were much better now; there were banks and hospitals and more schools. But it was easier for him to pr
aise these developments than for his Buddhist friends, for the monasteries that used to perform some of these functions were not part of his spiritual tradition. The crude new cosmopolitanism of Lhasa was, on the contrary, part of his emancipation.

  The last time I saw my Muslim friend was in an outdoor café on the lake behind the Potala. It was a beautiful, clear Saturday afternoon. Policemen with red country faces and green uniforms were splashing about in crimson pleasure boats, making a lot of noise. We were joined by a friend of the Muslim, a scholarly young man in a frayed brown jacket and gold-rimmed glasses. He was introduced to me as a computer scientist. But he spoke little and, when he did, very softly. He was from a Buddhist family in Qinghai, where life was better than in Lhasa, for Tibetans lived among themselves, in a “purer community,” not “mixed like Lhasa.” He said he was studying English, to get into a university in the United States. Things were very bad in Tibet. I saw the Muslim shift uncomfortably in his seat. He didn’t like it when conversations took this turn. And what, I asked, would the scientist study in America? The man looked pensively at the splashing policemen on the lake. The only way he could get a place in an American university was to apply as a computer scientist, he murmured. But once he was there, he would switch to Tibetan language and literature. After a short pause, he said: “The Tibetan department of the university here in Lhasa was closed in 1999.”

  Leaving Lhasa is in a sense to leave China, not officially, of course, but culturally. Little or no Chinese is spoken in the villages, let alone among the nomads who roam the vast, empty highlands, which to most Han Chinese are as strange and intimidating as the surface of the moon. Where the outside world does happen to glance off Tibetan village life, economic transactions of the crudest kind take place.

  There is only one road from Lhasa to Gyangtse, the town passed by in 1904 by a British expedition led by Sir Francis Younghusband on his way to Lhasa. Before reaching Gyangtse, he had mowed down some seven hundred unruly Tibetans with a Maxim gun, an event that is still remembered in Tibet. A rocky, unpaved road winds along some terrifying mountain passes with straight drops down to a glorious, deep blue lake. Jeeps and minibuses hired by tourists always stop at the same scenic spots, marked by Tibetan prayer flags fluttering from ceremonial piles of stones, or outside villages with whitewashed-stone houses, inhabitated by people in richly embroidered boots and coarse brown robes slung across their shoulders. The villagers are well aware of their photogenic appeal, and as soon as a tourist vehicle is sighted, women and children, the smallest of whom is dressed in his finest silk jacket, take up their positions together with a yak, whose long black hair contrasts prettily with red ribbons tied around its horns. The tourists are surrounded by children in states of remarkable squalor, with long, matted hair, like old rope, green mucus clotted around their noses and mouths, various kinds of milky eye infections, and layers of hard, black grime on every inch of exposed skin. “Hello,” cry the children, while rubbing their thumbs along the palms of their hands. “How are you, money, money!” An old man in dark rags, with a black face, sticks out his pink tongue in the old-fashioned Tibetan gesture of obeisance to social superiors. The child in the fine silk jacket is placed on top of the yak, and the mother holds up five fingers: five Chinese yuan for a photograph. The only way these villagers know how to make money from the tourist economy is by posing as themselves.

  Few villages are on the tourist beat, however. Most villagers don’t even have the occasion to pose or beg. I visited a village several hours away from Lhasa. It was actually less a village than a cluster of small, gray-stone huts in a beautiful green valley. The inhabitants herded yak and sheep. The richest person had several hundred yaks, the poorest just a few. Only the village head, elected by the villagers, understood some Chinese. I was taken to the village by a man who had been born there. He had not had any formal education; he called himself “a man without culture.” But he had managed to leave the village and make a life in Lhasa by serving for a few years in the People’s Liberation Army. It had not been a pleasant experience; the few Tibetan soldiers were harshly treated. But at least he had made some money and learned to speak Chinese. He was an intelligent, humorous man in his forties with the wrinkled, reddish-brown face of someone much older.

  Most of the people in the village looked poorer than the ones I had encountered on the road to Gyangtse. But there was a new school nearby, and a few of the younger people could read and write. I was politely offered cup after cup of yak-butter tea, which tastes like greasy soup but keeps one’s lips from cracking in the bone-dry air. One of the herdsmen reached inside his filthy shirt, tore off a chunk of dried raw meat, and kindly handed it to me. The meat was a year old. His hands were encrusted with dirt. My friend explained that most people suffered from intestinal diseases. The hard, raw meat tasted sweet, a bit like horse meat.

  The poorest house consisted of one dark room, home to a family of six, but the richest was more sturdily built; it had a gate, decorated with yak horns, and whitewashed walls. It was pleasantly furnished with painted wooden chests and sofas covered in carpets. On the wall were four religious paintings, one of which looked old and was finely drawn. The wooden ceiling beams were painted bright blue, apple-green, and pink. Both the rich and the poor displayed pictures of the current Dalai Lama, for which a person in Lhasa would be arrested. I also noticed a photograph of the Karmapa, the young head of the Kagyu sect, who had escaped to India in 1999. Since he was officially recognized by the Chinese government as well as by his followers, his flight was extremely embarrassing to the rulers in Beijing.

  I asked my friend, the driver, whether there was any risk in displaying these pictures. He made a dismissive gesture and said that Party officials hardly bothered to come to the villages. “They wouldn’t be welcome here,” he said. I asked, naÏvely, whether the villagers knew about the Karmapa’s escape to India. “Of course,” he snorted. “They knew before the government in Lhasa did. Every night before going to sleep, they listen to the Voice of America.”

  It was clear from his account that the links between Tibet, even in the villages, and India had not been cut. People knew where the Dalai Lama was and what he had been saying on his trips around the world. Young people still make their way to Dharamsala, despite border patrols and the risk of arrest. “They can’t control what is in our heads,” my friend said. It was not the first time I had heard that phrase in Tibet. He said: “They can make us say we love the Communist Party, but they can never make us hate the Dalai Lama.”

  Later, while we picnicked at the side of the river, my friend showed the first sign of despair. He had told me before that he had thought many times of going to India but had never had the opportunity. “It’s all over for me now,” he said. I kept silent. Then: “But maybe not for my son.” He asked me where I was from. I said that I lived in England, in London. “Ah yes,” he replied. “You English . . . you English came here with guns and killed many Tibetans. . . . When was it again?” I said it was in 1904. He smiled as though it were a fond memory and said: “If only you English would come here again, with many guns. Then we Tibetans would dress up in our finest clothes and give you a warm welcome.”

  It was only a passing fancy, of course. He went on to talk of the hard times in the past, of the killings during the Cultural Revolution and the destruction of temples and monasteries, often carried out by Tibetan Red Guards. They were the worst, he said. The Tibetan cadres were the most fanatical. “Long Live Chairman Mao,” I said facetiously. He looked at me, and casually tossed an empty beer can into the clear blue river: “Bullshit!” he said. “Long live us, the people!” We could both drink to that.

  Religion is the glory and the tragedy of Tibet. In China, religions and cults challenge the official Marxist dogma and test the limits of spiritual freedom. Religion, whether Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, or some mixture of all three, can make Chinese feel anchored in their tradition; it can make them feel more Chinese. But no matter how much successive Chines
e governments and their scribes try to make it so, China is not defined by a single faith. Tibet is.

  Tibet is not a state defined by borders. More Tibetans in China live outside the Tibetan Autonomous Region than inside—in Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, and Yunnan. The government led by the Dalai Lama is in India. But what almost all Tibetans have in common, apart from variations of the same language, is their worship of this religious figure as the highest representative of their faith, and thus of their nation. Without Tibetan Buddhism, most Tibetans would have no conception of Tibet. To keep their faith, then, is not just a matter of individual liberty but of national survival.

  The Chinese Communists know this, which is why they tried for a time to destroy its monuments. Most of the damage was done in the 1960s. Few of the thousands of temples and monasteries that once dotted the Tibetan landscape remain. Before the storm of Maoism there were about twenty-five hundred functioning monasteries. By 1972 there were ten. Now, however, a more subtle strategy prevails. When Chinese tourists arrive in Lhasa, tour guides tell them that the Tibetans are a religious people and that their faith must be respected. Booklets in Chinese are richly illustrated with pictures of the main religious landmarks, or what is left of them, the Potala, the Jokhang, and the Tashilhunpo in Shigatse, where the Panchen Lama, whose spiritual status is equal to the Dalai Lama’s political status, traditionally resides. And during their customary week in Tibet, the Han Chinese tourists are photographed with their friends against the exotic backdrop of praying monks and gorgeous pagodas; and they sigh at the mystery of it all.