China Road

by Rob Gifford

  A small group of foreigners has gathered at one of the main doors, feeling like voyeurs, peering into the darkness of some lost world. Soon, a few young monks, none of them older than ten, come to the entrance and join us. An old Tibetan woman with two long gray braids under a Stetson-type hat prostrates herself in the space between the spectators and the monks inside. Several Chinese tourists step forward and do the same, their sensible clothing looking oddly out of step with their actions. Other Han tourists come and throw money onto the ground by the doorway. A huge monk with a frightening headdress, which descends in woven metal and cloth down his back, motions to the boy monks in front of us to step back. He is the geko, or monastic disciplinarian.

  Quite by chance, I have arrived in Xiahe during an important time in the monastery’s year. It is the examination period, when hundreds of young monks take their philosophical exams. This is when the monks must prove their knowledge of Buddhist teachings in an open forum, at which they are tested by the other monks. It’s a tradition dating back centuries, though it was of course stopped under Mao and has only in recent years been restarted.

  “It’s so spiritual,” gasps a tattooed German woman standing beside me. “It’s so wonderful that they have this to believe in. Why don’t we have anything like this in the West?”

  The “exam” begins, though it takes more the form of a debate. Two young monks, probably in their early twenties, are standing in the center of the hall, where the front rows of the two sides face each other. Suddenly up jumps an older monk several rows back; he shouts to get the attention of one of the students and then barks a question at him in Tibetan, clapping his hands with a flourish as he does so. The onlooking monks, in a sea of red, shout and hoot, as though laughing at the question or the answer or both, while the first examinee responds. The grilling goes on for some time, with the two students being questioned alternately by monks on both sides of the aisle in which they stand.

  The only Han Chinese are the ones at the door with the foreigners, all of us outsiders to this otherworldly scene. Our guide has disappeared. I ask some of the boy monks in front of us if they speak Chinese, so they can explain the scene to me. “Ni hui jiang han hua ma? Do you speak the words of the Han?”

  They all just stare back at me, unable, or perhaps unwilling, to respond.

  The debate goes on and on, the two students wandering up and down the rows, taking questions from any monk who wants to stand up, with hoots and laughs going up from the other monks in chorus as answers are given. After half an hour, the foreigners and the Chinese tourists disperse. There’s only so much theater you can absorb in a language you don’t understand, however compelling and unusual it is.

  The prayer hall is the final stop on a guided tour of Labrang Monastery, which had begun an hour before. Xiahe has become a major tourist destination for Han Chinese people, and a Mecca (or the Buddhist equivalent) for foreign backpackers. So a motley group of bearded Australians, chatty Irishmen, and tattooed German women had gathered at the gates that morning to be met by an earnest Tibetan monk with high cheekbones and a cautious smile, who was to act as guide.

  A Chinese tourist couple are hanging around too, looking as foreign as we do, and while we are waiting, I ask them why they have come.

  “I’m interested in the minority peoples,” says the woman. “They have such different lives.”

  “Do you understand them?” I ask her.

  “No, not at all,” she confesses. “It’s all very strange to us.”

  Labrang Monastery itself is a sprawling complex that occupies a major part of the town. Built in 1709, it is one of the six great monasteries of the Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, sometimes known as the Yellow Hat school. Four are in Tibet proper, and one other (just near the birthplace of the current Dalai Lama) is northwest of here, in the province of Qinghai. At its height, before the Communist Party victory in 1949, there were four thousand monks at Labrang. That population was drastically reduced during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, when Mao encouraged attacks on all religions. Now, though, numbers are rising again, and there are some twelve hundred monks studying here.

  The tour provides a fairly innocuous basic introduction, touching on nothing sensitive as far as Tibet’s relationship with China is concerned. The foreign visitors ask polite questions about architecture, while gently probing to discover how frank the guide will be on the subject of the Dalai Lama. Soon the question is answered for us. We reach one hall where, on the altar next to the Buddha, is clearly displayed a picture of the exiled Tibetan leader.

  “Is that allowed?” I ask our guide quietly in English, glancing over my shoulder to check there is no one official listening.

  He smiles sheepishly and turns away, unwilling to answer. Beside him, though, is a bolder monk whose windburned cheeks illuminate his strong face. He has been listening at the fringes of our group, and he leans toward me saying, in broken Chinese, that sometimes the monks put the picture there “because the Dalai Lama is in our hearts.”

  “Sometimes the police come and take the pictures away,” says the monk. “Once they even smashed it. But someone always puts it back up.”

  There was an unbelievable assault on Tibetan culture under Chairman Mao, and so much was destroyed that I came here expecting a diluted experience. But what is striking about the monastery is how Tibetan it is. Of course, as everywhere in China, there is much that is unseen. There are spies in all Tibetan monasteries, and all the monks must be careful what they say. I am sure the purists would say that, compared with, say, the 1920s or the 1720s, it is no longer genuine. But the examination and the worship and the daily rituals are clearly not just being put on for the tourists.

  After the Communist victory, Beijing drew a line on the map and defined a large part of the traditionally Tibetan areas as the Tibetan Autonomous Region, or TAR. This is sometimes known as “political Tibet.” But large areas with Tibetan populations were not included in this political delineation, and many Tibetans still live in the provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, and Gansu, which surround the TAR. Religious freedoms in these parts, sometimes known as “ethnographic Tibet,” are often greater than they are in political Tibet because the Tibetans living there are not perceived by Beijing to be as likely to push for any kind of political independence. The Tibetans themselves, one imagines, recognize no such artificial boundaries and the Buddhism that still seems to flow in their veins also flows effortlessly across lines drawn upon a map.

  The Tibetan question is a tricky one and has become very emotive in the West. The Tibetans have been called the “baby seals” of the international community, with the Dalai Lama’s cuddly image and powerful message of nonviolence gaining him and his compatriots huge waves of sympathy. Many in the West believe what most Tibetans say, that China occupied Tibet for the first time only after the Communist victory of 1949. But to understand the full picture, you have to go back a long way before that.

  The Chinese government says that there have been “brotherly relations” with Tibet since the seventh century and that Tibet has actually been part of China since the Yuan dynasty of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Certainly there were contacts back in the seventh century, and there were contacts between Tibetan leaders and the Mongols (when the Mongols ruled China) in the thirteenth century. Of course it depends how you define it, but it seems to me that they barely add up to Tibet being “part of China.” The first real, effective consolidation of Chinese claims to Tibet did not come until 1720, when the Kangxi Emperor in Beijing ordered imperial troops into Lhasa. From that point onward, troops and imperial officials from Beijing were stationed in the Tibetan capital, with varying degrees of involvement in Tibetan affairs. By and large, the Tibetans were allowed to continue undisturbed with their way of life. The emperor got to say Tibet was “part of the imperial family,” the trade-off for the Tibetans being that the imperial soldiers helped to keep enemies such as the Nepalese across the border at bay.

  T
his relationship continued through the nineteenth century, when whatever hold the Qing dynasty had on Tibet was weakened even further by internal rebellions, and by the arrival of the Ocean People, causing problems along the Chinese coastline. Tibet missed its chance at independence after China fell apart in 1912, partly because the dastardly British in India refused to champion their cause, and partly because the Buddhist monasteries, fearful that modernization meant atheism and secularism, thwarted efforts in the 1920s to introduce social and economic reforms. So when the Japanese were finally defeated in 1945, and Chairman Mao united a disintegrated country and proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, Tibet was not in a strong position to resist demands from Beijing that Tibet come “back” into the fold.

  With no means to defend themselves, the Tibetan leaders were forced to cut a deal with Beijing and officially accept Chinese sovereignty for the first time. Chairman Mao actually tried to give them some space, not forcing the same Communist reforms on them in the 1950s that he implemented elsewhere in China. But it was no good. The Communist and Buddhist ways were diametrically opposed, and a full-fledged uprising against Chinese rule broke out in 1959. It was ruthlessly suppressed by the Chinese and ended with the Dalai Lama’s flight to India. He has not returned to Tibet since.

  The propaganda war that began then continues to this day, with Beijing highlighting the cruel and backward nature of the old theocracy from which the Tibetans had been “liberated” and the Tibetan government in exile railing against the Chinese destruction of Tibet and its human rights abuses against Tibetans.

  Between 1959 and 1976, Tibetan society was restructured along Communist lines. Nomads were organized into communes. Tibetan culture and religion were brutally attacked, and almost all of the monasteries were completely destroyed. Han Chinese officials (and more Chinese troops) were moved to Tibet, to make sure it did not rise up again and to contribute to its development and integration. In 1949 there were just hundreds of Han Chinese in what is now the Tibetan Autonomous Region, out of a population of about a million. In 2005, according to official figures, there were about 100,000, or 7 percent of the population. This figure is far too low, especially since the influx of migrants resulting from the completion of the Tibet railroad in 2006. You can now travel by train directly from Beijing or Shanghai to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. Tibetans fear that the number of Han Chinese will slowly climb until there are as many Han as there are Tibetans in the region.

  When Mao died in 1976, some of the more militant Communist policies were eased, but anti-Chinese demonstrations broke out in Lhasa in the late 1980s, and again were ruthlessly crushed.

  The crushing of those demonstrations was seminal. It did not persuade Tibetans to love the Chinese, but it persuaded many ordinary Tibetans that opposition really was futile, just as the crushing of the Tiananmen demonstrations on June 4, 1989, persuaded the Han Chinese of the futility of any fight for democratic reform. And this realization coincided with the launch of a huge economic development program in Tibet in the 1990s. If you can’t win the people through their hearts and minds, then win them through their stomachs was the official Chinese thinking. Along with the investment came tens of thousands of Han Chinese migrants. It was like the building of the American West, bringing with it plenty of jobs in construction, not to mention trade and prostitution.

  The investment in Tibet is not all just a cynical attempt to buy off the Tibetans and make them forget any aspirations to independence. There is still a large dose of old-fashioned Chinese paternalism that wants to improve the lot of the poorest people. And certainly rural Tibet is desperately poor. (Westerners who conceive of Tibet as some kind of Shangri-la in the Himalayas have not seen the poverty and difficulty that constitutes the lives of most Tibetans.) But there is no doubt that Beijing’s economic generosity also has a very political side effect. When I visited Lhasa a few years before, I was amazed to find large numbers of Tibetan teenagers who wanted to head east to Shanghai to get a better job and who had little interest in politics or religion. Progress for them seemed to have become, on the surface at least, as important as identity.

  “My grandmother likes the Dalai Lama,” one drunk sixteen-year-old Tibetan had told me in a Lhasa nightclub as he swigged from a bottle of Budweiser. “I don’t know much about him.”

  There is one final point to make about the incorporation of Tibet into China. Although it is no excuse for the appallingly brutal way the Communist Party has treated Tibet since 1959, it is important to remember a few chapters of our own history in North America, Australia, and elsewhere. Even conservative estimates say that more than 2 million indigenous people were killed during the colonization of North America. In Australia, the aboriginal population was reduced by disease, loss of land, and direct killing by 90 percent between 1788 and 1900. American and Australian history are full of examples of white men killing indigenous peoples just for the sake of killing them, almost for sport. And let’s not even get started on the slave trade and the full onslaught of white colonialism elsewhere. Chinese atrocities in Tibet during the 1960s and ’70s, and until today, have been shocking in the extreme, but they have not yet reached anywhere near those levels. That does not excuse them in any way. All I am saying is that the white man speaks with forked tongue on these issues, and you will never hear a Han Chinese person saying, “The only good Tibetan is a dead Tibetan.”

  That afternoon I call Xiao Lin, the Tibetan teacher I had met on the bus to Xiahe, and we arrange to meet the following day. Then I take the afternoon just to relax and explore the town. I watch the Tibetan pilgrims, dressed in their colorful robes trimmed with fur, gently turning the hundreds of prayer wheels that surround Labrang Monastery as though perhaps trying to turn back time. I watch the Tibetan monks in their robes in an Internet café, surfing the Web and playing online video games. I take a tiny motor rickshaw up to the beautiful grasslands a few miles above Xiahe and just ride around, breathing in the fresh mountain air. There are a few theme-park-style Tibetan tents for Chinese tourists to spend the night, and you get the feeling that the whole place could be on the verge of a tourism explosion. Most of the nomads from the grasslands are being settled now, and the ancient way of life is being changed. Soon, there may not be any more nomads at all.

  That night I have dinner on a rooftop terrace overlooking Labrang. I sit next to a monk in flowing burgundy robes who talks in Tibetan on his Nokia cell phone for most of my meal.

  “I’m from the countryside south of Xiahe,” he says in heavily accented Chinese once we get chatting. “Becoming a monk is really the only way to get an education for many rural families like mine.”

  Back at the Overseas Tibetan Hotel, groups of foreign backpackers are sitting drinking coffee. It’s the first time on my journey that I have crossed paths with Westerners in any numbers. The hotel is a classic backpacker hangout. Computers with Internet access sit in the lobby, bearded Scandinavians hang out beside the front desk, discussing the best overland routes south to Sichuan province, and an English-speaking receptionist offers dorm rooms for a few dollars a night.

  The following day, I leave Xiahe and meet Xiao Lin in the Muslim town of Linxia, where I changed buses on my way to Xiahe two days before. I am continuing to Lanzhou that afternoon, so we go for lunch at a small noodle bar beside the bus station. He seems to know that we will be talking about sensitive issues, so he asks for a private room, which even small restaurants provide.

  We sit down and order some noodles, and I tell Xiao Lin I am writing a book and ask if he would mind if I ask him some fairly frank questions. He smiles and nods, confirming that I’m not going to use his real name, and I launch in.

  “You are Tibetan. But you have been raised in the Chinese system. And now you are returning to teach the language of what many Tibetans call your ‘oppressors’ to your own people. Doesn’t that make you uncomfortable at all?”

  “Mei banfa. I have no choice. What other choices are there open
to me?”

  He tells me his story, about growing up in a largely Tibetan area and finding himself always at the top of his class in the Tibetan school. So he, like all the smartest children, was transferred to the Chinese-language school, where he continued to be top of the class. This meant he would have a good shot at college, and he was duly accepted at one of the best universities in western China, one of five students in his class of one hundred to go on to tertiary education. His parents, both Tibetans with little education, forced him to speak Chinese at home so that his chances of success would be greater.

  “No one blames me,” he says gently. “There is no other choice. The only way to say I’m not going to take part in this is not to learn Chinese and reject the whole Chinese system. But that would condemn me to poverty. You can never get a good job and improve your living standards if you do that.”

  His eyes are still bright, and his voice still soft, despite what he clearly knows is the tragedy of his people.

  “Of course our culture is being diluted. The need to learn Chinese, the influx of more Chinese people. And that is sad. But it is not being completely diluted. There are some nonnegotiables. For instance, I would never marry a Han Chinese girl. And my Buddhist faith is something I will never give up.”

  “But what about the lifestyle? Tibetans are nomads.”