The Contest of the Century

by Geoff A. Dyer

  A WOLF IN MONK’S CLOTHING

  When we arrived in the center of Lhasa, the air still held the scent of burnt timber. The old Tibetan quarter of the city is little more than a handful of narrow streets lined with two-story stone buildings. On every block there were several black, singed frames where once had been small storefronts. It was ten days since the Tibetan capital city had been shaken by the worst outburst of racial violence since the 1960s, but the old section of the city remained in near lockdown. On every street corner, armed guards looked on, demanding to see the credentials of the few passersby.

  Four days before the riot, around three hundred monks from the Drepung Monastery, just outside Lhasa, had staged a march toward the city—the first open political protest in the streets of the city in more than a decade. Fifteen monks were arrested. On March 14, 2008, a Friday, monks from the Ramoche Monastery also started a small protest. Ramoche is located near the center of the city, and this time the protest attracted many followers. With rumors spreading that the monks arrested earlier in the week had been beaten, some members of the crowd started to attack the police. The police initially held back, perhaps because there was no one to give them orders—most senior officials from the province were in Beijing at the time, for the National People’s Congress. At some stage, the ethnic Tibetans who were protesting turned their attention from the police to the large population of migrants who have moved to the city in recent years—mostly Han Chinese, but also some Hui Muslims. They used gasoline to burn the shops and businesses of the migrants. By chance, the Beijing correspondent of The Economist, James Miles, was in the city at the time. He watched dozens of different businesses being burned, looted, or destroyed. “It was an extraordinary outpouring of ethnic violence,” he wrote.

  Foreign journalists are only allowed into Tibet on tightly controlled visits, an indication of just how sensitive the political situation is. Miles happened to be on one of those visits—his first reporting trip to Tibet in fifteen years of covering China. Ten days after the riot, I was lucky enough to get one of the four places for Western reporters on another government-organized trip. The Foreign Ministry hoped the visit would help explain to the world its version of events in Tibet. Things did not quite work out that way. Instead, we found ourselves at the center of a firestorm that cast a long shadow over that year’s Beijing Olympics and brought out the very worst aspects of China’s brittle, anti-Western nationalism. The Beijing Olympics were supposed to be the occasion when China cast off much of the emotional baggage that feeds its nationalism. China had spent the best part of a century trying to secure the chance to host the Olympics. As far back as 1908, Chinese writers saw the Olympics as a perfect vehicle to erase the country’s image as the “Sick Man of Asia.” By 2008, that moment had come. The Games were the perfect opportunity to showcase the country’s many achievements and to cast off any lingering sense of inferiority. But five months before the opening ceremony, in the streets of the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, that dream started to go sour.

  In the days after the Lhasa riot, Chinese TV was broadcasting an almost constant loop of images of the “3/14 incident,” as it was known, showing how Han Chinese had been victims of the violence. We were taken to one clothes shop that had been set on fire, where five young women—four of them Han and the other Tibetan, according to reports—had been burned alive. The only things left were the charcoal frame of a storefront and bouquets of flowers lined up against what remained of the outside wall. A shopkeeper, who was a Hui Muslim, told me about the horror he had experienced on seeing a mob start to set his business alight, before they decided to go elsewhere. All the shops on his street were still shuttered, but most of the ones that were untouched had white silk scarves tied around the padlocks, a signal to the protesters that they were owned by Tibetans. The narrative that the Chinese authorities wanted us to believe was indeed true: there had been an ugly race riot in Lhasa, and Han Chinese had been the principal victims.

  Except that the official story stopped there. For all the gory details about what had happened, no convincing explanation was put forward as to why the protest took place. Government officials simply told us that the rioters were all common criminals and that they would be dealt with according to the law—“kuai zhua, kuai shen, kuai sha,” as Tibet Party Secretary Zhang Qingli later put it—“quick arrest, quick trial, quick execution.” There was no discussion about why such an ugly episode in racial violence had actually taken place, no reflection on why ethnic Tibetans had turned on the other residents of Lhasa in such a brutal manner. With the rioters dismissed as common criminals, there was no need to ask probing questions about how Tibet was governed. Moreover, the obsessive attention given to the “3/14 incident” obscured the reality that the Lhasa riot was not an isolated event. Instead, there had been a wildfire of protests across the Tibetan plateau. According to Robert Barnett at Columbia University, there were at least ninety-six different protests during that month, in which thirty thousand Tibetans took part. “The question that now faces China’s leaders, if not the world, is ‘Who lost Tibet?’ ” Barnett wrote shortly afterward.

  The official story started to unravel when we were taken to the Jokhang Temple, in the center of the city, one of the centers of Tibetan Buddhism. A senior abbot, portly in his purple robes, met us in an entrance hall and launched into a long explanation about how calm had been restored. “Everything is back to normal,” he insisted. As he was speaking, a group of maybe twenty young monks began to swarm around us. It was unclear at first what was happening, but we soon realized that it was an impromptu protest. The monks seemed in a state of extreme distress, some shouting while others cried. The state media at the time had been going out of their way to demonize the Dalai Lama (“a wolf in monk’s clothes,” Zhang Qingli called him), but the monks wanted to convince us of their undimmed affection for him. They told us that they had been under effective house arrest since the protests began and that the temple was still in lockdown. And then they dropped the real bombshell. The monks told us that everything going on in the temple that day had been arranged for our benefit. At the time, we were standing in a large hall outside the main temple. Through the door, we could see a throng of people who seemed to be going through their daily prayers, many with prayer beads in their hands. It was all a lie, the monks said. The people inside the temple were all Communist Party officials who had been brought in for the day and told to pretend to be regular worshippers.

  Our government minders were apoplectic, but with TV cameras running, they could not afford to break up the protest. So they tried to chip away at the edges. On a couple of occasions, I had to fend off attempts to pull me out of the tumult. After the monks had been talking for about fifteen minutes, two large security officials came up behind me, placed their hands on my shoulders, and lifted me away. The image from the temple proved explosive. The official Chinese narrative about Han Chinese being the victims of the Lhasa riot was true as far as it went. But the elaborate deceit at Jokhang exposed just how much effort the government was exerting to prevent any discussion of the simmering political problems that lay behind the rioting across the Tibetan plateau.

  ——

  The Chinese government’s response was effectively to go to war against the foreign press. In the days after the Lhasa riot, most foreign journalists reported as best they could on the event, even though they were not allowed to visit the site. But there were also plenty of mistakes. One German newspaper used a picture of a violent clash between protesters and police which had actually taken place in Nepal. CNN was accused of having cut out part of a photo of Chinese armed police that showed rioting Tibetans. The government jumped on the errors as decisive proof that the foreign media were irredeemably biased against China, and most Chinese of my acquaintance believed the authorities. Before long, witch hunts were being conducted against any foreign journalist who had been deemed to offend the honor of the nation. For a few days, the target of the campaign was Jane Macartney, the co
rrespondent of The Times of London. (This was particularly unfair as she had not written the article that appeared to cause offense, but it at least had a certain historical irony—she is a direct descendant of Lord Macartney, the British envoy in the late eighteenth century who refused to bow to the Qianlong emperor, a standoff that proved to be a precursor to the Opium Wars.) Geremie Barmé, the Australian academic, correctly described the exercise as “a radical demonisation of the western international press.” The four Western reporters who had been on the trip in Tibet also started to come under attack. When I arrived at the office in the morning, I would find abusive messages and a few death threats waiting on the answering machine. My colleague who runs the Financial Times’ Chinese-language Web site called one day, after reading the volume of hate mail that was coming into the site. He suggested that I maybe start to change the route I took to and from the office, just in case. At the time, I shrugged off the threats, assuming them to be from young men in Internet cafés who were letting off a little steam. But one of the other reporters who had gone to Lhasa received a rather more intimidating threat. Someone got hold of a photo of him, cut off the head, and then posted the two images on a Web site.

  Before long, the furor spilled over into the preparations for the Olympics. A few weeks after the Tibet riot, the Olympic torch was due to travel through several European capitals, part of an elaborate global tour. In London, a few pro-Tibetan protesters tried to disrupt the torch relay and were pushed away by Chinese police in track suits who were running alongside. In Paris, the protesters were more aggressive and tried to grab the torch from a young Chinese woman in a wheelchair. Jin Jing, a twenty-seven-year-old from Shanghai who was due to compete in Paralympic fencing, became a national hero after fending off the attack, “an angel in a wheelchair” as the Chinese media dubbed her. “I still feel very angry now, and I think the man was very irrational,” she said the next day. “Hosting the Olympics is such a good thing for our country, so why do they want to ruin it?”

  Back in China, a new wave of angry popular protests broke out, once again with the urban, educated youth at the forefront. Some of these young Chinese had an idealized view of the foreign media and were deeply upset at what they believed to be the obvious bias of the coverage of the Tibet riots. (“Don’t be so CNN” became a popular retort.) The disruption to the torch relay just added to their ire. After a rumor circulated that a Carrefour executive had made a large donation to a radical Tibetan group, a boycott campaign was organized online. Huge demonlong xof young people erupted at some of the chain’s Chinese stores. In Hefei, a provincial city three hundred miles inland from Shanghai, ten thousand people congregated one Saturday afternoon in the car park of a Carrefour to demonstrate their displeasure. An Internet video about the history of Tibet which went viral among young Chinese was entitled “Tibet WAS, IS, and ALWAYS WILL BE a part of China.”

  In some ways, tempers were even more frayed among young Chinese studying at overseas universities—precisely the constituency that some in the West hope will be an eventual bulwark for liberal reform in China. At Duke University in North Carolina, a young Chinese student named Grace Wang attempted to intervene in a fierce debate that had broken out between Han Chinese students at the university and ethnic Tibetans. Her intervention went viral on the Internet, and she was subjected to a vicious hate campaign, in which she was labeled by other Chinese students a “race traitor.” After her parents’ home address in Qingdao was circulated on the Internet, a photo appeared online which purported to show feces smeared all over the door. They had to go into hiding.

  It is hard to understand the intensity of the 2008 events without seeing how deeply rooted Tibet is in the framework of national humiliation. One of the flip sides of modern China’s victim mentality is a ferocious defense of its sovereignty, which was impugned by foreign powers in the nineteenth century, the invaders who “carved up China like a melon.” In the periods when China has been weak, its ambiguous influence over Tibet has loosened further, including when the British invaded in 1903. Control over Tibet is tightly linked to the urge to restore national pride. It is that mindset that can turn a dispute between Han Chinese and one of the country’s ethnic minorities into a struggle against imperialism. Since the early years of the republic, China’s leaders have been faced with the dilemma of trying to forge a modern, unified nation-state from the loose, saggy terrain of a multinational empire. The new national identity has leaned heavily on a strong sense of shared suffering, which Beijing has then imposed on all the country’s ethnic groups, even those whose historical connections to the Chinese state are full of nuance, complexity, and in some cases conflict. For Beijing to recognize deep political problems in Tibet or among other ethnic groups would be to undermine the narrative of China as a victim of outside interference. When Tibet explodes, the West sees a Beijing government floundering in a very different political culture; official China sees such complaints as a challenge to its core identity.

  The Olympics were supposed to provide the catharsis from this psychological burden, to show that China could move from victim to victor. Instead, the buildup to the Games made many Chinese feel that the country was being subject to a series of damning judgments, as if the West did not yet believe China was good enough. After all the changes and successes of the last three decades, many Chinese felt that the country was still not considered truly respectable. This was another reason to be furious at the Tibetans: they had tried to spoil the party. Beneath their bureaucratic exterior, the Tibetan riots exposed a kind of emotional rage among Chinese leaders, who experience such setbacks as a form of personal humiliation. At the same time, the contortions to avoid an open discussion about Tibet led even the more sensible members of the Chinese bureaucracy to take the most addled, paranoid positions. On one occasion, a very senior Chinese official was asked to explain why foreign journalists were banned from visiting Tibet except on carefully organized tours. Journalists could not be trusted, she said, because all the photos of the Dalai Lama hanging on the walls of homes and offices in Tibet had been brought in by foreign reporters. Tapping her finger on the table for emphasis, she repeated: “Every single photo.”

  SHALLOW AND INTENSE

  Li Yang was about halfway through a three-hour teaching session at the English-language boot camp when he started calling attention to me. “We have an important guest, Jiefu, from a British newspaper,” he announced, using a Chinese transliteration of my name. I was sitting at the back, and all the students turned round to look at me. They laughed when Li told them, “He has come down here to taste our jiaozi [dumplings].” Gradually, more and more of his comments seemed to be aimed in my direction. “The best place to teach English would be in church, but I do not think that Comrade Hu would allow this—don’t you think, Jiefu?” he said, smiling.

  Li insists that his entire routine is improvised, even when some of the sessions last for hours. To prove it, after a while he decided to summon me to the stage. Several hundred young Chinese students looked around at me with an expectant gaze, perhaps suspecting some sport might be in the offing. It would have been extremely rude to refuse, so, somewhat embarrassed, I wandered onstage. Li started questioning me about my life in China. Then he asked me what I thought to be the most impressive thing about China. I mumbled something, I believe, about the striking ambition and energy of ordinary Chinese people to improve their lives. “Wow!” thundered Li. “Listen to this. Jiefu, say that again. Repeat that, please, Jiefu. Everyone, listen closely.” My onstage ordeal continued for another ten minutes, during which Li anticipated one of my strongest reactions—and something that has also been a persistent criticism of his school. Looking out at the rapt audience hanging on his every word, with red flags lined up all across the auditorium, and monitors in army fatigues standing in the aisles to watch over the students, Li turned to me and said, “Jiefu, you must think this is a lot like the Cultural Revolution.”

  Class eventually broke for dinner, a school me
al served on metal trays with four different compartments, one each for the meat dish, vegetable, rice, and fruit. The Chinese New Year was only a few hours away, which the students would spend in a class, but there was time for one more entertainment: a torch rally. The students assembled in drill formation on an adjacent sports field to watch some fireworks and to listen to a short speech by Li. Then, with their monitors each carrying a torch, they marched in formation around the campus, chanting slogans in English about “Success” and “Achievement.” I watched, unsure what to think. If there had not been so much laughter in the air, if the students had not been so charming and curious, and if these kids had not been sacrificing the most important holiday of the year to learn a foreign language, then there might have been something just a little fascist about the spectacle.

  After two days in his company, I still could not decide whether Li Yang was really tapping a deep vein of nationalism, or whether his anti-American shtick was just performance art, a ritual about humiliation and sacrifice that his students understand and laugh at but which they do not really believe. That is the broader challenge in trying to understand Chinese nationalism. The last decade has seen a series of angry fits at the rest of the world, full of bitterness and bile, but these have quickly subsided. Is there a volcano of resentment waiting to explode, or are these just tantrums that will ease, the growing pains of a new great power adjusting to its place in the world? One of the most important questions about modern China is whether the nationalist chorus is relatively small, a rump of 10 percent of the population, who get more attention than they deserve, or whether it is the reflection of a set of attitudes that are ingrained into the national DNA.