What separates Tibet from Mainland China?
May 3, 2015
Shell Lin

Several days ago I saw a post on Facebook which said that the Dalai Lama will speak at University of Massachusetts, Amherst College, and Smith College in October 2015. This news alarmed me as a Mainland Chinese girl who is attending college in the U.S. Back home in China, the Dalai Lama is a controversial figure who is accused by the Chinese government of being a “traitor” who schemes to separate Tibet from China.

Not surprising to me, out of patriotism, few Mainland Chinese I know in the Five-College area care to listen to the lecture. None of my Chinese acquaintances have shared the post, and few have liked the official page of the Dalai Lama. Some are even enraged at the Dalai Lama’s upcoming visit to their campus, feeling that it is offensive to their political beliefs. “Smith is a school full of powerful Tibetan separatists,” says my Chinese friend at Smith College.

It is not news that Chinese people disdain the Dalai Lama and his Tibetan followers as separationists of China. These presumptions prevent them from accepting the Dalai Lama as a great spiritual leader of the much-persecuted Tibetan people, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and an international champion of human rights. It also makes them apathetic to his speeches, including the plea that he writes on his official website: “I assure you I have no desire to seek Tibet’s separation. My primary concern, as I have repeated time and again, is to ensure the survival of the Tibetan people’s distinctive culture, language and identity.”

Why do Chinese people have such bias toward Tibet, which is so stubborn that they refuse to listen to any voice from the other side? An all too common explanation may be that they are brainwashed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But this diagnosis is too condescending to be constructive. What Chinese people really need is not a dismissive label on them, but to realize how they were, and still are mistaking single-sided and even distorted information for truth, and how it has shaped their prejudice toward Tibet.

There is a reason why Chinese people think that they do not need others to tell them what is Tibet. They assume that they could see it themselves by traveling there. After the Qinghai-Tibet Railway was put into use in 2006, more and more people every year from China flow into Tibet to see the breathtaking scenery of Himalayas, and to appreciate Tibetan religious legends. They see visiting Tibet as an escape from materialism of cities like Beijing and Shanghai, and as a trip to the Holy Land.

However, are the tourists looking at an authentic Tibet, or a romanticized one? While many Chinese tourists innocently believe that they have touched the very core of Tibetan Buddhism, they are actually only seeing the superficial disguise of profit-driven tourism, which is run by Han Chinese. According to Free Tibet, a non-profit and non-government organization that campaigns for the rights of Tibetans, the main employees of most tourist destinations in urban areas are not Tibetans but ethnic Chinese migrants. The Chinese government also controls tourism. In 2003, Beijing even fired 150 Tibetan tour guides because of suspicions about their political views. The tourism of Tibet is notoriously connotated with mercantilism, which has harmed the religiousness of many sites of interest in Tibet. As Melinda Liu wrote in Newsweek: “The 1000-room Potala is now surrounded by hairdressing salons, chain-smoking prostitutes and karaoke bars blaring Madonna music. Streets that once housed traditional Tibetan teas shops have given way to rows of greasy Chinese eateries…near the Potala is a solar-powered radio and TV station that broadcasts Communist Party propaganda in Tibetan.”

Not being able to see the authentic Tibet, Chinese people are further tricked by government’s words and values. Mainland Chinese citizens are always reminded of how much the government has improved the Tibetans’ living conditions by creating Tibetans jobs, building highways and railroads, and accommodating farming and nomad families in modern houses with household appliances.

But few people have asked: are these “developments” really good for Tibetans’ lives? According to Free Tibet, it serves counterproductively for Tibetans. “The Chinese government has forced thousands of Tibetans to abandon their traditional rural nomadic lifestyle and move into new housing colonies or towns,” they write on their website, “Many of these people do not have the skills or experience to compete for jobs in the urban environment.” This case is the epitome of how Chinese citizens believe that their government is helping Tibet without thinking whether Tibetans need help, and what kind of help do they really need.

Instead of economic development, Tibetans ask for the right to freely practice their religion.

Buddhism is taken very seriously in Tibet, where 65% of the populations are Buddhists. People value rituals and communities. Thus they protest the CCP for controlling religious activity in the area and attempting to destroy the relationship between monasteries and the community-a relationship that is central to Tibetan society.

Tibetans’ value and reaction is not something Chinese people could emphasize with, because they have a different attitude toward religion. Though Buddhism is a major tradition in today’s China, it is not taken seriously. Most followers are laypeople, who accept the Buddha’s teachings but remained householders. They only loosely practice rituals. They pray and offer incense to the Buddha only occasionally, and hardly do they follow old traditions like copying the Buddhist texts by hand or keeping vegetarian on gods and goddesses’ birthdays.

Because of this geographical and ideological gap, Chinese people could hardly understand Tibetans. But what worse than not understanding is misunderstanding. What come to an average Chinese’s mind first when mentioning about Tibet is probably riots, attacks, and self-combustions there. This is because, in the fear of Tibetans’ campaign for rights, the Chinese government manipulates the media portraying Tibetans as terrorists. Chinese public are persuaded that these people intended to harm the society in the name of their religion.

While Dalai Lama has not yet separated Tibet from China, the Chinese people’s bias has created a gap of understanding between Tibetans and Mainland Chinese. Isn’t it a paradox to the goal of creating a truly unified China?