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Rangzen Charter

The Case for Tibetan Independence

Jamyang Norbu

CONTENTS (PART 2 OF 4)

Why Rangzen is Absolutely Essential
Rangzen Can Be Achieved
Why Give Up Now?
Even the Hope of Independance is Vital

WHY RANGZEN IS ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL

It can be argued that some countries have been part of other nations and empires and have not only managed to survive but in some cases have even benefited from foreign rule. The most obvious example being, of course, Hong Kong under Britain. But even China’s most ardent supporters will concede that Chinese rule in Tibet has been nowhere as visibly successful or even comparatively humane and liberal as Britain’s in Hong Kong.

Yet even relatively benign foreign rule appears on the face of evidence to be detrimental to the culture and morale of the native people. Australia and Canada are developed countries with rich economies and various democratic institutions to protect the rights of their people, including (at least these days) their indigenous populations. But many of the native people in these countries are demoralised, stricken with poverty and disease and victim to alcoholism and despair; a situation disturbingly similar to what is beginning to happen inside Tibet.

It seems that the only way to survive under foreign rule with any self-respect is by constantly defying the oppressing power and maintaining the hope of an eventual freedom. Even the respect of your conqueror is granted, it seems, only if you resist his tyranny. Of all the millions of native Americans who suffered and died under the injustice and violence of the white man, only the names of great war chiefs like Geronimo, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull are still remembered with respect by Americans. Those native leaders who tried to live peacefully under the white man and went to Washington DC to submit to the "Great White Father" are forgotten. George Orwell, in one of his newspaper columns, reflected on the fact that though the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome had rested entirely on slavery, in the same way as modern society depends on electricity or fossil fuels, we cannot recall the name of a single slave, except perhaps for Spartacus. And we remember him "…because he did not obey the injunction to ’resist not evil’, but raised violent rebellion".3

The hope for any kind of autonomous status under China is not realistic because it assumes that the Chinese system is flexible enough or tolerant enough to accommodate different political or social systems within it. One can envisage autonomous areas within, let us say, a nation like India, because of its genuine functioning multi-cultural and multi-racial makeup, and its democratic institutions like the constitution, the free press, free elections and an independent judiciary to prevent the government or a dominant group from suppressing the rights of another group. But this is something that by its very nature the Chinese leadership cannot do. The Chinese leaders are as much victims as their people of a long and oppressive cultural and political legacy — what a leading Australian sinologist, W.J.F. Jenner, has termed "the tyranny of history" — which has paralysed the realisation of positive fundamental changes in Chinese society and politics. Jenner raises "…the dreary possibility that China is caught in a prison from which there is no obvious escape, a prison continually improved over thousands of years, a prison of history — a prison of history both as a literary creation and as the accumulated consequences of the past".4

Simon Leys, "the most astute, the most elegant, the most corrosive — simply the best — of the contemporary China-lovers and China-watchers" (as Susan Sontag summed up this great scholar so precisely) has in his many brilliant essays commented exhaustively and discerningly on "the exact measure of the beast’s ability to change its stripes and its spots." To Leys, the Communist Party "… now cynical and completely discredited, is simply turning into a mafia of opportunists who are incompetent in all matters not directly related to their personal advancement". While China itself appears "…more and more like a dead planet; it is on a steady orbit but the very nature of its political atmosphere prevents any kind of growth…".5

The "one nation, two systems" granted to Hong Kong is an exception primarily because it is advantageous to Beijing. In fact, if China had not made that concession it would probably have damaged confidence in Hong Kong’s economy and caused China a crippling economic disaster. Furthermore, the people of Hong Kong are Chinese, and Hong Kong society is as thoroughly an economic society as one can find anywhere in this world; one where the inhabitants seem willing to put up with any kind of rule, foreign or despotic, as long as they are allowed to make money. The granting "of one nation two systems" to Hong Kong is entirely without risk because the people of Hong Kong, with the exception of a Martin Lee or so, seem sadly incapable of any serious effort or struggle for freedom. In spite of this, China has openly begun nibbling away at the Basic Law that was supposed to guarantee the ex-colony’s freedom.

Furthermore, unlike Hong Kong, Tibet is dangerous because even a small concession of autonomy would encourage Tibetans not only to demand, but to rise up violently, for independence. In fact, one of the reasons for the 1987 Lhasa demonstrations was the relaxation of earlier repressive policies. Even if, in the most unlikely future, China were to agree to some kind of autonomous status for Tibet it would have to maintain its full apparatus of repression in Tibet, as it is doing now, to crush the inevitable resurgence of the desire and struggle for independence — which would negate the very idea of autonomy. It is as Catch-22 a situation as any.

RANGZEN CAN BE ACHIEVED

The main, but often unspoken, reason why most people feel that Rangzen is not possible is their unconscious acceptance of the permanence of China’s power. This is, needless to say, not a very Buddhist attitude. After all, one of the primary observations of the Buddha was the impermanence of all phenomena. But probably the lack of a historical perspective is a more immediate reason for this condition. Our own independence was regained in 1912 after the fall of the Manchu dynasty. Also, well within living memory, China was the object of pity and derision, though more often of exploitation, by even second-rate colonial powers. This is not to say that such things will happen again in the same way but the Chinese themselves have traditionally never regarded the course of their history as progressive or linear. On the contrary, the opening line of the first and one of the most popular novels in the Chinese language, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (San Guo Yan Yi), now almost a proverbial saying, sums up the theme of the novel and also aptly epitomises an abiding truth of Chinese history: "Empires and dynasties when united tend to dissolution, and when partitioned strive once more for unity."

The Western media’s self-serving depiction of China as a dynamic modern country with an exciting ever-growing economy certainly contributes to the general acceptance of China’s invincibility. Tibetans who get their news through Time or Newsweek or other organs of Western business interests should not feel too discouraged. Nazi Germany got pretty much the same kind of press, till World War II broke out. A riffle through the back issues of The Times – apologia after nauseating apologia for Hitler and Nazism, and unrelievedly spiteful attacks against a pre-prime ministerial Churchill — should cure one of any undue faith in the infallibility or fairness of the Western press.

In China’s case, some human rights’ violations are occasionally reported but these are invariably soft-pedalled as short-term problems, assuredly disappearing with the "democratisation" of China — an inevitable process resulting from the adoption of market capitalism. Capitalism may or may not be a good thing, depending on one’s point of view, but to say that its adoption leads to democratisation is patently misleading. When the examples of Taiwan’s and South Korea’s democratisation are trotted out as vindication of this theory, what is not mentioned is Singapore’s success in perpetuating and even promoting a very sinister kind of authoritarian capitalism. The world’s longest-incarcerated political prisoner, Chia Thye Poh, has been held in a Singapore jail for 32 years without charge or trial, merely for expressing opposing views to the government. It must be remembered too that Nazi Germany was a capitalist country, with the state helpfully providing slave labour to the factories of Krupps, Thyssen, Volkswagen, BMW, and Siemens; and with private companies in neighbouring Sweden conveniently manufacturing and supplying the chemical Zyklon B, to gas Jews, Slavs, gypsies and other enemies of the Third Reich.

The reality of China is a country in terminal decline, or even by the most generous of observations — a nation in profound crisis. It is not the place here to address the issue in detail, but increasingly the world is waking up to the realisation that all the noise and fanfare of China’s economic miracle is in fact covering up a deep and profound malaise. Scholars and experts are beginning to write and comment on this. Some experts even argue that China’s attempts to avoid the Soviet Union’s problems by its hard-line anti-democratic policies could at best merely postpone the inevitable consequences of fifty years of disastrous Communist rule. There is also the strong possibility that this postponement will make the future situation in China even more unmanageable and chaotic than the present Russian mess.

He Qinglian, a Chinese economist, came out last year with an insightful and searing indictment of Deng’s liberalisation. Her book Zhongguo De Xianjing (China’s Pitfall) has had extraordinary sales in China (though recently her Shanghai publishers are facing charges of sedition). She argues that the Chinese political and economic system will eventually destroy itself. "The systematic corruption in which pursuit of private interest undermines society’s legal system and public morality will inevitably kill (China’s) reform before it matures."8

The scale of official corruption as reported by He Qinglian is staggering. Opportunistic officials have during the 1990s shaken loose at least 500 billion yuan from state funds intended for purchase of state grain, education and disaster relief, for use in private speculation on real-estate and other ventures. Another way in which power-holders and their hangers-on plundered public wealth was through bank loans. Such loans to state enterprises and private ventures owned by officials and their relations are mostly never recovered. China’s banks announce only part of their bad debt publicly. The official figure is that 20% of loans are "non-performing", but the actual figure may be between 40% and 60%. International banks observe a bad debt ratio of under 3%. In the spring of 1998, the state banks in Guangdong announced bad debts of 200 billion yuan, but inspectors sent from Beijing found the actual figure to be four times that amount. By international standards China’s banks are bankrupt, and deeply so.

An alarming decline in agriculture, increasing water scarcity and an exploding population has led to large-scale buying of food-grain by China from other countries, including India. Small but heavily industrialised nations like Japan, Taiwan and Korea import most of their food-grains, but China, because of its size, makes such impossible demands on supply that experts are predicting a global food crisis. Farmland in China is being bought up by speculators for wildcat development schemes. Peasants, discouraged by inflation and state-controlled grain prices, are illegally migrating to the cities in their millions, adding to the already large-scale problems there of crime, social unrest and unemployment. This last problem is compounded by the attempted closure of China’s bankrupt state-run industries and the laying-off of many millions of workers and cadres. The beginning of this year has seen large-scale demonstrations and rioting by Chinese farmers and jobless workers throughout the country.

Environmentally, the country was a basket case long before the eco-disasters of Mao’s Great Leap and even before the advent of modern industrialisation. Every bit of land that could be sustainably cultivated had been cleared and planted long ago, and forest and wetlands had disappeared from China proper even in imperial times. In 1889 lightning struck the Temple of Heaven (Tiantan) in Beijing and burnt it to the ground. Piece by piece the Chinese reproduced it, but even by then China’s forests were so impoverished that its four central pillars had to be imported from Oregon. The inability of the present Chinese leadership to prevent, or at least limit this ecological destruction, and its obsession with megalomaniacal monuments like the Three Gorges Dam, make it more than likely that China’s near future will be beset with catastrophic man-made "natural" disasters like last year’s record-breaking flooding of the Yangtze.

The richer coastal provinces are beginning to distance themselves from the rest of the country. The PLA has become an empire in its own right with its own industries, businesses and five-star hotels — though the leadership is attempting, somewhat unsuccessfully, to curb that. A possible future scenario for China is a reversion to the "Warlord Period" of the twenties and thirties with virtually independent provinces and power groups doing as they please, but conceding some kind of nominal acknowledgement to a weak and corrupt central authority in Beijing, in the spirit of Chinese solidarity.

Without going so far as to make specific predictions, it is not difficult to see that a gradual and peaceful transition to a democratic China is a near impossibility. Social unrest in China has no legitimate outlets except insurrection and violence. The Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing issued a very likely understated but even then astonishing report that 2,500 bomb blasts were recorded in the first nine months of 1998. This year, in January alone, 12 different bomb explosions have been reported, causing 33 deaths and over 100 injuries.

Chinese leaders themselves are very nervous about the situation, which probably explains their harsh crackdown on the few members of the quite unknown and quite insignificant democracy group. It can also probably explain why the reporting of an earthquake without official permission has recently been declared a crime. Traditionally, Chinese have regarded natural phenomena such as comets and earthquakes as signs of the end of a dynasty.

The possibility for anarchy and chaos is very real. In such an eventuality windows of opportunity for the realisation of Tibetan independence would certainly open up. Of course, we will have to seize such moments decisively and forcefully. The Chinese, no matter how weak or in disarray, are definitely not going to hand Tibet back peacefully or willingly. At the same time, it must be stressed that achieving Rangzen does not merely depend on waiting for China to self-destruct. Tibetans could contribute to that process by bringing about destabilisation inside Tibet and by organising international economic action against China.

We must always bear in mind that, even at the best of times, China’s resources are strained. Reports of district officials not being paid for many months, even a year or two, are not unusual these days. In Chabcha county in Amdo, local officials had not been paid for so long that two desperate Chinese officials committed suicide by drowning in the river. But in the "Tibet Autonomous Region" (especially in Lhasa), Beijing, in order to maintain pressure on "splittists" has to ensure, even if with the greatest difficulty, that all its officials, its vast army of security personnel, and even informers, are regularly paid. China probably spends far more to combat the active and growing insurgency in East Turkestan.

Even if, in the event, China does not fall apart but becomes weakened by its present travails, the opportunity still exists for Tibetans to create, or contribute to, a situation where China’s resources are dangerously overextended, and where the leadership in Beijing may have to eventually reconsider the wisdom of clinging to their peripheral colonies at the cost of China’s own stability and integrity.

According to a study of viceregal government in Sichuan under the Zhao brothers, Zhao Erfeng and Zhao Erxun, the province overextended itself by, imposition of direct Chinese rule into Eastern Tibet, and the invasion of Tibet proper in 1909, which among other factors, like tax rises in the province caused the rebellion of September 1911 in Sichuan. This, in turn, caused the Wuchang Uprising, bringing about the downfall of the Manchu Empire and the formation of the Republic. Of course, the fall of the dynasty had other and more fundamental causes, but the Sichuan revolution, caused in part by Chinese overextension in Tibet, was in the words of the author of this study "the fuse of the double ten revolution and part of its explosive force".9

WHY TO GIVE UP NOW?

There is certainly no denying that the situation inside Tibet is grim, especially when we take into account the fact of Chinese immigration. But the argument that to prevent Chinese immigration we must give up the Freedom Struggle and live under Chinese rule is clearly false. Have the Chinese leaders even hinted that if we gave up Rangzen they would halt immigration to Tibet?10 Of course not. If the Freedom Struggle were given up, and the situation inside Tibet became settled and peaceful, then Chinese immigration to Tibet would definitely increase. And if the Tibetan leadership accepted Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, then Chinese immigration would in a real sense become legitimised. After all, the citizen of a country should have the right to live wherever he or she wants to in that country. The only way to prevent Chinese immigration to Tibet is by intensifying the Freedom Struggle and destabilising Tibet to such a point that no Chinese would want to start a business in Tibet, much less settle there and raise a family.

Yet no matter how grave the fact of Chinese immigration into Tibet, we must bear in mind that this is not an entirely irreversible condition. Stalin forced large-scale immigration of Russians into small non-Russian nations like Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In 1939 the combined population of these three states numbered about six million, about that of Tibet’s. Stalin also executed thousands of the native people of these countries and deported hundreds of thousands of others to Siberia. It was generally thought in the world then that these countries were finished. In the fifties, sixties and seventies the very existence of these countries seemed to have been eradicated from human memory, in spite of the fact that the officially recognised representatives of those nations maintained their presence in London and New York. Even the Nobel prize-winning Polish writer, Czeslaw Milosz, born and educated in Lithuania, and speaking out for the Baltic people in the concluding chapter of his book The Captive Mind, leaves a lingering and sorrowful impression that, like the Aztecs wiped out by the Spanish conquistadors, the history of these ancient Baltic nations had come to an end.11

But now these small nations are free, and the fears and sorrows of yesteryear have vanished like bad dreams. Though these states still have considerable Russian populations, they are not the absolute threats to the survival or integrity of these nations as it was once thought they were.

The essential thing to bear in mind is that these small nations, once believed to be completely eradicated by Soviet totalitarianism and Russian immigration, are now free countries — flying their ancient flags, speaking their own languages and living in freedom.12

Tibet never disappeared quite so completely as the Baltic States, even during our worst period under the Chinese. And right now, in spite of the cynicism of governments and business interests, Tibet enjoys considerable attention in the world. Certainly, it is not always the kind of attention we want. Nevertheless there is increasing awareness of Tibet throughout the world and a growing concern for its plight. If there was a period when we might have been forgiven for giving up it would be the sixties and seventies, when it definitely seemed that International Communism and Chinese control of Tibet would go on forever, in sæcula sæculorum; and when most intellectuals or celebrities in the free world appeared to be besotted with Communist China and Mao’s Thoughts.

Right now, Tibet enjoys an unprecedented attention and sympathy in the world that is quite remarkable. Even high-profile issues like Northern Ireland or the Middle East do not receive quite the kind of sympathy and curiosity that Tibet does. The fact that this does not translate as a matter of course into political support for the Tibetan cause is certainly unfortunate. We Tibetans must accept partial blame for this in our inability to present our political objectives clearly and consistently to the world. In fact, these inconsistencies have spread confusion among our own supporters and bogged down every kind of activism on behalf of the cause. Yet the opportunity of transforming this international goodwill for Tibet to active support for the Freedom Struggle is more than a possibility. It does not require great imagination to see that we could badly hurt Chinese commercial and diplomatic interests all over the world, just through peaceful activism — if we first clearly defined our objectives and then stuck to them.

EVEN THE HOPE OF INDEPENDENCE IS VITAL

Of course, there is no guarantee that independence will happen soon, or even in our lifetimes — though I am somehow convinced it will. Yet it goes without saying that maintaining the goal of Rangzen is vital to its eventual achievement. It must be remembered that it was the hope of independence that kept our exile society strong and united in the difficult early years. Many of the problems our society now faces with religious and political quarrels, decline in school educational standards, the lamentably disgraceful commercialisation of our religion, cynicism in the administration, and loss of self-respect and integrity among the ordinary people, have definite roots in the gradual relinquishing of the Freedom Struggle by the Tibetan establishment during the last two decades.

The hope of independence is vital for people inside Tibet. Keeping alive the Freedom Struggle in exile gave people inside Tibet hope, and in spite of the terrible sufferings they underwent, gave them some assurance that their world had not disappeared entirely. In order for Tibetans to preserve their identity, culture and religion, the hope of a free Tibet must always be preserved. If we resign ourselves to being a part of China then we will certainly lose our identity. We might be allowed to remain Buddhist,13 but we must bear in mind that there are a lot of other Buddhists in China. We will just become another Chinese Buddhist sect.

I am aware of the old and oft-repeated Tibetan saying that "China will be defeated by its paranoia, Tibet by its hopes." But in this instance I feel inclined to disagree with traditional wisdom and instead endorse the views of the Chinese writer, Lu Xun, on the question of hope. Lu Xun’s pronouncement on this subject should be somewhat reassuring to Tibetans since he was an expert on China's tyrants, ancient or modern:

"Hope can be neither affirmed nor denied. Hope is like a path in the countryside: originally there was no path — yet, as people are walking all the time in the same spot, a way appears."

NOTES

3. George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol.3, As I Please 1943-45, Penguin Books, 1971, London, p. 231. | back |

4. W.J.F. Jenner, The Tyranny of History:The Roots of China’s Crisis, Penguin Books, 1994, London

5. Simon Leys, The Burning Forest: Essays on Culture and Politics in Contemporary China, Paladin Grafton Books, London, 1988, p.162

6. On the other hand there is no ethnic distinction among Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian Moslems. They are all the same people speaking the same language, but they have experienced different histories.

7. Elliot Sperling, "The Rhetoric of Dissent", in Robert Barnett & Shirin Akiner (editors), Resistance and Reform in Tibet, Hurst, London, 1994, p.280.

8. Liu Binyan and Perry Link, "A Great Leap Backwards?", book review in The New York Review of Books, October 8,1998, of Zhongguo De Xianjing (China’s Pitfall), Hongkong: Mingjing Chubanshe, 410 pages, Hongkong 1998.

9. S.A.M. Adshead, 1984, Province and Politics in late Imperial China. Viceregal Government in Szechwan, 1898-1911. Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series, London and Malmo: Curzon Press.

10. Or, for that matter, if we gave up independence would it help to stop human rights’ abuse in Tibet, or environmental degradation, or the construction of nuclear missile sites?

11. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, Penguin Books, 1980, London.

12. In His address to Yale University on October 9, 1991, the Dalai Lama said: "The changes in the Baltic States are particularly inspiring…Just as the people of the Baltic States have been successful in regaining their freedom, I am confident that we Tibetans will soon regain ours. We have maintained a steadfast determination to achieve this goal during forty-two years of occupation."

13. Even this is uncertain, as the Chinese authorities seem to be encouraging Hui Muslim immigration to Tibet and even abetting evangelical activities in Amdo and Lhasa.

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