Monday 17 March 2008
Brendan O’Neill
Using Tibet to settle scores with China
Tibetans want to be free. But they’ve been given a
green light to riot by Western elements driven more by
spite and envy than a love for liberty.
The grainy, sneaked-out footage of Tibetans rioting in
Lhasa and in parts of China itself clearly reveals one
thing: Tibetans want more control over their daily
lives and destinies. Frustrated with living under
illiberal and undemocratic Chinese rule, they are
lashing out against what they consider to be symbols
of Chinese domination: Han Chinese businesses and
buildings owned by Chinese officialdom.
But there’s another story behind the images of
instability being broadcast around the world, a more
complex, dangerous and difficult-to-spot story of
cynical, spiteful political manoeuvring. Elements in
the West have effectively encouraged Tibetans to riot,
not because they are committed to democracy and
liberty, but because they fear and loathe the Chinese.
Western encouragement of Tibetan instability may dress
itself in the rallying cry of ‘Free Tibet!’, but its
real motivation is to ‘Humiliate China!’
The Tibetan protesters’ angry outbursts reveal their
deep-seated dissatisfaction with life under the
Stalinist regime. Yet the protests can also be seen as
a physical, violent manifestation of Western
China-bashing, which is increasing in intensity as the
Beijing Olympics approach. For the past three months,
Western officials and commentators have implicitly
(and sometimes explicitly) encouraged Tibetans and
others to ‘use the Olympics to humiliate China’ (1).
Taking their cue, at least in part, from Western
culture’s feverish fear and suspicion of China,
Tibetans have launched protests that seem designed as
much to please Western observers as to push through
real, meaningful changes in Tibet and China.
In both their timing and their presentation, the
protests seem more a product of Western cajoling than
of an independent, groundswell demand for liberty
amongst Tibetans. It is no coincidence that the
protests, reportedly the biggest amongst Tibetans
since the late 1980s, have erupted in the run-up to
Beijing 2008. Vast numbers of political entrepreneurs
and activists are trying to transform the Olympics
into a platform for moral posturing and China-bashing.
According to the International Herald Tribune, such is
the frenzied politicisation of the Olympics by Western
officials and campaigners that athletes are becoming
confused about which cause to support. They have found
themselves ‘overwhelmed by menu choices’ and also by
numerous ‘wardrobe decisions’: should they wear a
‘China, Please’ armband to protest against China’s
links with Sudan, or a yellow ‘Livestrong’ bracelet to
indicate their support for a ‘pollution-free games and
lead-free toys’? An American triathlete has
complained: ‘Every time you turn around, there is
someone trying to make a statement about something.’
(2) The relentless politicisation of the Olympics by
Western elements, the widespread discussion of Beijing
2008 as an opportunity to ‘humiliate China’, has
helped to create a volatile atmosphere in the more
restive parts of China and its surrounding
territories, including Tibet.
Presentation-wise, the protesters’ use of English
slogans and their speedy dissemination of mobile-phone
footage suggest the demonstrations are aimed very much
at a Western audience. In the march of the Tibetan
monks in northern India last week, and during the more
fiery protests in Tibet and China over the weekend,
Tibetans carried placards with English-language
demands such as ‘Tibet Needs You’. They wore headbands
saying ‘Free Tibet’ - the favoured slogan of Western
middle-class and even aristocratic pro-Tibet
sympathisers, such as Prince Charles (3). Tibetan
monks in Dharamsala, India (where the Tibetan
government-in-exile resides, led by the Dalai Lama)
have put up English posters saying ‘Beijing 2008: A
Celebration of Human Rights Violations’ (4). One
British newspaper has celebrated Tibetan protesters’
use of ‘the most dangerous weapon in the world - the
cameras on their mobile phones’ (5). Many Western
observers who cheer Tibetans for using this ‘weapon’
to beam images of their struggle around the world
would probably feel very uncomfortable if Tibetans
used real weapons to force their Stalinist rulers to
make changes or concessions.
The protests seem orientated very much towards the
outside world. They appear to gain their legitimacy
and fire from today’s widespread China-bashing, and
they seem designed, in some ways, for Western
consumption. This shows the extent to which Tibetans
have become caught up in a global tug-of-war between
the West and China. No doubt some people feel
genuinely inspired by the Tibetan unrest, but many of
the Western elements cheering the Tibetan cause and
encouraging the Tibetans to ‘humiliate China’ are
motivated less by a genuine commitment to liberty and
democracy than by a deep and cynical desire to make
life difficult for the Chinese.
Today’s Tibetan protests are taking place in a broad,
quite sinister political context: the West’s
transformation of China into a cultural and political
target. In recent years, China has inexorably, and in
some ways unconsciously, been transformed into a
whipping boy for the West. Anti-Chinese sentiments cut
across the political divide: on both the old right and
the new left, attacking China for its economic growth,
human rights record, environmental destruction or
suppression of the Tibetan people has become de
rigueur. There is an unspoken consensus today -
amongst Western officials, commentators and radical
activists - that China is a global threat which must
be put back in its place with a short, sharp dose of
humiliation. Far more than the demonisation of the
Soviet Union as the ‘Evil Empire’ during the Cold War
era, the labelling of China as a dirty,
uncontrollable, violent beast enjoys widespread,
unquestioned support throughout political circles in
the West.
On the right, China-bashing has become a way of
settling old scores from the Cold War. American
right-wing thinkers and officials seem to take comfort
in the familiar feeling of standing up to an ‘old
communist foe’. Robbed of the ‘Evil Empire’ in the
East by the end of the Cold War, and thrown by the
unpredictability of global affairs more broadly, old
right elements cling to China as an old-fashioned
enemy from an era when politics was simpler and
international affairs were more black-and-white; they
are trying to recreate that era with a new
‘yellow-and-white’ divide between barbaric China and
the civilised USA (6). Last week, the Pentagon made a
splash with its annual report to US Congress on the
threat posed by Chinese military power. It was hard
not to nod, at least in partial agreement, with the
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman who accused
officials in the Pentagon of being consumed by ‘Cold
War thinking’ (7).
There is also an element of palpable jealousy in
right-wing attacks on contemporary China. As America’s
economy spins from one crisis to another, becoming
reliant in many ways on East Asian cash to bail it
out, traditionalist economic thinkers are discussing
Chinese growth as a problem and a threat. Using the
language of environmentalism - clearly sensing that
old-fashioned protectionism would not go down very
well today - establishment publications in the US
publish essays with headlines such as ‘Choking on
growth’; they argue that if China is to reduce its
carbon emissions (that is, slow down its growth) then
there will have to be a ‘wholesale mindset change’
amongst the Chinese people (
. Books such as The
River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to
China’s Future are snapped up and celebrated by
traditionalist American thinkers and economists (9).
Amongst left-leaning campaign groups and writers,
China has become the No.1 International Bogeyman
because of what they see as its ceaseless
industrialisation. Westerners who find the idea of
growth so nineteenth-century openly discuss China as a
poisonous nation that is killing its own people and
possibly the planet. Liberal green writers see only
the ‘dust, waste and dirty water’ in modern China;
they describe the economic progress there as the ‘mass
poisoning of a people and the ecological devastation
of a nation’, which is a product, apparently, of greed
- ‘ours and theirs’ (10). Those greedy Chinese,
getting jobs in the city and buying cars and TVs… why
don’t they go back to the paddy fields where they
belong? Green campaign groups call on Western nations
to cut their political and economic ties with China,
and instruct Western consumers that ‘If it says “Made
in China”, don’t buy it’: only then, they argue, will
‘The World’s Biggest CO2 Emitter’ and ‘The World’s
No.1 Consumer of Coal’ (that’s ‘China’ to those of us
who don’t think and speak in the dehumanising language
of trendy China-bashers) be forced to change its ways
(11). They fancy this as a radical stance, but in
today’s Great China-Bashing Consensus, greens are
merely the protesting wing of the backward, fearful,
protectionist politics of a West worried about the
‘Chinese threat’.
In many ways, campaigners and commentators in the West
are projecting their own disgust with ‘the Western way
of life’ on to China. They see in China everything
that they doubt or loathe about modernity itself. That
is why commentators frequently tell China not to make
‘the same mistakes that we made’. On everything from
economic growth to sporting competitiveness, from the
use of coal to the building of skyscrapers, today’s
China-bashing is motivated by Western self-loathing,
as well as by spite and envy towards the seemingly
successful Chinese. Ironically, this means that China
is now seen as ‘the Other’ precisely because it
appears too Western: it is China’s ambition, growth,
its leaps forward - things that a more confident West
might once have celebrated - which make it seem alien
to Western observers who today prefer carbon-counting
to factory-building and road tolls to road
construction. China-bashing is underpinned by a crisis
of belief in the West in things such as progress,
growth, development.
It is the sweeping consensus that China is dangerous
and diseased that has attracted Western observers to
the issue of Tibet. Both left and right elements in
the West are exploiting the Tibet issue as a way of
putting pressure on China. They are less interested in
securing real freedom and equality for Tibetans, and
for the Chinese people more broadly, than they are in
using and abusing internal disgruntlement in China and
nearby territories as a way of humiliating the Chinese
government. That is why Tibetans can symbolise
different things to different people. For conservative
commentators, the Tibetans are warriors for freedom
against a Stalinist monolith; their protests are a
replay of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in
1989 (12). For greener, more liberal campaigners,
Tibetans are symbols of natural and mystical purity in
contrast to rampant Western and Chinese consumerism.
As one author puts it, Tibetan culture offers
‘powerful, untarnished and coherent alternatives to
Western egotistical lifestyles [and] our gradually
more pointless pursuit of material interests’ (13).
Various political factions in the West are using
Tibetans as ventriloquist dummies in order to mouth
their own complaints against modern China. They are
promoting Tibetan unrest not to liberate Tibetans but
in the hope that the protests will represent their own
personal disgust for China in a real-world, physical
manner.
There is a long history of Western politicians and
activists using Tibet as a stick with which to beat
China. In his fascinating book Prisoners of
Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, Donald S
Lopez Jnr shows how, in the Western imagination, ‘the
invasion of Tibet by [China] was and still is
represented as an undifferentiated mass of godless
Communists overrunning a peaceful land devoted only to
ethereal pursuits… Tibet embodies the spiritual and
the ancient, China the material and the modern.
Tibetans are superhuman, Chinese are subhuman.’ (14)
Today, too, pro-Tibetan activism often disguises a
view of the Chinese as subhuman. Indeed, in the
current, all-encompassing right/left consensus about
China, even left-leaning campaigns can employ old
right tactics of demonising the Chinese. A poster for
the trendy campaign group Free Tibet shows Tibetans as
serene and peaceful and the Chinese as smog-producing
modernisers with distinctly slitty eyes and goofy
teeth (15).
spiked is no friend of the Chinese regime. Yet those
promoting self-serving internal unrest in the run-up
to the Olympics, encouraging Tibetans and others to
bash China for real where the West only does it with
words and propaganda, are playing a dangerous game
indeed. Such a strategy of cynical destabilisation
could unleash yet more violence in China, and have
repercussions around the world. And the biggest
losers, at least in the short term, are likely to be
Tibetans themselves: they will not win liberty or
equality by being transformed into performing
protesters for the benefit of Chinaphobic Westerners.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spike
