Notes from the Pig Trough: Cracks in "Chinese Tibet"

So long as Tibetans remain in the caricatured boxes Western Buddhists and their supporters have placed them into, they will receive moral and material support as individuals, but never as a nation.

In 60 years, the government of China has managed to convince not only its own citizens that Tibet is an inalienable part of China, but also most of the rest of the world.

It is amazing to see a nation like the USA claim to be fighting for freedom in so many other people's countries...yet turn their backs on Tibet. (We'll fight for Iraqi freedom, but ignore Tibet so that Coca Cola can keep selling their shit water to hundreds of millions of Chinese.)

It is amazing that a free and sovereign nation of millions could become invaded and occupied, with its native people pushed aside to make room for the colonial settlers. And all the while, the nation that is doing this very barbarous thing, China, is accepted by the world.

In Tibet, a once proud and free nation, the penalty for disagreeing that Tibet was ever a separate nation is imprisonment and torture. The penalty for even saying the word "rangzen" (freedom) is imprisonment and torture (if you survive being shot at).

The penalty for telling the truth is death.

I am not the Dalai Lama. I can follow His Holiness' Buddhist teachings while dismissing much of the political views he espouses. His Holiness is very wise, but on Tibet, he is wrong on one most salient point: There will never be a middle path for Tibetan freedom, in as much as there will never be a middle way for Buddhists to let go of what makes them suffer. In some things, the "middle path" is an avoidance of reality.

The reality is that China, despite its claims of "Serf Liberation" and of "Sacrificing" for Tibet, is not interested in Tibetans nor does China care about Tibet other than the land it comprises and the resources that go with that. All development in Tibet, including transit networks, urban infrastructure, education, and housing, are all geared towards a settler population consisting of "internal" migrants from south and southwestern China.

The fact that there were no serfs in Tibet on the eve of China's invasion will make your Chinese friends' mouths drop if you mention it. Tibetans, contrary to decades of Chinese mythmaking and racist stereotyping, were not bound to the land nor to "landowners." But Chinese people can be forgiven for seeing Tibetans by the lights of their own experiences, since Chinese people themselves had lived under feudal slavery for generations.

The entire enterprise of Chinese celebration over liberating and modernizing Tibet can be seen in the same way that European colonialists celebrated their triumph over native superstition and cultural lag. The barbarians are not to be trusted to know what they themselves want. Who would ever not want to be a part of China?

So Tibet, as well as its neighbor, East Turkestan, with whom it shares the misfortune of being a nation being colonized by China (in an age when this shit supposedly doesn't happen) gets to be the Chinese man's burden.

The sad fact is that in all of this, neither China nor the Chinese people have ever even bothered to get to know who the Tibetans really are. There has just been the implicit assumption that they "of course must be proto-Chinese, waiting to be taught how to become really Chinese."

Like many colonized peoples' experiences, the Tibetans have to learn the ins and outs of colonialist Chinese culture and occupation/settler society to survive...all the while the Chinese never have to even move an eyebrow to ever learn what any Tibetan may really think about all of this.

The extent of the colonialist project that China has built is so vast that most Chinese people today would consider the very idea of Tibetan independence, whether today or at any moment in history, to be ludicrous.

But THAT is exactly where the cracks in the facade start to show.

The Tibetans have to negotiate their way through the occupation Chinese every day, knowing the colonialist society on even more intimate terms than most of the settler citizens of that society. The Tibetans know exactly where to hit back. When to bide time and be patient, and when to fight back. The Chinese...can only respond from fear. From a position of ignorance...Since they do not know the heart of Tibetans and can only try to impose what they have proclaimed to be Tibetans' heart.

Mao Zedong was wrong when he mentioned that a lie told a hundred times becomes the truth. Mao Zedong was right when he said a single spark can start a prairie fire.

Abraham Lincoln said "How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg?.....

"Four. Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg."

Calling Tibet a part of China does not make it so. Trying to silence the Tibetans and spin their resistance as "a fight for autonomy within China" does not hide the truth that they are fighting for their complete freedom, even after all these years.

I wonder if the American Patriots could have held out for so long.

You may think that the Rangzen Spring of 2008 was Tibet's last stand, but you have only fooled yourselves.

-Hugh Kunsang

Notes from the Pig Trough

A UK national, Akmal Shaikh, convicted in China of heroin smuggling was executed today.

British PM Gordon Brown condemned the execution. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband expressed regret that the UK's concerns regarding the case were not taken into Consideration by China.

The People's Republic of China Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, said something particularly PRC-like in her response: "Nobody has the right to speak ill of China's judicial sovereignty. We express our strong dissatisfaction and opposition to the British Government's unreasonable criticism of the case. We urge the British to correct their mistake in order to avoid harming China-UK relations."

Much as China likes to try to pressure world leaders into ignoring the Dalai Lama and Tibet. You may read this and think "so what? China can't control what people around the world think." But you ignore the fact that the People's Republic of China, with regards to Tibet, has had a strategy of co-opting the world wide academia for the past several years, to the point where once sympathetic western scholars now speak and write about how wonderful Tibetans' lives are under Chinese rule.

Much as how China has managed to pressure and cajole nations around the world to recognize Chinese sovereignty over Tibet (and then turns around and tries to claim that no nation has ever recognized even a country known as "Tibet"). When was the last time you heard an American president (great "promoters of freedom" that they are) speak out about the fundamental human right of Tibetans to be free of foreign oppression? When was the last time you heard any European leader speak about Tibet truthfully...i.e. not as an internal Chinese matter, but as a matter of one nation occupying and colonizing another?

It is conceivable that China, since it spares no expense with regards to controlling not only Tibet, but how people around the world think about Tibet, feels it can also control world opinion about how it treats people, such as Akmal Shaikh.

The basic line of argument from the PRC side is that one doesn't even have the right to argue with what China does. One has no right to complain. Especially if you are not Chinese.

While I certainly agree that if one commits a crime one is liable to the local authorities for justice, I disagree with the principle that nobody can say some nation's judicial system is a crock of shit. Criticism is healthy. If China's judicial system had its ducks in a row, why then did they not seek a mental health evaluation for Mr Shaikh? Is it that it is more important to deal out justice or punishment, then it is to honor justice?

China can respond by saying that they are sovereign and had no need to seek out a mental evaluation since they already received British documentation about Akmal Shaikh but no mental illness was diagnosed in any record anywhere.

But this ignores the fact the justice should spare no expense in pursuit of the idea "innocent until proven guilty." This may be an American and Western idea, but China should not refuse it on those grounds, since the PRC itself is officially "communist" and Communism is lock-stock-and-barrel a Western tradition of anti-capitalist ideology.

So we are not to criticize China's judicial system and its handling of the Akmal Shaikh case. Nor its treatment of Tibet. Nor its colonization of East Turkestan. Nor its wanton destruction of the environment. Nor its official system of apartheid between those from agricultural communities and those from the coastal cities. Yep. World power indeed. And the ego to match.

Vomiting China's Lies

Nowadays, reading articles and scholarly works about Tibet, one gets the impression that Tibet is an "ethnic" region as opposed to a nation of its own. This is further supported by the idiotic declarations from the current Tibetan Government in Exile, which claim that Tibet is only an internal affair of the People's Republic of China.

Wow. How far the mighty have fallen. I used to respect the Tibetan Government in Exile, until I realized it had no spine. (The aftermath of the Rangzen Spring of 2008 should have clued anyone in to this fact.) I wonder if the Tibetan Government in Exile has realized the implications of their statements. I mean, since the whole affair is an internal PRC issue, then why in the living fuck does the exile government continue to exist? Silly idiots.

One of the worst absurdities of the whole affair is the attitude now being peddled by China and her supporting scholars that Tibet has been a part of China since "since human activity began." It is no longer good enough to claim Tibet was incorporated into China by the Yuan Dynasty more than 700 years ago (and the Yuan Dynasty is really the name for the period when China itself was under the Mongolian Empire, no matter what today's fenqing like to claim). China is now claiming that the Tibetan imperial dynasty of Lha Tsenpo is really a "coexisting dynasty within China, next to the Tang" much as how in many periods of Chinese history, several warring kingdoms coexisted within the sinosphere. It sounds so nice.

Unfortunately it is complete and utter bull shit.

According to Tang dynasty records, Tibet was a foreign and "barbarian" competitor which had superior metallurgy and weaponry. Tang China and the Tibetan Empire locked horns many times over the lands which until very recently were considered inviolate frontiers between China and Tibet.

I suppose the modern day running dogs of Beijing (and this includes some of the western scholars as much as it does the chinese supporters of the illegal atrocity Tibet has had to endure now for the past 6 decades) think that since Mao said truth is malleable, then all they need do is change the truth to their liking. And they have the wealth and the means to do so, since not many in the world could give a rats ass about a piss poor mountain nation, unless we count those who donate money to Buddhist teachers (so long as they remain spiritual first and Tibetan last).

As many more articles and editorials are written about Tibet and Tibetans since the Rangzen Spring of 2008, it appears that there is a carefully crafted avoidance of the fact that Tibetans inside of Tibet for the most part are striving for complete independence from China, not "autonomy" as is often repeated by the idiot pencil pusher journalists we have here in the West who call themselves "leftists" or "progressives." I guess since the Dalai Lama supports Chinese rule over an "autonomous" Tibet now, this means everyone else should check their brains at the door to this issue.

I guess it means that the cries of RANGZEN (freedom) from the Tibetans living inside of Tibet will continue to be silenced, or mistranslated...so as not to piss off the Beijing government. It is sickening, how many times you can clearly hear in footage of Tibetan protesters the word "rangzen" and yet have some commentator explain that Tibetans want merely their fair share under the PRC. Nice. It is like living in 1984.

Rangzen has become the new word to avoid. It is an obscene word. The Tibetan Government in Exile hates it. The western running dogs of Beijing continue to spin it or downplay it. Or to say that anyone who wishes for the complete independence of Tibet is unrealistic. As for the Chinese, at least they are being honest to themselves. They can't even imagine the idea that Tibet was ever a nation of its own now. And this is the view they are demanding everyone else in the world take. The world doesn't seem to mind either.

It is amazing, really. Months and months ago I warned that China would rewrite the ancient history of Tibet and force every else to accept it. Now that this is happening, I am hearing not a peep of protest from anyone but the Tibetan Rangzen supporters. No one else in our great western democratic countries seems to give a shit.

They may get away with it. Or..rather...it may seem to them and their smug supporters that they are getting away with it. But, the simple truth is still the truth. No disguise can deface evil.