death to pacifist monks
by Stefan Koski
Published: March 25, 2008
The area of Tibet (let’s not lend it credence by calling it an “occupied country”) has long been a sore issue with Chinese bureaucrats. Obstinately positioned on China’s geographical western border and periodically insisting on a political status of - depending on who you talk to - somewhere in-between autonomy and full independence. Look, just because its people boast different customs, a different language, culture and spiritual leader in the form of the Dalai Lama, doesn’t mean they aren’t Chinese.
In the last couple of weeks, the Tibetans have been at it again, peacefully demonstrating at first, but then morphing into violent riots when Chinese law enforcement tries politely to disperse them.
China has tried to export its growing financial success to the western province of Tibet over the last decade in many ways: creating tax incentives for Han Chinese businessmen to open up shop in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, giving contracts to Han Chinese contractors to build shopping complexes and the Qinghai-Tibet railway, transforming old run-down neighborhoods into bustling new business sectors. The result has been unrivaled economic growth (for Han Chinese businessmen) in the region.
The pessimistic Buddha-huggers will say that the economic system set up in Lhasa gives preference to Chinese workers and entrepreneurs, marginalizing Tibetans in their own homeland. From there they’ll tack on all the other complaints typical of rebellious Tibetan nationalism - how the Dalai Lama still isn’t permitted to return to Tibet, how exiles are sometimes shot for trying to cross the border into Tibet to visit relatives, human rights abuses ad nauseam.
All of it detracts from the overwhelming good that China has done for the region. Not everyone can share in its economic success. That is the nature of capitalism. Some people will naturally expand and thrive in the modern world, and others will simply disappear, assimilated by the populations and cultures around them. No big deal.
Much to the dismay of Chinese officials, Tibetans refuse to disappear despite all of the efforts they have made toward that end in the last half-century. These latest riots, just four months before Beijing hosts the Olympic games, only further proves their unwillingness to cooperate with an industrially and materialistically superior nation. The Chinese are thus left to their usual recourse: dispatching thousands upon thousands of troops to heroically do battle with downtrodden peasants and monks armed with prayer wheels.
We can only hope that the international community will obligingly look the other way, as it has done so often in the past.
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