“Unveiling China’s Agenda in Tibet: The Erasure of History, Language, and Culture”
The Tibetan identity, borne from a deep and long culture of a non Han civilisation presents a political nightmare to modern China, inseparable with Tibet’s latent political identity. If unattended, the Tibetan way of life may usher in winds of an uprising that may dismember Han hegemony on the plateau with ripple effects, unquieting the sophisticated halls and balls of Beijing.
Modern China, with it’s strategy of governance fuelled by a self-justified and propelled Han fervour has designed and executed a sinister policy of eradicating Tibetan culture, the Tibetan DNA in Tibet whilst simultaneously creating and rewriting Tibetan history in the text books of China to produce a Han understanding, a Han consciousness, a Han psyche, aligned and empowered to accept and back it’s efforts of cultural genocide in Tibet.
Due to it’s extremely efficient surveillance techniques and strength in enforcing political law and order, the Chinese machine of suppression and manufacturing compliance has over the decades, evolved from a rather raw and high-handed, visible approach to a subtler and sophisticated execution of policies to ensure the eradication of Tibetan footprint in Tibet while making it psychologically correct in the eyes and understanding of the non-Tibetan consciousness of modern China and the wider world.
Designing, creating, sketching and propagating images of Tibet and Tibetans depicting uncivilised, unruly barbarians with uncouth mannerisms of a mental and social leaning, ripe with superstitions and existentially begging to be liberated by the civilised communist leadership. Subtly stereotyping the Tibetan minority as a group of people that owe a great debt of gratitude to China in the minds of millions, growing up in a world where information is curtailed to suit a prescribed sense of knowledge – primed to solicit feelings of internal national pride and external loyalty towards the middle kingdom. Towards China’s economic and political expansion.
The complete invasion of Tibet by the Peoples Republic of China in 1959 marked the beginning of a traumatic era for the people of the Land of Snows. Tibetans had never lived under Chinese rule in it’s long history of self rule and nationhood until China, after it’s own hour of awakening in 1949, under the dictates of Moa Zedong, healed it’s own wounds and commenced the onslaught of revisionism – cultural and political, impacting the lives of billions in China and historically neighbouring states such as Tibet.
The DNA of the Tibetan plateau is organically imbued with the Tibetan language. The Tibetan written script – based on alphabets, contrary to hieroglyphical Chinese characters, was the only language used in daily life and in the expression of Tibetan thought and civilisational treasures – art, literature and religion. All forms of local and national governance. Social interactions in cities, towns and villages were thought, expressed and conducted in Tibetan. The Tibetan way of life began and flourished with Tibetan values. Centuries of Tibetan emotions and a strong and civilised Tibetan thought thrived among Tsampa eaters spanning the roof of the world.
Beijing is acutely aware of what Tibetans in occupied Tibet want. What is important to Tibetans and most importantly, what rules the Tibetan psyche. What Tibetans want, in contrast to the Han way is clear where the freedom to earn a living comes foremost in the Han requirement of a fulfilling life. The very basis of a Communism with Chinese characteristics. Economic growth trumps personal freedom.
Tibetans on the contrary, have lived centuries with of a way of life inundated with Buddhist thought. Where all passages of life and social norms are influenced by Buddhist understandings of compassion and dependent origination. Buddhist psychology internally running the checks and balances of this life and the next. For centuries Tibetans have held the freedom to worship as central to life.
Additionally, in the rarified air of the wide expanse of the Tibetan plateau, the bridge or the link to a sustainable inner and outer peace centred on a teacher – the most kind and compassionate Lama – The one who is peerless in the wisdom of the Buddha Dharma and the way of living the Buddha Dharma.
Tibetans hold their Lama, dearer than life itself. Red-faced Tibetans are rather possessed with this sentiment. Their faith in there religion and lama is representative of their identity, their existence. Nothing can interfere nor make them supplicate to man made directives and rules – even if it comes from the barrel of a gun or delegated with time, behind bars of steel made in China with gruelling sessions of hellish torture, enticing them to embrace the Han way of life.
To a spiritually inclined and inspired people whose very existence is synonymous with the freedom to worship, blessed and guided by their lama, the economics of politics and promised liberations bare remote and rather irrelevant traumatic solicitations akin to a vibrant and enthralled sales pitch, selling snow to Eskimos. A sophisticated and violent irritation tolerated and resisted by Tibetans with non-violence.
Beijing and it’s representatives who have had experience in designing and executing policies towards dehumanising Tibetans and the Tibetan way of life in order to Sinicize Tibet have first hand experience of this attitude from the Tibetans. This attitude, engrained in the DNA of Tibetans has resulted in the Chinese aggressively forming and executing policies to eradicate the footprint of Tibetan history, language and culture from the world. Within China, it has produced an internal world for the Han majority where designed misinformation is being manufactured to keep generations of Chinese aligned to party policies towards Tibet and Tibetans so as to maintain the momentum of eradicating Tibetan culture. An effort to sanitise Tibet to fit into the fabric of modern China – effectively reducing Tibetan lives to objects of existential representation devoid of any say in their right to self determination, positioning Tibetans as cultural eunuchs in the manicured and forced nationalism of Han fanaticism – a totalitarian state with capitalistic addictions transcending the economy.
After decades of disappointment in trying to suppress and annihilate the Tibetan political will and identity, China, with its burgeoning economy and a tempered middle class – appreciative of China’s global stand is perhaps, making Tibet ready for the rest of China to finish the work started by the men of the tenth army as they marched into Tibet as invaders.
Millions of curious and financially potent Chinese, empowered by their emotional return on investment in the party and the economy are stampeding their way into Tibet to find loot in the western treasure house.
With the aid of government policies to facilitate a smooth and lucrative existence for the Han in Tibet, they will dislodge the cultural fabric of the Tibetan way of life, rice-grain by rice-grain within a conducive ecosystem nurtured by the vigilant army and the government – driven with the dictates of a supremacist doctrine that all is Han – between heaven and earth, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping. All things Tibetan need to be liberated because it is in the way of the middle kingdom.
The envisaged Tibetan way of life on the Tibetan plateau – A peaceful life where one lives according to one’s means and inculcates values of living with nature as a resource to aid the process of living – resources never seen to be abused. This way of life, co-existing peaceably with others, respecting diversity of thought collides with the vision of how life should be lived according to Beijing.
The Tibetan way of life is so different from the Chinese way of life that the very existence of the Tibetan language, the foundation for Tibetan thought and the collective identity of Tibet, is the most dangerous element stopping the complete forced integration of Tibet into Han identity in the eyes of Beijing. Beijing is determined to make Tibet safe and hospitable for the rest of China. For any Chinese to have the option of working and living in Tibet. To grow Han roots in Tibet, the Tibetan way of life poses a economic, political and cultural threat to China.
Hegemony in Tibet for China involves the eradication of the minority Tibetan thought amongst Tibetans in Tibet and the manufacture of an appropriate Tibetan history and persona, fed to the Han majority.
The evolution of Tibet under Chinese invasion has seen policies and operations enacted in brutal occupation starting in 1959. If one looks at the continuum of injustices borne by Tibetans living under Chinese rule, the anguish of Tibet is laden with gross injustices visible to the world as it started in 1959. However, it is not just the invasion of a country – it is the physical looting of Tibet’s civilisational and natural resources, the cultural genocide of the culture of the roof of the world, the legalised psychological genocide of a people with the aim of producing future Tibetans who function as cultural and existential eunuchs to serve the emperor with the Han mandate. Where hell is the normalised existence for Tibetans in Tibet.
