Letters to the Editor
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@RMP
What Michael Parenti seems to miss is whether, on grounds that the government is backwards and oppressive, and feudal, there, it is right for another much more powerful country with a large military to invade and occupy that country in order to impart a better form of government on its people. The question sounds oddly apropos to some other government we know, doesn't it?
Bhutan, and to some extent Nepal, are also quite feudal, quite backward, and little pockets up in the Himalayas. Should somebody invade them because Mr. Parenti thinks Marxism is a better form of government? Should cobbled together states of tribal nomadic Arabs be invaded because democracy is a more just form of government?
Mr. Parenti consistently avoids using the word invasion, and the Chinese occupation of Tibet is vaguely presented as if they just magically sprung up from the soil there, and then sat down with the Tibetans and signed a treaty. The nasty Tibetan government was somehow practicing corvée two years later in his history, but who cares about dates.
I'm sure the oppression of feudal societies (you can't really call the ruling classes in those societies corrupt unless you define what a non-corrupt feudal society is first) is nothing anyone wants to return to. Least of all the Dalai Lama, who was pretty much a house prisoner for life under that system. But the wonderful land reforms Mr. Parenti talks about are still going on. The Chinese are forcing the nomadic herders to give up their grazing lands which are made into collective farms on which the nomads are expected to farm. A touch like Josef Stalin's land reforms, don't you think? He could say that isn't happening, but it happens to be one of the causes of this week's unrest. When 5% of Lhasa (the ethnic Han Chinese who got bonus money from the Chinese government for 'settling the frontier regions') own almost all the shops, and won't hire anybody but other Chinese -- maybe they are just the new feudal lords.
The last time the Tibetans had this kind of disturbance was in 1989. Look in all the U.S. newspapers, and they tell you that, completely out of context. It was during the protests in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in China (there were actually gun battles in Chengdu). Zhao Ziyang favored negotiation and looking at the demands of the protesters. He was sidelined and then house arrested, and the hardliners came in under Li Peng, and you remember what happened in Beijing. In Lhasa, they were similarly hardline, and also curiously made a law forbidding monks from wearing sneakers. The hardliner there was a young protege named Hu Jintao.
Are there inaccuracies on the Tibet in exile side? Of course. They claim the Chinese shelled the Potala in 1959, for instance. It didn't happen. It did get shelled during the Cultural Revolution, though.
Yes, of course, it would be good for all Americans to know the history in Tibet and learn about the oppressiveness of feudalism there, just like it would be nice if people understood that the Buddhist government in Sri Lanka is perpetrating a pretty horrible war. Illusions are better shattered. But it would also be nice if they learned it from someone who knew that "Emperor Kublai Khan" wasn't Chinese.