China and Tibet: a reply to Zizek

To: Retort
From: GS
 
Mr. Zizek's rationalization for China's actions in Tibet [See under "Knout market?" 5.v.08] is astounding. First, he knows practically nothing first-hand about Tibet. He reveals this in his etymology of the title "Dalai Lama," assuming that because the word Dalai is of Mongolian origin, it must have come to Tibet via China. In fact, the Mongolians and Tibetans are anciently related directly, not through China, geographically, ethnolinguistically and religiously. Mongolians practice Tibetan Buddhism of the Gelugpa School. Mongolia and Tibet were essentially contiguous before the relatively recent era of Chinese westward expansion. Zizek's been looking only at modern maps.
 
Zizek's comparative assessments of Chinese actions in Tibet amount to one long invocation of the universal exculpation: "It's not so bad because other people do bad things."
 
Thus we have: "The Chinese are doing what the West has always done, as Brazil did in the Amazon or Russia in Siberia, and the US on its own western frontiers." Um, excuse me? Have we now become so ethically incapacitated that we should now accept repetitions of the various genocides against indigenous peoples committed by Euro-Americans and Russians?  The Han Chinese now get a free pass?  To extend Zizek's own logic, if the Chinese get a free pass, why not the Israelis too?  After all, EVERYBODY's done it. It ain't so bad.
 
I shouldn't need to say that Zizek's pronouncements about the benefits of Chinese imperialism and modernization are more than a little wacked. I do have some first-hand knowledge of this. In 1991, I traveled through East Turkestan, just north of Tibet, covertly visiting indigenous communities of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Xibo and Mongolians. While a complete travelogue is beyond the current scope, I shall summarize by saying that no phenomenon in history compares to the Han invasion of western China. None. Ever. Nothing even remotely close. Reasoning by analogy is not possible.
 
To give but one example, I visited the city of Urumqi, the capital of East Turkestan, historically a multicultural Silk Road city that had been 80% Uyghur as late as 1980. By 1991, it was 80% Han, and virtually all of those "immigrants" did not know the indigenous name of their city, the name the city had born for many thousands of years. (The Han call it Wu Lu Mu Chi.) I was able to evade the Chinese authorities and pass for Uyghur only by donning a native coat and hat and learning a few words of the Uyghur language. The Han invasion cannot be called "immigration," any more than Cortez could be called an immigrant to Mexico. The people of Central Asia lived in multicultural harmony and diversity for eons, until the Han came in to obliterate and homogenize. Think Walmart raised to the hundredth power. Think the Borg, offering assimilation with "a higher standard of living." If you haven't seen it, you cannot comprehend.
 
I have my own gripe with Western Tibetophiles who romanticize theocracy and see Tibet as the exceptional case. But my gripe is not that the Tibetophiles are too tough on the Chinese government. My gripe is that they isolate Tibet, and do not discuss the equally salient situations in East Turkestan and Inner Mongolia, which, if anything, are even more deserving of our attention and support. Unlike Tibet, East Turkestan is irreducibly multicultural, and far from being theocratic by default, the Turkestanis established a rather laudable secular democracy during their brief experience as an independent republic in 1945. That was until the Chinese infamously shot down the airplane carrying Turkestani diplomats on their way to negotiate a treaty of peace -- perhaps the most barbarous single act in the history of international relations, and one practically unknown in the West.
 
I guarantee the Turkestanis have not forgotten it. Why have we?
 
Respectfully,
 
Geoffrey Sea