A Way Out of Tibet’s Morass

China has survived the 50th anniversary of the failed uprising by Tibetans against Chinese rule in 1959 without major protests. But, to keep Tibetans off the streets, China’s government had to saturate the entire Tibetan plateau with troops and secretly detain in unmarked jails hundreds of people for “legal education”.

Those moves suggest that Tibet has become an increasingly serious concern for China’s rulers, one that they have not yet found ways to handle without damaging their standing in Tibet and around the world.

A year ago, Chinese and Western intellectuals competed in dismissing popular interest in Tibet as a childlike confusion with the imaginary Shangri-la of the 1937 film Lost Horizon. But after more than 150 protests in Tibet against Chinese rule over the past 12 months, concerns about the area seem anything but fanciful. Indeed, Tibet could soon replace Taiwan as a factor in regional stability and an important issue in international relations.

The areas populated by Tibetans cover a quarter of China; to have such a large part of the country’s territory under military control and cut off from the outside world weakens the Communist Party’s claims to legitimacy and world power status.

Last year’s protests were the largest and most widespread in Tibet for decades. Participants included nomads, farmers and students, who in theory should have been the most grateful to China for modernising Tibet’s economy.

Many carried the forbidden Tibetan national flag, suggesting that they think of Tibet as a separate country in the past, and in about 20 incidents government offices were burned down. In one case, there were even attacks on Chinese migrants, leading to 18 deaths. It is hard not to see these events as a challenge to China’s rule.

The government’s reaction was to blame the problem on outside instigation. It sent in more troops, hid details of protesters’ deaths, gave a life sentence to an AIDS educator who had copied illegal CDs from India, and for months banned foreigners and journalists from the Tibetan plateau.

In November, Chinese officials, live on national TV, ridiculed Tibetan exiles’ proposals for negotiation. They cancelled a European summit because of a meeting between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the Dalai Lama, and regularly imply that Tibetans are terrorists.

On March 28, Tibetans in Lhasa had to celebrate “Serf Emancipation Day” to endorse China’s explanation for its take-over 50 years ago. But such class-struggle terminology reminds people of the Cultural Revolution and, since such language would be unimaginable in inland China today, only makes Tibet seem more separate.

Although both sides claim to be ready for dialogue, they are talking at cross-purposes: the exiles say that talks must be based on their autonomy proposals, while China says that it will discuss only the Dalai Lama’s “personal status” - where he would live in Beijing should he return to China. Visceral sparring matches are continuing, with the Dalai Lama recently describing Tibetans’ lives under China as a “hell on earth”.

He was almost certainly referring to life during the Maoist years rather than the present, but his remarks enabled China to issue more media attacks and raise the political temperature further.

Western governments have been accused of interference, but it is unlikely that any want to derail their relations with China, especially during an economic crisis. Last October, British Foreign Minister David Miliband was so anxious to maintain Chinese goodwill that he came close to denouncing his predecessors’ recognition of Tibet’s autonomy 100 years ago.

But foreign concerns about the status of China’s mandate in Tibet are understandable: Tibet is the strategic high ground between the two most important nuclear powers in Asia. Good governance on the plateau is good for everyone.

China could help to lessen growing tensions by recognising these concerns as reasonable. The Dalai Lama could cut down on foreign meetings and acknowledge that, despite China’s general emasculation of intellectual and religious life in Tibet, some aspects of Tibetan culture (like modern art, film and literature) are relatively healthy.

Western observers could accept the exiles’ assurances that their proposals on autonomy are negotiable and not bottom-line demands, rather than damning them before talks start.

All sides would gain by paying attention to two Tibetan officials in China who dared to speak out last month. A retired prefectural governor from Kardze told the Singapore paper Zaobao that “the government should have more trust in its people, particularly the Tibetan monks”, and the current Tibet governor admitted that some protesters last year “weren’t satisfied with our policies”, rather than calling them enemies of the state, the first official concession from within China that some of its policies might be connected to the recent protests.

The party has so far been following a more conventional strategy: last week it sent a delegation of officials to the US (the first ever sent, it said, to have been composed solely of Tibetans - a fact that one might expect them to have been embarrassed to admit) and had its leader, Shingtsa Tenzin Choedak, tell journalists that Tibetans enjoy freedom of religion.

As anyone who has worked in Tibet recently knows well, this was an inexactitude: since at least 1996, all Tibetans who work for the government and all Tibetan students in Tibet have been forbidden any Buddhist practice, even though it is illegal under Chinese law to stop people from practising an official religion.

China’s government could improve the situation overnight by sacking the officials responsible for such illegal policies, and by apologising to Tibetans for having overlooked such abuses for 15 years. And it could start reassessing its Tibetan policies instead of increasing controls and allegations. Until then, China’s quest for international respect is set to remain elusive and Tibet is likely to stay on the world’s agenda.