China’s perch amid Tibet’s vultures

Press, 19 August 1983, Page 14

China’s perch amid Tibet’s vultures

From a correspondent in Lhasa

As a winnable international cause, the campaign for an independent Tibet ranks somewhere alongside the movement for a free Kurdistan.

Thirty-three years after Chinese troops invaded the world’s rooftop, the 1.9 million Tibetans continue to resent and resist their Chinese occupiers. Opposition ranges from stuffing appeals addressed to the United Nations into the pockets of Western visitors on the streets of Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, to antiChinese violence.

Chinese sources in Lhasa say that a group of Tibetans hijacked a bus in southern Tibet earlier this year and lynched seven Chinese passengers.

Most organised resistance groups in Tibet were broken up some years ago and their leaders executed. Nevertheless, an underground movement continues to press for international guarantees of religious freedom that might enable the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibet’s Buddhists, to return from India, where he fled after a failed uprising in 1959.

The last serious revolt took place in 1968 in four villages near Lhasa, and ended with the execution of 80 rebels and the imprisonment of many others. Altogether, there are said to be some 2500 political prisoners in Tibet. In the last few years the Chinese have softened their policy towards Tibet. Some of the Buddhist temples destroyed after 1959 have been rebuilt, and religious worship is permitted. Economic reforms, including tax concessions for agriculture and payment by results, were introduced after a'visit to Tibet in May, 1980, by the Communist party leader, Mr Hu Yaobang. They have almost doubled peasant incomes since 1979, despite what local officials call the worst drought in 53 years.

Local officials claim that because of Tibetanisation — the replacement of Chinese officials with Tibetan ones — there are now more than twice as many Tibetans as Chinese among senior bureaucrats, the reverse of the ratio in the 19505.

The Chinese, however, still always have the last word, and they have made it plain that autonomy of the kind being promised to Taiwan and Hong Kong will not be offered to Tibet.

Tibet seems little changed since the days when the Dalai Lama ruled supreme and Buddhist monasteries owned much of the land. About 70 per cent of Tibetans are still illiterate and communications are difficult.

Tibet remains railwayless and, to judge by a jolting ride along the main Tibet-Sichuan highway, the 21,500 kilometres of road the Chinese say they have built since 1950 are little better than yak trails.

Most striking of all is the Tibetans’ continuing devotion to religion. Pilgrims stream into Lhasa to light yak butter candles in the Potala, the former palace of

the Dalai Lama, or walk clockwise around the Jokhang temple for hours.

One model commune member told your correspondent that eacn month he gives Buddhist monasteries 45 yuan (S2B at the official exchange rate, almost the average monthly wage in China). Two people from his production team perform “sky burials” — the ritual mountaintop dissection of corpses whose remains are then flung to the vultures as a step towards reincarnation of the spirit. Faced with Tibetan intractability, the Chinese Government wants

the 49-year-old Dalai Lama to return from exile — to a desk job in Peking. Mr Young Pei, the director of the “department of minorities” in Tibet (which in fact deals with the region’s Tibetan majority), says that if the Dalai Lama came back he would be named vice-chairman of the standing committee of China’s nominal parliament, the National * People’s Congress. A pretty prosaic post for the spiritual leader of people who still feed entrails to vultures. Copyright - “The Economist.”