Chinese are pumping dollars into a tour-Tibet promotion

Press, 16 August 1985, Page 22

Chinese are pumping dollars into a tour-Tibet promotion

From

JOHNATHAN MIRSKY

in Lhasa. Tibet

After 30 years of using the Army, the Party, Red Guards, economic distortion, and religious persecution to extinguish Tibetan culture — and failing — China has turned to the ultimate weapon: the foreign tourist. A clear picture of Tibet’s future, as envisaged by the Chinese, was provided to me in Lhasa by Han Xiaoli, president of the China Tibet Tourist Corporation, a grave but co-operative man, one of the few high officials left in China who wears a Mao suit.

Han began agreeably by providing a little scoop. Within two years, Tibet, China’s poorest area (in fact it is officially destitute), intends to operate its own airline, featuring several up-to-date jets. Peking is providing the funds. The jetliners will connect with Lhasa, with Sichuan province, Shanghai, and perhaps Peking. The hope, says Han, is that they will deposit 500 additional tourists in Tibet every day. He warmed to his subject. This summer, 5000 foreigners will have visited Tibet. Next year there would be 50,000, and by 1988 the figure should reach 100,000 — roughly one tourist for every ten Tibetans.

At present tourists are accommodated in guest houses for which “no frill” is high praise. Next year, when they may be paying up to $2lO per day (the flight is extra), many of them will stay in the 420bed Lhasa Hotel, a short stroll from the Potala Palace, once the home of the self-exiled Dalai Lama. The hotel is a startlingly beautiful building and every last nail, window, air-conditioner, and elevator (nine of them) has been trucked in over 5182-metre passes from China proper. Designed in Nanking, the hotel has been entirely built by 3000 Nanking workmen, who are being naid out-of-sight wages to finish {he job in a year. “Tibetans couldn possibly do it,” says the hotel manager, Chen Zhuang Huai, who was trained in Switzerland. Next to the Lhasa Hotel is rang the Tibet Guest House, 220 beds Signed to lookjaguelrbke * Tibetan fortress. Here, 800 wore meS from south-east Fukien province are labouring to complete it "Only Fukien

cut stone properly,” says Han, who has only been in Tibet two years and may not have noticed the masonry in Lhasa’s extraordinary temples. Is he worried that fastidious foreign guests may be put off by some of Tibet’s more exotic rituals, such as the “sky burials” in which the dead are dismembered and then eaten by vultures? Han, who knows that over-curi-ous tourists who venture near the plateau on the outskirts of Lhasa where the dismembering takes place, have been chased away by Tibetans brandishing carving knives, intends to erect distant telescopes, perhaps coin-operated. From these the foreigners can view in comfort. He is also looking into arrangements for a tidied-up dismembering plateau. Manager Chen of the Lhasa Hotel is also keen on a clean scene for foreigners. The municipal government, he told me, is advising the Lamas at the Potala to reduce the number of butter lamps. Thousands of them burn constantly as a sacrifice to the Buddha, filling the air with a breakfast-like smell. There will also be brilliant lighting for the ancient paintings, which are normally only dimly seen, and modern toilets.

Han speaks no Tibetan. Neither does his deputy, Miss Cao, who has been here 13 years. Nor do any of the 30 or so Chinese guides in the travel service. A handful of Chin-ese-speaking Tibetan guides is kept on tap to give introductions about the religious aspects of Tibetan life, which the guides then translate into English, French, German, or Italian. Han admits he has not actually consulted the Lamas about their happiness with the approaching .foreign avalanche, but he says he has discussed the matter with Thai colleagues, and they assure him that Buddhism in Thailand has stood up to tourism very well. But, of course, for Han and Chen the priority is not Buddhist happiness but the Tibetan economy. Last January, the “Shanghai Journal” reported that for 35 years Tibet’s

economy has been entirely underwritten by Peking. Tibet’s revenues amount to a mere $10.5 million per annum. Last year alone, China supplied $628 million. It happens that $10.5 million is the very sum the Party has allowed for restoring the more than 2000 temples wrecked during the Cultural Revolution. In the immense Ganden complex, a bonejarring 90-kilometre drive from Lhasa, exactly four rooms out of 1000 have been restored.

There is a new Party secretary in Lhasa, overseeing all this and presiding over a 15-day meeting being held to prepare for October, the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Tibet Autonomous Region, into which the Chinese Army moved in 1950.

Party Secretary Wu Jinghua, himself a “minority nationality” (he is a Yi from Sichuan), delivered an inaugural speech in Lhasa in June, in which he acknowledged that China had inflicted “wrongs and grievances” on Tibet in the past. He then thanked his audience “for forgiving the mistakes of various lands made by the party.” He was referring to decades of starvation, terror, and profound cultural chauvinism. Like most other officials, first Secretary Wu speaks no Tibetan, so the Tibetan forgiveness would have been expressed to him in the conquerors’ language. Visitors strolling through Lhasa often spot Tibetans who wear Dalai Lama pins, an open expression of nationalist defiance. In the Johang temple, an elderly monk, after looking over his shoulder and drawing his finger across his throat, thrust a letter into my hand. It would make any tourist stop in his tracks: “Dear foreign friend, welcome to Tibet, we want independence. Our only leader is the Dalai Lama. We do not want to stay under Communist China. Help to kick out foreign Chinese from Tibet. long live the 14th Dalai Lama, O.K. thank you very much.” Copyright — London Observer. Service. * *