Abstract
The unprecedented wave of immolations sweeping through Tibet and ethnic-Tibetan-majority areas in China and India has re-ignited a global debate about China’s actions in Tibet. Whereas the Chinese claim they have liberated Tibet from Buddhist feudalism and are modernizing the nation, many Tibetans argue they are the victims of a Communist-driven holocaust. In an attempt to map the communicative dynamics of this crisis, this essay analyzes the rhetorical structures of the key stakeholders: China’s claims about Tibet are characterized as presenting the patriotic rhetoric of modernizing communism; the Tibetan dissidents’ resistance rhetoric is characterized as offering a testimonial rhetoric of catastrophic witnessing; and the “middle way” approach of His Holiness the Dalai Lama is questioned for its noble yet fruitless embodiment of the conflicted rhetoric of Buddhist care. The situation in Tibet is wrapped up in issues of Chinese imperial ambitions and Tibetan counter-claims, globalizing capital and international human rights, and both clashing historical narratives and the contemporary politics of postcolonialism, meaning this examination of the rhetorical dynamics unfolding on the “roof of the world” offers a case study of what happens when an expansionist nation–state meets opportunistic global capital over the bodies of marginalized populations seeking justice while working with an array of international NGOs.
Keywords:
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Donovan Conley, Patrick Dodge, and Lisa Keränen, a team collectively known as the Tibet Study Group, for their camaraderie on the road and their intellectual contributions to this essay. Following the editing suggestions of editor McKerrow and the journal’s two anonymous readers, the piece benefitted from comments from the Tibet Study Group, Gordana Lazic, Stephen Thomas, Supriya Karudapuram, Robert Acker, and Brian Ott. Whereas images one and four have been downloaded from publicly-accessible websites, the photographs used in images two and three were taken by the author. Research conducted in China in 2010 and 2011, and in Hong Kong, China, and Tibet in 2012, was made possible by grants from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of the University of Colorado Denver; research in 2013 in the formerly Tibetan region of Amdo (now called Qinghai by the Chinese), in Kathmandu, Nepal, and in Dharamsala, India (the two epicenters of the Tibetan exile community), was made possible by a grant from the Waterhouse Family Institute (a social justice organization associated with the Villanova University Department of Communication). Research assistance was provided by Harry Archer, Erin Davison, Kirsten Lindholm, and Nicole Palidwor.
Notes
1. For video of the event, see “Tibet Protester Identified as Jampa Yeshi Lit Himself on Fire,” posted by GokhaCreed, March 27, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExT23-Zm6Y8; for photographs, see Katy Daigle, “Jampa Yeshi Dead: Tibet Exile Who Set Self on Fire Dies in India,” Huffington Post, March 28, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/28/jampa-yeshi-dead-tibet_n_1384568.html.
2. Details of Yeshi’s immolation are taken from Rick Gladstone and Sruthi Gottipati, “Tibetan Exile Sets Himself Afire at Rally,” New York Times, March 27, 2012; “Tibetan Self-Immolates in India,” March 26, 2012, http://www.freetibet.org/news-media/na/tibetan-self-immolates-india; and from the sources in notes 1–7. Please note that Jampa Yeshi is sometimes listed in Tibetan sources as Jamphel.
3. The best sources of information about the wave of immolations are the Free Tibet website, http://www.freetibet.org; the International Campaign for Tibet’s “Self-Immolation Fact Sheet,” http://www.savetibet.org; and the Tibetan Youth Congress’s fact sheet, http://tibetanyouthcongress.org/tibet-burning/; as of June 10, 2013, these sites have catalogued 118 immolations, with 100 confirmed deaths.
4. “Fiery Suicides Highlight Tibetans’ Desperation,” New Zealand Herald, April 4, 2012. Reporters without Borders has argued that “even Pyongyang has an international media presence, which is not the case in Lhasa” (“Authorities Tighten Grip, Isolating Tibet Even More from the Outside World,” March 1, 2012, http://en.rsf.org/chine-tibet-cut-off-from-the-rest-of-the-23-02-2012,41930.html); on the broader struggles over freedom of information in China, see Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) and Stephen John Hartnett, “Google and the ‘Twisted Cyber-Spy Affair’: US–Chinese Communication in an Age of Globalization,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97 (2011): 411–34.
5. Jim Yardley, “India Tightens New Delhi’s Tibetan Districts on Eve of Summit,” New York Times, March 28, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/world/asia/india-tightens-new-delhis-tibetan-districts-on-eve-of-summit.html?_r=0.
6. Edward Wong, “Tibetan Exiles Rally around Delhi Self-Immolator,” New York Times, March 27, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/world/asia/tibetan-exiles-rally-around-delhi-self-immolater.html.
7. Qiangba quoted in a Xinhua article, “China Lawmaker Says Monk Immolations Aimed to Internationalize Tibet Issue,” May 16, 2012—all articles from Xinhua cited herein are pulled from BBC Worldwide Monitoring, best accessed in the USA via the LexisNexis database.
8. “Chain reaction” from Wang Lixiong, “Independence after the March Incident,” in Wang Lixiong and Tsering Shakya, The Struggle for Tibet (London: Verso, 2009), 223–51, quotation from 226; for a critique of this propaganda ploy, see Warren W. Smith Jr., Tibet’s Last Stand?: The Tibetan Uprising of 2008 and China’s Response (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 234–50.
9. Tsering Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947 (New York: Penguin, 1999), 204.
10. Choling quoted in a Xinhua article, “China’s Tibet Chief Says Dalai Lama’s Separatist Attempt to Fail,” March 27, 2012.
11. Many of the final statements written before, and some of the slogans shouted during, the immolators’ actions have been collected in Tibet Burning: Profiles of Self-Immolators Inside Tibet (Dharamsala, India: Tibetan Youth Congress, 2013), and in Human Rights Situation in Tibet, Annual Report, 2012 (Dharamsala, India: Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, 2013), 10–12.
12. Susan K. McCarthy, “The State, Minorities, and Dilemmas of Development in Contemporary China,” Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 26 (2002): 109; and see Ralph Litzinger, “Theorizing Postsocialism: Reflections on the Politics of Marginality in Contemporary China,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (2002): 33–55.
13. John F. Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows: The Definitive Account of the Dalai Lama and Tibet since the Chinese Conquest (New York: HarperPerennial, 1979), xii.
14. J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation (New York: Broadway Books, 2008), 303.
15. “Editorial: Lost in Tibet,” Guardian, March 13, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/14/china-tibet-communist-party.
16. See Leonard C. Hawes, “Human Rights and an Ethic of truths: Pragmatic Dilemmas and Discursive Interventions,” Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 7 (2010): 262–79; Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Gerard A. Hauser, “The Moral Vernacular of Human Rights Discourse,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 41 (2008): 440–66.
17. Robert Barnett, “Introduction,” in Wang Lixiong and Tsering Shakya, Struggle for Tibet, 13; on this communication pattern, see Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Wang Jisi, Addressing US–China Strategic Distrust (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2012), http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2012/03/30-US-China-lieberthal; for a case study of this dynamic, see Hartnett, “Google and the ‘Twisted Cyber-Spy Affair.’”
18. Fu Mengzi quoted in Li Xiaokun and Li Lianxing, “Chinese Experts Urge Better Understanding,” China Daily, May 27, 2011, http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/us/2011–05/27/content_12590112.htm.
19. On the communicative dimensions of these liberation struggles, see Julie M. Norman, “Creative Activism: Youth Media in Palestine,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 2 (2009): 251–74, and Todd Wolfson, “From the Zapatistas to Indymedia: Dialectics and Orthodoxy in Contemporary Social Movements,” Communication, Culture, & Critique 5 (2012): 149–70.
20. Barry K. Gills, “Introduction: Globalization and the Politics of Resistance,” in Globalization and the Politics of Resistance, ed. Barry K. Gills (London: Palgrave, 2000), 4.
21. On “communication activism,” see Communication Activism, eds. Lawrence R. Frey and Kevin M. Carragee, 2 vols. (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2007); Stephen John Hartnett, “Communication, Social Justice, and Joyful Commitment,” Western Journal of Communication 74 (2010): 68–93; and D. Robert DeChaine, “Humanitarian Space and the Social Imaginary,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 26 (2002): 354–69.
22. See Rya Butterfield, “Rhetorical Forms of Symbolic Labor: The Evolution of Iconic Representations in China’s Model Worker Awards,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15 (2012): 95–125; Xing Lu, “From ‘Ideological Enemies’ to ‘Strategic Partners’: A Rhetorical Analysis of US–China Relations in Intercultural Contexts,” Howard Journal of Communication 22 (2011): 336–57; Hartnett, “Google and the ‘Twisted Cyber Spy’ Affair”; Michelle Murray Yang, “President Nixon’s Speeches and Toasts during His 1972 Trip to China: A Study in Diplomatic Rhetoric,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14 (2011): 1–44; Kent A. Ono and Joy Yang Jiao, “China in the US Imaginary: Tibet, the Olympics, and the 2008 Earthquake,” Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 5 (2008): 406–10; and Xing Lu and Herbert W. Simons, “Transitional Rhetoric of Chinese Communist Party Leaders in the Post-Mao Reform Period: Dilemmas and Strategies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 262–86.
23. Raka Shome and Radha S. Hegde, “Postcolonial Approaches to Communication: Charting the Terrain, Engaging the Intersections,” Communication Theory 12 (2002): 249; on globalization, see The Cultures of Globalization, eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Critical Globalization Studies, eds. Richard P. Appelbaum and William I. Robinson (London: Routledge, 2005); and Raka Shome and Radha S. Hegde, “Culture, Communication, and the Challenge of Globalization,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 172–89.
24. Shome and Hegde, “Postcolonial Approaches to Communication,” 250.
25. I use the word “trope” here not in the classical sense of a structural figure of speech but in the postmodern sense of indicating narratives and sets of images and claims that have congealed into ossified thought patterns; for the CCP’s latest whitepaper describing “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” see China’s Peaceful Development, September 6, 2011, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-09/06/c_131102329.htm.
26. The fourteen women—Wangchen Kyi, Sangay Dolma, Chagmo Kyi, Tenzin Dolma, Tamding Tso, Dolkar Tso, Dickyi Choezom, Rikyo, Rinchen, Tsering Kyi, Tenzin Choedron, Palden Choetso, Tenzin Wangmo, and Qiu Xiang—are discussed in the reports produced by the groups cited in note three.
27. Mao quoted in Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 445.
28. Li Youyi, “Tibet: What is Mysterious and What is No Longer Mysterious,” in Eyewitnesses to 100 Years of Tibet: Interviews with Witnesses, History Instead of Conclusion, ed. Zhang Xiaoming (Beijing: China Intercontinental Press, 2005), 2; Ngapoi Ngawang Jigmei, “Truth of the March 10 Event of 1959,” Eyewitnesses, 124; Lin Tiann, “Plunging into the Democratic Reform in Kaisum Manor of Shannan,” Eyewitnesses, 134.
29. The image appears in Chabai Cedain Puncos, “Human Rights in Old and New Tibet,” Eyewitnesses, 67.
30. Puncong Zhaxi, “The Peaceful Liberation of Tibet I Experienced in 1951,” Eyewitnesses, 95.
31. Wang Derong, “Following the Living Buddha Sharicang to Tibet,” Eyewitnesses, 84.
32. Lin Tiann, “Plunging into the Democratic Reform,” Eyewitnesses, 129, 130, 145.
33. See Mao’s Graphic Voice: Pictorial Posters from the Cultural Revolution, eds. Patricia Powell and Shitao Huo (Madison: University of Wisconsin Museum of Art, 1996).
34. Melvyn C. Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951; The Demise of the Lamaist State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 1, 24.
35. Goldstein addresses the “manorial estates” system in History of Modern Tibet, 3–6, and discusses the pre-1950 politico-economic management of the nation at 1–37.
36. 92 percent is reported in Wang Lixiong, “Reflections on Tibet,” in Lixiong and Shakya, The Struggle for Tibet, 57.
37. Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows, 11.
38. Dibyesh Anand, Geopolitical Exotica: Tibet in the Western Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 31.
39. When Genghis Khan’s armies (and then his grandson’s, Godan’s) were conquering central Asia, the spirituality of the lamas impressed the Mongol invaders so much that they formed, circa 1239, the “priest-patron” relationship, thus linking Tibetan Buddhism, in the minds of the conquered Han Chinese, with foreign invaders (see Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows, 14–15).
40. See Laurence A. Waddell, Lhasa and Its Mysteries, With a Record of the Expedition of 1903 to 1904, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1905).
41. “The Agreement of the Central People’s Government and the Local Government of Tibet on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet,” signed in Beijing on 23 May 1951, rpt. in Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows, 450. The signing of this document is a central plank in China’s claims that Tibet agreed to its current political conditions; the signing ceremony is thus enshrined in the Tibet Museum in Lhasa in a sculpture depicting the event.
42. As quoted in Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows, 84.
43. Deng Xiaoping, as quoted in Chenqing Ying, Tibetan History (Beijing Intercontinental Press, 2003), 131.
44. See “Nobel Has Nothing to Do with Peace,” China Tibet Online, October 25, 2010, http://chinatibet.people.com.cn/7175915.html; “Beijing Blasts Nobel Peace Prize Meddling,” People’s Daily Online, October 9, 2010, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90776/90882/7160366.html; “Nobel Peace Prize Politically Distorted,” People’s Daily Online, October 19, 2010, http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/7170896.html; and “What Can be Inferred from Awarding Nobel Peace Prize to Dalai Lama and Liu Xiaobo?” China Tibet Online, October 13, 2010, http://chinatibet.people.com.cn/7164767.html; on Liu’s fate, see Stephen John Hartnett, “To ‘Dance with Lost Souls’: Liu Xiaobo, Charter 08, and the Contested Rhetorics of Democracy and Human Rights in China,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 16 (2013): 223–274.
45. Quoted in Che Minghuai and Zhange Huachuan, Zhang Jingwu: The Representative of the Central People’s Government in Tibet, trans. Tao Geru, revised by Xiang Hongjia (Beijing: China Tibetology Publishing House, 2009), 98.
46. Che and Zhange, Zhang Jingwu, 59, 110.
47. Chabai Cedain Puncong, “Human Rights in Old and New Tibet,” Eyewitnesses, 69; “reactionaries” is from Wang Derong, “Following the Living Buddha,” Eyewitnesses, 84.
48. Chenqing Ying, Tibetan History, 157.
49. Chenqing Ying, Tibetan History, 169.
50. Qi said this in an editorial in the CCP-run Tibet Daily, the new Chinese language newspaper published in Lhasa, as quoted in Andrew Jacobs, “China: Official in Tibet Orders More Security,” New York Times, February 1, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/world/asia/communist-official-in-tibet-orders-increased-security.html.
51. Zhao’s speech of June 12, 2000, was leaked to and then posted by Free Tibet at http://www.freetibet.org.
52. Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002), 119; and see Carole McGranahan, Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
53. John Powers, History as Propaganda: Tibetan Exiles versus the People’s Republic of China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 111.
54. Fei-Ling Wang, “Stuck in Panic Mode,” New York Times (blog), February 28, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/28/why-is-china-nervous-about-the-arab-uprisings/stuck-in-panic-mode.
55. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 71, emphasis added.
56. Chen Quanguo quoted from a speech printed in the Tibet Daily, as quoted in Peter Simpson, “Chinese Police Shoot Dead Two as Tibetan New Year Approaches,” The Telegraph, February 10, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/tibet/9074401/Chinese-police-shoot-dead-two-as-Tibetan-New-Year-approaches.html.
57. Nicholas B. Dirks, “Foreword,” in Bernard S. Cohen, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), ix.
58. See Che and Zhange, Zhang Jingwu, 49, and Chabai Cedain Puncog, “Human Rights in Old and New Tibet,” Eyewitnesses, 63–70; on “New Lhasa,” see Garma Dorje, “Revisiting the New City of Lhasa,” Eyewitnesses, 221–28.
59. Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) is also listed as Guomindang (GMD).
60. Michael Dutton, Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo, and Dong Dong Wu, Beijing Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 208.
61. See Abrahm Lustgarten, China’s Great Train: Beijing’s Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet (New York: Times Books, 2008).
62. Lan Xinzhen, “China’s West: Generating Change,” China Today, April 2011, http://www.chinatoday.com.cn/ctenglish/se/txt/2011–05/18/content_359003.htm: 47–49.
63. Jolan Zhao, “Tibet’s Industrialization Realizes Leapfrog Development,” China Tibet Online, August 4, 2011, http://eng.tibet.cn/2010jj/xm/201108/t20110805_1114527.html and “Tourism Helps Tibetan Herders Get Rich,” China Tibet Online, October 10, 2011, http://english.chinatibetnews.com/news/2011–10/10/content_790796.htm.
64. “China to Further Invest in Critical Sectors,” People’s Daily Online, June 19, 2012, http://english.people.com.cn/90778/7851020.html#.
65. This idea has outraged Tibetans, as reported in Aida Akl, “China Pushes Tibet Tourism in Theme Park Project,” Voice of America, August 29, 2012, http://www.voanews.com/content/china-pushes-tibet-tourism-in-theme-park-project/1498114.html.
66. See Emily T. Yeh, “Tropes of Indolence and the Cultural Politics of Development in Lhasa, Tibet” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97 (2007): 593–612, and Andrew Martin Fischer, State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet (Copenhagen, Denmark: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2005).
67. For a summary of these counter-claims, see Ian Buruma, Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing (New York: Random House, 2001), 299–315.
68. Oliver P. Richmond, “Critical Agency, Resistance, and Post-Colonial Civil Society,” Cooperation and Conflict 46 (2011): 419–40.
69. Dalai Lama, “His Holiness Bestows Yamantaka Initiations and Talks about Peace in Troubled Times,” (speech) April 22, 2012, http://www.dalailama.com/news/post/688-his-holiness-bestows-yamantaka-initiations-and-talks-about-peace-in-troubled-times.
70. On the politics of witnessing, as wrapped up in human rights claims, see Moyn, The Last Utopia, and Stephen J. Hartnett and Jeremy D. Engels, “‘Aria in Time of War’: Investigative Poetry and the Politics of Witnessing,” in The Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd ed, eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 1043–67.
71. Michelle Murray Yang, “Still Burning: Self-Immolations as Photographic Protest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97 (2011): 1–25, quotation at 2.
72. Dalai Lama, Freedom in Exile (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), 249.
73. The quotation appears under the heading of “Torture in Tibet,” from the Free Tibet website, http://www.freetibet.org/pages/torture.html.
74. Manfred Nowak, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment of Prisoners (New York: U.N. Commission on Human Rights, 2006), 19.
75. “Tortured Prisoner Dies in Tibet,” December 11, 2011, http://www.freetibet.org/news-media/na/tortured-prisoner-dies-tibet.
76. Woeser, “A Terrible Picture: Chinese Military and Police Beating Tibetans to Death,” (blog) March 21, 2009. Re-posted by China Free Press, March 26, 2009, http://www.chinafreepress.org/publish/cfpnews/A_Terrible_Picture_Chinese_Military_and_Police_Beating_Tibetans_to_Death.shtml.
77. Stephen Browne, “‘Like Gory Spectres’: Representing Evil in Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 277–92, quotation from 277.
78. See Jacqueline Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002); for a classic example of how abolitionists responded, see Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of A Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839).
79. John Beverley, Testimonio: The Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), and see Veena Das, “Trauma and Testimony: Implications for Political Community,” Anthropological Theory 3 (2003): 293–307.
80. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 14, 13.
81. The quotations appear next to a photograph of Palden Gyatso posted on http://www.freetibet.org; the weapons appear in a photograph beneath the heading “Palden Gyatso Speaks About his Experiences”; this monk spent 33 years in Chinese prisons.
82. In the Tibet Museum in Dharamsala, India, where Palden Gyatso’s story is featured prominently, these torture devices are displayed as evidence of Chinese barbarism.
83. Tenzin Tsundue, “The Testimony of a Former Tibetan Prisoner,” China Rights Forum (2007, no. 2): 107–16; the cattle prod drawing appears on p. 112.
84. So says Lian Xiangmin in “Tibet’s Path to Democracy,” China Daily, May 26, 2011, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2011–05/26/content_12581327.htm.
85. Committee Against Torture, “Advanced, Unedited Version; Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 19 of the Convention; Concluding Observations of the Committee Against Torture,” November 21, 2008, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cat/docs/CAT.C.CHN.CO.4.pdf, 3, 4, 5; and see the corroborating evidence in Nowak, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Torture, 14.
86. Woeser, “A Terrible Picture.”
87. Xing Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 13.
88. Chen Yi quoted in Chang and Halliday, Mao, The Unknown Story, 515; the methods noted here are depicted in Kaige Chen’s Farewell My Concubine (Beijing: Beijing Film Studio/Miramax, 1993), and in Yiyun Li, The Vagrants (New York: Random House, 2009).
89. The image is from the Chinese language version of Boxun.com; I linked to this news source at http://boxun.com/news/gb/china/2011/12/201112021216.shtml, and was led there via a link posted by Free Tibet, listed under “Photos of Crackdown from Tibet,” December 2, 2011, http://www.freetibet.org.
90. “Faces of Arrested Tibetans,” January 25, 2012, http://www.freetibet.org/news-media/na/faces-arrested-tibetans.
91. For an image of the monument, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tibet_Peaceful_Liberation_Monument,_Potala_Square.jpg.
92. “Young Tibetans Make a Stand,” March 8, 2012, http://www.freetibet.org/news-media/na/young-tibetans-make-stand.
93. Human Rights Watch, “China: Tibetan Monasteries Placed Under Direct Rule,” March 16, 2012, http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/03/16/china-tibetan-monasteries-placed-under-direct-rule; and see Andrew Jacobs, “Tibetan Self-Immolations as China Tightens Grip,” New York Times, March 23, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/world/asia/in-self-immolations-signs-of-new-turmoil-in-tibet.html?pagewanted=all; while the management plan is “new” in recent times, monastic control has been deployed from as early as the mid-1950s, as portrayed in “The Abbot,” an interview in Liao Yiwu, The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up, trans. Wen Huang (New York: Anchor Books, 2008), 73–92. For details of the new monastic management plan, see Religious Repression in Tibet: Special Report 2012 (Dharamsala, India: Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, 2013), 35–57.
94. Dalai Lama, Freedom in Exile, 99; J. Jeffrey Franklin notes in The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008) that “the Law of the Dharma is an immensely complex doctrine for which there is no single definition and manifold interpretations” (148); it is a combination of faith and science, belief and right action, an all-encompassing world view based on the premise that “everything and everybody is impermanent” (148).
95. Du Yongbin, “Tibet Moves Ahead with the Nation,” China Daily, May 23, 2011, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2011-05/23/content_12557384.htm; International Campaign for Tibet, 60 Years of Chinese Misrule: Arguing Cultural Genocide in Tibet (Washington, DC: International Campaign for Tibet, 2012).
96. Anand, Geopolitical Exotica, 4.
97. Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan, “Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrain,” in Imperial Formations, eds. Stoler, McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 3–42, quotation at 18.
98. China: Minority Exclusion, Marginalization, and Rising Tensions (London: Human Rights in China/Minority Rights Group International, 2007); and see Powers, History as Propaganda, 126, on “Chinese racial fantasies of the barbarian Other.”
99. “Recent Attacks on Tibetans,” December 16, 2011, http://www.freetibet.org/news-media/na/recent-attacks-tibetans.
100. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21, 29.
101. Quoted in Andrew Jacobs, “Many Chinese Intellectuals are Silent amid a Wave of Tibetan Self-Immolations,” New York Times, November 9, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/world/asia/educated-chinese-are-silent-amid-tibetan-self-immolations.html.
102. “Ngaba Protests Update,” January 23, 2012, http://www.freetibet.org/news-media/na/ngaba-protests-updates.
103. “Tibetan Killed as Chinese Fire Upon Protest,” January 23, 2012, http://www.freetibet.org/news-media/na/tibetan-killed-chinese-fire-upon-protesters.
104. “Faces of Arrested Tibetans.”
105. “Monastery Official Self-Immolates,” February 17, 2012, http://www.freetibet.org/news-media/na/monastery-official-self-immolates; for corroboration of the FT claims in this paragraph, see “Graphic News of Tibetan Unrest in China,” The Nation (from Thailand), January 27, 2012.
106. US Department of State, 2009 Report on International Religious Freedom—China (includes Tibet, Hong Kong, Macau) (Washington, DC, October 26, 2009), 23, http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2009/127268.htm.
107. “China Must Address Root Causes of Growing Tibetan Protests,” Human Rights in China (blog), January 27, 2012, http://www.hrichina.org/content/5787.
108. Scarry, Body in Pain, 41; she calls this “an undoing of civilization,” 38.
109. Robert A. F. Thurman, “Critical Reflections on Donald S. Lopez Jr.’s ‘Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69 (2001): 191–201, quotation at 193.
110. Dalai Lama, “Five Point Peace Plan,” September 21, 1987, speech before the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus, http://www.dalailama.com/messages/tibet/five-point-peace-plan; rpt. Dalai Lama, Freedom in Exile, 247–48; for elaboration, see “His Holiness’s Middle Way Approach,” posted at http://www.dalailama.com/messages/middle-way-approach.
111. “Nobel Laureates Urge President Hu for Dialogue on Tibet,” April 3, 2012, signed by Desmond Tutu, Jody Williams, and ten other Laureates, http://tibet.net/2012/04/03/nobel-laureates-urge-president-hu-for-dialogue-on-tibet/.
112. Woeser, “Lhasa Nights,” trans. A. E. Clark, China Rights Forum (2006, no. 4): 35. Note that I have altered the punctuation for clarity.
113. Orville Schell, Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 46.
114. Dalai Lama, Freedom in Exile, 248.
115. China’s military posture in Tibet, as quoted in China: Minority Exclusion, Marginalization, and Rising Tensions, 25; and see Lustgarten, China’s Great Train, 209, where he argues that the CCP’s transportation modernization program has been launched to support the Party’s efforts to turn Tibet into “the military epicenter for much of the western half of China.”
116. This figure is reported in Defining Tibet and Tibetan Autonomy (Washington, DC: International Campaign for Tibet, n.d.), 8.
117. The Nazi comparison was aired in “Seven Questions to Dalai Lama,” March 22, 2012, under “Question 4,” http://eng.tibet.cn/2010home/news/201203/t20120322_1728698.html.
118. The quotations here are from Gillian Wong and Isolda Morillo, “China TV Blames Dalai Lama for Tibet Immolations,” Associated Press, May 16, 2012, http://news.yahoo.com/china-tv-blames-dalai-lama-tibet-immolations-074959483.html. See the CCTV documentary, “The Dalai Clique and the Self-Immolation Event, Part 1,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYcVa7yp6BA.
119. Colin Thubron, To a Mountain in Tibet (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 109.
120. Brian Spegele, “Resistance on Tibet is Conundrum for China, Dalai Lama,” Wall Street Journal, January 9, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203513604577140753573184924.html.
121. Simon Denyer, “In Tibet, Protest against Chinese Rule Grow,” Washington Post, April 2, 2012; outside of CCP propaganda sources, the most sustained critique of the Dalai Lama I have found is Barry Sautman, “‘Vegetarian Between Meals’: The Dalai Lama, War, and Violence,” positions 18 (2010): 89–143.
122. Dalai Lama, “Chinese Understanding of Tibetan Issues is Growing,” January 3, 2012, http://www.dalailama.com/news/post/783-chinese-understanding-of-tibetan-issue-is-growing-says-the-dalai-lama.
123. James A. Benn, Burning for the Buddha: Self-Immolation in Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 8, 14, 35.
124. “Tibetan Youth Congress is a Terror Group,” Global Research, April 15, 2008, http://www.globalresearch.ca/tibetan-youth-congress-tyc-is-a-terror-group/.
125. Bhuchung K. Tsering, “Man on Fire,” February 10, 2012, http://www.savetibet.org/media-center/tibet-news/man-fire; “Freedom Flames” is one of the phrases interspersed throughout the images available from the TYC at http://tibetburning.tibetanyouthcongress.org/photos.php.
126. This line was produced on the China Tibet Online site and in an article published by Xinhua; it is quoted here from Andrew Jacobs, “China Attacks Dalai Lama in Online Burst,” New York Times, March 25, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/world/asia/china-attacks-dalai-lama-in-online-burst.html?_r=0.
127. See Ed Douglas, “China is Fuelling the Fires of Tibetan Resistance,” Guardian, October 17, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/17/china-tibetan-resistance-self-immolation.
128. Mimi Lau, “Suicide Bomber Kills 3 in Land Row,” South China Morning Post, May 11, 2012, http://www.scmp.com/article/1000640/suicide-bomber-kills-3-land-row.
129. Xing Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 193.
130. Stefan A. Halper, The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model will Dominate the Twenty-First Century (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 3.
131. See Banyan, “Nepal and Its Neighbors: Yam Yesterday, Yam Today,” The Economist, January 18, 2012, http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2012/01/nepal-and-its-neighbours.
132. “Calling the Shots: Chinese Influence in Nepal Grows,” The Economist, March 17, 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21550315; also see “US Official Talks to Nepal about Tibetan Refugees,” Associated Press, April 4, 2012, posted by the International Campaign for Tibet at http://www.savetibet.org/media-center/tibet-news/us-official-talks-nepal-about-tibetan-refugees.
133. Xi Jinping, as quoted in Jamil Anderlini, “Tibetan Area Calmed by Chinese Tolerance,” Financial Times, February 16, 2012, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e00739aa-57bd-11e1-b089-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2RZw74RMG; the “tolerance” noted here refers to policies in Qinghai, where the CCP has tried a different strategy than the “pulverize[ing]” one deployed in Lhasa.
134. Halper, Beijing Consensus, 229.
135. Zhu Feng, “No One Wants a Clash,” New York Times (blog), May 3, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/05/02/are-we-headed-for-a-cold-war-with-china/no-one-wants-a-cold-war-between-the-us-and-china.
136. Lieberthal and Jisi, Addressing US–China Strategic Distrust, 20; and see Joseph. R. Biden Jr., “China’s Rise Isn’t Our Demise,” New York Times, September 7, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/opinion/chinas-rise-isnt-our-demise.html.
137. Melvyn C. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 116; to avoid this scenario, see “Twelve Suggestions for Dealing with the Tibetan Situation,” rpt. in Lixiong and Shakya, Struggle for Tibet, 271–75.
138. Gary Wills argues in Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (New York: Penguin, 2010), that both the US presidency and foreign policy more broadly have become trapped by the machinations of the military–industrial complex; for case studies of this argument, see Stephen John Hartnett and Laura Ann Stengrim, Globalization and Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 212–66.
139. Lixiong and Shakya, Struggle for Tibet, 242; his list of institutions is on 224–25.
140. See Stephen John Hartnett and Greg Goodale, “Debating ‘The Means of Apocalypse’: The Defense Science Board, the Military–Industrial Complex, and the Production of Imperial Propaganda,” in Rhetoric and Democracy: Pedagogical and Political Practices, eds. Todd F. McDorman and David M. Timmerman (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008): 181–224.
141. See Meenakshi Ganguly, “Generation Exile,” Transition 87 (2001): 4–25, and Schell, Virtual Tibet.
142. See the chart posted by Buddhist Studies at http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/history/bud_statwrld.htm.
143. See the chart posted by Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations.
144. J. Jeffrey Franklin, “The Counter-Invasion of Britain by Buddhism,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003): 19–42, quotation at 20.
145. US Department of State, Report on International Religious Freedom (2009), 3, http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2009/127268.htm.
146. Calum MacLeod, “In China, Tensions Rising over Buddhism’s Quiet Resurgence,” USA Today, November 2, 2011, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/religion/story/2011-11-01/tibetan-buddhism-china-communist-tension/51034604/1.
147. In 2011, the Dalai Lama declared “I will not play any role in the future government of Tibet” in “Guidelines for Future Tibet Policy,” http://www.savetibet.org/resource-center/dalai-lama/guidelines-future-tibet-policy; Dr. Lobsang Sangay has since then been elected to the role of Kalon Tripa, or political leader of Tibet.
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Stephen John Hartnett
Stephen John Hartnett is at Department of Communication, UC Denver
