Apr
20
Goldstein’s Tibet Study (2)
April 20, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
By Cindy Ru
A few days ago I was talking with a British friend about Tibet. She asked, “why won’t China give Tibetan people a referendum and let them decide if they want independent or not? since neither you nor I know exactly how the masses of Tibetan people are feeling (about independence)?” I thought about this and the answer i could give her back then was “theoretically you could say so, but realistically China will not allow this to happen because it is about sovereignty and strategic concern.”
But thinking back, this question still puzzles me. What is really the international norm about it?
Reading Dr.Goldstein’s article The Dalai Lama’s Dilemma on Foreign Affairs(1998) helps me to understand the above “tibet question” better. In the opening paragraphs, he says,
As a classic nationalistic dispute, the Tibet question pits the right of a people, Tibetans, to self-determination and independence against the right of a multi-ethnic state, the People’s Republic of China, to maintain what it sees as its historical territorial integrity. Such disputes are difficult to resolve because there is no clear international consensus about the respective rights of nationalities and states. The U.N. Charter, for example, states that the purpose of the world body is to ensure friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination, but it also states that nothing contained in the charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters that are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.
The ambiguity about when entities have the right to seek self-determination has made international opinion an important dimension of such disputes, and the struggle to control representations of history and current events is often as intense as the struggle to control territory. In the case of Tibet, both sides have selectively patched bits and pieces of the historical record together to support their viewpoints. The ensuing avalanche of charges and counter-charges is difficult to assess, even for specialists.
One thing i didn’t mention enough in my previous post is that start from 1986 to 1987, the Dalai Lama and his exile community started a range of political activities to gain international support for Tibet’s cause. In 1987 the Dalai Lama appeared for the first time as political leader in the west. On September 21, the Dalai Lama made his first political speech in the United States Congress. It was a well-planned and powerful speech, and he said Tibet was independent at the time when China invaded and accused the Chinese of serious human rights violation. Main points in his suggestion to solve the Tibet problem included transforming Tibet into a “zone of peace” and demanding the withdrawal of Chinese troops and reversing the dangerous population transfer policy. The area that he demanded political autonomy at that time not only includes the Tibet Autonomous Region(political Tibet), but also the ethic Tibet in nearby western regions. Beijing invited the Dalai Lama for a talk in 1989, but the Tibetan exile government discouraged the Dalai Lama from going since they felt they were getting the momentum. And soon after riots broke out in Lhasa in 1989 and the Chinese government declared martial law, the door of negotiation was shut.
After 1989, the hard-liners from the PRC government decided to “coddle” Tibet no more and began to restrict previous ethnic policy but continued to accelerate its economic policy. Huge Han Chines influx got into Tibet and from Goldstein’s point of view, this was an essential policy that was “changing the nature of Tibet” since “over a thousand years of recorded history, through wars, conquest, and external domination, Tibet remained the exclusive home of a people”.
So Beijing in the 90s had little interest in engaging talks with the Dalai Lama. The Tibetan exile government was losing the real deal – “the ethnic and economic character of Tibet”.
The Dalai Lama was forced into a corner with basically two choices – serious compromise or escalation. Both options were hard for the Dalai Lama to take, as Goldstein argues. Adopting the former one, the Dalai Lama risks of losing both political support from his own exile community and economic support from the west. The latter option runns against his commitment to nonviolence, but “it may be difficult for him to prevent, even if he personally opposed it”.
Compromises from both Beijing and the Dalai Lama to preserve the ethnic and cultural integrity of Tibet within the framework of the Chinese state may be the best and most realistic solution for the Tibet problem.
But why has such kind of compromises so hard to reach? Goldstein sums it up with one sentence, “there simply is too little trust and too many powerful reasons for not taking a risk.” And today with most media from both the PRC and the west only reinforcing existing clinches and charges and pointing fingers at each other, i fear it would only deepen the distrust from both sides.
