Spoiling Tibet

China and Resource Nationalism on the Roof of the World

Gabriel Lafitte

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780324364
• eBook ISBN: 9781780324388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

The mineral-rich mountains of Tibet so far have been largely untouched by China's growing economy. Nor has Beijing been able to settle Tibet with politically reliable peasant Chinese. That is all about to change as China's 12th Five-Year Plan, from 2011 to 2015, calls for massive investment in copper, gold, silver, chromium and lithium mining in the region, with devastating environmental and social outcomes. Despite great interest in Tibet worldwide, Spoiling Tibet is the first book that investigates mining at the roof of the world. A unique, authoritative guide through the torrent of online posts, official propaganda and exile speculation.

ONE

Tibet in its own right

It is the contention of this book that Tibet should be seen through Tibetan eyes, as a land conducive to material comfort and ease, available to feed those who know how to gather skilfully what nature provides; and a land conducive to mental comfort and ease, a source of deep inner strength and mental stability through training the mind, in mountain caves, to discover the full capabilities of the human condition.

The millions of Tibetan pastoral nomads see themselves as gatherers of what the landscape generously provides; all that is necessary is to remain mobile, never overstaying. These pastoralists live what they consider an easy and bountiful existence, not a desperate struggle to subsist, at the mercy of the forces of nature.

Gatherers are conventionally considered an inferior group. Even those who are uncomfortable with ‘man’s dominion over nature’ are leery of going too far in the opposite direction, living entirely dependent on whatever is to be found naturally. But nomads live off uncertainty, unpredictability, in extreme climates that generate knee-high flower-filled alpine meadows and barren alpine deserts; paralysing blizzards and gentle drifts of monsoonal virga. The nomads survive, and thrive, not despite uncertainty, but because of it.¹ A flexible, mobile, adaptable way of life is both a prescription for successful pastoralist productivity and a definition of the goal of Buddhist practice. It is not an accident that Buddhism thrived, to the fullest extent, in the landscapes of the Tibetan Plateau. Spaciousness is a key outcome of the Buddhist path; it is also necessary as a tool on the path, so as to not get claustrophobically bound up in the little world of the accreted self. Spaciousness is the attribute of the Tibetan Plateau evident even to the casual visitor to an area the size of western Europe that had but 6 million people until Chinese immigrants swept in.

China has never learned to see Tibet through Tibetan eyes, or even guess that there might be any reason to bother. Imperial China and Republican, revolutionary and contemporary capitalist China have been consistently incurious as to whether there is anything to be learned from backward and remote Tibet. Nor has the wider world learned to see Tibet as Tibetans see it, due to the grand romance of Shangri-La, and the compulsory silence of the Tibetans who are criminalized when they attempt to speak for themselves.

In the absence of Tibetan perspectives, the Plateau is readily dissected, categorized into useful and useless, farmland and waste land, alpine meadow and alpine desert. Categorization, selecting the most favourably endowed locales, is how modernity proceeds. Modernity’s difference engine particularizes and fragments whole landscapes. Except as a source of water and minerals, Tibet now has little instrumental value. Everything above the treeline is waste land, good only for capturing what little monsoonal moisture reaches the high peaks, to be held there as glaciers, melting slowly to provide all of Asia’s lowlands with a steady source of water. The pastures below the snowline cannot be made to sustain intensive cropping with Chinese characteristics, yet the slopes above the forests and meadows have even less use, except as Asia’s ‘water tower’, a favoured trope of China’s central leaders.

Mining old Tibet

Tibetans never mined anything, because the land was sacred. A lot of people believe such nonsense. In Western countries, supporters of Tibet have peddled a dualism in which the saintly Tibetans never dug or cut the earth. In the romanticized version of Tibetan values in the 1997 movie Seven Years in Tibet, it seems Tibetans spent more time saving worms from the spade than any other activity. The idealized proto-Tibetan Ba’ku people of Star Trek Insurrection, peace-loving earth mothers all, would never dream of doing anything so crude as mining. This is just another crude dualism, the obverse of a resource-hungry Western modernity. The reality is that Tibetans chose whether or not to mine, in moderation, for reasons that modernity finds almost unintelligible.

Archaeologists say metalworking goes back thousands of years in Tibet. Scholar and explorer John Bellezza says:

Thogchags are Tibetan talismans made of bronze and meteoric metals dating as far back as the Bronze Age. Archaeological evidence from various sites indicate that it started around the beginning of the Second Millennium bce. An unbroken tradition of producing amulets extends into the Iron Age and Buddhist periods creating a cultural legacy several thousand years old. Highly prized by Tibetans, thogchags were traditionally worn for protection and good luck. In the pre-Buddhist Bon religion rituals to dispel evil and attract good fortune were prevalent. The function of thogchags closely reflects this ancient religious preoccupation. Although they were often hung around the neck or attached to clothing, thogchags were also sewn on amulet pouches or tied to religious articles. They were frequently used and displayed by healers, spirit-mediums and magicians, the so-called shamans of Tibet. Thogchags have a close association with indigenous Tibetan religious beliefs and their practitioners and form a very important part of the country’s pre-Buddhist and Buddhist heritage.²

In 2006 New Yorkers were amazed by a display of Tibetan chain-mail armour twelve centuries old:

The exhibition highlights stunning examples of pierced ironwork embellished with gold and silver, masterfully crafted swords and sword blades, and extremely rare examples of decorated leather-work. Complete armour for men and horses was kept for use on ceremonial occasions, particularly the Great Prayer Festival, a massive event held in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa as part of the New Year celebrations at the start of each year. Several rare and complete lamellar armors and helmets dating from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century are included as well. Superb examples made of hundreds of small plates laced together with leather have been brought together here. Many different types of helmets are also featured, including multiplate helmets made of up to forty-nine narrow iron plates and a helmet decorated with a popular Buddhist symbol known as the Three Jewels. A few of the helmets in the exhibition are so unusual as to have almost no stylistic parallels. The exhibition features unprecedented displays of stunning Tibetan horse armour, a type that did not exist outside of Tibet. On view is a complete figure of a Tibetan heavy cavalryman from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century. Several shaffrons (armour for a horse’s head) are also included, one of which is the fourteenth–fifteenthcentury piece reinforced with iron plates and densely embellished in gold and silver, the most highly decorated piece of armour of this type known. Made from hundreds or even thousands of small, interlocking iron rings, mail armour was used in Tibet from a very early date as described in texts from the period of the Yarlung Dynasty (the seventh to the ninth century), during which Tibet’s empire extended through much of Central Asia.³

China was acutely aware of the high quality of Tibetan metalwork:

To judge by records of gifts from Tibet to T’ang, which over and again list large objects of gold, remarkable for their beauty and rarity and excellent workmanship, the Tibetan goldsmiths were the wonder of the medieval world. One of the largest gifts of Tibetan gold was one of the earliest. Late in 640, Gar sTongtsan, the minister of the great King Songtsan Gampo, came to Chang’an to arrange a marriage between his lord and a Chinese princess. To bind the engagement he presented golden vessels weighing a thousand catties, and many other precious things. A gift sent by the same Tibetan king in 641 to his father-in-law, T’ai Tsung, was a golden wine jug in the form of a goose seven feet high. Early in 658 the Tibetans sent another marvel of metalwork: a golden city, populated by golden horsemen, and the figures of horses, lions, elephants and other animals. There were many other metallic wonders. Tibet was a golden land. In the ninth century its king lived in a sumptuous tent, decorated with tigers, leopards, and fierce reptiles executed in gold.⁴

Paul Pelliot, citing T’ang dynastic records, says this golden ewer held 60 litres.⁵

Art historian Amy Heller says:

At present, a silver jug stands in a wooden frame in one of the chapels of the Lhasa Jokhang, traditionally regarded as the oldest temple in Tibet. This jug is approximately 80 cm in height. It was hammered from silver sheets, cut and assembled in four parts, two hemispherical sections joined at the diameter of the circle, a long thin neck, surmounted by an animal head with round mouth from which liquid can be poured. It weighs some 35 kg when full of liquid, and monks fill it daily with offerings of chang, Tibetan barley beer. The gilded designs on the upper bowl of the jug are raised scrolling in heart shaped medallions, while on the lower bowl, there are three scenes representing Central Asian people, two lively solo dancers and three men in drunken revelry. The people represented on the jug reflect Tibetan familiarity with their neighbours’ appearance and customs. Early records document Tibetan export of armour and weapons and salt as well. The Tibetans were so skilled in metal craftsmanship that the 3000 meter gorges of the Mekong river were crossed by Tibetan iron-chain suspension bridges by the early 8th century. Tibetan chain-mail and lamellar armour was renowned in the Tang Annals and judged to be invincible. The Tang historians wrote, ‘The men and horses all wear chain mail armour. Its workmanship is extremely fine. It envelops them completely, leaving openings only for the two eyes. Thus, strong bows and sharp swords cannot injure them.’⁶

In 2007 the Environment Desk of the Tibetan government in exile explained:

There is a long history of the use of metals in Tibet, for sacred images, temple finials, oracular mirrors, iron chain bridges, armour, coinage, reliquaries, jewellery and ceremonial offerings.⁷ Tibet has a rich tradition of metalworking, with the government of pre-communist Tibet employing 150 gold and silver smiths in a workshop just below the Potala. There are many Tibetan words for the tools of these expert craftsmen, their techniques and products. These craftsmen could stretch a mere 11 grams of silver into necklace wire more than a kilometre in length. Metalworking, especially in Tibetan villages, was a winter livelihood, a valuable source of off-farm income in a season when nothing grows and there is no work in the fields.

Yet Tibetan culture frowned on mining, disturbing the earth and its spirits, and on forging metals in the blacksmith’s fire. Metalworking was defined as a ‘deplorable’ occupation, forbidden to monks. Tibet often preferred to buy its metals from others. Tibet turned to the growing kingdom of Gorkha Nepal to mint its coins, ceasing this arrangement only after a Nepali invasion was repulsed. The mines providing raw materials were invariably small, and were worked without tunnelling, chemicals or explosives. Today they would be called artisanal mines. Gold was obtained almost entirely by sluicing alluvial gold flecks from stream beds, rather than by digging. There are many recorded instances where gold nuggets found in the earth were returned, out of respect for local gods. Because gold is plentiful in many Tibetan places, its use was common. An English traveller in Tibet in the 1880s noted that ‘in Lhasa even the poor people wear gold jewellery’.⁸

The aristocratic Tibetan historian Tsepon Shakabpa wrote One Hundred Thousand Moons Reflected in the Luminous Pond of the Playful Lake in which Young Intelligent Bees Take Joy as an encyclopaedic account of pre-communist Tibet, including a survey of the natural endowment of the earth of Tibet. He catalogues the known minerals of Tibet and their uses.⁹ He lists fifty-seven minerals, sometimes as they appear in the periodic table, mostly defined by their use. Writing of old Tibet in the present tense, Shakabpa observes: ‘These minerals are extracted by the government or the landowners a little at a time, as they are needed. Beyond that, no large scale mining takes place.’ Shakabpa attributes this to attitudes more ingrained in Tibetan society than any official edict.

It is said that such minerals were being extracted from the land in the ancient past, that was actually owned by spirits. They became jealous and annoyed; consequently, rain did not fall during the rainy season, and an epidemic, a famine, and a war resulted. The second legend says that when minerals were being extracted, the fertility of the soil declined in that area; the productivity and resources of the famers and nomads suffered.

These are the ‘primitive’ beliefs of premodern peoples, proving, to modernist Chinese, the backwardness and superstitions of the Tibetans. To many modern minds, such beliefs are laughable, signs of a slavery to nature that must be resolutely repudiated so the bounty of the earth can be ours. Tibet’s culture heroes, the lamas, are also sceptical of the powers ascribed to earth and water spirits, yet they bind them rather than abolishing them. These spirits, so prone to jealousy or annoyance, have no objective existence. Nor does everyday reality exist as solidly as we suppose, the lamas say. So a belief in spirits is no more deluded than materialist literalism. From the perspective of the lamas, most people are addicted to that which causes them repeated dissatisfaction, fleeting pleasure and endless suffering. So the task of those who have more fully experienced the nature of reality is not to deny everyday lived reality, including the presence of spirits, but to wrestle with those spirits openly, powerfully and forcefully, to subdue them. In much the same way, the lamas wrestle with everyday popular delusions, fixations and beliefs, in their effort to turn minds.

The land of Tibet: foreground of enlightenment

The Tibetan Plateau is huge, but sparsely populated by the standards of today’s urbanized world. On a global scale it is the size of western Europe, or India’s eight largest states put together. It is one-sixtieth of the land surface of the planet. But by Tibetan standards it is also immense. It took months to cross, and few did. In the days when high lamas regularly were invited to Beijing to bless the emperor and safeguard his rule, the journey took many months. Even now, with a new rail track traversing the plateau, the journey between the two biggest plateau cities, Xining and Lhasa, takes twenty-four hours even with almost no stops.

Despite the great expanse of Tibet, and the extreme climate, almost all of the plateau had human uses. Tibetans learned 9,000 years ago how to live on this land of earthquakes, a young land geologically, by living lightly, by mobile land use, always moving on before grazing pressure exhausted the grass. A mobile civilization based on the seasonal cycles of the hardy sedges and grasses of Tibet made use of all terrains where plants grow. Because the plateau is only 10 degrees beyond the tropics, the snowline is high, with bare rock, snow and glaciers only above 4,500 metres from spring through to autumn. Yet even these barren mountainsides had – and today have – crucial roles in maintaining and transmitting the core values of Tibetan culture, as places of deep meditative retreat, where yogis spent years undistractedly investigating the nature of mind, before coming down to rejoin society.

Tibetans talk of Tibet as a body, the body of the Sri Sinmo, the earth spirit and mother of all Tibetans, who lives in the earth and, if annoyed, causes earthquakes, landslides and other disasters. Her limbs remain pinned down by the greatest of Tibetan temples, and rituals to renew their power to subdue (but never destroy) her are led by high lamas, today, as in past centuries. A mobile civilization, with elaborate mobile courts of high lamas, is what made Tibet humanly habitable. Tibetan civilization was light on the land; China is heavy. A light touch is suitable for a land so cold that organic life takes centuries to establish itself, and does not recover when cut for railways, highways, mines, towns and so on. China is creating a manufactured landscape, remaking Tibet in its own industrial image, and it won’t work. It may take a long time before this is realized. By then, it will be too late, the damage will be irreversible, the nomads will have been long removed, the land depopulated, the minerals exhausted, the Tibetans remade into factory workers in Chinese cities. Only then will it become obvious that the modern project of making the land of Tibet submit to human will was mistaken, unworkable, even disastrous. That is what happened in Siberia.

Geology has now had sixty years of intensive investigation to assemble a coherent story of the uplift and formation of the entire Tibetan Plateau, including the formation of the mineral deposits. The complex story is of the upheaval of the shallow Tethyan Sea and the Indian subcontinent as it ploughed inexorably into Eurasia, creating the mountain chains that crown the plateau. The uplifted result of the tectonic collision is the most distinctive feature of Eurasia. Not only is the plateau unlike its surrounding lowlands geologically; it is as distinctive meteorologically, hydrologically, climatologically, botanically and zoologically. To zoologists, the cold plateau was probably the origin of many species that spread widely during the Ice Ages.

What is more remarkable is that in its human uses the Tibetan Plateau has been as distinct. The traditional Tibetan economy of barley cropping, wool and butter production; the evolution of a mobile civilization based on nomadic pastoralism; the extensive land use; the fusion of sacred and secular power; the spread of the Tibetan language – all of these correlate closely with the geographical extent of the plateau. Nowhere else in continental Eurasia is there such congruity of physical and cultural boundaries. Even now, the sum of officially designated Tibetan ‘autonomous’ counties, prefectures and regions adds up very closely to the scientific map of the Tibetan Plateau.

Tibetans see Tibet, the land of snows, as a unity, to be respected and cared for, not overused by concentrating too many people or too much investment in one place. Tibetans see the thousand plateaus and the nine mountain ranges as a landscape conducive to full awakening to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Maps of Tibet and China
• Introduction
• 1 Tibet in its own right
• 2 Gold rush in Tibet
• 3 Reach of the revolutionary state
• 4 Chromite globalization
• 5 Capitalizing on Tibet: privatizing the treasure house
• 6 Intensive exploitation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Further reading on Tibet
• Index