Tibet on Fire

Self-Immolations Against Chinese Rule

Tsering Woeser, Kevin Carrico

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784781538
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784781545
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Central Asian History
• Index: History

Since the 2008 uprising, nearly one-hundred and fifty Tibetan monks have self-immolated in protest of the Chinese occupation of their lands. Most have died from their wounds. "If Tibetans saw even a sliver of an opportunity to hold demonstrations, then they would not resort to self-immolation," Woeser, the dissident Tibetan poet, has written in the New York Times. The Tibetans she references includes herself: a prominent voice of the Tibetan movement, and one of the few Tibetan authors to write in Chinese, Woeser has been placed under house arrest and lives under close surveillance. Tibet On Fire is her account of the oppression Tibetans face, and the ideals driving both the self-immolators and other Tibetans like herself. Angry and clear, Tibet On Fire is a clarion call for the world to take action.

1

Why Are Tibetans Self-Immolating?

The Kirti Monastery, the site of the Ngawa Massacre and of the first self-immolation in Tibet, is known in Tibetan as Ngawa Kirti Gompa. The Kirti Gompa is located on the edge of Ngawa, which was once a region given over to nomadic herders and has long been a place of great religious reverence. A statue of the Shakyamuni Buddha towers above the structure—the largest monastery in the region—and its thirty-meter white chorten, draped on all sides by prayer flags, has become a landmark of Tibetan faith in the region. The monastery has also been at the center of the recent wave of self-immolations, as home to Tapey, Lobsang Phuntsog, Palden, and others.

In 2011, the chief abbot of Kirti Monastery, Kirti Rinpoche, appeared before the bipartisan Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the US House of Representatives to testify on the rise of self-immolations in Tibet. “There is no greater expression of their desperate opposition to the Chinese government than by resorting to the most powerful method of a nonviolent movement, which is by refraining from causing any harm to the Chinese people and appealing to the Chinese government, than by setting themselves on fire,” he said. In his statement, Kirti Rinpoche described the repressive policies put in place by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) throughout Tibetan regions but in particular in Ngawa, the area with which he is most familiar. Kirti Rinpoche recounted in detail three generations of wounds to the people of Ngawa, which he emphasized would be “very difficult to forget or to heal.”¹

These three generations of trauma trace a history of Chinese oppression against the Tibetan people. The first generation’s scars date from the Long March of 1934–35, when the Communist Party’s Red Army soldiers, retreating from advancing Nationalist Party forces, embarked on a year-long march around China that has become part of a heroic myth that the Party tells about itself. When the Red Army passed through Ngawa, their plundering led to unprecedented food shortages.² They massacred monks and laymen and looted monasteries, General Zhu De even occupying the prayer hall of Kirti Monastery and despoiling images of the Buddha.³

Yet greater tragedies were soon to come. The second generation suffered under the CCP’s program of “democratic reforms” from 1955 onward, which consisted of collectivization in “mutual aid groups,” redistribution of land, and the forced resettlement of nomads.⁴ Then, during the Cultural Revolution in 1966, all Tibetan monasteries were either vandalized or destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of Tibetans were persecuted, detained, and even in some cases killed, in a complex mix of factional struggles and ethno-religious persecution.⁵ Environmentally, the region was also subjected to extensive resource-exploitation through mining and forestry by state-owned enterprises throughout the Maoist era—a practice that continues to this day.

Within this long, tragic history, recent decades have brought increasingly extreme oppression to Tibet’s third generation under Chinese rule. This oppression is primarily manifested in five areas of Tibetan life. First, Tibetan beliefs have been suppressed, and religious scholarship has been subjected to political violence. The dispute over the reincarnation of the 10th Panchen Lama in 1995, in which Beijing selected its own Panchen Lama and placed the Dalai Lama’s chosen appointee under house arrest, created the world’s youngest political prisoner and produced an irreparable break in relations between Beijing and the Dalai Lama. By 1998, Beijing had sent work teams to Lhasa’s main temples to enforce a paranoid “patriotic education” program that consisted primarily of forcing monks to denounce the Dalai Lama openly, and expelling or arresting any who refused. The extremism of this movement, which continues to this day, and its demands that Tibetans not only renounce their faith but furthermore denounce their spiritual leaders and change their very lifestyles, has contributed greatly to the recently growing wave of self-immolations.

A similarly paranoid decision in 2008 to expel all monks who were not born and raised in Lhasa from the city’s three main monasteries (Drepung, Sera, and Ganden) was one of the main factors leading to the protests that spread throughout the region that March. After the 2008 protests, the “patriotic education” program was intensified and expanded beyond Lhasa to cover every monastery across Tibet. In a policy that stoked further discontent, monasteries were even required to fly the Chinese flag and display images of Chinese leaders in monks’ dormitories. Outside of the temples, the people of Tibet face regular searches of their residences: images of the Dalai Lama are confiscated from their homes, and there have even been cases of believers being imprisoned simply for having a photograph of His Holiness.⁶

Second, the ecosystem of the Tibetan Plateau is being systematically destroyed. The desertification of the Tibetan grasslands is a direct result of the Chinese state’s campaign against the nomadic lifestyle—a lifestyle that Tibetan herdsmen have been practicing for millennia. The state has forced thousands to leave behind the sheep, grasslands, and traditions of horseback riding with which they are familiar to move to the edges of towns, where they remain tied to one place. They have uprooted people from the sacred mountains and rivers that they called home, and forcibly changed their language, diet, and lifestyle, all of which have long been intertwined with the spirits and other living beings of the grasslands. Their dignity and their memories have been torn away from them: one can only imagine the heartbreak and pain of such “integration.”

The greatest irony of these developments is that the grasslands have not become any quieter since the herdsmen’s departure. In their wake, a sea of Han workers has arrived from across the country armed with blueprints, bulldozers, and dynamite. They have immediately gone to work on the empty grasslands and rivers, mining copper, gold, and silver, building dams, and polluting our water supply and that of Asia as a whole (in particular, the upper reaches of the Mekong, Yangtse, and Yarlung Tsangpo rivers).⁷ The product of this “development” has been widespread pollution and the complete destruction of the Tibetan Plateau’s ecosystem, resulting in increasing earthquakes, avalanches, debris flows, and other disasters.⁸

Third, Tibetan-language education has been increasingly de-emphasized in Tibetan schools. The goal here is clearly not a “melting pot” of benign cultural integration but rather the complete assimilation of the Tibetan people. Take, for example, the state’s reform of Tibetan-language teaching in Qinghai Province, which stipulates that “Chinese shall be the primary language of instruction, and Tibetan a secondary language.” Such educational reform has been designated by the Qinghai government as nothing less than a “pressing political task” for the future of Tibetan regions, aiming to accomplish through cultural and linguistic assimilation what the rulers of China have been unable to accomplish by any other means over the past sixty years: making Tibet “Chinese.”⁹ Since the protests of 2008, the state has even come to view the Tibetan language itself as a threat: a threat which, in their eyes, must be slowly eradicated in order to ensure long-term “stability.”

Fourth, Han Chinese immigration into Tibetan regions has increased in recent years. Under the pretext of “developing” Tibetan regions and attracting new talent and investment, the government has provided preferential taxation, land, finance, and welfare policies for Han immigrants to Tibet. A new policy, initiated in 2008, recruits local police from the military and special forces stationed in Tibet, reaping the dual benefit of providing plenty of well-trained recruits for the mission of “maintaining stability” in Tibet while at the same time ensuring a stable population of colonizers.

Finally, state surveillance and control have expanded across every inch of Tibet. The authorities have spared no effort in developing an Orwellian monitoring system that covers the whole territory, known simply as “the grid.” The grid divides neighborhoods into multiple units with corresponding government offices, which are benignly advertised as expanding social services. In practice, however, these offices are essential to the enhanced monitoring of Tibetan communities, and in particular such “critical groups” as “former prisoners, nuns, and monks who are not resident in a monastery or nunnery, former monks and nuns who have been expelled from their institutions, Tibetans who have returned from the exile community in India, and people involved in earlier protests.”¹⁰ By monitoring these groups, the grid, according to the authorities, “will cast an escape-proof net over Tibet for maintaining social stability” with “nets in the sky and traps on the ground.”¹¹ Even before 2008, western journalists visiting Tibet commented that you could feel the terror in the hearts of the Tibetan people. Now that terror is palpable in each and every breath we take.

Looking back upon the deterioration of conditions over the past decade, it now seems that the talks held between the Chinese government and representatives of the Dalai Lama from 2002 to 2008 were from the start nothing but an elaborate exercise in international public relations by the Chinese state for the sake of their beloved Beijing Olympics. Throughout these talks, the people of Tibet maintained their optimism and waited patiently for real progress. But then, on March 10, 2008, in his statement on the forty-ninth anniversary of Tibetan National Uprising Day, the Dalai Lama declared: “Since 2002, my envoys have conducted six rounds of talks with concerned officials of the People’s Republic of China to discuss relevant issues. However, on the fundamental issue, there has been no concrete result at all. And during the past few years, Tibet has witnessed increased repression and brutality.”¹² The fundamental issue, according to the Dalai Lama, is China’s lack of legitimacy in Tibet—a result of the state’s apparent inability “to pursue a policy that satisfies the Tibetan people and gains their confidence.”¹³

His Holiness’s words shocked Tibetans, who had been waiting patiently, year after year, for any sign of real progress. The 11th Panchen Lama had been taken away as a child and hidden from the public since 1995, replaced by a Panchen Lama selected by the Chinese government. The 17th Karmapa, also the subject of a controversy about the Chinese selection of Tibetan religious figures, had fled to India in 1999 after the Chinese state placed increasing restrictions on his activities. And the Dalai Lama, whom the Tibetan people hold in the highest esteem, has faced an endless stream of official slander and denunciations in recent decades, both through the official media and in the patriotic education campaign. Yet throughout all of this, the people of Tibet maintained the hope of a breakthrough. Then, in 2008, the Dalai Lama suddenly acknowledged what Tibetans living in Tibet had long known: not only had there been no progress, but life in Tibet had only become increasingly oppressive. The monks of the Sera Monastery near Lhasa were among the first to hear the Dalai Lama’s comments, and they immediately came to an agreement: “We must stand up!” They took to the streets, carrying the Tibetan flag and shouting slogans for freedom, launching the first stage of the protest movement that would rock culturally Tibetan regions in the coming weeks. That same afternoon, hundreds of monks from the Drepung Monastery—another of the capital’s three historic monasteries—came down to the center of Lhasa from the hillside in protest. They were followed in the following days by monks and nuns from all of the monasteries across the city.

The protests, known in China simply as the “March 14 Incident” and portrayed in official media as an unprovoked riot by ungrateful savages, grew out of ever-intensifying oppression and continual disappointments in Tibet. Once these protests had emerged, they grew and spread quickly. A common, cynical view of the protests blames protestors for all of the oppressive government actions that followed in their wake: the cruel suppression of peaceful protests, the tightening of security restrictions and expansion of police posts and checkpoints, and the transformation of Tibet into an open-air prison patrolled by omnipresent armed military police, armored personnel carriers, and surveillance cameras. But blaming protestors for state suppression betrays not only a flawed view of history, overlooking the continual heightening of repression long before the protests, but also a flawed ethical position. It is like arguing that the slave-driver uses his whip only because the slave has been disobedient; if we see the world through such a lens, the slave will always remain a slave. The oppression that has taken place since 2008 is a continuation and intensification of the oppression that preceded and produced 2008. We must remember that accepting oppression does not make it disappear, and that dictatorships have never been known for being charitable.

In February 2012, a post appeared on China’s popular Netease forums (similar to Reddit) entitled: “An Open Letter by a Tibetan Cadre.”¹⁴ Soon after being posted, the letter was deleted. The anonymous author, writing under the pseudonym Luo Feng, used his or her position as a Tibetan member of the Chinese Communist Party to complain to its leaders about the “human and natural disasters” visited upon Ngawa by then prefectural Party secretary and hardliner Shi Jun, whose tenure in the area ran from 2007 to 2012. Viewing the Tibetan people collectively as an enemy, Shi Jun oversaw a paranoid intensification of security measures, monitoring, and arrests. “Some called him the Lord of Devils, who escalated small incidents into huge confrontations to advance his own career,” the author wrote. “He claimed that the rusting, ancient knives and guns abandoned over thousands of years in the monasteries’ and temples’ shrines to the dharma protectors—abandoned to show an abandonment of evil—were the secret stockpiles of anti-communist insurrection and Tibetan independence.” The letter also discussed the growing number of self-immolations in Ngawa Prefecture, noting that “non-Tibetan officials, who have no principles and no feelings, show no sensitivity in response to such sensitive incidents, even saying, ‘As long as they burn away to nothing, that’s just fine,’ and ‘Execute the lot of them.’ ”

Complaints about Shi Jun and other officials with his enemy consciousness clearly have little effect. When this letter was posted, Shi Jun had already been promoted, in 2012, to the post of assistant to the Sichuan provincial governor and director-general of public security in Sichuan. Long after the letter’s release, he continues to hold these posts.

The letter also took aim at two Han Chinese officials in charge of “stability maintenance” work in Ngawa Prefecture: deputy prefectural governor Yan Chunfeng and the head of the management department for Kirti Monastery, Liu Feng. Both Yan and Liu are pure Party-state politicians without any knowledge of local beliefs and customs, and no interest in learning about the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1. Why Are Tibetans Self-Immolating?
• 2. The Protestors
• 3. State-Sponsored Slander and Media Blockades
• 4. Lhasa: Apartheid Redux
• 5. Self-Immolation as Protest
• Conclusion: Standing Together Through It All
• About the Cover Illustration
• Notes