by Ang Cher Kiat

From fiery exchanges on internet forums to commentaries in international dailies on the outburst of pro-Tibet protests around the world, most often than not, the word “history” is thrown around putatively from both side.[i] A notable example came from a recent Jakarta Post editorial stating that “any student of history cannot but condemn the occupation (of Tibet).”[ii]

Despite some insightful points made on the cultural ties between Indonesia and Tibet by Anand Krishna, a well respected spiritual activist, I cannot agree that he speaks for all “students of history”. Placards waved by Pro-China demonstrators from San Francisco to Canberra with the words, “Tibet was, is and will always be a part of China” (emphasis mine) continues to betray the partisanships of the issue.

The point that I am trying to illustrate is how polarised the history of can be when faced with the “Tibet question”. The complexity of the issue is illustrated by a well-informed but alas inadequate Straits Time editorial’s attempt on presenting some “bedrock truths” about Tibet. It states that “romanticised nonsense spewed about Tibet does not change the fact that it has been a part of Chinese empire for three centuries.”[iii]

This opinion fails to consider the historical political structure of the Manchu empire and the Spiritual master-student relationship between the Dalai Lama and Manchu emperors. In an effort to shed more light on the subject, a survey of existing western works addressing the 1951-1959 “invasion” of Tibet is carried out to highlight how Tibet’s history have been used and abused.

Available literature on the “invasion” of Tibet can be roughly grouped into those with partisan positions and those which hold the middle-ground. Partisan discourses include a Tibetan Lobby, informed by the Tibetan Diaspora and sympathisers, and discourses informed by a cold war mentality. Pro-China scholarships are carried out by Chinese scholars based in America and China sympathisers.

Discourses shrouded in cold-war mentality usually serve as the fulcrum of American anti-communist effort in South Asia. The authors’ chief concerns are generally with Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) operations in Tibet during the 1950s, placing the Tibet issue within the context of the Cold War. The Cold War mentality also laid the foundation for future accusations against the atrocities of the Chinese invading forces through the reports of the International Commission of Jurist (ICJ), an organization tasked to carry out a full-scale investigation of what happened in Lhasa.

The ICJ was hardly impartial. It had “evolute” from the Investigating Committee of Free Jurists (ICFJ), an organization funded by the CIA (to the tune of least U.S. $650,000) to “publish anticommunist propaganda”. ICJ’s primary purpose has been explicitly stated in American Bar Association Journal as “gather(ing) and publish(ing) documented reports throughout the world of systematic Communist injustice behind the Iron Curtain.”[iv]

The work of ICJ has also informed many partisan scholars’ work such as Hugh E. Richardson’s Tibet and its people and a self-proclaimed handbook for American higher education in Tibetan studies, Tibet: A handbook by Helmut Hoffman. [v]

Post Cold War scholarship persists in the same vein regardless of attempts to repackage them. Jane Ardley’s The Tibetan Independence Movement: Political, religious and Gandhian perspectives (2002) and ex-CIA operative in Tibet, John Kenneth Knaus’s Orphans of the cold war (1999) are examples of some of these works.[vi] These works continue to be a wellspring of inspiration for hawkish US legislators addressing the perceived “Chinese threat” through its rise as an economic power.

Donald S. Lopez Jr, a scholar on Tibetan Buddhism has examined the introduction of Tibetan iconography into mainstream American popular culture in the 1970s-90s and interpreted it somewhat exaggeratingly as “spiritual colonialism”. The cultivation of Tibetan Buddhist sensitivity has laid the ground for garnering greater political sympathies towards the Tibetan cause.[vii] This juxtaposition of reverence for Tibetan culture with explicit calls for Tibetan independence is not only based on ICJ’s accusation of cultural genocide but can also be seen as part of the Dalai Lama’s political strategy in his struggle with the Chinese government.

Publications put out by lobbies such as International Campaigners for Tibet (ICT) and Tibet Information Network (TIN) usually carry such partisan scholarship. Publishing houses, such as Snow Lion and Shambala Publishing, were also set up to propagate literature for the Tibetan cause,. Patt David’s misleadingly named work, A strange liberation: Tibetan lives in Chinese hands published by Snow Lion, does not detail the existing livelihood of Tibetans as it suggests, but consists of two accounts of the Chinese “invasion” by two Tibetan nobles, including Tibet’s poster female resistance fighter, Ama Adhe.[viii]

University Presses are also keen to publish works by Tibetans, such as Tsepon W.D. Shakabpa’s Tibet, a political history and Tsering Shakya’s The dragon in the land of snows: a history of modern Tibet since 1947.[ix] Both authors were key Tibetan government officials prior to the “invasion”, which implies that they could be personally invested when telling their sides of the story.

Literature which presents China’s case also began to appear within the western academic sphere soon after the “invasion”. Such works are written by Chinese and foreigners, Marxists and non-Marxist scholars and largely empathises with the pre-‘liberated’ general Tibetan populace.

In Li Tieh Tseng’s revised edition of The Historical Status of Tibet (retitled Tibet: Today and Yesterday), he suggested that “Tibet’s independence should be the Tibetan people’s choice” but – in adopting President Wilson’s self-determination principle – “do not think that those landed aristocrats and feudal lords of Tibet who took refuge in India can speak for the Tibetan people.”

The Gelder brothers, journalists who travelled to Tibet in 1962, while being sceptical of the claims by the “Chinese Communists”, saw for themselves the legacy of the exploitative Tibetan nobles and religious bureaucrats.[xi]

Han Suyin also recorded the testimonies of atrocities committed against novice and child-monks from poor families within the Sera monastery, the world’s largest active religious site.[xii]

(The Sera Monastery is in the foreground)

(Monks in Sera Monastery)

Anna Louise Strong, a Marxist scholar who defected to Beijing, also helped promoted Beijing’s line in the West.[xiii] These works started to abate as the Tibetan lobby’s influence increased during the 1970s and 1980s, but some of their arguments were followed up by middle-ground scholars.

Amidst such polarized discourses, scholars such Dawa Norbu, A. Tom Grunfeld and Melvyn C. Goldstein took a more middle-ground approach in trying to present more balanced perspectives of the issue.[xiv] I am not suggesting that these scholars do not have ideological positions on the issue of political legitimacy, but they have been able to synthesise arguments from both sides and generally refrained from being overtly partisan. These works have been able to evolve out of the Kuhnian limitations of organised institutions or discourses because they recognise inherent problems within existing scholarship and attempt to resolve them.[xv]

The case of Dawa Norbu is especially informative of the prevailing climate amongst the Tibetan Diaspora. Because he had dared to veer away from official discourses, Norbu has been criticised and accused of being a traitor by the Dalai Lama camp. What Norbu had aimed to highlight was the ambiguity of a united Tibet and that “fractionism” has to be factored into any discourse on the Chinese “invasion”. He also suggested that Tibetan’s claim of legitimate sovereignty phrased in modern terminologies only appeared after contact with the Communist Chinese’s own claim of sovereignty in Tibet.[xvi]

Hence, the Tibet issue is not as clear-cut as various commentators have made it out to be. In highlighting the plurality of discourses above, I hope to demonstrate that to understand what is happening in Tibet today, one has to not only know its “history” but understand how various “histories” have been created.

The author graduated with honours in History from NUS in 2005. He is currently Publication Executive at Chinese Heritage Centre and is interested in History of Modern China-Tibet relations and Chinese Overseas. The article is partly based on researches carried out in the author’s undergraduate years and the opinions expressed are within his personal capacity.

[i] My personal favourite is a comment made by a local radio DJ on the morning aftermath of the London Olympic torch relay hubbub: “These people (the protestors attempting to extinguish the Olympic torch) does not know the history!” Having made the comment after reference to the political status of Tibet, “History” here presumably refers to the history of Tibet, not that of the Olympics nor the torch relay. The perceived separation of the Olympics and politics makes for more discussion, for a recent survey of historical works on the issue, see Allen Guttmann, “Sports, Politics and the Engaged Historian”, Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 38, No. 3, Sports and Politics (July 2003), pgs. 363-375. It is sufficient to note here that the Olympic torch relay was invented as part of the Third Reich’s propagandistic spectacle at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

[ii] Anand Krishna, “Indonesia, Tibet and the secret of ‘terima kasih’”, The Jakarta Post (24 March 2008). Thanks to Gille Massot for posting the article to Taoism-singapore yahoogroup.

[iii] “What Tibet is to China”, The Straits Times (18 March 2008).

[iv]Tom Killefer, “Free lawyers and Cold War. The International Commission of Jurists” American Bar Association Journal, 41 (May 1995) p. 417, cited in Tom A. Grunfeld,The making of modern Tibet (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, Rev. ed. 1996), pgs. 146-147.

[v] Hugh E. Richardson, Tibet and its history, (Boulder: Shambhala 2nd ed., rev. and enl., 1984), pgs. 241-243; and Helmut Hoffman in collaboration with Stanley Frye, Thubten J. Norbu, Ho-chin Yang, Tibet: A Handbook (Bloomington: Published for the Asian Studies Research Institute by the Research Center for the Language Sciences, Indiana University, 1975) pgs. 80-81.

[vi] See Jane Ardley, The Tibetan Independence Movement: Political, religious and Gandhian perspectives, (New York: Routledge, 2002) and John Kenneth Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan struggle for survival (New York: PublicAffairs, c1999).

[vii] Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pg. 207.

[viii] Patts David, A strange liberation: Tibetan lives in Chinese hands (Ithaca, New York: Snow Lion Publications, 1992).

[ix] Tsepon W.D. Shakabpa, Tibet, a political history (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1967) and Tsering Shakya, The dragon in the land of snows: a history of modern Tibet since 1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

[x] Li Tieh-Tseng, Tibet: Today and Yesterday (New York: Bookman Associates, revised ed., 1960) pg. xiii.

[xi] Stuart & Roma Gelder, The timely rain; travels in new Tibet (London, Hutchinson, c1964).

[xii] Han Siyun, The Open City - A journey to Tibet (New York: G. P. Punam’s Son, 1977). Sera Monastry is a key site during recent protests.

[xiii] Anna Louise Strong, When Serfs Stood up in Tibet (Beijing: New World Press, 1965).

[xiv] Tom A. Grunfeld, The making of modern Tibet(Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, Rev. ed. 1996).

[xv] For a discussion of institutional influences on academic scholarship refer to Thomas S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions (IL: University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed, 1996).

[xvi] See Dawa Norbu, China’s Tibet policy (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001).

Tags: historiography, Tibet

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