Autonomy? Think again
Sul quotidiano in lingua inglese “The Times of India” è uscito l’altro ieri questo interessante contributo del tibetologo Elliot Sperling che pubblico volentieri, sia pure non tradotto, vista l’importanza delle sue analisi.
P.V.
Autonomy? Think Again
(By Elliot Sperling, “Times of India”, July 20, 2009)
As if any further evidence were needed of the ways in which China has been running rings around the Dalai Lama and his government-in-exile, recent events have made the situation abundantly clear. Last November the Tibetans presented a memorandum to China, meant to demonstrate that the Dalai Lama’s position on Tibetan autonomy was wholly compatible with China’s existing laws on regional nationality autonomy. The memorandum was vehemently rejected and the dialogue process between the two sides screeched to a halt.
On June 22, there were reports that exiled Tibetan officials were meeting to draft a statement clarifying their stand and, it was hoped, would open a way out of the impasse. The new statement is intended to demonstrate that the Tibetans want to reach an accord with China on the basis of Chinese autonomy laws. Unfortunately, the ignorance with which the authorities in exile deal with China is now on display in embarrassing detail. The Dalai Lama’s chief negotiators, Kelsang Gyaltsen and Lodi Gyari, have met with other officials to hammer out a position that they fantasise will interest China, and Lobsang Sangay, a Harvard-trained expert, has been reinforcing the exiled government’s views with his own analysis of the law. But the fact is that all of these people are functionally illiterate in the hundreds of articles and books all in Chinese that constitute the body of interpretive literature on regional nationality autonomy in China. That never seems to have perturbed the Dalai Lama’s people as they wander quite blindly around major issues of
Chinese policy.
Since the spring of 2008, China has responded to criticism of its historical claims to Tibet by scrapping its common line, that 13th-century Mongol conquerors made Tibet part of China, with the more forceful, take-no-prisoners position that Tibet has been a part of China “since human activity began”. Much as this exemplifies the attitude that history is not an objective measure against which to weigh Chinese claims, so too a new debate has opened in China that demonstrates that the laws on autonomy are not to be considered fixed standards against which the government can be challenged. To the contrary, they are tools of the government and party, dispensable when they are not serving the desired political ends. In April, seemingly unbeknownst to the Dalai Lama’s authorities, Ma Rong, a scholar who often writes on minority demographic and population issues, proposed a drastic measure, akin to what was done in the area of history: scrap the regime of regional nationality autonomy laws. The real problem, according to Ma Rong, is that China’s autonomy laws derive from a Stalinist heritage (which, in the Soviet Union, included rights to secession and independence), saddling China with a system that alienates minorities from the notion that they are part of the larger Chinese nationality. Now, with uncanny timing, the recent unrest in Xinjiang has underscored his contention. As Ma Rong puts it, the nationality laws encourage minorities to exclude others from their regions, privilege their own language, assert economic rights of their own and maintain and strengthen the historical consciousness, religions and practices that differentiate them from others, all in accord with Stalin’s definition of “nationality”. For Ma Rong, this is the crux of the problem: the current system leaves minorities with little or no sense that they are Chinese. Only three other countries, he notes, ever implemented a similar system with specific geographical regions for minority nationalities: the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. It goes without saying that the historical track record is not good. In contrast, India and the United States provide useful counter- examples. Jawaharlal Nehru in particular is cited for imbuing the members of various groups with the sense of being part of “the Indian nation”, while at the same time dulling the areas of ethno- national conflict between them. In the US, the election of Barack Obama is presented precisely because his platform was directed at the benefit of all Americans, with no taint of racial interest. Neither country has regional minority nationality autonomous
structures.
The debate that Ma Rong opened up in April is of critical importance to China’s Tibet policy. But no one in Dharamsala seems to have noticed. Rather than devote resources to acquiring the databases that would allow them to access the wide range of Chinese materials available online, the Dalai Lama decided in May to send $1,00,000 to Florida International University to support its religious studies programme. Though American dharma students are hardly an endangered species, such are Dharamsala’s priorities. Sonam Dagpo, of the Dalai Lama’s Department of Information and International Relations, told a news agency towards the end of June that the Tibetans “want to settle the issue mutually and within the framework of the Chinese constitution, law and national regional autonomy”.
Best of luck with that one, guys.
July 26th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Caro Piero,
Purtroppo sembra difficile dissentire dal professor Sperling. Anche da altri analisti politici e tibetologi quali Charles Rambler di Oxford ho sempre avuto conferma che il governo in esilio negli ultimi anni abbia giocato male e in modo dilettantesco la sua partita con la diplomazia cinese. Il finanziamento delle scuole di Dharma negli Stati Uniti evidenzia ancora una volta la contraddizione strutturale della politica del Dalai lama tra leader religioso universale e leader politico del Tibet. Come dice Riccardo Zerbetto l’unica speranza sta nella nascita di una vera alternativa laica alla guida dei tibetani.
Cio, Manfred
July 27th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Caro Manfred,
credo anche io che il punto di vista critico del professor Sperling non possa che essere condiviso.
Sul discorso del doppio ruolo religioso e politico del Dalai Lama il discorso sarebbe lungo e mi piacerebbe affrontarlo con te, Riccardo, Claudio e gli altri frequentatori di questo sito.
Magari nei prossimi giorni.
August 1st, 2009 at 6:27 pm
cari amici,
il corriere ha riportato alcuni giorni fa la tesi di Bahrat Verma direttore dell’Indian defence review sulla possibilita` concreta di un futuro conflitto tra Cina e India. Vi allego il testo in inglese da Times of India. Sarei felice di avere la vostra opinione in proposito e quali potrebbero essere le implicazioni che un tale scenario avrebbe per la questione tibetana.
Nervous China may attack India by 2012: Expert
A leading defence expert has projected that China will attack India by 2012 to divert the attention of its own people from “unprecedented” internal
dissent, growing unemployment and financial problems that are threatening the hold of Communists in that country.
“China will launch an attack on India before 2012. There are multiple reasons for a desperate Beijing to teach India the final lesson, thereby ensuring Chinese supremacy in Asia in this century,” Bharat Verma, Editor of the Indian Defence Review, has said.
Verma said the recession has “shut the Chinese exports shop”, creating an “unprecedented internal social unrest” which in turn, was severely threatening the grip of the Communists over the society.
Among other reasons for this assessment were rising unemployment, flight of capital worth billions of dollars, depletion of its foreign exchange reserves and growing internal dissent, Verma said in an editorial in the forthcoming issue of the premier defence journal. In addition to this, “The growing irrelevance of Pakistan, their right hand that operates against India on their behest, is increasing the Chinese nervousness,” he said, adding that US President Barak Obama’s Af-Pak policy was primarily Pak-Af policy that has “intelligently set the thief to catch the thief”.
Verma said Beijing was “already rattled, with its proxy Pakistan now literally embroiled in a civil war, losing its sheen against India.” “Above all, it is worried over the growing alliance of India with the US and the West, because the alliance has the potential to create a technologically superior counterpoise.
“All these three concerns of Chinese Communists are best addressed by waging a war against pacifist India to achieve multiple strategic objectives,” he said.
While China “covertly allowed” North Korea to test underground nuclear explosion and carry out missile trials, it was also “increasing its naval presence in South China Sea to coerce into submission those opposing its claim on the Sprately Islands,” the defence expert said. He said it would be “unwise” at this point of time for a recession-hit China to move against the Western interests, including Japan.
“Therefore, the most attractive option is to attack a soft target like India and forcibly occupy its territory in the Northeast,” Verma said. But India is “least prepared” on ground to face the Chinese threat, he says and asks a series of questions on how will India respond to repulse the Chinese game plan or whether Indian leadership would be able to “take the heat of war”.
“Is Indian military equipped to face the two-front wars by Beijing and Islamabad? Is the Indian civil administration geared to meet the internal security challenges that the external actors will sponsor simultaneously through their doctrine of unrestricted warfare? “The answers are an unequivocal ‘no’. Pacifist India is not ready by a long shot either on the internal or the external front,” the defence journal editor says. In view of the “imminent threat” posed by China, “the quickest way to swing out of pacifism to a state of assertion is by injecting military thinking in the civil administration to build the sinews. That will enormously increase the deliverables on ground – from Lalgarh to Tawang,” he says.
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