The Chinese are invading Tibet–again. Four decades after the People’s Liberation Army seized the kingdom and crushed an uprising by the followers of the Dalai Lama, Beijing has found a more effective method of conquest: money. In 1992 the government lifted controls on Chinese migration to Tibet, then made it worthwhile by offering jobs that paid two or three times the rate of the same work in China’s interior. Last year alone Beijing invested some $270 million in 62 projects including the plaza near the Potala and a solar-powered radio and TV station that will broadcast Communist Party propaganda in Tibetan. As a result of these inducements, Lhasa’s population is now at least 50 percent non-Tibetan, according to Western analysts.
Locals might not mind so much if they thought they were getting more of the economic benefits. Tibet-which means “Western treasure house” in Mandarinhas long been plundered for its gold, timber and other resources and remains unremittingly poor. Many Tibetans still live a nomadic hand-to-mouth existence. Working herds of shaggy yaks in the summer and retreating to the capital in the winter to seek alms until the winter snows subside, they earn less than $100 per year. But now maroon-robed monks compete with Chinese beggars for spare change. Lhasans also grumble that most new entrepreneurial opportunities go to outsiders. Government funds are “inextricably linking Tibet’s economy with the rest of China,” argues Prof. Melvyn Goldstein, a Tibet scholar at Case Western Reserve University. “This has also resulted in non-Tibetans controlling a large segment of the local economy at all levels, from street-corner bicycle repairmen to electronic-goods-store owners and firms tradil) is a general- of China.”
Newcomers have a significant advantage over locals connections in the Chinese interior. In landlocked Tibet, the best consumer goods were smuggled in from Nepal only a decade ago. Now Chinese Muslim (Hui) peddlers in the vegetable market hawk chicken eggs trucked in from Gansu province, bananas from coastal Guangdong and Lux soap made in Shanghai. Chinese shopkeepers prefer to sell to other Chinese and seem openly disdainful of Tibetans, sometimes grabbing a broom to shoo out gawking nomads who spend too much time fiddling with the merchandise.
The tension inevitably erupts. Recently a local sat down in a Hui restaurant to a meal-and pulled from his plate of dumplings what Xinhua news agency called “a long fingernail.” The disgusted diner shouted to his friends, “They’re serving human flesh!” After the enraged restaurateur attacked them with a metal bar, some Khampas from eastern Tibet joined the brawl. The fighting spilled into the street for a while, and resumed the next day. When it was over, several Hui shops had been vandalized; a dozen Tibetans were arrested. The provocations continue. On Lhasa’s streets, Chinese vendors sometimes prepare dog meat in plain view of passersby-an outrageous affront to Tibetans, who believe that dogs are reincarnated as people. “The potential for overreaction,” says a Western diplomat in Beijing, “is great.”
Government officials dismiss the idea that China is obliterating Tibetan culture. “That’s sheer fabrication,” snaps Raidi, deputy Communist Party secretary of Tibet. who is Tibetan. He claims that Chinese people constitute less than 3 percent of Tibet’s population of 2.2 million-neglecting to mention the 60,000 PLA troops and 50,000 or more migrants in the region. The official press blames Tibet’s troubles on a “psychology of idleness.” There are now more monks and nuns than high-school students, the Tibet Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, recently pointed out. “Such a huge number of young, strong people are not engaged in production…. The negative influence on economic and ethnic cultural development is self-evident.”
But Beijing continues to undermine Tibet’s self-sufficiency. Designated as an “autonomous region,” Tibet is anything but. Its religious life, as well as its economic and political fate, depends entirely on Beijing. Chinese authorities recently dropped a commitment to mandate the use of the Tibetan language in government offices. “Tibetans can speak Tibetan at -home and at work,” says a Lhasa intellectual who has a government job. “But in order to get ahead, you must speak Chinese.”
The influx of Chinese people has a political purpose, too –to muffle calls for independence. Many Lhasa residents blame Hui shopkeepers for harboring police during separatist demonstrations back in 1989, and for supporting the brutal crackdown that followed. Today, closed-circuit video cameras monitor activities at major intersections in the Tibetan quarter, around the markets near the fabled Jokhang temple, even in the altar rooms of the Potala Palace. Police pounce on protesters before they can attract crowds. The intimidation seems to be working. “The Chinese are more clever than we Tibetans,” says an educated Lhasan. “So they get all the good jobs. They work very hard, even moving mountains when they want to.” Beijing’s most potent weapon is to make Tibetan culture seem worthless–even in a Lhasan’s eyes.
