Because I have an LJ: It cannot last.
This is kinda cool. I can enter random stuff in here late at night when I run out of time during the day. I can put it in the public domain and thus pretend that I'm 'performing,' ignoring the fact that no-one reads this journal, and go to sleep with some feeling of creative accomplishment. Hopefully this will stop me from getting frustrated and falling fallow again. We'll see.
Tibet. Oh Tibet.
It cannot last. Either the whole premise of rightness on which we've built our world is faulty, or it cannot last. I wouldn't sniff at the first proposition, either. That's the main source of China's current repugnance - after the Cold War we thought that we'd established the common morality, but China has a different moral structure. The EU is part of the same moral tradition as the USA, but China is not. Its morality has a different tradition, and of the geopolitical axis nations it is in this way unique.
Now there may be some truth to the idea of valid divergent moral codes. There's definitely truth to the idea that our current state of affairs is not the ultimate expression of societal ethics. However, you can go too far. An alternative morality may have valid points, but at some point alternative approaches become the same old oppression that never lasts.
Tibet is such a case.
You know what the Chinese are doing. It's the same thing that's happening in West Papua (or "Irian Jaya") - mandated population transfers of the conquering ethnicity into the new area in order to disperse and destroy the conquered culture. And I have seen the colonial defense used for it - "We've built railroads and cities and brought in so much prosperity to Tibet." This, perhaps, is the crux of the new morality. Prosperity trumps all. A little oppression is acceptable if you're getting wealthier as a result. Ignore for a moment the racism that keeps Tibetans working as labourers while loyal Chinese management is brought in to reap the rewards. You know the colonial story too.
What is important is this: what happens when the wealth runs out?
There are a few similarities between Tibet and Indonesia, or rather Tibet and the Dutch East Indies. Actually, come to think of it, Xinjiang and the Dutch East Indies might share more similarities - because there are precious few natural resources in Tibet that make it worth holding. Before the Chinese takeover, the economy was basically subsistence agriculture. Now it's tourism...and subsistence agriculture. Has China gained money on the Tibet acquisition? I wonder.
There is no economic reason for China to keep Tibet. There is no ethnic reason for them to do so - the recent Chinese immigrants number around 6% of the population as of 2000. There are very, very few Tibetans who would prefer Chinese administration to their own, and many houses still have a portrait of the Dalai Lama when he is considered an agitator and dissident renegade by the Chinese authorities.
And now the Tibetans have had it and the Chinese responded with force. Which, perhaps, illustrates the only real reason for China's invasion.
Military.
I suppose that Tibet is quite strategic in terms of its proximity to India. I suppose that the glorious People's Liberation Army (pardon me while I spit out the Orwell in my mouth) feels the need for new fights every so often, and a principality it owns is a principality it cannot let go - even if all the Dalai Lama asks for is an autonomous status similar to Hong Kong's. The PLA's been throwing a few quiet tantrums recently - notably when it refused to allow a U.S. naval ship to dock in Hong Kong for shore leave on Thanksgiving, or when it refused safe harbour to two U.S. naval vessels caught in a storm. That, incidentally, is a breach of international naval law. But who cares inside their hallowed halls?
Perhaps we forget that, before Deng Xiao Ping, China lobotomised and applied electric current to its collective brain for nigh on 7 years. It also dismembered its collective body and since then has pursued bread and circuses in an effort to forget - but the bread is poisoned by industrial runoff and not everyone gets to see the circus. To put it bluntly, they're insane. Still. The people who lived through the insanity had to become mad themselves, and they still exert influence over China today. Hu Jintao is the first of the new guard, and he isn't all that new.
What happens when the party's over? When those frivolous Americans upset the apple cart China's been riding on? When the critical mass of farmers turns against the corruption of their prefectural superiors? Do they think that they can always call in the army and suppress things with brute force? Wall St thinks it can use brute financial power to bail out markets every time one of the star players screws up, but we've gone from quiet hedge fund collapses to Bear Stearns being bought out for $2 a share. Bear Stearns was one of the holdouts over the LTCM affair - the most stubborn player, the one most reluctant to come to the party. They were LTCM's clearance bank, for heaven's sake! They held the axe over its head. And now they're being bought out by JP Morgan for 1/15th of their current share price (which had already lost 47 percent in the last day).
Once again China's people will suffer torment and hardship brought upon them by their leaders' casual use of collective lives and livelihoods as a blunt tool of governance. I don't know when it will happen, but it will happen.
Because of Tibet. Because they've demonstrated the bankrupt nature of their policies, and all those policies have to fall back on is brutal, cowing, unmerciful killing force.
It cannot last.
Tibet. Oh Tibet.
It cannot last. Either the whole premise of rightness on which we've built our world is faulty, or it cannot last. I wouldn't sniff at the first proposition, either. That's the main source of China's current repugnance - after the Cold War we thought that we'd established the common morality, but China has a different moral structure. The EU is part of the same moral tradition as the USA, but China is not. Its morality has a different tradition, and of the geopolitical axis nations it is in this way unique.
Now there may be some truth to the idea of valid divergent moral codes. There's definitely truth to the idea that our current state of affairs is not the ultimate expression of societal ethics. However, you can go too far. An alternative morality may have valid points, but at some point alternative approaches become the same old oppression that never lasts.
Tibet is such a case.
You know what the Chinese are doing. It's the same thing that's happening in West Papua (or "Irian Jaya") - mandated population transfers of the conquering ethnicity into the new area in order to disperse and destroy the conquered culture. And I have seen the colonial defense used for it - "We've built railroads and cities and brought in so much prosperity to Tibet." This, perhaps, is the crux of the new morality. Prosperity trumps all. A little oppression is acceptable if you're getting wealthier as a result. Ignore for a moment the racism that keeps Tibetans working as labourers while loyal Chinese management is brought in to reap the rewards. You know the colonial story too.
What is important is this: what happens when the wealth runs out?
There are a few similarities between Tibet and Indonesia, or rather Tibet and the Dutch East Indies. Actually, come to think of it, Xinjiang and the Dutch East Indies might share more similarities - because there are precious few natural resources in Tibet that make it worth holding. Before the Chinese takeover, the economy was basically subsistence agriculture. Now it's tourism...and subsistence agriculture. Has China gained money on the Tibet acquisition? I wonder.
There is no economic reason for China to keep Tibet. There is no ethnic reason for them to do so - the recent Chinese immigrants number around 6% of the population as of 2000. There are very, very few Tibetans who would prefer Chinese administration to their own, and many houses still have a portrait of the Dalai Lama when he is considered an agitator and dissident renegade by the Chinese authorities.
And now the Tibetans have had it and the Chinese responded with force. Which, perhaps, illustrates the only real reason for China's invasion.
Military.
I suppose that Tibet is quite strategic in terms of its proximity to India. I suppose that the glorious People's Liberation Army (pardon me while I spit out the Orwell in my mouth) feels the need for new fights every so often, and a principality it owns is a principality it cannot let go - even if all the Dalai Lama asks for is an autonomous status similar to Hong Kong's. The PLA's been throwing a few quiet tantrums recently - notably when it refused to allow a U.S. naval ship to dock in Hong Kong for shore leave on Thanksgiving, or when it refused safe harbour to two U.S. naval vessels caught in a storm. That, incidentally, is a breach of international naval law. But who cares inside their hallowed halls?
Perhaps we forget that, before Deng Xiao Ping, China lobotomised and applied electric current to its collective brain for nigh on 7 years. It also dismembered its collective body and since then has pursued bread and circuses in an effort to forget - but the bread is poisoned by industrial runoff and not everyone gets to see the circus. To put it bluntly, they're insane. Still. The people who lived through the insanity had to become mad themselves, and they still exert influence over China today. Hu Jintao is the first of the new guard, and he isn't all that new.
What happens when the party's over? When those frivolous Americans upset the apple cart China's been riding on? When the critical mass of farmers turns against the corruption of their prefectural superiors? Do they think that they can always call in the army and suppress things with brute force? Wall St thinks it can use brute financial power to bail out markets every time one of the star players screws up, but we've gone from quiet hedge fund collapses to Bear Stearns being bought out for $2 a share. Bear Stearns was one of the holdouts over the LTCM affair - the most stubborn player, the one most reluctant to come to the party. They were LTCM's clearance bank, for heaven's sake! They held the axe over its head. And now they're being bought out by JP Morgan for 1/15th of their current share price (which had already lost 47 percent in the last day).
Once again China's people will suffer torment and hardship brought upon them by their leaders' casual use of collective lives and livelihoods as a blunt tool of governance. I don't know when it will happen, but it will happen.
Because of Tibet. Because they've demonstrated the bankrupt nature of their policies, and all those policies have to fall back on is brutal, cowing, unmerciful killing force.
It cannot last.