The Tibetan Intifada

What happened in Tibet and the neighboring provinces might best be called an intifada. I won’t attempt a comparison with the first and second Palestinian intifadas (the first is closer to the Tibetan uprising, though it lasted much longer and probably involved a larger proportion of the population). But I want to tell the Tibetan story with the Palestinian story in the back of my mind.

We don’t have much detailed information about the recent demonstrations or about the repression. Accounts from Tibetan sources tell of peaceful marches broken up by police and soldiers with clubs and then with guns. Journalists confirm these accounts but tell also of riots that involved the looting and burning of Chinese shops and attacks on individual Chinese settlers. Official sources in Beijing emphasize the attacks and insist that police and soldiers fired only in self-defense. Most commentators assume what I will also assume, that whatever the violence of the demonstrators, the violence of the repression has been greater. It has also been highly effective very quickly—a sign of its massiveness and probably of its brutality.

The leader of the Tibetans, the Dalai Lama, and many of his followers live in exile. They supported the intifada, but criticized the attacks on Chinese settlers; they also sharply rejected charges by the Chinese government that they had instigated the uprising. While participants in the demonstrations chanted slogans calling for an independent Tibet, the official position of the Dalai Lama asks only for religious freedom and some sort of autonomy. While supporters of the intifada urged a boycott of the Beijing Olympics, the Dalai Lama has refused to support boycott activity.

The Dalai Lama is committed to nonviolence, and so are most of his followers. So far as I know, terrorism has never been practiced by the Tibetans—or even debated as a possible strategy. The moderation of the official Tibetan political program is, I assume, an example of reluctant realism. A two-state solution was never acceptable to the Chinese government, and today it is no longer possible (this is the biggest difference between Tibet and Palestine). There is now a Han Chinese majority in Tibet, and no one imagines the withdrawal of this population, though many of its members probably long for the China they left behind. Tibetans are a fairly small and dispersed minority in the neighboring provinces; they too may long for their lost homeland, but they are unlikely ever to return. Faced with a great power committed to a program of massive settlement, they have lost the big political battle for independence.

The Palestinian intifada that began in 1987 led—partly because Israeli repression was nowhere near as brutal or effective as what we have seen in Tibet and partly because Israel’s Labor party won the 1992 elections—to secret negotiations and then to the Oslo agreement. Will the Tibetan intifada have similar results? I suspect that it won’t. The repression has been too successful, and there is no opposition party that can contest an election—and no real elections to contest. But the fact that the Tibetans are asking for so little should make it easy to reach an agreement on some measure of autonomy. The Chinese government has an extraordinary opportunity to resolve the Tibetan question and perhaps, at the same time, open the way for an eventual resolution of the status of Taiwan. But while the Tibetans are pragmatists, at this moment the Chinese are rigid ideologues. Communist ideology is eroding (and in erosion there is hope), but it has been replaced by a fierce nationalism that seems to preclude an agreement on autonomy anytime soon.

Meanwhile, should the Western left be urging a boycott of the Olympics? What about a boycott of Chinese scholars and universities—on the model of the boycott of Israeli scholars and universities urged by many leftists? We have argued in Dissent against boycotts, and I think that is the right position. But it isn’t an argument for silence. There are many forms of agitation and demonstration (as we have recently seen in London and Paris). The people of Tibet have every right to ask for our active support. But athletes and academics, and diplomats too, should continue to meet even while we agitate and demonstrate.

Michael Walzer is the co-editor of Dissent