Urging, not bashing, over Tibet
Maybe you didn’t notice: On the Ides of March, no less, baseball — America’s game — was Nero’s fiddle while Rome burned. Sports fans: In this column, you’ll need a scorecard to count the metaphors. Or the dead.
See, it wasn’t Rome; it was Lhasa, Tibet. And the city didn’t burn, but dozens of people protesting for democracy lost their lives violently. The numbers vary, depending on whether you believe the Chinese government, which has restricted information on the unrest in Lhasa.
But if the world was uncertain about how many died in Tibet, they certainly knew the score of the first American baseball game ever in Beijing between the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers. It was 3-3. How’s that for an exhibition of communism in action? Three-to-three? Just like a T-ball game. Everyone’s a winner in China!
That is, unless you’re a monk in Tibet or a Chinese person yearning for a little freedom.
You’ll get your head cracked if you don’t “play ball.”
The baseball game in Beijing, the Olympics and the torch run represent real opportunities for everyone to deal with China’s issues: Beyond Tibet, there’s oil in Darfur, food, animal and product issues, and the basic human rights of prisoners. The list goes on.
Sports are a diversion from real world politics and shouldn’t be politicized. But sports shouldn’t be seen as merely frivolous exercises either. Their greatest value is to offer a way to humanize and familiarize ourselves with different countries and cultures. They represent real opportunities for understanding in the larger issues that matter.
So this is the time for all China watchers to focus their gaze. And protest may be the best way to express concerns and dissatisfactions over China, and how our U.S. government and institutions play a role in China’s behavior.
Whither, Tibet?
Surely, it will take a lot more than going out to protest at the Olympic torch route in San Francisco to get things to change in China.
That’s not to say demonstrations are mere futile displays. They count for something. Even that resolution passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is meaningful. It’s not exactly standing up to a tank in Tiananmen Square, but it is an act by a representative body in America’s most Chinese American city.
Still, it will take a massive dose of all of these things by the whole world to set the stage for the power players to be nudged enough to take some dramatic moves, especially for Tibet.
In a recent Wall Street Journal commentary, Wang Lixiong, a Beijing writer who has written extensively on the Tibet policy, wrote about how the easy solution really is simple and easy — but, so far, unattainable.
He wrote about the conflict of the Tibetan monks who are told by China to reject the Dalai Lama, currently in exile, or face the brutality they have faced in recent weeks. As Wang points out, that’s like asking the monks to renounce a parent.
But China is holding steady, and what’s driving all the violence is a matter of “face.” In view of the monks, the Chinese have denounced freedom for Tibet as giving in to “splittism.” It can’t really be called democracy, can it?
Wang cited Phuntsog Wanggyal, a former Tibetan Communist official now retired in Beijing, as saying a group of hardliners in the party who deal with religious and cultural affairs have adopted a new belief of “anti-splittism.”
“Having invested their careers in anti-splittism,” Wang writes, “these people cannot admit that the idea is mistaken without losing face and, they fear, losing their own power and position as well.”
And so we have harsh crackdowns justified by “hostile foreign forces.” The end result is people dig in and adopt the party line.
The way to change it then seems clear: Make doing the right thing a matter of saving face. And that’s where demonstrating can be an act that could gently nudge the power players to find a path to a better conclusion from the inside out.
The Dalai Lama has suggested autonomy for Tibet, except in foreign affairs and national defense. It’s a middle ground position that may be enough to quell the violence for now, but not the thirst for real freedom and autonomy.
And what of the rest of China’s “issues”? So far, the Tibet issue just seems more doable if the goal is an end to the violence. Converting an anti-splittist should be easier than hitting a split-fingered fastball.
emil@amok.com