The Real Reason For The Tibet Protests
April 6, 2008
XIAHE, China, New American Media — As Tibetan horsemen charge like fiery embers over withered grass to attack a Chinese government outpost, the Dalai Lama and the Beijing government point fingers of blame for the firestorm sweeping the Tibetan Plateau. Far from these vast grasslands, neither authority — religious or secular — has much of a clue of the range war happening here.
This battle for the grasslands has been smoldering for the past decade over the volatile price of livestock and food-cost inflation, largely due to the skyrocketing market value of meat. While Buddhists around the world may practice vegetarianism, red meat is essential to the Tibetan diet — especially for monks known as lamas — since it is the only effective means of transforming the abundant grass into protein.
As is the case for workers in the meat industry worldwide, Tibetan herders and family farmers here are at the bottom rung of the economic ladder, receiving the least cash for the most hours worked. Tibetan herdsmen are scattered, often illiterate and unable to converse in Mandarin. They are even discouraged from owning trucks, since lamas tell them that their scant earnings are better spent on donations to the Buddhist monasteries.
Pastoral isolation leaves the herders open to undercutting by Muslim middlemen. Ten years ago, the price of a fat-tailed sheep was about US$14. Four years ago, as the newly constructed western highways were extended, the price tripled due to rising demand for lamb chops in wealthy cities of the distant Pacific Coast. This sudden boom led to encroachment by one group of herders onto the lands leased by other groups. Range wars erupted between odd coalitions of Tibetans, Mongols and Muslims.
Here, money is meat, meat is grass and people kill for grass. Though the bloodshed in the high prairie may seem anachronistic, it is directly linked to the global economy that Beijing has so eagerly embraced. Far away in the capital, foreign executives can tuck into a business lunch featuring an 8-ounce rib eye with potatoes, vegetables and salad for a mere $4 at a steakhouse affiliated with Cargill, the gigantic U.S. grain conglomerate. A medium-rare steak is surely a sign of reform and free trade — but the delivery mechanism remains hidden from view.
In more recent years, huge feedlots supplied by American grain companies have sprung up in Inner Mongolia, the Shantung Peninsula and outside of Shanghai. Their purchasing agents ply the Muslim truckers with fistfuls of cash for shipments of thousands of live animals. With so much demand from the rich cities, meat became scarce in local markets, and food prices shot up.
Tibetans were buying a leg of lamb for the price of a whole animal, and few would ever stop to consider the inflated price of fuel and truck leasing for the Muslim middleman. In the first day of the Lhasa riots, most of the casualties of arson were Hui Muslim noodle restaurant workers, who migrated to the newly prosperous provincial capital over the past decade — just as Mexican immigrants have gone to major cities to work as dishwashers.
The frustration and anger of the Tibetan mobs will not immediately result in either independence or genocidal repression — only a heightened state of anxiety and distrust. The rules of Tibetan Buddhism have curbed the native population from common trades practiced by citizens of a modern secular nation-state. Instead, a multiethnic caste system is being perpetuated, with the Muslims doing the butchering, running restaurants and driving; the Nepalese crafting the jewelry and brassware; and the Chinese laborers building roads and raising power lines. With rising expectations and ruthless greed, cultural and religious difference is a formula for ethnic vendetta.
One solution lies in establishing a fair trading system for poverty-stricken Tibetan herders and for the Muslim meatpackers. The solution is not easy, given the steady loss of grassland and glaciers to global warming. The only consolation from this vicious cycle is that long after the global economy collapses under its own unsustainable weight, the Tibetan and Mongol herdsmen will still be grazing their sheep in these uplands, while their Muslim neighbors grow fields of wheat in the arid valleys below.
Yoichi Shimatsu is a media studies lecturer at Tsinghua University in Beijing and former editor of the Japan Times Weekly in Tokyo. Shimatsu is a mountain-environment consultant currently working on grasslands restoration projects in the Tibetan Plateau and other arid uplands of western China.
CORRECTED: The author, Yoichi Shimatsu is a contributor to New American Media.
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Asian Americans, Tibet, China and the Olympics
Comments
25 Responses to “The Real Reason For The Tibet Protests”
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Nice analysis, but the fact that the protesters on horseback were shouting ‘Free Tibet’ and then went on to storm a government building and replace the Chinese national flag with a Tibetan one might suggest that they are concerned with more than the price of meat. Like getting their country back.
the author’s name is Yoichi not voichi and the piece ran in New America Media first, fyi…
@Joshua Schrei
Don’t you have more important things to do, like organize Olympic torch relay disruptions than monitoring asianweek.com?
I must thank all the Free-Tibet peeps and the obliging mainstream Western media. Due to your efforts, Han Chinese is more united than ever.
Cheers!
Folks:
This is one of the best, most useful?, pieces on the subject I have read in some time.
Whereas Yoichi Shimatsu is likely “Japanese” and he lectuires at a prestigious Mainland university, his brief article here ties in factors totally ignored by our “mainstream” media.
I particularly appreciate his references to both the economic “globalization” and “global warming” issues, which should resonate a hell of a lot deeper for all humanity and not just Americans or “the West.”
As for other “comments” in related threads herein, the individual who is ranting about “body parts” harvestings is referring, I believe, to a generation(s)-old practice of the prison system that did so with the executed? Grisly. But we freely ask drivers to participate in “organ donor” programs.
As for Joshua Schrei, don’t you find the quoting of a “protester on horseback” shouting “Free Tibet!” in English a bit convenient for western media?
Which, of course, ties in with my personal belief, that the bloody fingerprints, and funds, of the CIA are pretty clearly identifiable.
Which then leads to an easy response to a Chinese-American respondent’s query about “proof” or documentation for this website’s claim of FBI solicitations in the S.F. Chinatown community.
Take it on political faith, it’s common practice for ALL policing agencies, the worst aspect, of course, being the informers who double as provocateurs.
And, finally, to our dear Emil, who, in his column today posts a mighty glib sidebar:
That clause or phrase? about “freedom” and “democracy” actually applies more accurately to “us” than to the Mainland, which has, of late, neither invaded nor occupied a nation halfway around the world in the very names of “freedom” and “democracy.”
Freedom of and from what? The occupier?
As for “democracy,” how about starting here at home and listening to a better than two-to-one “majority” that has been clamoring, Get the Hell out of Iraq.
Frank Eng
P.S.: And is the Falun Gong registered as a political party OR lobby?
P.P.S.: Hey, guys, AsianWeek Beta 2.0? is proving, on this subject, a much much better, more balanced, and more enlightening source than the entire so-called MSM?
China’s human rights abuses are “staggering”: the detention of hundreds of thousands of people, including political activists, for “reeducation” programs, and forced labor camps; and the liberal use of the death penalty in China — including for political prisoners — which makes China the site of 8 of every 10 government administered executions carried out in the world!
It is clear that the Communists can’t be trusted at all and they have a bag full of tricks to fool not only Tibetans but the people of China with a state-controlled press. The solution is a free Tibet. There is no doubt that a sovereign Tibet would be a savior state not only for Tibetans but for all ethnic groups of China who have nowhere to go if they disagree with the CPC. A free Tibet would be such a free democratic heaven and haven.
If the Chinese regime’s treatment of Tibetans is the same as that of the Nazis’ discrimination of the Jews, then it should be condemned.
@dk,
IF the Chinese regime’s treatment of Tibetans is the same as that of the Nazis’ discrimination of the Jews, there would NOT be 6 million Tibetans left in China. PRC had direct control over Tibet for 50 years now. Unless you are accusing the Chinese being much less efficient than Nazi in carrying out Genocide.
Frank Eng, sounding ill prepared to take on his next role, which is to clarify the newfangled “Chinese consensus” ( by means of which oddly ungrateful subhumans are told exactly what they could ever possibly want or need)…
At the appointed time, he’ll be mano-a-mano with western cynics rarin’ to barbarously rope and brand the lumbering beast ‘Chinese man’s burden’. SSSSSS.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Maybe the Tibetans should learn from the Muslim and Han traits of hardwork, business skills and work ethic, tibetans are often percived as lazy, they themselves should be to blame rather than point the finger to beijiing, rioters and looters should be caught and punished to the extent of the law.. last thing we want to see is a ‘jihad’ in tibet
Rick and dk, you two are two stupid pieces of white ****.
Rick shows that’s it’s not about Tibetans, but rather anti-Communist, anti-China rhetoric. He uses distorted, unproven, statistics provided by the Dalai cult.
Meanwhile what the Nazis did was far worse than what China did to the Tibetans, which was to maintain law and order during riots.
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
-Gandhi (famous Asian)
[…] Real Reason For Tibet Protests April 7, 2008 2:58 pm Balaji Srinivasan Uncategorized Yoichi Shimatsu breaks down the Tibet Protests, Freakanomics style, in an article in The Asian Week. The article sheds light on factors that at […]
The Chinese government handed out Tibetan monk robes
to Chinese soldiers. These photos of the Chinese soldiers
receiving the traditional burgundy and yellow robes are
all over the web. This means that corrupt Chinese politicians have been also staging the violence. The Dalai Lama has repeatedly called for non-violence.
Anyone who uses terminology like the Dalai cult has been brainwashed by Chinese propaganda. The Dalai cult-that
is the cult of Nobel Peace Prize winners like Gandhi and
Martin Luther King. The cult that has no Chinese non-violent members because they lack the superior mental faculties to be among the members. You mean that cult? Or do you mean like the Blue Oyster Cult?
As I am reading the posts on AsianWeek and other sites, I’m disturbed at the negative racial overtones taken by many free tibet supporters. Please keep your feelings about the Communist government of China separate from Chinese people themselves.
Calling the 1+ billion Han Chinese subhuman or lacking mental capabilities due to the action of an oppressive government is irresponsible. Just as Americans are a varied bunch…so are the Chinese. It’s just like saying all Americans support the Iraq war because our military is there.
While I support a country’s self-detemination…the tone and rhetoric makes me recoil. I find it hard to support a cause when it degenerates from one about an oppressive government into one against an entire race of people…a heritage that I share.
totally unrelated: i was driving down the road
just yesterday listening to n.p.r. and nearly rear-
ended this grandma driving a subaru outback
with a tibetan flag on its hatchback…in my mis-
directed rage i started to rant ‘n rave over how
slow the driver in front of me was moving
then i stopped and realized it wasn’t the flag
of tibet but the flag of the state of arizona
‘jeez louise!
Ignore Cao Meng De’s comments - he’s obviously an ardent supporter of the savage Chinese government.
Blood-chilling statements like “Han Chinese are more united than ever” reverberate with the worst kind of ethno-centrism and racial supremecism. The entire world is now arrayed against the barbaric, totalitarian Chinese government, and within China itself, millions are moving towards resistance movements organized around everything from land seizures that have dislocated vast numbers of people in the countryside to the unevenly applied “one child” policy and the PRC’s genocidal practices in Tibet. I see massive destabilization that will ultimately lead to a free and democratic China and an independent Tibet. All power to the Chinese and Tibetan revolutionaries!
Kudos to you, Chris M! While it is just and appropriate to condemn the Chinese (AND U.S.!!!) governments for their respective crimes against humanity, the Chinese people deserve our respect and solidarity in their struggles for a more just and democratic nation. Demonizing and casting racist aspersions upon them benefits no one, especially given the Western powers’ long history of barbarism both in China and the rest of Asia. International solidarity must permeate all of our interactions with our brothers and sisters in China.
It is naive to assume that pro-Chinese posts are spontaneous expressions of the citizens. Maybe some of them are, but I hear echoes of droning tourist guides telling American tourists in the Soviet Union all about exceeding quotas at tractor factories. Now the Chinese have framed some poor Tibetan monks, claiming that these ardent pacifists set off a bomb. What obvious BS that is!
I greatly admire the Tibetan demonstrators and the Han Chinese civil rights activists that the repressive dictatorship governing China has imprisoned and tortured. The Dalai Lama is, like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, a spiritual leader who is both a pacifist and an passionate civil rights leader. Free Tibet! Boycott Olympic sponsors, and boycott Chinese goods!
Our Prince of Peace was elected by the people, yet he did not win the popular vote. Once the ruler of the greatest power on the planet, he schemed to rule the world.
It was 3 A.M. and the phone rang. Our Prince of Peace got a message that Arab terrorists were aiming for the twin towers. He ordered his servants to stand by and take the hit. They countered” lots of innocent lives will be lost”. He replied “No pain no gain.”
After September 11th, our prince of peace took Afganistan. It was a good training ground for bigger prizes. There were some resistance, but the world
as a whole avoided conflict with our Prince of Peace.
The writing on the wall says “Either you are with us or you are against us.” A black list was created to keep track of all those who where against. They were called the “axis of evil.”
Next came Iraq, Saddam was the run away poodle. He had to be taught a lesson. It was an illegal war, but few countries could afford to protest. They all remember the writings on the wall very clearly and did not want to be on the black list. Some of the European nations stood up to protest. They had to be brought back to the fold.
Our Prince of Peace decided to erect a missile defense shield in Poland. The shield was not meant to protect the Europeans against Iranian missiles. For all we know, the shield doesn’t even work. Its grand purpose was to ruffle the Russian feathers and bring out the Cold War mentality. It’s final purpose was to bring the Europeans back to the fold. For that purpose, it worked like a charm.
Now our Prince of Peace is ready for its next victim. Those poor Iranians don’t stand a chance. One by one our Prince of Peace will conquer until finally our world will learn too late.
The Tibetans are nothing more than a pawn for our Prince of Peace. They will be used to weaken the fragile government of China. Like all the victims before it, China will not stand a chance against our Prince of Peace. Their outdated war machines will not last a week against the mighty state of the art machines of our Prince.
All the money that is owed to China and Japan will not be paid back. They were spent on machines that will be used to conquer them.
Our Prince is a master of propaganda. When he is ready to conquer a country, he will fabricate evidence and lies.
The story above could be true. These are the types of stories that Western journalist will write. They are baseless and imaginative. Our journalist are not free to write the stories. They have to write stories that sells.
Sometimes the truth could be too boring or too late. So in order to get the punch, sometimes they cut corners and cheat. That is irresponsible.
Comparing the Dalai Lama, a living “god-king” of a theocracy, to the late and humanly unrivalled Mohandas K. Gandhi is more than a stretch of sociopolitical rhetoric.
It is, in a word, absurd.
As for the ongoing, “Christian”?, alarum adjectives like “savage,” “blood-chilling,” “barbaric,” ho-hum.
They apply almost everywhere these days, including on these posts.
As for the “spontaaneity,” forget “authenticity,” of perceived “pro-China” posters here, what, exactly are YOUR bona fides, Mr. Dunn?
I think it safe to assume that EVERYone here, both the self-righteous and the defensive, believes him- or herself above if not beyond reproach, and that life and living is not ambivalence itself, and that the implacable, seemingly, tides of realpolitik are reducible to simplistic solutions.
Stopping whatever factual oppressions and suppressions that exist on the Mainland, and, by the way, the Han are only one of NINE? major population groupings, forget the subgroupings thbereof, seems to me egregiously trumped by our own, daily documented, responsibility for the killings in Iraq.
Something that could be checkmated this instant?, by the mere Democratic majority in Congress, cutting off the FUNDING?
Then, morally, we may have the “right” to chase after ill-informed and prejudice-laden projections of hate, what else can you call it?, on a peoples and a nation rapidly emerging as a rival, perceived as a threat, obviously, by far too many.
Those of the latter above are as tinkling cymbals, but those in power in the Beltway are the promise of Armageddon and Apocalypse.
Truth to tell, “most” of us will be far too occupied with the day-to-day of putting bread on the table and that roof over our heads, even as those poorer and deprived and hopeless and overlooked will, surely, add to the growing chaos and “crime” throughout the land.
Whereas I agree totally with Leon Sun’s recent adjuration after HIS psrsonal experience in Justin Plaza Wednesday, or was it on the waterfront?, to one and all to “Grow Up,” I think one other caution may well take precedence, to wit: WAKE UP.
Frank Eng
P.S.: Whereas, sadly, the original French “ambiance” has long since given way to the lesser “ambience,” I rather doubt, Christian, that you have a Chinaman’s chance of routing “supremAcy” out of Webster’s, whatever edition.
Golly, Molly:
One-upped. And by a “slant-eyed view” at that.
What is this great nattion coming to?
I laughed all the way through this piece, and, guys, ignore the bit of pidgin, because it’s the message, stupid.
Only cavil: all the technology and all the delivery systems notwithstanding, “our Prince of Peace” can NOT prevail, albeit the proof of this pudding may simply be mutual annihilation, or, better yet, mutual exhaustion.
Remember, Rummy’s and Cheney’s “finest” have failed to checkmate lower-cased i.e.d.s assembled out of scrap provided by us.
It’s the human spirit, stupid.
And bullets still can’t kill ideas.
Nor bombs touch, much less annihilate beliefs.
Actually, both are COUNTERproductive and pro-opposition.
Take that, you swiftboaters of the world, Nazis then and Amurrikans today.
By the way, where can I find a subprimed condo near the San Juan Straits that I could bluff a loan for?
Maybe with hot and cold running maids and servants.
the level of american argument and ignorant about the rest of the world.
It is no wonder america century and the lone superpower status will come to an end.
America win big on the hardware but lose big on the soft power especially with ignorant and egoistic citizen.
Good bye sunset america
“Blood-chilling statements like “Han Chinese are more united than ever” reverberate with the worst kind of ethno-centrism and racial supremecism. The entire world is now arrayed against the barbaric, totalitarian Chinese government, and within China itself, millions are moving towards resistance movements organized around everything from land seizures that have dislocated vast numbers of people in the countryside to the unevenly applied “one child” policy and the PRC’s genocidal practices in Tibet. I see massive destabilization that will ultimately lead to a free and democratic China and an independent Tibet. All power to the Chinese and Tibetan revolutionaries!
–PRC=FascistState on Apr 11, 2008″
what extreme foolishness, let’s just say a referendum on Tibet was passed out in a newly democratic China, how many chinese citizens would rather their own country split and balkanised into smaller weaker states? Most rational and normal people want the country they live in to be as rich, influential and powerful as possible, China included.
Tibet will always be an integral part of China, democracy or no democracy.
The CPC may be an autocracy but cannot rule if it does not have the goodwill of the majority of the population, just as a democratic government does. With the likely exception of looser media restrictions, the government policies of a democratic China would be no different to a CPC China. Eat it and weep, China haters!
Some Chinese ignores the fact that somewhere along their line of ancestry; someone has been killed or has died by the hands of the communist party. They can trade or accept it since in the process it did bring material advancement as we see in China today. But for the Tibetans, were majority had loss an ancestor/relative due to the Chinese Communist invasion/Cultural Revolution, they will find it hard to forget what has been done. Liberating another country from serfdom or even slavery won’t give excuse for an outright invasion of another nation. All countries progress at their own pace depending on their location and culture. Serfdom does not exist in any country today be it a capitalist, socialist, dictatorship or democratic system.
The worse part of it is the Chinese authorities endeavor to change world history just to justify its illegal occupation in the first place. It’s double insult to the Tibetans when people of whatever race denies the fact that they had suffered and its culture totally disrespected by people who fanatically tow this lie.
History will speak for itself eventually and deep inside all of us, we know who is right and what is wrong.