Half a century ago today, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces were launching their final assault on Lhasa, forcing the Dalai Lama and eventually hundreds of thousands of Tibetans to flee their homeland. Fifty years ago, Tibet as a free state was disappearing, engulfed by China, which expanded its empire dramatically.
During the last 50 years, the Dalai Lama has become a symbol of peace, religious wisdom and self-determination, welcomed by crowds and governments alike, praised and showered with honorifics.
Still, the reality is that the Dalai Lama’s charisma and universal appeal, as well as the peaceful resistance that he espouses, have failed. Today, generations of Tibetan exiles are no closer to going home than they were when the tanks first turned their turrets toward the old capital. In fact, the tanks are still there. Half a century of occupation and repression has taken its toll on symbols of Tibetan religion and culture, while society has become polarized between the subjugated and those who, out of self-interest or for other reasons, are now repeating the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) line that the PLA “liberated” Tibet.
Facing growing criticism within his ranks, the Dalai Lama has himself admitted that peaceful resistance — or the “middle way” — hasn’t worked, that the CCP has been a dishonest negotiator and that hope is dwindling. So humiliating has been Beijing’s lack of response to the Dalai Lama’s call for “meaningful autonomy” for Tibet that other, younger generations have been wondering if means other than pacifism might not be the solution. That this implies taking on China’s formidable tool of repression, the PLA, shows the level of desperation and frustration — and hope — that flows in their veins.
Despite its success in crushing rebellion and peaceful resistance, Beijing has failed to understand one precious lesson of history — “the indestructibility of man’s yearning for freedom,” as Soviet war correspondent and author Vasily Grossman, who was among the first to report on the Nazi extermination camps, wrote in his critique of Fascism and totalitarianism, Life and Fate.
A totalitarian or authoritarian regime’s ability to control the masses is contingent on the use of force or the threat of the use of it. Either it uses “eternal violence” until a point is reached where there is no one left to kill, or it dies of its own choosing by relinquishing its prerogative to violence. The CCP not only faces this challenge with Tibetans, but also with Uighurs in Xinjiang, Falun Gong practitioners, ordinary Chinese who strive for freedom and, should it come to this, Taiwanese.
By making force the principal agent of its legitimacy and its primary means to remain in power, the CCP is ensuring its eventual demise. For while it can use or promise “eternal violence,” the human thirst for freedom will always be stronger — as strong as life itself. It is this spirit of hope, of unremitting resistance to oppression even when the odds are bad, that we cherish today as we remember the terrible events of half a century ago.
“Man’s fate may make him a slave,” Grossman wrote, “but his nature remains unchanged.”
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Tuesday last week apologized over allegations that the former director of the city’s Civil Affairs Department had illegally accessed citizens’ data to assist the KMT in its campaign to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors. Given the public discontent with opposition lawmakers’ disruptive behavior in the legislature, passage of unconstitutional legislation and slashing of the central government’s budget, civic groups have launched a massive campaign to recall KMT lawmakers. The KMT has tried to fight back by initiating campaigns to recall DPP lawmakers, but the petition documents they
RSS