By Bhuchung K. Tsering
Tibetan Review
Whenever there is talk about a difference between the situation in Tibet and the one prevailing in China we are left wondering about reasons behind this development. Two reports coming out of China at the end of 2004, however, made the situation a little bit clear.
On December 28, 2004, the Washington Post carried a lengthy report by Philip Pan about a defamation case in Fuyang, in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui, filed by the local Communist Party chief against two Chinese authors. The Party chief claimed that the authors had defamed him in their book about China’s peasantry by portraying him as a local tyrant. The writers were represented by a band of lawyers, including Pu Zhiqiang, who has become well known in China as a legal activist. The defence team pursued the case by trying to establish that the Chinese Communist Party, symbolized in this case by the local Party head, was not above the law of the People’s Republic of China. At the time of the Post report, despite the hearing having been completed in August, the courts had yet to pass a verdict.
The first point to note in this case is that a senior Chinese official was seeking legal recourse to subdue two Chinese citizens instead of merely using his power to strike them down. Even though the ultimate outcome may turn out to be the same (the Post report clearly pointed out the imbalance with the Party chief having the upper hand since the courts are controlled by the Party), at least at the procedural level, there is an adherence to the rule of law. This is significant because for people to feel that they can get justice, those in power need to show that they respect the rule of law.
The second, but more important aspect of this case is the confidence with which the two writers have sought to defend themselves and the way in which the defence team have fought the case. At one time during the trial one of the defence lawyers actually asked the Party leader to resign. As the Post said, “The defence responded forcefully. “If a party secretary can’t take criticism without considering it defamation, I suggest he quit and go home,” said Lei Yanping, the authors’ local barrister.” The special point to note here is not only that the lawyer made such a statement but that nothing untoward seemed to have happened to him following this.
The Post summed up the development:
“What happened in the Fuyang case highlights a momentous struggle underway in China between a ruling party that sees the law as an instrument of control and a society that increasingly believes it should be used for something else: a check on the power of government officials and a guardian of individual rights. How this conflict unfolds could transform the country’s authoritarian political system.”
Why do we not hear of any such development among Tibetans in Tibet? There seems to be many social problems in Tibet today even if we leave out the political problem. A recent Tibetan visitor to her homeland talked about the rampant corruption that seems to permeate the society there. Everything seems to begin and end with bribe is how this visitor described the situation. Why is it that socio-political activism has not made its mark in Tibet when Chinese intellectuals are becoming more forthright? A partial answer to the above questions can be got from the latest essay written by Chinese scholar Wang Lixiong. This essay was written for a conference on the information age in China held in the United States in November 2004. I attended the conference and we were informed that Wang had change of plans and was not attending it. Excerpts from his paper were, however, read on his behalf.
In the essay, Wang uses as a peg the travails of a Tibetan woman writer, Woeser, at the hands of the authorities after she wrote a book in which she talked about her reverence for His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In the process he talks about the two worlds that exist in today’s People’s Republic of China: one for the Chinese and the other for Tibetans.
After talking about the persecution meted out to Woeser, Wang writes, “For people living in free societies or in today’s inland China, the significance of this kind of punishment to Tibetans might not be clearly understood. Society within inland China has now diversified into different options. There are enough opportunities beyond the official system to allow many people to survive and prosper without dependence on the system. In contrast, the modernizing of Tibet and its society has been structured to completely rely financially on Beijing. There is no real social stratification there. With the monastic sector as the sole exception, nearly all of other kinds of cultural workers and intellectuals have been entirely recruited into the system. In other words, only when inducted as a part of the system, can one have a chance to become a professional working in the fields of culture; otherwise, there is even no guarantee of basic survival.”
Wang seems to have hit the target accurately when he wrote,
“I had been puzzled that while dissenting intellectuals were active in the public sphere in the previous Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and are now in inland China, this has not been the case in Tibet, despite the suffering Tibetan people have experienced, the international support they have received, and the fact that they have the spiritual leadership. Why have we so far only heard about the quite resistance from the monastic or at a very grassroots’ level? I think one important reason for this is Tibetan intellectuals’ lack of space to survive outside the system. The system therefore retains the power of deciding an individual’s life and death. The system that feeds all of the cultural professionals is also the system that disciplines all of them. When one is scared by the system, there is no chance to be against it. The current suppression of Tibetan culture is carried out through this kind of control from within the system. To punish Woeser is to send out an alarm to the rest.”
