CHINA, POLITICS: Life in Tibet, A Rebuttal

By Shi Rui

I avoided mentioning the Tibetan’s life deliberately in the essay on my trip to Tibet, because it’s too complex to describe and analyze in a travel article. Some people think the Tibetans are quite satisfied with their former life and don’t like the change the PRC government forced on them. It’s partly true, but not exactly.

After the liberation, apart from the more convenient and modern life, the Tibetans obtained the rights and opportunities to have a better education, to know more about other parts of the world, and to take the reins of their own life. People in Tibet can be divided into three kinds: city dwellers, town dwellers and the nomadic people. The Tibetans that live in cities are gradually getting used to modern life, and are becoming more and more dependent on the comforts that the new life brings them.

Take Lhasa for example: shopping centers, hotels, and restaurants can be seen everywhere. Many Tibetans wear the same kind of clothes as the Han, giving up their heavy, complicated traditional dress. No one forces them to change their clothes; they do it willingly, and I don’t consider it a betrayal of their race or religion. Why? The modern textile industry has developed so rapidly that much softer, lighter, and warmer fabrics flood into every corner of the world.

I don’t mean that forgetting the old traditions is good. Of course, Tibetan’s special clothes are a kind of culture, but it’s too old to be dominant nowadays. It is more suitable to be viewed and admired. When festivals come, or great events happen, all of the Tibetan people will put on their traditional dresses, which I think is enough.

I stayed in Lhasa for 3 days and then left. I traveled east by jeep with my father, planning to drive all the way straight to Sichuan province. We stopped on the way frequently for different purposes: having lunch, looking for water, taking photos, picking flowers, and talking to the local people. We stayed at the small taverns in the towns for the night and observed the people’s life. Things were quite different in towns than in the city. We could always see pigs and chickens walking on the main street. The pace of life was obviously slower. People in those towns lead the life the Tibetans in Lhasa led decades ago.

I was told by our provisional driver, a Tibetan man, that in the past a man’s life was very easy in the small towns. Women did all the housework, planting and grazing. The men just drank wines, horsed around, got together to sing, dance and chat in the sun. Some of the men would leave home for traveling in spring, carrying all the money of the family with them, and come back at the end of the autumn penniless. They did not share the responsibility of raising the family. Their wives and daughters took care of everything.

That is why when I mentioned the Tibetan country scene I referred to the “beautiful shepherdess.” On the one hand, they were too busy to go to school; on the other hand they had very few schools and teachers. Nowadays children in the cities and towns can have a better education, and some of them get the opportunity to come to Beijing or Shanghai for further study. I went to Tibet on a summer vacation and accidentally saw posters pasted on the wall in a town, reading: “the following students are accepted by the first-class universities.” And then there was a name list and the marks they got in the college entrance examination.

There is a Tibetan girl who majors in English in my department here at Beijing Foreign Studies University. She came here from Lhasa in the year 2003 and now is in her sophomore year. She is not different from us except that she can run much faster and won the 800-meter race last semester in the school sports meeting. What’s more, there are 5 Tibetan students in my mother’s class (my mother teaches English in another college in Hubei province). They work very hard and diligently because they cherish the chance.

My Tibetan guide told me that all of the high school students in Tibet learn mandarin and English together with their Tibetan language. Most of them accept the course arrangement and consider the language learning necessary and useful.

About the clothing issue, I noticed that almost all the people in towns and small villages wore the same clothes as Han. It was amazing. When I was in Lhasa, of course, I saw Tibetans dressing like us but the percentage was not as large as in the towns. People in traditional Tibetan dress could still be seen everywhere. An engineer explained the phenomenon to me several days later. He said the Tibetans in Lhasa are of two kinds: local inhabitants and pilgrims.

Many of the local inhabitants work in the travel service field since Lhasa is the inescapable center of everyone’s trip to Tibet. All people serving the travelers are required to wear their traditional dress and all of the pilgrims must wear the same unquestionably. That’s why we saw lots of Tibetan dresses in Lhasa but not even one in the other places.

We did meet some Tibetans who were fiercely against the PRC government. They thought we were invaders and that we destroyed their life, their culture, their great religion and their freedom. It’s hard for me to say. Maybe they are right. Maybe they really prefer their former life, the difficult, harsh, but to some extent spiritually rich life.

Generally speaking, the objectors are devotional believers of Buddhism who regard the Dalai Lama as their only master. Many of them will go to Lhasa on foot however far away they live, and make their pilgrimage to the Buddha in the Potala Palace. The journey was once so long and dangerous that one might never return home.

No matter how much these believers hate the changes our government has brought about, at least now they can go on pilgrimages more easily, more quickly and more safely on the national highway built and maintained by the PLA.