Beijing’s policy is ‘fusing’ the minorities within the larger Chinese identity through state-incentivised intermarriage and massive settlement of unemployed migrant Chinese workers on minority lands
File image of Chinese president Xi Jinping. AP
Some observers say what’s happening these days in Tibet and other so-called minority regions of China is another ‘Cultural Revolution.’ For others who have a keener sense of China’s final solution to what it calls its minority problem, the prospect is frightening. Beijing’s policy is “fusing” the minorities within the larger Chinese identity through state-incentivised intermarriage and massive settlement of unemployed migrant Chinese workers on minority lands.
There is a historical precedent for this. More than 500 years ago, the Manchus, marauding nomads from up north, brought the whole of China under their rule and gave the country its present shape and size. However, at the last count about 20 years ago, only about 50-100 elderly Manchus could speak the language. After centuries of demographic attrition and complete Chinese absorption of Manchuria, both the people and the land are now history.
For Beijing, there is nothing better than for remaining minorities like the Mongols of Inner Mongolia, the Tibetans, and the Uyghurs of East Turkestan (Chinese: Xinjiang) to go the way of the Manchus. Submerging these minorities within the Chineseness of China would prevent the country from the fate that befell Yugoslavia. Otherwise, what explains the present fate of a million or more Uyghur Muslims held in concentration camps in East Turkestan for no other crime than that they belong to a different ethnicity or faith?
As for Tibet, Beijing’s current policy is nothing less than the subversion of the Buddhist faith. Beijing’s open hostility and active subversion of Buddhism (post-invasion and post-Cultural Revolution) can be traced more than a couple of decades ago when the late Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok attracted thousands of followers from across Tibet, Southeast Asia and more than 10,000 Chinese from the mainland itself. After a few years of indecision and outright fascination with the ability of one man to attract followers across international boundaries, the authorities moved in. They dismantled the late Buddhist master’s retreat centre. His followers were sent packing back to their homes across Tibet and Southeast Asia. In all this dismantling and expulsion, to their credit, the Chinese authorities left the widely respected Buddhist teacher alone, undisturbed but robbed of his students.
These days in Tibet, China’s “fusion” policy targets the new generation. Tibetan children, some as young as five years old, are shipped to boarding schools throughout the vast Tibetan plateau for as many as nine or ten years at a stretch. The medium of instruction in the schools is Chinese. During these formative years of their growth, the students don’t see their families, nor have the opportunity to speak or brush up on their native tongue or being able to be immersed in their traditional culture and spiritual heritage. China scholar James Liebold puts Beijing’s minority policy in this way. He says Beijing, “work(s) to actively alter the thoughts and behaviours of what Chinese authorities perceive to be a ‘backward,’ ‘deviant, and innately ‘dangerous’ sub-section of its population by uplifting their ‘bio-quality’…and overseeing their rebirth as loyal, patriotic, and civilized Chinese citizens.”
All these are Beijing’s attempt to groom the new generation of Tibetans as the willing and inspired representatives of the new imperial order. That this policy does not work is demonstrated by the fact that Tibet was the place where China’s surveillance network was perfected. The authorities then proudly called it China’s “nets in the sky and traps on the ground.” Without the benefit of a high surveillance system and iron-fisted rule, left to themselves, Tibetans or for that matter any other minority won’t willingly bend the knee to Beijing. One indication is more than known cases of 155 Tibetans self-immolated since 2009, condemning Chinese misrule and calling for the return of the Dalai Lama to his homeland.
This is what Beijing does to the minorities, in fact to the whole of China, in an ongoing attempt to impose Party (Chinese Communist Party) will on its docile masses. Under President Xi Jinping and facilitated by the ongoing rage of the Covid-19 virus in its many variants, the Chinese people suffer a double lockdown. They are locked in by censorship and the outside world is locked out by Beijing’s determination that there are viruses more dangerous than Covid-19 and its variant lurking in the outside world that would prove fatal to the political health of the Chinese Communist Party. That is the Party’s ultimate dilemma: It needs the world but doesn’t trust it.
The writer is the author of ‘Falling Through the Roof’, a work of fiction, and ‘Copper Mountain’, a new work of fiction. Views expressed are personal.
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