"The Struggle for Tibet" by Wang Lixiong and Tsering Shakya

John Gittings at The Guardian UK reviews this new book - one that sounds very interesting for anyone who is concerned about the plight of Tibet and its people. The second half of the review looks at The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (Verso), the leading Chinese critic Wang Hui - read the review here.

"The Struggle for Tibet" by Wang Lixiong and Tsering Shakya

Few will have heard of Tibet's Joan of Arc, the young Trinley Chodron, who believed that a bird sent by the Dalai Lama had given her magic powers and led a troop of "warrior-heroes" against the Chinese. Chodron was executed in 1969 during the cultural revolution.

The Struggle for Tibet
by Tsering Shakya, Wang Lixiong
280pp, Verso Books, £8.99



Buy The Struggle for Tibet.
The US version came out in 2009, from Verso.

And before reading The Struggle for Tibet I, too, was unaware of the Tibetan monks who, more recently, were ordered to write down that the Dalai Lama "is the biggest obstacle to Tibetan Buddhism". By adding a barely visible dot to the script, they were able to convert "is" to "is not". Nor did I know that many educated Tibetans can only communicate in Chinese with Tibetan exiles they meet when travelling abroad, because their grasp of their own language is so poor.

But our ignorance is hardly surprising. We talk a lot about the Tibet we see from the outside, but as Robert Barnett, one of a handful of western scholars who understand the country, tells us in his introduction, the voices of the Tibetan people are only heard in "snatches and fragments".

After the country was sealed off by China in 1959 following the Lhasa rebellion and flight of the Dalai Lama, it became a "muffled, incoherent place". The British left has always been diffident about the Tibet issue, unable to shake off the memory of our own imperial designs, and uneasy at the CIA's role in the 1950s and 60s in the Tibetan resistance (two of the Dalai Lama's brothers worked with them).

A few years ago New Left Review (NLR) broke through this barrier, publishing a conversation between the Chinese scholar-activist Wang Lixiong and the leading Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya which launched a new debate. The dialogue, with subsequent analyses from both writers, now appears in The Struggle for Tibet, an excellent and informative book from Verso (the publishers founded by NLR).

After the 2008 riots in Lhasa and in China's Tibetan areas, Wang organised a petition signed by 300 Chinese intellectuals, included here as an appendix, complaining about the ferocious attitude of the tame Tibetan officials who rose to power during the cultural revolution, and urging Beijing to open a dialogue with the Dalai Lama.

Both scholars warn that Tibet's cultural and national identity has been dangerously eroded, and that China's rushed economic development only benefits a minority. "What do we see today?" asks Wang. "Temples brim with burning incense and butter lamps, which well-dressed people can afford to light in the thousands at once. Yet they only want the Buddha's blessings to help with job promotions and increasing their wealth."

The Tibetan resistance, which spread in 2008, becoming more violent, is about "the right to have a voice", Shakya says, and Tibet will not remain mute for ever.

About the authors (from Amazon):

Wang Lixiong’s books include China Tidal Wave, Sky Burial: The Fate of Tibet, and Yellow Peril, the political fantasy that has gained widespread popularity in China despite having been banned by the communist regime. He lives in Beijing with his wife, the well-known Tibetan writer, dissident and poet Woeser. In response to a 2008 letter (co-authored with Tsering Woeser and several Chinese authors in and outside China) asking Chinese authorities to consider implementing the Dalai Lama’s “Middle Way” approach as the basis of a negotiated statute for the future of Tibet, Wang and Woeser were placed under house arrest by the Chinese authorities.

Tsering Shakya was born in Tibet and teaches Tibetan history and literature at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He holds the Canadian Research Chair in Religion and Contemporary Society in Asia at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Asian Research and is the author of The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947, and Fire Under the Snow: The Testimony of a Tibetan Prisoner. Tsering Shakya provides critical assessments of immigration and asylum procedures as well as compliance with various international civil/human rights laws for the Swiss Government’s Federal Office for Refugees. He also works off-air for Radio Free Asia’s (RFA) Tibet news service and on-air, every fortnight, presenting an international current affairs ‘slot’ on RFA. He also makes regular appearances on the BBC and CNN and frequently writes feature articles for Time magazine.

Tags: The Struggle for Tibet, Wang Lixiong, Tsering Shakya, The Guardian UK, Buddhism, Tibet, books, culture, China, New Left Review, John Gittings