[CPProt.net] How Britain helps China destroy Tibet

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

How Britain helps China destroy Tibet 

Tristram Hunt
Sunday September 11, 2005
The Observer 


As well as ending the great Sino-Euro bra war, the Prime Minister's
diplomatic triumphs in Beijing last week included a series of cultural
exchanges. The Victoria and Albert Museum has agreed a major Chinese design
exhibition to coincide with the 2008 Olympics. Darcey Bussell will give
tutorials to China's best ballerinas. And the British Museum has secured a
ground-breaking deal with the National Museum of China to share collections.
All of which is highly regrettable. Governments have to involve themselves
in mucky compromises with distasteful regimes, but world-class cultural
institutions do not. By lending their prestigious names to the Chinese
government, the British Museum and others implicitly sanction Beijing's
cultural policy and, with it, the ongoing artistic, linguistic and religious
genocide in Tibet.

Over the past 10 years, mainland China has rediscovered its pre-communist
past. The iconoclastic modernism of the Great Leap Forward has been replaced
by official respect for China's ancient civilisation. But this admiration
for heritage has come too late for the people of Tibet.

The terrible truth of Mao's Cultural Revolution bears repeating. Between
1966-1977, an entire civilisation was gutted as 2,000 years of Tibetan
history was razed. Prior to China's invasion, there had been 6,259 Buddhist
monasteries and nunneries; by 1976, eight remained. In the name of socialist
purity, untold numbers of statues, artefacts, ancient manuscripts and
paintings vanished.

A few high-profile palaces and temples were restored in the 1980s. But since
1994, the Chinese government has opted for an active programme of destroying
the nation's sense of its autonomous history. The British Museum and V&A are
lending their names to this cultural suppression.

In human terms, it has meant savage treatment of the monks and nuns who
embody centuries of Buddhist teaching. The arbitrary arrest of religious
leaders Tenzin Deleg Rinpoche and Ngawang Phulchung is just the tip of an
iceberg of human-rights abuse. Currently, hundreds languish in jail without
trial for 'crimes' including raising a Tibetan flag, while others suffer the
hideous inventiveness of the People's Liberation Army's torture tactics.

With the people has gone the historic fabric. China is currently engaged in
a wholesale demolition of the ancient neighbourhoods of the holy city of
Lhasa. Despite its unique world heritage status and any number of objections
from Unesco, the ancient architecture is being ruthlessly replaced with
communist concrete.

Lhasa, a site of supreme significance for Tibetan Buddhists, is awash with
brothels and barracks. The meditative rhythms of a monastic city have been
replaced by the sonic blare of go-go bars and neon glare of tacky commerce.
An aggressive, militaristic capitalism overwhelms the pacifist tradition of
centuries. Meanwhile, in the schools, the Tibetan language is under
sustained assault.

Perhaps the final indignity is that, under Chinese beneficence, some gutted
monasteries are being restored, not as functioning religious sites, but as
heritage attractions. An authentic culture is being transformed into faux
'living history'. Tibet is being turned into a theme park.

Sometimes, the remit of our national museums and galleries fruitfully
coincides with official policy. In the wake of the war in Iraq, the British
Museum worked tirelessly with diplomatic staff to save Mesopotamia's
endangered treasures. But in this case, the geopolitical needs of the
British government and the proper calling of the V&A and British Museum are
not the same. What their directors must realise is that when modern China
hears the word culture, it all too often reaches for its revolver. 

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/