Left Flank

Robert Barnett, a Tibet scholar at Columbia University, warns against a simplistic understanding of the events in Tibet. It seems that even in Tibet, interest is gray.

We have to be very careful not to confuse exile politics, which is a demand for anti-China this and anti-China that, with internal politics, which is much more pragmatic, complex, and sophisticated.

A very important sector of Tibetans have become very wealthy because China has poured money into creating a middle class in Tibetan towns, though there hasn't really been a dividend for the countryside and the underclass. So, we can't explain this as just economic modernization. We could explain the violence against the [Han] Chinese in that way. It could have to do with that. But the violence is present in just one demonstration out of 50 in the past two weeks.

These protests are really about two things: A huge sector of the rural population has said, «Tibet was independent in the past. We reassert that belief. That doesn't mean we demand that it be independent again, but we are reinserting that into the discussion.» And, «The Dalai Lama represents our interests.» I suppose a possible third thing is, «We are certainly not happy with Chinese President Hu Jintao.» This is a huge political statement that nobody anticipated.

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The most significant of the 50 protests are the rural peasants taking over the countryside. These are people who get on horseback or march down to the local government office or police post, burn it to the ground, and raise the Tibetan flag. You can be shot on sight for having a Tibetan flag in Tibet in a non-Olympics year. Nothing like this has been seen in Tibet for decades, and it has untold political significance for China.

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We [in the West] think that people do politics by saying, «I'm going to stage this protest in order to get X.» But nobody gets X in China. It just doesn't work like that. You're dealing with one of the biggest power systems in the world. Instead, burn a government building, put a flag up, and then you've achieved this huge victory because China has created a symbolic form of politics in which everyone is supposed to have forgotten that they were independent once. So, just by doing that, you have completely changed the political equation.

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The exile complaints are not about power. And we have to put aside suggestions that the protests in Tibet are because people are unhappy about economic loss. That really is reductive. And I think we have to get over any suggestion that the Chinese are ill-intentioned or trying to wipe out Tibet. It's obviously horrible that people are being savagely beaten up and killed. But crucially, this is a historic change in the profile of Tibetan politics. We're looking at something much larger than any immediate anxiety about Olympics, or whether somebody planned one of these things, or whether people are upset about economic disadvantage. Historians are going to tell us that we missed the big picture if we didn't notice that this is the big story here. All the party cadres are going to be sent to the countryside areas to listen to the Tibetans' complaints and find out what has gone so wrong with the policy machine in China.

In other words, globalization has offered a peek into a very abnormal way of doing politics in a part of the world few westerners understand.