Chalmers Johnson - Blowback, Second Edition - The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

The legal status of Tibet today is clear and is similar in nature to the kind of colonial rule Japan imposed on Korea in 1910. A seventeen-point agreement, signed by Beijing and Tibetan representatives in 1950 at a moment when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had occupied much of the country, incorporated Tibet into the Chinese state as a “national autonomous region.” This was an unprecedented status. Even then, the Tibetans never expected the Chinese to interfere in the actual running of their country. But a brutal occupation—including mass executions, forced labor, confiscations of property, and destruction of religious sites—led to a low-level revolt in the mid-1950s that exploded in March 1959 into open rebellion. The CIA covertly aided this rebellion, which may be part of the reason why the Chinese have shown so little flexibility in dealing with Tibet. 8Blowback from CIA support, which was cut off at about the time that President Nixon decided to pursue an opening to China, has been very costly to the Tibetans. In 1959, the Dalai Lama was forced into exile in India, where he has ever since devoted himself to a campaign to publicize the Tibetans’ plight. He turned sixty-three years old in 1999—and there is every sign that the Chinese will simply try to wait him out, believing that on his death they will be able to appoint a youthful successor, as they have done with the Panchen Lama, the second-holiest lama in the Tibetan hierarchy.

China will probably succeed in maintaining its imperium over Tibet and ultimately assimilate both the Tibetan people and their culture. There are no powerful interests to save them. The Tibetans are in this sense similar to the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America. A continuing propaganda barrage from both Beijing and Taipei argues that the Tibetans are “feudal” and do not deserve to be saved. But the Chinese are very nervous about what they are doing and regularly make stupid mistakes.

A typical example was the spectacle of officially atheist China attempting to name a pro-Chinese Panchen Lama. On May 15, 1995, from Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama designated a six-year-old shepherd boy as a “living Buddha” and the successor to the Panchen Lama, who had died in China in January 1989. The Chinese government responded that the Dalai Lama was interfering in China’s domestic affairs and in elaborately staged ceremonies in Beijing and Lhasa anointed a different six-year-old (evidently placing the Dalai Lama’s choice and his family under house arrest). They formally installed him on December 9, 1995, as the Eleventh Panchen Lama; he was quoted in the newspapers as having said, “Thank you, Jiang Zemin. Thank you, government of China. I will study hard and love the motherland.” 9

It is possible that, as they regain their national self-confidence, the Chinese will invite the Dalai Lama to return and allow him to re-create something like the relationship that existed in the past between Lhasa and Beijing. This would be clever of them. As matters stand now, people in Buddhist countries like Japan and Korea (or in Hollywood) could well become as emotionally involved with the fate of Tibet as others have been with the pandas, whose fate seems destined to be similar. The most likely scenario, unfortunately, is that Tibet will become Sinified and its lamaseries will be left as nothing more than crumbling museums, as most already are.

A particular focus of foreign concern over Tibet as well as other areas of Communist Party rule is China’s record on human rights. This is a subtle and complex issue. As the prominent sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz wrote at the height of the Cold War,

Politics is a game of vulnerabilities, and the human rights issue is clearly where the “socialist” world has proven most vulnerable, just as the economic rights issue is where the “capitalist” world is most open to criticism. . . . The debate on human rights can be conceptualized in part as a struggle between eighteenth century libertarian persuasions [the West] and nineteenth century egalitarian beliefs [China]—that is, from a vision of human rights having to do with the right of individual justice before the law to a recognition of the rights of individuals to social security and equitable conditions of work and standards of living. 10

During the Cold War, the West consistently used the issue of human rights as a weapon against the Communists—but always only in its first, eighteenth-century sense. The Communists consistently returned the favor, using the issue of human rights—but always in the second, nineteenth-century sense—as a weapon against the West. We in the United States may sometimes abuse our citizens’ political rights through police wiretaps or sting operations, but we are much more sensitive to these abuses than to economic abuses. The Chinese have generally taken an opposite stance.

Americans hold that human rights are a universal matter, and in a philosophical sense of course they are, but we ignore how that universalism can sometimes disguise very specific agendas and the ways in which it can be wielded as a political weapon to advance our own interests. We conveniently fail to classify civilian safety from land mines, for example, among human rights; and we are regularly indifferent to or conveniently look the other way when human rights as we define them are suppressed by regimes like those in Turkey, Chile, or Guatemala that are important to us for political, strategic, or economic reasons. The selective linking of Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status (that is, giving or withholding access to our market on the most preferential terms) to a regime’s human rights record is a prime example of this process. In December 1974, Congress first attached the Jackson-Vanik amendment to Nixon’s 1972 trade agreement with the USSR (which granted the Soviet Union MFN status, as well as access to U.S. Export-Import Bank financing) in order to help Jews emigrate from Russia. The amendment specified that the president had to certify annually that trade with Communist countries was consistent with freedom of emigration. In 1979, China was also granted MFN status, and Jackson-Vanik automatically applied because China is a Communist country. When Deng Xiaoping, on his first visit to the United States after we recognized the Beijing government, was asked about the freedom of Chinese to emigrate, he smiled broadly and replied, “How many do you want?”

In the autumn of 1989, however, following China’s use of army troops to disperse demonstrators in Tiananmen Square and kill workers and students in the surrounding streets, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi of California sponsored legislation giving thousands of Chinese students in the United States permission to extend their stays. Congress later amended these provisions to require annual presidential certification that China was making “overall significant progress” in its human rights policies, in trade practices, and in weapons nonproliferation, backing all this with the threat of MFN withdrawal. But that threat was never credible, since its implementation would have meant putting at risk extensive American investments in China. Thus the withdrawal of MFN remains primarily a rhetorical device used by members of Congress for partisan political advantage at home without the serious intent of altering policy at all. 11

The selective way the U.S. government has wielded the human rights issue has had an unintended consequence. It has stimulated Asians of many different persuasions to develop an “Asian concept of human rights” and to attack the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights as not “universal” at all but only another manifestation of Western cultural imperialism. As so often is true whenever invidious comparisons between Asia and the West are involved, former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore gained a certain prominence as a spokesman for the Asian point of view. “Americans believe their ideas are universal—the supremacy of the individual and free, unfettered expression. But they are not. Never were . . . ,” he insisted. “The ideas of individual supremacy and the right to free expression, when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep American society cohesive. Asia can see it is not working.” 12