Changing Lifestyles : Tibet : Chinese are reweaving the region’s social fabric

Sonam is a tall, handsome, 34-year-old taxi driver who worships both Buddha and Rambo, oblivious to any contradictions that might imply.

Jigme is a 44-year-old carpenter, rebuilding a famous Buddhist monastery that was destroyed during China’s 10-year Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that sent rampaging Red Guards into the four corners of Tibet. He says that Tibet is better off today than it was 40 years ago, but adds that there are too many Han Chinese migrants here, threatening to reverse the gains.

Ngawang is an aristocratic Tibetan physician, daughter of a high-ranking rinpoche --or reincarnated Buddhist teacher--who hides her fluency in Chinese and worries about Tibet’s lack of “environmental consciousness.”

Yu, 28, is a successful Chinese businessman and haughty colonist from the “Middle Kingdom.” As we dance one evening in the fancy Sunlight Nightclub he whispers:

“The Tibetans are very stupid. This place is a primitive society that still needs to be developed. We have to train the Tibetans.”

These were some of the characters I encountered on a recent four-week journey through Tibet with an American photographer.

Since anti-Chinese riots broke out in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, in 1987, foreign journalists have been severely restricted in their travels to Tibet. As a prospective graduate student in forestry at Yale University, I’m not precisely a journalist. And my fluency in Chinese allowed me to leap many of the hurdles set up by the Chinese government. The result was a rare, unobstructed view into a land that for many years has been the focus of a propaganda battleground between the Chinese government and the followers of the exiled Tibetan religious leader, the Dalai Lama.

The photographer and I flew from Beijing to Tibet, which is often called “The Roof of the World” because it lies on a plateau that averages more than 13,000 feet above sea level.

According to the Chinese government, Tibet is a primitive land being led benevolently into the 20th Century under the astute leadership of Beijing. For the Dalai Lama and his many overseas celebrity supporters, Tibet is a land raped and sacked by Hans, China’s ethnic majority, who invaded the country from the east in 1950 and forced the Dalai Lama to flee in 1959.

We found Tibet neither as oppressive as some human rights organizations claim, nor as progressive as the Chinese government asserts. Many Tibetans claimed that religious rights have blossomed in recent years. Still others feel that they are being submerged by a flood of Chinese immigration. Most of the Tibetans claimed that the standard of living is better now than it was before the Chinese invasion.

“Tibet is much better off now than it was before the Chinese came,” said Jigme, the carpenter working on the restoration of the Tashilhunpo Monastery in Xigaze. “Then, there was not one (concrete) multistory building, now there are many. Then we did not have enough food to eat or clothing to keep warm; now that problem is basically solved.”

Then he pointed to the downside: “When the Chinese first came it was good, our lives improved, but now there are more and more Chinese coming, and it is bad.”

According to Chinese government statistics, 95% of Tibet’s 2.3 million people are ethnic Tibetans, but this figure is suspect. It probably does not include the substantial Chinese military presence or Chinese living here without residence permits.

In Lhasa, Chinese appear to outnumber Tibetans. The London-based Tibet Information Network quotes unofficial sources as saying only one-third of the civilians in the city are ethnic Tibetans.

The influx of Chinese migrants is clearly transforming both the appearance of Lhasa and its social fabric. Traditional Tibetan-style buildings are being destroyed. Only a small section of the old city remains standing, the area around the Jokhang Temple, Tibet’s most important religious site. While many of these old buildings are scheduled for demolition in 1995, hundreds of craftsmen and laborers are working on restoration of the Jokhang itself. And the temple is packed with Buddhist pilgrims every day.

Nevertheless, Lhasa’s distinctive architecture is disappearing, and it looks more and more like any other Chinese city. The view of the awesome Potala, the former winter residence of the Dalai Lama and one of Tibet’s most important landmarks, is marred by a new pin-striped water tower, while the street below the Potala is lined with rows of Chinese shops, restaurants, and karaoke bars. The Potala’s interior has been cheapened with tacky chandeliers.

In one Lhasa restaurant frequented by Tibetan yuppies who drive motorcycles and four-wheel-drive vehicles, a life-size poster of Michael Jackson towers over a small portrait of the Dalai Lama.

Young Tibetan men who work for the Department of Foreign Economics and Trade wear black leather jackets and shiny gold jewelry, a sharp departure from the plain clothes of the countryside.

Speaking in fluent Mandarin on cellular phones, they make deals with China’s provinces on quotas for coveted imported goods earmarked for Tibet’s drive to modernize. The special quotas are granted under a Chinese government program that gives preferential treatment to minority and backward areas. Instead of benefiting Tibet, however, they result in profits for the young Tibetan hustlers.

These Tibetans, the first generation educated under the Communist Chinese system, spend their evenings and cash in places like the Sunlight Nightclub. Here, both Tibetan and Chinese thirtysomethings share the dance floor.

Sitting at one of the club’s many tables, each decorated with a plastic rose illuminated by a spotlight, Yu Wenhua, a Chinese businessman who owns an electronics company in Lhasa, took me for a spin on the dance floor, explaining that the nightclub is similar to those in his native Jiangsu province, so it makes him a little less homesick.

Tibet, said Yu, a tall, thin man in a suit and tie, has more and more of the comforts of home, but it has a long way to go.

“When I first came here eight years ago there was absolutely nothing,” he said. “There were no multistory buildings, only mud houses. There were no paved roads, only dirt and cobblestone.”

The biggest changes, he said, have been in the last two years, since China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, made his now-famous trip to the south that launched the country on a development binge.

“Now the pace of change is growing more and more rapid, but this place is still like a primitive society. Tibet will never achieve the level of development of Jiangsu, because the people here are too stupid,” Yu said.

Like many other Han Chinese, dreams of wealth brought Yu to Tibet, which the Chinese call Xizang--”Western treasure house.”

“When I was 8 years old, I was hungry,” he said, pointing to his stomach.

“There was not enough to eat,” he continued, taking a huge wad of bills out of his wallet to pay for a round of drinks. Yu’s secret to his success in Tibet, he explained,is a Chinese saying: “The mighty dragons are no match for the native serpent,” which means, he explained, “that when you first come to a new place you have to establish good relations with the locals.”

But there is a cost to Chinese ambitions here. For instance, the migrants and their quest for wealth are taking a toll on Tibet’s environment, which was pristine before the Chinese invasion. The soil is not suitable for supporting a large population. Intense cultivation and chemical fertilizers are increasing crop yields to feed the growing Han population, but these techniques are also causing desertification.

The farmland in Tsang, Tibet’s western province, is sandy, and afternoon dust storms are so bad that most townspeople do not dare to go out. These daily storms presage a probable dust bowl.

If it is not the winds, it is the sound of explosives. Tibetan religious doctrine considers mining sacrilegious, but even in remote parts of the country one cannot escape the sound of blasting as workers build roads and mine Tibet’s vast mineral wealth.

More blasting is required to tunnel through Mt. Kumba La for a $40-million pump-storage hydroelectric station being built to meet Lhasa’s growing energy needs. The blue-green waters of one of Tibet’s largest lakes, Lake Yamdrok, home to a mythical dragon and teeming with aquatic life, will be pumped up Mt. Kumba La at off-peak energy demand periods, and then will be released at peak periods down a vertical drop of 8,400 feet to run turbines that are expected to generate 90 megawatts of power.

Women in brightly colored, traditional Tibetan-style dresses with infants strapped to their backs work in the fields by the lake, as women in the area have probably done for generations. But I learned from three young boys that life along Lake Yamdrok has already started to change. The boys told me in perfect Mandarin that they wanted to be, respectively, a banker, driver and a policeman when they grew up. They like to play TV video games when they are not doing homework, and they want to live in Lhasa.

Ngawang, the doctor of traditional Tibetan medicine whom I met as she was making a pilgrimage to Samye, opposes the Lake Yamdrok project, but she believes that her efforts to protect Tibet’s environment will fail.

“Most Tibetans have not developed an environmental consciousness, and those who do have an understanding of environmental problems have no power,” she said. “The cadres make all of the decisions, and the cadres are all Han Chinese.”

Wearing a Western-style mountaineering jacket and a Tibetan hat, Ngawang expressed her strong concern about the Chinese educational system.

“My Mandarin is poor, because Tibetan parents do not want their children to learn Chinese and the Chinese ways, so they do not send them to school,” said Ngawang. “But we need Mandarin to survive, so it puts us in a difficult position.”

Indeed, more than the extensive military presence, the educational system is China’s most powerful tool, next to television, in submerging the Tibetan culture and diluting Tibetan nationalism. Tibetan schoolchildren see Chinese as the language of modernity; they see Tibetan as the language of backwardness.

An 8-year-old Tibetan girl I met in a restaurant, clean and well dressed with a charming smile, asked me in perfect Mandarin to sing a song in English. Then I asked her to sing. She sang a couple of patriotic Communist Chinese songs including, “I love Beijing’s Tian An Men Square, the sun rises over Tian An Men, the great leader Chairman Mao Tse-tung guides us forward.”

When I asked her to sing a Tibetan song, she refused.

Sonam, our talkative driver, in contrast to Ngawang, supports the Chinese-style development of Tibet.

Last year, his work unit, which is part of the transportation department, took him on a tour of Beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai. Sonam was impressed with the modernization of these regions, especially Shanghai’s Nanpu Bridge.

He is a tall, well-built man just starting to get a pot belly. He said that he got fat when he quit smoking a few years ago after a bout with pneumonia. The windshield and dashboard of his army green jeep are covered with stickers: “No-smoking” in English, “Harley-Davidson” and “Rambo.”

When we were in Tibet he was taking a leave of absence and using his work unit’s jeep as a taxi to take people the 1 1/2-hour ride from Xigaze to Gyangze. He jumped at the chance to make a bigger profit to take us in the other direction on the old road to Lhasa, via Lake Yamdrok.

Sonam’s two sons, ages 9 and 12, are bilingual. They are enrolled in school, and Sonam hopes that they will go on to university.

Sonam is grateful that they have the opportunity to receive an education that he never had. Born in 1960, he did not learn about Tibetan Buddhism when he was a child, because any display of religious belief was forbidden during the Cultural Revolution. When Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978 and restrictions on religious practice were loosened, Sonam became curious about Buddhism.

“At first, I was afraid of Buddha,” he said. “But later I learned that praying is for the peace and the good of all beings, and I was no longer afraid.”

Norbu is a 52-year-old craftsman who is overseeing the restoration of murals on the walls of Gyangze’s Palkhor Chode Monastery. At the age of 9, he began his training in painting tankas , religious scrolls. He said he was forbidden to practice his craft from 1959 until 1981.

Although there are few craftsmen left to keep up the complex Tibetan art of painting mandalas, which are symbols of transformation through enlightenment, and tankas , which are religious scroll paintings, Norbu is confident that his disciples, along with the generation of disciples that are now being trained, will fill the gap.

“For more than a generation there were no artists trained,” he said, “but now we are training some who are starting young enough, and they will keep the traditions alive.”

There is another side to the story. The government is paying Norbu to restore a monastery that the state is fixing up as a major tourist attraction for Gyangze, where a luxury hotel has just been built. Norbu said that when all of the work on the monastery is finished later this year, the craftspeople will return the monastery to the country and cadres will come for a big celebration. But many of the more remote monasteries and nunneries, such as Tidrom Nunnery, that will never be on the route of a package tour have received no restoration funds.

After four weeks’ traveling in Tibet, the most vivid impressions are of a land with startling contrasts: traditional Buddhist seminarians exist alongside hip, cellular-phone yuppies; restoration of sacred temples is accompanied by environmental destruction on a massive scale; the goal of universal education runs parallel to cultural alienation; gold-plated tourist temples smack of prosperity while off the tourist track, sites such as the Tidrom Nunnery starve for attention.

Even in individual families, the divided path brought by Chinese colonization is evident.

Lobsang was a little boy encountered at Ganden Monastery.

A talkative 12-year-old, Lobsang said his sister attended a Chinese school and did very well, allowing her to advance to higher study at the university, something impossible to imagine in the pre-Chinese days, especially for women.

Because of his sister’s success, Lobsang said with a smile on his face, “my mother is happy every day.”

Lobsang himself did not do well in Chinese school but chose a path that also pleased his mother. He is in the Ganden Monastery studying to be a monk.

Now, he exclaimed again, “my mother is happy every day.”

Grinspoon has been a researcher in the Times’ Beijing Bureau.