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False portrayals distort Tibetan story
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IN a children’s clothes shop in downtown Lhasa, Choizong, 73, buys sportswear and a pair of soccer shoes for his 6-year-old grandson.
The boy loves playing soccer with his father at an indoor pitch in the suburbs of the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region.
“We mainly wore wool robes covered in patches in our childhood,” remembered Choizong, who is happy that his grandson was born in an era of rapid development.
In 2013, the per capita net rural income in Tibet reached 6,578 yuan (US$1,067) and the per capita disposable income of urban residents exceeded 20,000 yuan. The average lifespan in Tibet has risen from 35.5 years in the 1950s to 68 years today.
Tibet was once one of the most impoverished places in the world. Before 1950, more than 95 percent of Tibet’s population were serfs and 90 percent were illiterate.
Since British novelist James Hilton introduced the fictional “Shangri-la” to Western readers eight decades ago, Tibet has often been considered a mystical, harmonious paradise cut off from the rest of the world.
The prevailing image is of a permanently happy land where most inhabitants are meditative lamas clad in crimson robes, twirling prayer wheels and chanting mantras.
This Western “Shangri-la complex” hampers and limits a rational understanding of the region.
In China, Tibet is often thought of as a backwater with a formerly inhumane serf system in which its people craved development and civilization just like any other part of the world.
Hilton had never been to the places he wrote about. While journalists, film directors and politicians in his time portrayed Tibet as a heaven on Earth, the region itself was under the feudal system — a society as cruel as, if not worse than, European society in the Dark Ages. It was also a land where women who had extramarital affairs would have their noses and ears cut off for punishment.
“Despite the British invasion of Tibet in 1904, the West did not have the opportunity to understand Tibet,” Alessandra Spalletta, China news editor of the Italian news agency AGI, told the “Forum on the Development of Tibet, China” in Lhasa. “They started the mystification of Tibet while building the mythology of ‘Shangri-la.’
“Western people are fond of their own images of Tibet rather than the real Tibet,” she said.
As some scholars point out, Tibet has become a “spiritual supermarket” for Westerners trying to find what they have lost from their own societies in the process of industrialization and modernization.
Some call Tibet the “last pure land on Earth” and want it to be immune from any development, afraid it might lead to the destruction of Tibetan culture and the annihilation of Tibetan Buddhism.
“People who think this way believe that Tibet should remain at a primitive stage forever and Tibetans should always ride yaks and live in tents,” Cui Yuying, vice head of the State Council Information Office, told the opening ceremony of the forum on Tuesday.
For the past half century, however, Tibet has been on an irreversible path of development, matching the general trend of the development of human society, Cui said.
Tibet’s GDP has maintained double-digit growth for the past two decades. In 2013, the Tibetan economy was worth 80.2 billion yuan.
“Tibet is in the best development period of its history,” said Losang Jamcan, chairman of the Tibetan regional government, stressing that Tibet will never sacrifice its environment for economic growth.
“Tibet remains one of the places with the best environment in the world,” said Jambae, head of the Tibet Environmental Protection Department. Water quality in rivers and lakes in Tibet has maintained high standards.
Environment
The air quality is excellent or good in Lhasa and other major townships most of the time. The Chinese government plans to invest 15.5 billion yuan to protect Tibet’s environment.
Obstructed by the “Shangri-la complex,” many Western scholars have opted to study Tibet’s history before the 20th century. Some even suggest the history of Tibet after 1951, when the region was liberated, is not worth studying at all. Some Western media shun the economic achievements Tibet has made.
The notion of Shangri-la, created by Westerners, has been utilized by separatists endeavoring to split Tibet from China.
“Romanticization (of Tibet) is a part of the Dalai Lama’s campaign for separatism,” said Narasimhan Ram, chair of Kasturi & Son Limited and publisher of the Indian newspaper The Hindu.
He said the Dalai Lama always talks about the beauty and isolation of the old Tibet rather than its backwardness and extreme poverty, taking advantage of the “Shangri-la complex.”
Matevz Raskovic, a board member of the Confucius Institute, at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, said that some Western media’s skewed depiction of Tibet has reinforced the “Shangri-la complex,” which hinders and limits a rational understanding of the autonomous region.
“When you look at Tibet the way some Westerners perceive it, religious issues are at the heart of everything,” Raskovic said. “It should be the responsibility of journalists to expose other sides of Tibet, such as tourism and the cohabitation of diverse cultures.”
(Xinhua)
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