We’ve just had some heated threads (over-heated, really) that pounded on the same theme, i.e., that Westerners cannot understand China and shouldn’t comment on it. Whatever. So I’m pleased to point you to Isabel Hilton’s review of a Chinese writer’s book on Tibet and the glorious liberation it has been lucky enough to enjoy.

Tibet, of course, is one of those radioactive issues and a lighning rod for extreme opinions. On the one side, we have the starry-eyed Hollywood liberals who’ve fallen for the romanticized Tibet mythology of Lost Horizons, and on the other we have the CCP talking points: the CCP took a chaotic, feudal society and brought them modernization, infrastructure, freedom from serfdom, etc. And there’s certainly some truth to the latter, even if many (most?) Tibetans would have preferred not being liberated. But that’s a small detail.

From Hilton’s spell-binding review:

In one scene in his travel memoir Red Dust, Ma Jian – who has fled Beijing to escape arrest in the Campaign against Spiritual Pollution – describes dining with a doctor and his friends on an owl that they had stolen that afternoon from the dissection lab in the local hospital. “It reeked of formalin,” he wrote, “but after braising it in ginger and soy sauce, the taste was quite bearable.” Later, after a visit to the maternity ward, his doctor friend brings home some placenta to stuff dumplings with for supper.

It’s worth mentioning these episodes because, without the Tibetan context in which Stick Out Your Tongue was written, the stories can seem stark, even brutal. Relations between Han Chinese and Tibetans are not generally warm. For Tibetans, Han Chinese are the occupiers of their land and destroyers of their culture. For most Han Chinese, Tibetans are the dirty, backward and ignorant people of Beijing’s propaganda, lucky to be “liberated” by the Red Army from their feudal serfdom. For those Han Chinese who find Beijing’s propaganda less appealing, Tibet can seem like the romantic locus of a profound spirituality and a place of exhilarating, if dangerous, beauty….

In 1983, Ma Jian was living in Beijing as a photographer and painter in a circle of dissident friends – young men and women who snatched moments of sexual licence, exchanged precious copies of foreign books, and discussed each other’s work in tiny gatherings that were reported by the neighbours and raided by the police. They were seen as socially deviant – and so dangerous – elements and therefore vulnerable to persecution in the now quaint-sounding Campaign against Spiritual Pollution. It sounds less quaint when the figures are tallied: more than a million arrests and 24,000 executed. Ma Jian embarked on his journey to evade arrest himself and on publication of Stick Out Your Tongue he was held up as an example of both “spiritual pollution” and “bourgeois liberalism”. He has lived in exile ever since….

The three-year journey that inspired first Stick Out Your Tongue and then Red Dust was taken 20 years ago, and the book itself was banned in China in 1987. In Lhasa, when he arrived, the Chinese were celebrating the 20th anniversary of the “liberation” of Tibet, a miserable festival of flags and blaring loudspeakers imposed on a sullen, conquered people. Ma Jian escaped to the high plateau to wander among nomads and monks in search of spiritual truth, but discovered instead poverty and the degradation of a spiritual tradition all but destroyed by political persecution. Tibet since has been subject to waves of Han migration. The Tibetan city of Lhasa has largely been destroyed and prostitution flourishes amid the Chinese-imposed concrete blocks and karaoke kitsch. Today Han Chinese visit Tibet as tourists, buying up Buddhist images that they hope will help them in their businesses; for them Tibet has been tamed as a spiritual Disneyland, not unlike the Tibet of many western imaginations.

Ah, liberation. Read the article, and if you want to read a Chinese writer’s personal experiences in Tibet, buy the book. Though, needless to say, you won’t find it in China.