Zeng

astralis sir,

I think that your friend and colleagues at the CECC are doing good job and collecting correcting information not like the Western Medias and those self-claimed human right watch-dogs. As a mainland Chinese, I can say that the situation in Xinjiang is improving and that is not Chinese government propaganda.

A decade ago, Han Chinese people were warned by the government for not traveling to Southern Xinjiang without joining a group because the local Uyghur people were hostile to Han Chinese. Quite a number of them were supporting separatist movement of “East Turkistan” that was originated from 2 short lived self-claimed “independent state” in 1930s and 1940s.

As the slow opening of Chinese religious policy and especially the economic development, the Han Chinese vs. Uyghur people relation was improved significantly. The booming tourism becomes the major income source for the Uyghur people in Southern Xinjiang area that is on the South path of the ancient Silk Road, where different ancient cultures and religions met together. Today, Han Chinese people are welcome there to spend money. Local Uyghur people hate the extremists that block the local tourism and economic development. The support to those extremists is getting less and less. When people get a decent life, they hardly want to fight.

Also, Uyghur people, like all 55 minorities in China enjoy privilege over Han Chinese on college application. The one child family policy was only imposed on Han Chinese but not on the minorities. If one of the parents is a minority, their children can claim to be minority to enjoy the privilege. They can claim to be Han Chinese too. But as far as I know, in reality, most of them claim to be minority for the benefit of being a minority. It indicates that given the choice people want to be minority in China. Some suppression stories are really far fetched. Of cause, the minority elites would not be happy to this kind of arrangement that weakens their minority identities. But in any countries, the minority will be assimilated to certain degree by the majority unless you want to be American Indians who stay in their reservation land and drift off from the modernization process.

The Tibetans are not very aggressive probably because their Tibetan Buddhism practiced by the ordinary Tibetans is not aggressive although the Tibetan Buddhism practiced by the elite Tibetan Lamas is very brutal. In 1950, it was documented that the elite Tibetan Lamas practiced their highest Tibetan Buddhism tricks in order to defeat PLA’s advancing into Tibet. During that practice, 64 Tibetans were sacrificed and their bodies and bloods were taken as gifts to their gods for help.

Anyway, there were hardly problems for Han Chinese to travel in the Tibetan region except for very short period of time in 1959 during Tibetan rebelling (uprising if you like to call it). Today, if you go to a Tibetan home, you may see pictures of both Mao and Dalai Lama and Tibetans are very friendly to Han Chinese. Basically, Tibetans respect power, strongman, variety of gods and ghosts. Dalai Lama was their highest god (living Buddha) on earth. But Mao was even stronger to drive Dalai Lama out, so Mao became their god too. A very interesting thing about Tibetan Buddhism is that it is hard to distinguish between gods and ghosts, between virtue and reality, between good and bad, which fascinate me a lot. Both gods and ghosts can do good things and bad things. The worst of them can do the best thing and the best of them can do the worst thing. Their strongest gods or ghosts can be their biggest enemy originally. I think that Mao may fit into that category for some Tibetans. Tibetan Buddhism is really an x-dimensional religion.

Dalai Lama has announced that he doesn’t want an independent Tibet but he wants a true autonomous “Grand Tibet” of the size of more than 1/5 of the China with less than 0.5% of the Chinese population. His true autonomous Tibet will be pretty much a monk state governed by monks. Dalai Lama’s grand Tibet is also overlapping with the “East Turkistan” that claims around the same size of the land. If both “Grand Tibet” and “East Turkistan” get independence, China will loss more than 40% of the land, and “Grand Tibet” and “East Turkistan” will fight with each other for land disputes. They may even fight with other countries as well because both have lands occupied by China’s neighboring countries. So, be careful in supporting their independence. You will get endless fights waiting for you.

In Dalai Lama’s “Grand Tibet”, Han Chinese was already the majority hundred years before PRC was born. No Han Chinese people want to live in his monk state that hates railway and all modernizations. Besides monks, there are not many Tibetans on Dalai Lama’s side either. Although Dalai Lama has zero bargain power, Chinese government still started to negotiate with him after Deng Xiaoping took power and even invited his brother, another living Buddha to visit Tibet several times. But Dalai Lama just can not distinguish between virtue and reality. He always misunderstands the foreign spotlight he enjoyed oversea to be the reality back in Tibet. If he really cares about his Tibetan followers, he should forget the foreign spotlight he enjoyed and come back before he dies. I am sure that China can give him a very high symbolic position staying in Beijing and China can do something according to his requests for his Tibetan followers. This is totally negotiatable. But if he is obsessed with foreign Nobel winner spotlight and continues to do those anti-China things around the world, I think that China will wait his death and select another Dalai Lama based on traditional Tibetan ritual. Then, he wasted any possibility for him to leave a legend of did something for his followers in Tibet before he dies.

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I am here for exchanging opinions.