茨仁夏加 西藏与中国：现在的过去

茨仁夏加说：中国官方庆祝1959年“解放”西藏，乃是一个否认藏人声音与意愿的殖民者愿景。

China's official commemoration of its "liberation" of Tibet in 1959 is underpinned by a colonial vision that denies Tibetan voice and agency, says Tsering Shakya.


茨仁夏加 西藏与中国：现在的过去

【原文发表于英国“开放民主”http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/tibet-and-china-the-past-in-the-present】

译者：台湾悬钩子


中国政府在2009年1月宣布，有史以来第一次，一个称之为“西藏百万农奴解放纪念日”的节日，将在西藏展开庆祝活动，以此来纪念1959年的事件：在藏人反对中国人僭越统治而群起抗议之后，中国人民解放军占领了拉萨，直接统治了该国家。

成立节日的决定——也是对于2008年3月与4月，遍及青藏高原各地抗议事件的回应——乃是经过精心的计算，并且以反映西藏人民真诚祈盼的样子来呈现。这个“解放日”的宣布【1】——2009年3月28日——是由拉萨的“西藏自治区人民代表大会”的藏族委员所作出的，这个机构代表的是中国对藏人所承诺的自治权，然而实际上却是一个，总是承奉中国共产党指令的橡皮图章，而并未反映当地的民情。

当然有可能，这样的动议确实是来自一群藏人——少数的党员高官，因为没办法在2008年向中央政府保证藏民族的忠诚与听话，而受到了内部批评。但这本身已经很能显示“农奴解放日”的提案的性质：在一个极权统治的政体里，地方代理政府的失职，代表它只剩下少数几个选择，表演即为其中之一。那么很自然的，极权政体会喜欢看到壮观的表演活动，仔细规划以臻完美，民众亦被要求参与仪式表演，以表达他们的幸福美满。

这种现象在北朝鲜相当明显。但即使在那里，这样的表演活动在地方人民心目中的逻辑，跟它表面上所想传达的讯息，也许也是非常不同的。有一次，一个北朝鲜的难民告诉我，他当时很喜欢参加这些表演活动【2】，我以为他可能是欣赏其中的美感；事实上，他说，他喜欢表演的原因，是因为参与者在彩排与演出当天，都可以饱餐一顿。

对于地方的藏族官员来说，“农奴解放日”想要传达的讯息，就是人民大众服从北京领导的成果展现。一个经过精心策划的壮观典礼，里面会有前“农奴”声泪俱下地控诉旧社会的邪恶，而数百名土著会齐步走过领导的演讲台，身穿多彩的服装，并且划一地舞蹈着——这些都会强化党对1959年事件的说法，更传达出今日藏人的心满意足，感激涕零。这个也会让藏族官员创造出一场让他们保住乌纱帽的表演，而地方人民满足了地方领导的需要，才能安居乐业。如同约瑟夫•康拉德(Joseph Conrad, 3)笔下【4】，一百年前在欧洲帝国主义统治下的非洲，地方土著学着体会殖民主人对他们的“高度信任”("exalted trust" )。

生存之道

还有其他近如眼前的事例。中国自己也在日本占领期间经历了类似的状况，当时中国本土与日方合作的人士——如汪精卫，他本是1940年代早期的中国官员，现在大部分的中国人都认为他是汉奸（背叛汉族的人）——被迫施行日方的命令，代表他们的统治者强迫人民做事。今日，党在处理非汉人的需求时，也需要这样的当地买办，来提供土著顺服的表象；据说，党经常为这些官员举办会议，而从北京为此目的专门派下来的党员高干，会花上几个小时，轮流赞美与警告这些地方官僚。

博弥（藏语，藏人）并不会指控这些人为叛徒，而是以俚语来嘲笑他们，笑他们见人说人话，见鬼说鬼话的模样：go nyi pa (藏语，两头人)。与此同时，地方的领导班子有时候被认为实在是太有办法了，因为比起其他的汉人同事，他们往往能够保住乌纱帽长达数十年之久：文化大革命时代的许多极左官员都在1976年之后被“清理”了，只有西藏地区的还保留下来。但他们能够继续待在原来的位置上，还有其他因素，因为党在这些“少数民族”地区，没有了他们，就没办法运作。

文化的道路

这种长寿的结果往往造成可笑的现象，特别是在文化的领域上。例如，党一直有一份可以接受、能唱样板歌曲的藏族流行歌手名单。但这份名单从来就没有改变过：官方到现在还是认为藏族歌谣的天后就是才旦卓玛，这位从1950年代就被指定为最受宠爱的藏族歌手。虽然有很多人很讨厌她的歌，然而到现在，她还是出现在每一个政治性的场合。原因很简单，党觉得她的歌很迷人，是因为围绕着她的生活所建构的象征性：被人民解放军解放的一个贫穷农奴女孩，靠着一副好歌喉而斐声全国，她就是阶级斗争中光荣、正确的翻身代表，也是土著真诚拥护国家的象征。

但是像在“农奴解放日”典礼上可见到的整套繁复的忠诚表演，总是可能遭遇的困难是，当地人民会有什么看法是难以控制的。我自己小时候在拉萨长大，还记得那时候去看史诗电影《农奴》（1963年，李俊导演）第一次在西藏公映。这部电影刻画了一个名为强巴的“农奴”受苦的一生，他的双亲被邪恶的地主杀死，他本人被地主的儿子当马来骑，（他在寺院又被道貌岸然的活佛欺凌），直到人民解放军来到，使他免服差役为止。这部电影，意图激发人民对于西藏上层阶级压迫的反感，到目前为止，仍在中国内地被视为对西藏社会制度的有力刻画。

但即使它在拉萨放映时，几乎没有人用上述的感觉来看待这部电影。当地人早就见过李俊以及他的工作队拍摄电影的过程，他们还认识其中的演员，也听说他们只能遵照指令，对于电影中许多不正确之处没有置喙余地。

然而这并不妨碍土著民族的“真情”演出：西藏的每个人在看这部电影时，都应该要哭泣；在当时的环境下，假如你看了以后不流泪，那就有可能被指控对封建领主抱以同情。所以我的母亲与她的朋友们就在眼睛下面抹清凉油，好让双眼看起来泪汪汪。

在一个著名的场景中，强巴因为肚子饿而偷窃寺院佛龛上的供品，因而被僧人痛打。当时的拉萨人并不把它看成什么阶级压迫，反而认为他是个亵渎神佛的小偷，所以受到因果报应。这部片子于是在拉萨被称为“强巴多玛古玛”（意谓：强巴，盗窃供品的小偷）。即使今天，在提到这部电影时，也没什么藏人使用官方指定的名称。对中国官员来说，危险是“农奴解放日”也很有可能会在庆祝典礼过后，即在人民的记忆中遭逢同样的命运。

对于中国人来说，问题更大，因为1959年的周年纪念日，不只是政治的重新安排，也是文化的重新塑造，亦即地方神祗必须受到诋诽，而地方的传统被称之为迷信（即使也是“充满异国风情”的）。

在家乡的宣传

中国政府一直未能在西藏建立起良好的管理与统治的系统，也没办法聘任能够了解人民的干部。西藏地方政府的主要目标，乃是针对“分裂主义”与“达赖集团”进行“殊死斗争”；当地的政治人物必须常常重复呼喊适当的口号，以展现他们“反分裂”的决心。但把这个当成官吏是否适任与能否升迁的标准，等于创造出妨碍良好政策发展的环境。

有一段很长时间——自从1950年代晚期的“反右”运动开始，甚至更早，在图博（藏语：西藏）东部——能够为两个族群真正带来和谐关系的人，已经都被排挤出原来的位置。这也是殖民统治的典型特征，亦即透过地方的买办公开表示支持外来统治，如此创造其统治正当性，并且透过土著顺从的表演来维持。而这个计划能够成功的核心，就是否认当地自发的行动，虽然被呈现出来的民情刚好相反：地方人民热烈欢迎外来的现代化模式。

这一点突显了，中国政治算计中统治图博的一个重要的优先性，那就是要说服“家乡”的听众（而不是被占领地区的人民）。这种展现“拥有”的行为——透过仪式性的权力展示、典礼与伴随而来的国家象征主义——都必须向国内民众一一解释与合理化。

而达成的方式非常简单。例如中国的媒体常常会发表有关西藏主题展【5】的文章（包括国外展出与中国境内的），这些展览显示中国人在1950年代来到西藏之前，藏族生活的落后与野蛮。文章的形式，就是引述一个汉人的看法，请他（她）作证展览的说服力（而不是请一个藏人来肯定展览内容的真实性）。

官方的报纸（英文）中国日报，报道了北京的一个内容相当血腥、暴力的“西藏今昔”展，正是在2008年藏区抗议最猛烈时匆忙推出的，其中引述了一位中国参观者的看法【6】：“展览让我觉得旧西藏是充满野蛮与黑暗的地方，更加了解到政教合一的落后制度阻碍了西藏的发展与进步。”中国政府需要首都人民笃信其任务的美德，清楚地显示了殖民计划本质上总是存在的不确定性与焦虑感。

然而，需要安抚家乡百姓的需求，却会造成其他的后果。2008年3月西藏的抗议爆发后，中国的中央电视台翻来覆去地播放拉萨的藏人攻击无辜的汉人平民的画面，还报道了店铺员工的死亡消息。同样的影像与同样的报道一再地播放，造成中国内地人民以及全世界各地的中国人，对藏人的愤怒。

所以支持中国政府、支持其后的镇压行动的浪潮出现在网路上时，也激起并引发了中国内部的族群对立，更进一步分开了汉人与藏人，并且让中国絮叨了数十年的族群融合与和谐社会的说辞，全都功亏一篑。

它也创造出激进的民族主义者与进步中国知识分子之间的紧张。一群中国知识分子联署签名了批评北京处理抗议方式的意见书，他们敦促政府做的第一点，就是停止单方面的宣传。北京的中国社会科学院哲学研究所的张博树写道【7】：“尽管当权者不愿意承认，‘西藏问题’究其源，实在是执政的中国共产党自己一手造成的。”

中国政府努力塑造内地民众的共识，而创造出来的另一个问题，则显现在西藏动乱乃是由外来势力——达赖喇嘛、美国中情局、CNN、整个西方与其他机构——所主谋的描写上。这种转移焦点的反应——全世界受到批评的政府都是一样的——允许政府不必检讨政策的缺失。但它也暗示着一种有力的概念（许多类似的情境里也发过）：否认“土著”有理性思考的能力，并替换以一种先入为主的偏见，认为土著都是暴力残忍的。观众不必去思考为什么土著会如此不平静。


再一次，中国人自己过去也是这样被描述的对象。1900年的庚子拳乱——可以被视为中国人民首次针对西方帝国主义的起义事件——被西方列强描写为一种异教徒狂热群众所进行的残酷种族运动。新闻报道里，拉萨的汉族居民不只赞成政府的镇压行动，还欢迎警察持枪巡逻街道，亦是回应了西方媒体报道1901年住在北京的欧洲人对义和团的反应：欣喜于秩序终于恢复，而生活回归正常。

但这是为了谁而建立的秩序与正常生活？今日，拉萨的居民活在无时不刻的监视之下。他们的房屋随时有可能被警方搜查；手机上传送的每个讯息，刻录在CD上的每一首歌，或者下载于手机上的音乐，都会被检查，看其意识形态是否正确。每一位地方干部都必须参与无数会议，宣誓效忠党与祖国。然而核心的问题却没有人问：为什么被解放的“农奴”的儿子与女儿，会起来反抗“解放者”？唯一受到官方允许的答案是，只有外国势力的煽动与原住民族天性的暴力倾向。

暴力的自然化

“农奴解放日”的言说对于中国政府如何看待藏人很有启发性。因为不停地使用“农奴”或“奴隶”等字眼（虽然是描述过去的压迫），官方中国也把藏族矮化为原始初民地位，赋予了外界经营他们生活的权力。

一个退休的人民解放军飞行员，江达三，1950年代曾派驻图博东部的青海地区，在他的博客里写了一个很能说明此论点的故事【8】。他说他亲眼见到，军队的将领最初试图使用“教育”的方法来赢得藏人的民心失败后，于是就邀请藏人的领袖来观看空军的轰炸演习。藏人看到人民解放军的火力强大，江写道：“这下子真感到解放军是‘天兵天将’了”。一些藏人激动地晕倒；一些人尿湿裤子；其他人则高喊口号：“共产党万岁！毛主席万岁！”这个故事与西方殖民作品里的记述非常类似，土著在看到白人的科技力量以后，敬畏得跪在地上投降，因此更强化了他们就是情绪化、头脑简单的人物，没有一点反思能力。

中国如何述说2008年3月至4月的抗议事件的方式，也有许多相似之处。这些抗议事件中最血腥的发生是在3月14日的拉萨，有一些民众死亡（官方说有十八个人），其中十二个是在暴动的人民放火燃烧中国商店以后。不清楚的是，我们不知道纵火者是否知道商店的二楼与后间有人躲藏，或者是否了解他们没有办法逃出商店。

“拉萨事件”跟世界其他地方的反移民城市暴动很类似：都是城市的贫民犯下的罪行，反映的是地方政治过程（译按1）的失败。它与1992年波士尼亚发生的种族清洗不同，当时的罪行乃是经过仔细的计划，武器乃从外国进口，仇恨的宣传经过蓄意地制造煽动；也不是2002年印度古吉拉特(Gujarat)所发生的宗教屠杀运动，当时狂热的印度教徒谋杀了数百名穆斯林。但中国的媒体呈现的方式，的确是很像美国媒体对2001年9月11日的受难者的报道：特别是在保罗•吉罗伊（Paul Gilroy，9）称之为“帝国式的仔细描述，它决定了死亡在哪里发生就应该受到赞美，也决定了参与者的特性”的地方【10】。

汉族店员的死亡，在中国的官方电视新闻频道、海外中文电台上反覆播放，很少或不曾提及在火灾中死亡的藏族店员（或者稍后被军警杀死或打伤的藏人）。这样的沉默诉说了千言万语：就像所有小人物的挣扎一样，中国境内藏人的真实体验与声音，都被认为是不重要的。即使它们果真获得注意，也被认为是其他势力所造成的结果（不论是外国势力、自然灾难或种族天性所造成的。）

这种看法让中国政府觉得理直气壮，并且还能激发民族情绪——汉藏两边都是。就在2008年的紧张气氛升高之际，大部分的中国人民都听从政府的呼吁，反对西方，扞卫祖国。结果是，每位亲西藏与讲人权的抗议场合，往往受到中国的反抗议者抗议。还发生过迫害运动——如同杜克大学的一位中国留学生在校园里公开为藏人讲话，就被自己的同学、中国的官方媒体辱骂【11】；一位在哈佛念过书的流亡藏人学生，在美国电视上以复杂的词彚来诉说当前局势的微妙与不同之处，没有把中国人全部都妖魔化为压迫者，就被藏人的民族主义者激烈地攻击（上述两个例子中，被攻击的对象都祸延到他们的家人）。这些事例展示了某种特殊心态的思考方式，也是偏见、盲目的民族主义，以及愤怒的丑陋言词如何超越政治取向的事例。

然而，权力的极度不均冲，意谓着中国官媒描写藏人的方式可以很容易下达与影响到民众的能度。2008年3月到4月这段期间，中国民众明显地对藏人的态度转为强硬，而他们本来就认为藏人是野蛮而又“不知感恩”的土著，天生就倾向暴力。甚至许多海外的年轻中国人，还有“六四”屠杀后逃离中国的民运分子，都支持他们政府的行动，谴责藏人抗议者是“抢匪”、“暴民”（同样的字彚也被拿来形容天安门的抗议者）。

藏人就是落后的概念，深植于官方对于西藏的论述之中；而这种看法已经渗入、贯穿中国民间对西藏的印象。然而值得注意的是，这是一个非常晚近的发明：它一直要到1959年的征服发生后，才变成整个系统的一部分，并且是作为这个过程的一部分：被征服的民族被转化成为野蛮人，等待征服者教化与文明的施舍（这一点，跟前几世纪中国人认知他们从藏人那里学会了很多，特别是在哲学与宗教上面，有显著的不同）。



经历了半个世纪的中国文明教化后，已经让藏人普遍感受到人类学家郝瑞教授（Stevan Harrell，12）称之为“被污名化的身份”（"stigmatised identity"）。这一点反映在中国的藏人必须在他们的演讲里与写作中取悦施恩于他们的主子；几乎每一篇被出版的文章开头都必须要有这样仪式性的赞美之词。人们变得很习惯在社会里扮演这个被指定的角色；创造出这些角色的逻辑，以及让这些角色固定化的更大不平等关系，已经被藏人内化了，而且他们也渐渐认为这都是很自然又必要的。

（就像科罗拉多大学学者埃美莉•T•叶所显示，13）许多藏人开始相信外界那个广为传播的概念，他们比起汉族就是“天生”比较懒散；而这也是每个曾经受到殖民的民族非常熟悉的体验。这让统治者更加震惊，因为这种顺服而懒散的种族居然有人抗议了，就好比鱼族开始对鱼类学者讲话一样。

经济发展的局限

藏人的不安，乃是中国现代化的矛盾产物：中国政府希望西藏人民被动地接受现代化的各种计划，也希望他们接受西藏人民就该是感激的土著的框架。胡锦涛的和谐社会概念，等同于呼吁全国人民都保持被动。所有引进西藏的激烈改变——包括大规模的基础建设计划——西藏人民应接受为现代西藏的新风貌，但是人民并不同意，然而他们在生活遭逢这样剧烈变化的过程之中，没办法有自己的声音。

中国现代化的主要论述——虽然现在因为经济不景气而变得没有那么有自信了——就是经济发展的模式，而其核心议题就是成长、效率、生产力以及消费。

当然物质生活的进步对于任何社会都是很重要的。但光有物质是不够的。就如同文森•塔克(Vincent Tucker，14)曾经写道：“如果不考虑文化的话——亦即人类如何控制自己的命运、人们如何以能够反映他们特殊经验的方式来命名这个世界的东西——经济发展只是一个社会工程（social engineering，译按2）的全球化过程，而经济与军事力比较强大的一方，能够为了自己的目的，控制、宰制与形塑其他人的生命。”

这乃是对于西藏正在发生的事情的准确描述。对藏人来说，从上而下强加于他们家园的经济模式，激起的是反抗的意识。而这种反抗，也是有关于在过程之中能够发出自己的声音的权利，还有更大的尊严与尊重。只要得不到这些，让人们上街头抗议的因素就还会继续存在。中国的国家机器，挟带其所有的武力，能够也将会继续控制这块土地，但将会发现人民心中的怨恨比较难以消除。拿掉达赖喇嘛的照片，取谛“反动”歌曲，也没办法移除人们一开始把照片放在那里的原因。

党内强硬派所希望看到的中国政府对抗议的反应，就是结合民族主义狂热、殖民态度与强大的武力三者，将中国带入警察国家以及急就章式的经济发展。这种方法，没有办法消除藏人的反对之意，也会进一步让西藏民族离心离德。

“农奴解放日”的庆祝仪式，就是统治西藏人民之中国，其国家权力之性质的经典说明。只有地方的意见被听取，地方的记忆被理解，围绕着西藏情势的认知与语言等议题被处理了，以权力下放为基础的政治的解决方案被考虑了，这个问题才有解决的可能。

2009-03-18

茨仁夏加是英属哥伦比亚大学亚洲研究所亚洲宗教当代社会的讲座教授，著有《龙在雪域：1947年后的西藏现代史》(哥伦比亚大学出版社，1999年)。

1、英文中国日报报道'Serf Liberation Day' to be set in Tibet (Xinhua) Updated: 2009-01-11 08:56
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-01/11/content_7385332.htm
中文请见：新华网“西藏九届人大二次会议将审议设立百万农奴解放纪念日议案”http://big5.xinhuanet.com/gate/big5/news.xinhuanet.com/newscenter/2009-01/11/content_10637598.htm
2. 图片可参考
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/07/asia_pac_inside_north_korea/html/9.stm
3. 约瑟夫•康拉德英文简介http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/os_conrad_joseph
4. 约瑟夫•康拉德《黑暗之心》, Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
5. 纽约时报全球版的报道：http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/12/asia/exhibit.php
6.英文中国日报报道Tibet exhibition draws appreciation from visitors (Xinhua) Updated: 2008-05-05 15:46
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-05/05/content_6661752.htm
中文：新华网“‘西藏今昔大型主题展’在观众中产生热烈反响”
7. 张博树“西藏问题的根本出路”，
http://2newcenturynet.blogspot.com/2008/04/blog-post_8198.html
英文翻译
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2008/05/zhang-boshu-the-way-to-resolve-the-tibet-issue/
8. 请见江达三博客“西藏平叛之一”
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4bf5830401000ajh.html
英文翻译
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2008/03/popular-history-the-suppression-of-a-rebellion-in-tibet/
9. 保罗•吉尔洛伊目前是伦敦政治经济学院社会系的教授，专长是种族歧视丶民族主义以及族群研究，并以西方社会里的黑人族群历史为著作主题。其简介可见:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/sociology/whoswho/gilroy.htm
10. 本文请见:http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-911/article_249.jsp
11. 王千源事件的链结，英文请见：
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2008/04/grace-wang-caught-in-the-middle-called-a-traitor/
12. 郝瑞是研究台湾与中国境内族群的美国华盛顿大学人类学教授。他曾于1972-73年在台湾研究民俗宗教，1980年代则从事中国西南族群研究和彝学研究。个人英文网页：
http://faculty.washington.edu/stevehar/bio.html
13. 埃美莉•T•叶是科罗拉多大学地理系教授，个人英文网页：
http://spot.colorado.edu/~yehe/
14. 文森•塔克主编，《发展的文化观》Vincent Tucker(ed.), Cutural Perspective on Development (Routledge, 1997)

译按1：“地方政治过程”（local political process），指的不只是从上而下的政策制定实施，也是从下情如何上达，地方政府如何与地方民众互动的过程，在民主国家中特别指民意代表产生、地方选举等过程。
译按2：“社会工程”（social engineering）是政治学的概念，指称政府或私人团体大规模影响民众的观感或社会行为的一种努力。

Tibet and China: the past in the present

By Tsering Shakya

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/tibet-and-china-the-past-in-the-present

China's official commemoration of its "liberation" of Tibet in 1959 is underpinned by a colonial vision that denies Tibetan voice and agency, says Tsering Shakya.

18 - 03 - 2009

The Chinese government proclaimed in January 2009 that for the first time a festival called "Serf Liberation Day" is to be celebrated in Tibet, in commemoration of the events of 1959 when Chinese forces occupied Lhasa and established direct control over the country following the uprising of Tibetans against their encroaching rule.

The decision - a response to the widespread protests that engulfed the Tibetan plateau in March-April 2008 - was carefully crafted and presented as if it reflected the heartfelt sentiments of the Tibetan people. The announcement of this "liberation day" - 28 March 2009 - was made by the Tibetan members of the standing committee of the regional National People's Congress in Lhasa,西藏自治區人民代表大會 a body that represents China's promise of autonomy to Tibetans but which in fact functions invariably as a conduit for the iteration of Chinese Communist Party directives rather than expressing local views.

It is indeed possible that such an initiative may have come from one group of Tibetans - senior party apparatchiks on the receiving end of internal criticism for their failure in 2008 to guarantee a loyal and docile populace. But this itself is telling of the nature of the Serf Liberation Day initiative: for in an authoritarian regime, the failure of a client administration leaves performance as one of the few options available. It is natural then that authoritarian regimes have a love of public displays of spectacle, engineered to perfection, in which the people are required to perform ceremonial displays of contentment.

The phenomenon is most evident in North Korea. But there as elsewhere, the local logic of such events may be quite different from the external message they communicate. When a North Korean refugee once told me that he had liked taking part in these performances, I thought he might have been appreciating their aesthetic merit; in fact, he said, the reason he liked performing was because the participants were fed during the rehearsal and on the day of the performance.

For local Tibetan officials, the intended message of Serf Liberation Day will be the delivery of public mass compliance to the leadership in Beijing. A choreographed spectacle - in which former "serfs" will tearfully recount the evils of the past while locals in their hundreds march past the leaders' podium, dressed in colourful costumes and dancing in unison - will both reinforce the party's narrative of 1959 and convey the contentment of Tibetans today. This will allow the Tibetan officials to produce the performances required to retain their posts, and the local people to fulfil the needs of the local leaders so that they can be allowed to maintain their livelihoods. As Joseph Conrad discerned in his evocation of the native predicament under European imperialism in Africa a century ago, the local subject learns to savour the "exalted trust" of the colonial master.

The way to survive

There are other and more immediate precedents. China itself experienced a similar situation under the Japanese occupation, when local collaborators - such as Wang Jinwei, a official in the early 1940s now known to most Chinese as a hanjian ("traitor to the Han") - were forced to carry out orders to coerce the people on behalf of their rulers. Today, the party in its dealings with non-Chinese needs such local intermediaries to provide a semblance of native acquiescence; it reportedly holds regular meetings of such officials where for hours they are alternately praised and admonished by apparatchiks sent from Beijing for the purpose.

Tibetans do not accuse these people of treachery, but rather mock them using a slang word that refers to their need to say different things to different people: go nyi pa ("two-headed men"). At the same time, the local leaders are sometimes seen as immensely skilful, because many of them retained their positions decades longer than any Chinese counterpart; no other leaders from the cultural-revolution era were allowed to remain in power after the ultra-leftists of that time were purged in 1976. But there are also instrumental reasons for their survival: the party could not operate without them in the "nationality" areas.

The routes of culture

This longevity has had its semi-comical dimensions, particularly in the cultural sphere. The party, for example, has maintained a roster of acceptable Tibetan pop stars whose songs are considered exemplary. But the list has never changed: the official diva of Tibetan song is Tseten Dolma, who has since the 1950s been decreed the most loved of all Tibetan singers. She appears regularly at every political event even though many people despise her music. The reason is plain. What the party finds enchanting is the symbolism constructed around her life: the fairytale saga of a poor serf girl who was liberated by the People's Liberation Army (PLA), brought to national status through her voice, seen as a vindication of class struggle and an authentic sign of native approval for the state.

The difficulty with elaborate performances of loyalty such as Serf Liberation Day is that local interpretations are always impossible to control. As a child growing up in Lhasa, I remember when the epic Chinese film Nongnu (The Serf [1963], directed by Li Jun) was first shown in Tibet. The film depicted the harrowing life of a "serf" called Jampa whose parents are killed by an evil landlord and who is used as a human horse for his master's child until freed from bondage by the arrival of the PLA. The film, meant to arouse indignation amongst the people against the Tibetan elite's class oppression, is still seen in China as a powerful depiction of the Tibetan social system.

But when it was shown in Lhasa, nobody watched it with quite those sentiments. Many of the local audience had watched Li Jun and his crew shooting the film; they also knew the actors, and had heard stories that they were just following instructions and were not allowed to correct many of the inaccuracies in the film.

This didn't affect the performance of sentiment. Everyone in Tibet was supposed to watch the film and cry; in those days if you did not cry, you risked being accused of harbouring sympathy with the feudal landlords. So my mother and her friends would put tiger-balm under their eyes to make them water.

In one famous scene, Jampa is shown being beaten by monks after hunger had forced him to steal food left as an offering on a temple shrine. Lhasa people at the time saw this not so much as a moment of class oppression but as the karmic reward due to a sacrilegious thief. The film became known locally as Jampa Torma Kuma (Jampa, The Offering Thief): even today hardly any Tibetan uses the official title when referring to the film. The risk for China's officials is that Serf Liberation Day will face a similar fate in popular memory once the public spectacle is over.

The problem for the Chinese goes deeper, for the claims embodied in the 1959 anniversary commemoration require a cultural as well as a political rearrangement, where local gods are denigrated and local traditions are branded as redundant (even when being seen as "exotic").

The homeland effort

The Chinese government has been unable to establish good governance in Tibet, and to appoint cadres who are attuned to the people. The government's primary goal is the "life or death" fight against "splittism" and "the Dalai clique"; local politicians must repeat the appropriate slogans and demonstrate their anti-splittist zeal. But to establish these as the only criteria needed for survival and promotion is to create an obstacle to the development of good policy.

For a long period - ever since the "anti-rightist" campaign in the late 1950s, and even earlier in eastern Tibet - local Tibetan officials who could have brought genuine accommodation between the two peoples have been edged out of position. This too is a feature that is typical of colonial administrations, where legitimacy is created through public endorsement by local intermediaries and maintained through mass performances of native compliance. At the heart of this project is denial of indigenous agency, though it is typically presented as the opposite: a local populace's welcome to a foreign model of modernity.

This highlights the fact that a crucial priority in Chinese political calculations in Tibet is to convince a "home" audience (rather than the subject one in the occupied area). The act of possession - and the ritualised displays of power, ceremony and state symbolism that grow up around it - has to be explained and legitimated to key domestic constituencies.

The way this works can be transparent. The Chinese press, for example, often publishes articles about exhibitions (abroad as well as in China) that display the evils of Tibetan life before the Chinese arrived in the 1950s. The formula is to quote a Chinese interviewee attesting to the persuasiveness of the exhibits (rather than a Tibetan confirming their authenticity).

An official party paper, the China Daily, reported on a gory exhibition in Beijing of the Tibetan past hurriedly launched during the height of the 2008 protests in Tibet by quoting a Chinese visitor: "I feel in the exhibition the barbarianism and darkness that permeated old Tibet, and have a better understanding how the backward system of mixing politics and religion thwarted Tibet's development and progress." The uncertainty and anxiety that underlies the colonising project is indicated by the need to have the metropolitan centre persuaded of the merits of its mission.

This need to appease the home audience can have complications, however. When the protests in Tibet erupted in March 2008, Chinese state television repeatedly broadcast footage of Tibetans lashing out against innocent Chinese civilians in Lhasa and reported the death of shop-workers. The same images and the same reports were broadcast over and over again, arousing the wrath of Chinese people in China and around the world against Tibetans.

But the wave of support for the Chinese government and its crackdown that ensued also inflamed and licensed ethnic antagonism in China, further dividing Chinese and Tibetans, and undoing decades of rhetoric in China about the unity of nationalities and the harmony of society.

It also helped create tensions between aggressively nationalist and progressive Chinese citizens. A group of leading Chinese intellectuals circulated a petition criticising Beijing's response to the protest, and the first point they urged on the government was to desist from one-sided propaganda. Zhang Boshu of the Philosophy Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing wrote that "although the authorities are not willing to admit it", the problems in Tibet "were created by the Chinese Communist Party itself as the ruler of China."

A further complication in the Chinese government's effort to ensure the consensus of the domestic audience is inscribed in the portrayal of the Tibet unrest as the work of outside forces - the Dalai Lama, the CIA, CNN, the west in general or other institutions. This deflective response - common to besieged administrations everywhere - allowed the government to avoid answering questions about its own policies. But it also insinuates a potent notion (again, one that echoes many other comparable situations): a denial of the "native's" reasoning capacity and in its place an assumption of his inherently violent character. The spectators are not asked to consider why the natives are restless.

Again, the Chinese themselves were long the target of the very same depictions. The Yihetuan rebellion of 1900 - which can be regarded as the Chinese people's first uprising against western imperialism - was portrayed by western powers as a kind of racial project of cruel, heathen masses. The reporting of Chinese residents in Lhasa applauding the government's action and welcoming the police's armed street-patrols echo those of the western press with regard to Europeans in Beijing in 1901: order is restored and life returned to normality.

But order and normality for whom? Today, citizens of Lhasa live under surveillance. Their houses are liable to be searched; every text they produce, every piece of music they record on a CD or download on a phone can be examined for its ideological content. Every local cadre has to attend countless meetings, and to declare loyalty to the party and the motherland. The central question is avoided: why are the sons and daughters of "liberated slaves" rising against the "liberator"? The only permissible answers are foreign instigation and an inherent ethnic propensity for violence.

The naturalisation of violence

The discourse of Serf Liberation Day is revealing of how the Chinese government sees Tibetans. For in repeatedly using the words "serfs" or "slaves" (albeit in relation to past oppressions), official China also reduces Tibetans to the status of primitives, and authorises outside management of their lives.

Jiang Dasan, a retired PLA pilot who was stationed in the Qinghai region of eastern Tibet in the 1950s, wrote a tale on his blog that illustrates this view. He was witness to an incident where Chinese army generals, realising that the initial attempts to win over local Tibetans through "education" had failed, invite the Tibetan leaders to witness a bombing display by their air-force. When Tibetans saw the PLA's firepower, Jiang writes, "they really believed the PLA was ‘heaven's army'". A few people couldn't take it and fainted; some urinated in their pants; others shouted slogans at the top of their voice: "Long live the Communist Party! Long live Chairman Mao!" The incident recalls similar accounts in western colonial literature where the natives fall to their knees and submit, awestruck by the white man's techno-magical power and reified as emotionally driven simpletons without reflective capacity.

There are many parallels too in China's presentation of the protests of March-April 2008. The bloodiest early incident of these protests occurred on 14 March in Lhasa, when a number of civilians (official reports say eighteen) were killed, twelve of them after rioters set off fires in Chinese shops. It's not clear if the arsonists had any idea that there were people hiding in the shops' upper floors or backrooms, or that they were unable to escape.

The "Lhasa incident" resembled the anti-migrant urban riots familiar from elsewhere in the world: a crime of the urban dispossessed that reflects the failure of the local political process. It is not comparable to the ethnic cleansing seen in Bosnia in 1992, where crimes were meticulously planned, with weapons imported and hate-propaganda fomented; nor to the religious pogrom seen in Gujarat in 2002, when Hindu zealots murdered hundreds of Muslims. But the Chinese media did handle it in ways reminiscent of the United States media's coverage of victims of 11 September 2001: in terms of what Paul Gilroy (in openDemocracy) called "the imperial topography, which dictates that deaths are prized according to where they occur and the characteristics of the bodies involved."

The death of these Chinese shop-workers was broadcast repeatedly on Chinese national television news and overseas Chinese-language stations, with little or no mention of the Tibetan shop-workers who died in the same fires (nor, later, of any Tibetans killed or injured by security forces). This silence is symptomatic: for as with all struggles by the powerless, the actual experience and voices of Tibetans inside China are regarded as unimportant. Where they are noticed at all, they are regarded as the effects of other forces (whether these be foreign powers, natural disasters or ethnic tendencies).

This argument has served the Chinese government well, and helped arouse nationalistic sentiments - on both sides. As the 2008 tensions escalated, the Chinese community in large part heeded its government's call to defend the motherland against the west. As a result, every pro-Tibetan or human-rights protest tends to be countered by Chinese counter-protests. There have been persecution-campaigns too - just as a Chinese student at Duke University who publicly reached out to Tibetans on her campus was vilified by her compatriots and even Chinese state-owned media, an exile Tibetan student at Harvard who had spoken on American television in complex terms about the nuances of the current situation without demonising the Chinese as oppressors was viciously attacked by Tibetan nationalists (and in both cases the attacks extended to the students' families). These experiences demonstrate the workings of a mindset where prejudice, blind nationalism, and an ugly anger in language transcend differences of political alignment.

The huge imbalance of power, however, means that the Chinese depiction of Tibetans can more easily reach and influence citizens' attitudes. The period since March-April 2008 has seen a hardening of attitudes against Tibetans, which draw on long-standing attitudes that view them as primitive and "ungrateful" natives who are predisposed to violence. Even many young Chinese abroad and those who escaped the aftermath of the 4 June 1989 massacre supported their government's actions and condemned the Tibetan protesters as "looters" and "hooligans" (the same words used to depict the Tiananmen protesters).

The idea of the Tibetan being luohou (backward) is entrenched in the official state discourse on Tibet; and the perception has penetrated the Chinese popular image of Tibet. Yet it is notable how recent an invention this is: it has been systematised only after the conquest of 1959, as part of the process of transforming a conquered people into the uncivilised awaiting the gift of civilisation from the conqueror (and is a marked contrast to earlier centuries, when the Chinese acknowledged their copious learning from the Tibetans, particularly in matters of philosophy and religion).

A half-century of the Chinese mission civilisatrice has left Tibetans with what the social anthropologist Stevan Harrell calls a "stigmatised identity". This is reflected in the requirement for Tibetans in China to propitiate the benevolent ruler in their speeches and writings; almost every published text opens with such ritual invocations. People become accustomed to performing their assigned roles in society; they internalise the logic that has made these roles, and the wider unequal relationship that fixes them, seem natural and necessary.

Many Tibetans have (as Emily Yeh has shown) come to believe the widely disseminated notion that they are "naturally" more idle than their Chinese counterparts; again, a familiar aspect of the experience of every colonised people. This makes it all the more shocking to the rulers when elements of this docile and indolent native population protest: like a fish speaking back to ichthyologists.

The limits of economics

The Tibetan unrest is a product of the paradox of modern China, in which the government wants the people to passively accept its programme of modernisation and its framing of Tibetan subjects as grateful natives. Hu Jintao's notion of a harmonious society is tantamount to a call for passivity on the part of the citizens. The radical changes being introduced to Tibet - including large-scale infrastructural projects - are accepted as a facet of a modern Tibet but the people do not acquiesce, as they do not have a voice in this transformation of their lives.

The main discourse of modern China - albeit with somewhat less confidence as the severe effects of the recession are felt - is the economic-development paradigm, where the core issues are growth, efficiency, productivity and consumption.

It is true that material well-being is crucial for any society. But it is not enough. As Vincent Tucker has written: "without consideration of culture, which essentially has to do with people's control over their destinies, their ability to name the world in a way which reflects their particular experience, development is simply a global process of social engineering whereby the economically and militarily more powerful control, dominate, and shape the lives of other for their purposes".

This is a precise description of what is happening in Tibet. For the Tibetans, the imposition of the economic paradigm has aroused resistance. The resistance is also about the right to have a voice in the process, and wider dignity and recognition. As long as these are denied, the conditions for people to take to the streets will remain. The Chinese state, with all its might, can and will be able to control the land, but will find underlying resentment harder to erase. The removal of the Dalai Lama's pictures and the banning of songs will not remove the reasons why the people put the photographs there in the first place.

The Chinese government response to protest favoured by party hardliners is to combine nationalist fervour, colonial attitudes and brute force in shifting increasingly towards an agenda of control and rushed development. This approach, far from eliminating Tibetan opposition, will further alienate the Tibetan population.

The commemoration of "Serf Liberation Day" is a classic illustration of the nature of Chinese power over Tibetans. Until local voices are listened to and local memories understood, until issues of perception and language that surround the Tibetan situation are addressed, until a political settlement based on the devolution of power is considered, it is unlikely that any progress will be possible.

Social engineering is a concept in political science that refers to efforts to influence popular attitudes and social behavior on a large scale, whether by governments or private groups.

Tsering Shakya is research chair in religion and contemporary society in Asia at the Institute for Asian Research, University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet since 1947 (Columbia University Press, 1999)