BEIJING'S YELLOW BRICK ROAD

Jamyang Norbu's most recent column, "Negotiation Nightmare," gives ample evidence of the frustration a lot of us felt as Kelsang Gyaltsen and Lodi Gyari returned from their meeting with the Chinese.  I, and many other commentators, felt that these talks were little more than stall tactics, buying time until the Olympics were done.  Norbu gives us a glimpse into the daily reality faced by the Tibetans, both in Tibet and by those Tibetans whose sources of information are a good deal more reliable than mine.  This of course is a reality that these dialogues have done nothing to address:

I have also heard of many hundreds, maybe even a thousand or so men in rural Amdo and Kham hiding out in the mountains, to avoid police and military crackdowns in their districts. There has been the report of a gunfight between Tibetans and Chinese security personnel. A couple of days ago I received an unconfirmed account of two women in a village in Amdo who were harassed beyond endurance by Chinese policemen about religious images in their home. The women stabbed three policemen to death and were themselves subsequently gunned down. In all likelihood it appears that the situation in Tibet will deteriorate further. The situation is deeply troubling especially since there is little or no information on what is actually happening.

Clarification here is needed; much of the material we read on both sides seems convinced that the Chinese or the Tibetans can be persuaded that their policies are wrong.  If only one more body, one more atrocity is uncovered, then they will see!  This I believe is naive. 

Fruitful dialogue is possible only when both parties feel that their fundamental principles are, to some degree, negotiable.   If this spirit of co-operation is absent, there are various ways to induce it, and Norbu proposes one such way in his post.  I mentioned Alisdair MacIntyre in a previous post; he acknowledges that protests can be effective, but that they do not, in their modern guise, win over converts by the force of their logic:

The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose an argument either.  Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors' premises.  This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this (71).

In other words, if you view Tibetan autonomy as a fundamental political right, and you are talking with those who view autonomy as a direct threat to national unity--their own notion of a fundamental political right--then until one of you concedes his fundamental political right, dialogues are logically impossible.  And conceding fundamental political rights isn't currently the order of the day.

Of course, this is old news, Diplomacy 101.  The negotiations that occur at the table--and this is particularly true in the current situation--are the smallest percentage of the negotiations that are actually occurring.  This is where MacIntyre's sense of protest is important.  Protests are not held to win arguments logically; they are held to compel those who hold opposing views to abandon those views by building consensus against them and showing them ultimately that their power--usually calculated in numbers--is dwindling. Black children were not allowed to attend public schools in the South because Civil Rights workers logically demonstrated to the Klan that such racist practice was inhuman.  Integration occurred because the world finally saw black children facing the business end of high-powered water hoses and skidding across pavement.  The media covered the protests, broadcast the images, and the world responded.  Most of the time, if the world is given a choice between senseless human slaughter and bountiful human life, they will choose the latter.

But until this critical mass of outrage is reached, the Chinese will continue to use the diversionary tactics that Norbu so wearingly recounts in his post.  And because the media have been effectively taken out of the formula with the Chinese crackdown, this critical mass will build much more slowly; therefore, bloggers like Woeser, who I mentioned yesterday, are all the more important.

Like the Wizard of Oz, though, the Chinese are continually asking us to pay no attention to the  man behind the curtain.  But the Tibetans parted those curtains in March, and now the Wizard is asking us to look away (while he shuts the curtains again), to look toward the Olympics, to acknowledge the murderous conspiracies of the Dalai Lama, to remember the feudal society of Tibet.  And in the meantime they're frantically pulling the levers of oppression.

So these are not logical arguments that can be won at a negotiation table or on the streets; to try to win such an argument is to play the Wizard's game.  It's time to get off the Yellow Brick Road. 

Let your argument be the bearing of witness, and let your witness gather strength daily by however you choose the strengthen it.  I'd recommend education, and I'd recommend as a first step to garnering that education, reading Jamyang Norbu's column and the forum that follows his posts.