The media imposes certain stories on us, and the
one about Tibet goes like this. The People’s
Republic of China, which, back in 1949, illegally
occupied Tibet, has for decades engaged in the
brutal and systematic destruction not only of the
Tibetan religion, but of the Tibetans themselves.
Recently, the Tibetans’ protests against Chinese
occupation were again crushed by military force.
Since China is hosting the 2008 Olympics, it is
the duty of all of us who love democracy and
freedom to put pressure on China to give back to
the Tibetans what it stole from them. A country
with such a dismal human rights record cannot be
allowed to use the noble Olympic spectacle to
whitewash its image. What will our governments
do? Will they, as usual, cede to economic
pragmatism, or will they summon the strength to
put ethical and political values above short-term
economic interests?

There are complications in this story of ’good
guys versus bad guys’. It is not the case that
Tibet was an independent country until 1949, when
it was suddenly occupied by China. The history of
relations between Tibet and China is a long and
complex one, in which China has often played the
role of a protective overlord: the anti-Communist
Kuomintang also insisted on Chinese sovereignty
over Tibet. Before 1949, Tibet was no Shangri-la,
but an extremely harsh feudal society, poor (life
expectancy was barely over 30), corrupt and
fractured by civil wars (the most recent one,
between two monastic factions, took place in
1948, when the Red Army was already knocking at
the door). Fearing social unrest and
disintegration, the ruling elite prohibited
industrial development, so that metal, for
example, had to be imported from India.

Since the early 1950s, there has been a history
of CIA involvement in stirring up anti-Chinese
troubles in Tibet, so Chinese fears of external
attempts to destabilise Tibet are not irrational.
Nor was the Cultural Revolution, which ravaged
Tibetan monasteries in the 1960s, simply imported
by the Chinese: fewer than a hundred Red Guards
came to Tibet. The youth mobs that burned the
monasteries were almost exclusively Tibetan. As
the TV images demonstrate, what is going on now
in Tibet is no longer a peaceful ’spiritual’
protest by monks (like the one in Burma last
year), but involves the killing of innocent
Chinese immigrants and the burning of their
stores.

It is a fact that China has made large
investments in Tibet’s economic development, as
well as its infrastructure, education and health
services. To put it bluntly: in spite of China’s
undeniable oppression of the country, the average
Tibetan has never had such a high standard of
living. There is worse poverty in China’s western
rural provinces: child slave labour in brick
factories, abominable conditions in prisons, and
so on.

In recent years, China has changed its strategy
in Tibet: depoliticised religion is now
tolerated, often even supported. China now relies
more on ethnic and economic colonisation than on
military coercion, and is transforming Lhasa into
a Chinese version of the Wild West, in which
karaoke bars alternate with Buddhist theme parks
for Western tourists. In short, what the images
of Chinese soldiers and policemen terrorising
Buddhist monks conceal is a much more effective
American-style socio-economic transformation: in
a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the
status of Native Americans in the US. It seems
that the Chinese Communists have finally got it:
what are secret police, internment camps and the
destruction of ancient monuments, compared with
the power of unbridled capitalism?

One of the main reasons so many people in the
West participate in the protests against China is
ideological: Tibetan Buddhism, deftly propagated
by the Dalai Lama, is one of the chief points of
reference for the hedonist New Age spirituality
that has become so popular in recent times. Tibet
has become a mythic entity onto which we project
our dreams. When people mourn the loss of an
authentic Tibetan way of life, it isn’t because
they care about real Tibetans: what they want
from Tibetans is that they be authentically
spiritual for us, so that we can continue playing
our crazy consumerist game. ’Si vous êtes pris
dans le rêve de l’autre,’ Gilles Deleuze wrote,
’vous êtes foutu.’ The protesters against China
are right to counter the Beijing Olympic motto -
’One World, One Dream’ - with ’One World, Many
Dreams’. But they should be aware that they are
imprisoning Tibetans in their own dream.

The question is often asked: given the explosion
of capitalism in China, when will democracy
assert itself there, as capital’s ’natural’
political form of organisation? The question is
often put another way: how much faster would
China’s development have been if it had been
combined with political democracy? But can the
assumption be made so easily? In a TV interview a
couple of years ago, Ralf Dahrendorf linked the
increasing distrust of democracy in
post-Communist Eastern Europe to the fact that,
after every revolutionary change, the road to new
prosperity leads through a ’vale of tears’. After
socialism breaks down the limited, but real,
systems of socialist welfare and security have to
be dismantled, and these first steps are
necessarily painful. The same goes for Western
Europe, where the passage from the welfare state
model to the new global economy involves painful
renunciations, less security, less guaranteed
social care. Dahrendorf notes that this
transition lasts longer than the average period
between democratic elections, so that there is a
great temptation to postpone these changes for
short-term electoral gain. Fareed Zakaria has
pointed out that democracy can only ’catch on’ in
economically developed countries: if developing
countries are ’prematurely democratised’, the
result is a populism that ends in economic
catastrophe and political despotism. No wonder
that today’s economically most successful Third
World countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Chile)
embraced full democracy only after a period of
authoritarian rule.

Following this path, the Chinese used
unencumbered authoritarian state power to control
the social costs of the transition to capitalism.
The weird combination of capitalism and Communist
rule proved not to be a ridiculous paradox, but a
blessing. China has developed so fast not in
spite of authoritarian Communist rule, but
because of it.

There is a further paradox at work here. What if
the promised second stage, the democracy that
follows the authoritarian vale of tears, never
arrives? This, perhaps, is what is so unsettling
about China today: the suspicion that its
authoritarian capitalism is not merely a reminder
of our past - of the process of capitalist
accumulation which, in Europe, took place from
the 16^th to the 18^th century - but a sign of our
future? What if the combination of the Asian
knout and the European stock market proves
economically more efficient than liberal
capitalism? What if democracy, as we understand
it, is no longer the condition and motor of
economic development, but an obstacle to it?