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PM - Tibet expert warns of dangers ahead for China 07/05/2010
MARK COLVIN: One of the foremost western experts on Tibet says China has created a time bomb by migrating millions of Han Chinese people into the mountainous province. Dr Robert Thurman is Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. He's come to Australia for a conference on 'Happiness and its Causes'.
It's three weeks now since a massive earthquake hit Qinghai province on the Tibetan plateau. It's a measure of China's control of the media that we've heard very little since except from official Chinese newsagencies and TV. Even they said that a hundred thousand people might have to be evacuated. But there are indications that the death toll was high.
I asked Dr Thurman what he knew about the earthquake's aftermath.
ROBERT THURMAN: Well, the Chinese are downplaying with the number killed and they're downplaying the role of the Tibetan monks and the Tibetans themselves in dealing with the situation. And they're also trying to act like they're doing something but they're not really playing it that much to their own public, like they did the other earthquake where the majority population was Chinese.
Most of the people who were hurt were living in these prefab things that were made for them by the Chinese in their campaign to move them off the steppe, the nomads, where they lived in felt tents that wouldn't fall down on you in an earthquake, or if they did it would just be uncomfortable, wandering with their yaks, you know.
And they're trying to inturn all of the Tibetan nomads so they can control them. Taking away their wealth, which is their yaks, and on the excuse that this will support the steppe, you know this will restore the steppe but the Tibetans have been on that steppe for thousands of years and they know how to take care of it. The yaks don't hurt it.
MARK COLVIN: I read one article which described Tibetan monks performing a rescue.
ROBERT THURMAN: Oh absolutely.
MARK COLVIN: And then being pushed out of the way at the very end when the rescue was happening by soldiers who wanted the picture of it.
ROBERT THURMAN: That's right. Exactly right. That's the kind of thing that they do. They want, they want to show that they, the Chinese, are doing something about the victims and they really dislike it that the monks are because, you know, they've been for, for 17 years now, they've been, they have proclaimed that Tibetan Buddhism is the source of the Tibetans sedition and that Buddhism itself is seditious because Tibetan Buddhism makes Tibetans like the Dalai Lama and so on and therefore is the reason the Tibetans won't identify with the Chinese motherland, which is incorrect, but that's what their policy has been since 1993, 1994, what they call the Third Work Forum on Tibet.
So anything that casts the monks in a good light they don't like and they don't want to spread around either Tibet or China.
MARK COLVIN: But you really shoot the blame home to the building of these, essentially jerry-built houses and forcing these nomadic people into them?
ROBERT THURMAN: Yes, yes those are the worst. If you note in the pictures from the
(inaudible) earthquake area, the Chinese police station and so forth didn't fall down as part of the earthquake. But those residences that were built, jerry-built for them to get them out of their comfortable tents and out of their, away from their herds, that's what was destroyed.
So that's a very embarrassing element and that of course hasn't come out at all in the media.
MARK COLVIN: Somebody like you who studies Tibet must get frustrated over time. Is there any change? Is there any progress? Do you see any possibility?
ROBERT THURMAN: I do see progress. I am frustrated but not really in a sense that, it's very sad what's going on and the last few years have been particularly sad. Things were getting better in the eighties with Hu Yaobang, you know, the one who died before Tiananmen Square. He was relaxing things in the eighties and then things got a little bit better.
But then he was busted by Deng Xiaoping, Deng was very hardline about Tibet is the key. And then things turned really bad in Deng's old age, after Russia let loose Kazakhstan and Soviet Union went down. He became very worried that this could happen in the future to China.
So he started spending a lot of money to colonise Tibet, to build the railroad. He put a sur-tax on the coastal provinces that made money to build up the west and he subsidised the settlers to go there, despite of the fact that China's own scientists say that people from lower altitudes cannot live at that altitude.
That's why they weren't there a thousand years ago, you know, why it wasn't China, in fact, because there was special body chemistry not to get sick. What they call CMS chronic mountain sickness, they get ill when they try to colonise up there.
MARK COLVIN: Is that actually happening?
ROBERT THURMAN: Yes it does. In three or four years the right ventricle of your heart starts to dilate and you have all kind of heart problems and Chinese scientists
MARK COLVIN: But the Chinese have moved in tens of thousands of people
ROBERT THURMAN: Yeah but only lately and they are under high subsidy, millions they have moved in and they're under high subsidy but the majority of their millions are in the eastern edge where it's sort of falling below ten thousand where it's a little more doable.
But even there it's long-term unhealthy and the women have a hard time not miscarrying because placenta is very hard to form when you don't have that Tibetan chemistry.
So, you know, they set
MARK COLVIN: This is all well-established scientifically, is it?
ROBERT THURMAN: Yeah, it is pretty well-established scientifically. I was, I didn't know it myself. I spent two years of studying until I wrote a book two years ago called Why The Dalai Lama Matters where I was researching all this kind of thing and I was amazed to see this work from Shening (phonetic) and Chengdu (phonetic), these Chinese scientists, talking about it. Then some Swiss people also, researchers, the Tibetans have a unique nitric oxide production in their lung tissue that is what spreads the oxygen in a certain way where they can stand it.
In fact when you hike in Tibet that's something that's very impressing, you're staggering along and huffing and puffing, some Tibetan guy who's chain smoking walks over and offers to carry your pack or even carry you, you know, and they're totally cool up there. But it's very hard for us to acclimatise.
MARK COLVIN: So if you're right about that then this huge transmigration is a time bomb for China?
ROBERT THURMAN: It is doomed to failure. It's a waste of their money. Mao himself, in 1950, when they first invaded Tibet, he proclaimed that a hundred million Chinese would be in there in ten years, because it's huge, it's as big as the whole Western Europe, big as, bigger than the Louisiana purchase, you know, from Napoleon, the American west.
But they abandoned the thing because they can't live up there, you know, there's no subsistence for them and he couldn't afford it and then Deng just was, wouldn't let go. He was from Chengdu which is on the edge of Tibet, two thirds of Chengdu state is the Tibetan autonomous prefecture of Sichuan.
It was like he, the people on the coast, the Shanghai people, they don't care about Tibet really. I mean they can go mine there with owning it or not owning it, you know, the military thinks it's important to sit on top of India and to compete with Russia as a continental sort of, have a continental profile.
MARK COLVIN: But if you're right, by the time what you predict comes to pass, will Tibetan culture have been crushed anyway?
ROBERT THURMAN: Well, that's the danger. That's the fear, you know, by the mass population transfer that their culture will have been crushed.
MARK COLVIN: Dr Thurman, Dr Robert Thurman, Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University and an old friend of the Dalai Lama.
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MARK COLVIN: One of the foremost western experts on Tibet says China has created a time bomb by migrating millions of Han Chinese people into the mountainous province. Dr Robert Thurman is Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. He's come to Australia for a conference on 'Happiness and its Causes'.
It's three weeks now since a massive earthquake hit Qinghai province on the Tibetan plateau. It's a measure of China's control of the media that we've heard very little since except from official Chinese newsagencies and TV. Even they said that a hundred thousand people might have to be evacuated. But there are indications that the death toll was high.
I asked Dr Thurman what he knew about the earthquake's aftermath.
ROBERT THURMAN: Well, the Chinese are downplaying with the number killed and they're downplaying the role of the Tibetan monks and the Tibetans themselves in dealing with the situation. And they're also trying to act like they're doing something but they're not really playing it that much to their own public, like they did the other earthquake where the majority population was Chinese.
Most of the people who were hurt were living in these prefab things that were made for them by the Chinese in their campaign to move them off the steppe, the nomads, where they lived in felt tents that wouldn't fall down on you in an earthquake, or if they did it would just be uncomfortable, wandering with their yaks, you know.
And they're trying to inturn all of the Tibetan nomads so they can control them. Taking away their wealth, which is their yaks, and on the excuse that this will support the steppe, you know this will restore the steppe but the Tibetans have been on that steppe for thousands of years and they know how to take care of it. The yaks don't hurt it.
MARK COLVIN: I read one article which described Tibetan monks performing a rescue.
ROBERT THURMAN: Oh absolutely.
MARK COLVIN: And then being pushed out of the way at the very end when the rescue was happening by soldiers who wanted the picture of it.
ROBERT THURMAN: That's right. Exactly right. That's the kind of thing that they do. They want, they want to show that they, the Chinese, are doing something about the victims and they really dislike it that the monks are because, you know, they've been for, for 17 years now, they've been, they have proclaimed that Tibetan Buddhism is the source of the Tibetans sedition and that Buddhism itself is seditious because Tibetan Buddhism makes Tibetans like the Dalai Lama and so on and therefore is the reason the Tibetans won't identify with the Chinese motherland, which is incorrect, but that's what their policy has been since 1993, 1994, what they call the Third Work Forum on Tibet.
So anything that casts the monks in a good light they don't like and they don't want to spread around either Tibet or China.
MARK COLVIN: But you really shoot the blame home to the building of these, essentially jerry-built houses and forcing these nomadic people into them?
ROBERT THURMAN: Yes, yes those are the worst. If you note in the pictures from the
(inaudible) earthquake area, the Chinese police station and so forth didn't fall down as part of the earthquake. But those residences that were built, jerry-built for them to get them out of their comfortable tents and out of their, away from their herds, that's what was destroyed.
So that's a very embarrassing element and that of course hasn't come out at all in the media.
MARK COLVIN: Somebody like you who studies Tibet must get frustrated over time. Is there any change? Is there any progress? Do you see any possibility?
ROBERT THURMAN: I do see progress. I am frustrated but not really in a sense that, it's very sad what's going on and the last few years have been particularly sad. Things were getting better in the eighties with Hu Yaobang, you know, the one who died before Tiananmen Square. He was relaxing things in the eighties and then things got a little bit better.
But then he was busted by Deng Xiaoping, Deng was very hardline about Tibet is the key. And then things turned really bad in Deng's old age, after Russia let loose Kazakhstan and Soviet Union went down. He became very worried that this could happen in the future to China.
So he started spending a lot of money to colonise Tibet, to build the railroad. He put a sur-tax on the coastal provinces that made money to build up the west and he subsidised the settlers to go there, despite of the fact that China's own scientists say that people from lower altitudes cannot live at that altitude.
That's why they weren't there a thousand years ago, you know, why it wasn't China, in fact, because there was special body chemistry not to get sick. What they call CMS chronic mountain sickness, they get ill when they try to colonise up there.
MARK COLVIN: Is that actually happening?
ROBERT THURMAN: Yes it does. In three or four years the right ventricle of your heart starts to dilate and you have all kind of heart problems and Chinese scientists
MARK COLVIN: But the Chinese have moved in tens of thousands of people
ROBERT THURMAN: Yeah but only lately and they are under high subsidy, millions they have moved in and they're under high subsidy but the majority of their millions are in the eastern edge where it's sort of falling below ten thousand where it's a little more doable.
But even there it's long-term unhealthy and the women have a hard time not miscarrying because placenta is very hard to form when you don't have that Tibetan chemistry.
So, you know, they set
MARK COLVIN: This is all well-established scientifically, is it?
ROBERT THURMAN: Yeah, it is pretty well-established scientifically. I was, I didn't know it myself. I spent two years of studying until I wrote a book two years ago called Why The Dalai Lama Matters where I was researching all this kind of thing and I was amazed to see this work from Shening (phonetic) and Chengdu (phonetic), these Chinese scientists, talking about it. Then some Swiss people also, researchers, the Tibetans have a unique nitric oxide production in their lung tissue that is what spreads the oxygen in a certain way where they can stand it.
In fact when you hike in Tibet that's something that's very impressing, you're staggering along and huffing and puffing, some Tibetan guy who's chain smoking walks over and offers to carry your pack or even carry you, you know, and they're totally cool up there. But it's very hard for us to acclimatise.
MARK COLVIN: So if you're right about that then this huge transmigration is a time bomb for China?
ROBERT THURMAN: It is doomed to failure. It's a waste of their money. Mao himself, in 1950, when they first invaded Tibet, he proclaimed that a hundred million Chinese would be in there in ten years, because it's huge, it's as big as the whole Western Europe, big as, bigger than the Louisiana purchase, you know, from Napoleon, the American west.
But they abandoned the thing because they can't live up there, you know, there's no subsistence for them and he couldn't afford it and then Deng just was, wouldn't let go. He was from Chengdu which is on the edge of Tibet, two thirds of Chengdu state is the Tibetan autonomous prefecture of Sichuan.
It was like he, the people on the coast, the Shanghai people, they don't care about Tibet really. I mean they can go mine there with owning it or not owning it, you know, the military thinks it's important to sit on top of India and to compete with Russia as a continental sort of, have a continental profile.
MARK COLVIN: But if you're right, by the time what you predict comes to pass, will Tibetan culture have been crushed anyway?
ROBERT THURMAN: Well, that's the danger. That's the fear, you know, by the mass population transfer that their culture will have been crushed.
MARK COLVIN: Dr Thurman, Dr Robert Thurman, Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University and an old friend of the Dalai Lama.
More to add? Alert us »
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