*Note that my previous blog posts on Tibet are to be found on PLU Professor Adam Cathcart's blog http://adamcathcart.wordpress.com/. If you want to read more things I've been writing regarding Tibet, please click on the "Tibet" link and...well, let yourself wander where your cursor takes you. I will probably end up linking these directly anyway, but for the time being, I just wanted to get out my most recent article:
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So….as if I couldn’t get enough of my day/summer job in my university's archives, I’ve been poking around reading old Tibet-related articles from the 1950s as cached by the Google News Archives. While I’ve just started delving into them, the findings have been fascinating.
So far of note:
Melbourne’s The Age did an interesting post on March 31, 1959 (note the date) regarding Nehru’s opinions of Tibet and of the Dalai Lama. As it turns out, the focus of this story was NOT on Nehru, but rather a mix of an account of the Dalai Lama’s illness following his escape into India…Nehru was awkwardly quoted in this on occasion, and the article essentially reflected that Nehru was doing a one-man juggling act holding a hot potato. That said, the way in which this story was covered may be good to bring to the ongoing (if it is such) discussion on the nature of suowei “Tibetan sovereignty.” And where did Pravda side on all of this? It sounded part and parcel like that coming out of Xinhua. I’d refrain from adding an “of course” because, especially as we know now, the relations from everything from politics and economics to even philosophy and theory were incredibly strained…and especially in 1959. Pravda’s“relief” that the Dalai Lama and friends’ “reactionary” uprising was unsuccessful sheds an interesting light on the situation on general – after all, would it not be to the USSR’s advantage if China were made weaker as a result of Tibet’s “splittism?” After all, let’s get realpolitik, USSR politics and a genuine interest in promoting communist ideology had already parted ways for a while by this point, and was only dredged up if it happened to serve the political needs of the day --- in this case, Lenin’s policies on the autonomy of ethnic minorities could have been a handy card to play. So, to any and all readers out there, why didn’t the USSR via Pravda not play it, and instead opted to claim the insurrection was a result of “foreign imperialists” and the wealthy bourgeois, and forego using the same arguments as a jab at the powers in Beijing that had already severed friendly ties with Mother Russia?
**Even more, this same article also cited that “more than 800 Tibetan teachers and students in Peking today praised as “wise and correct”the Chinese Communist dismissal of the Tibetan Government and its replacement with a “prepatory committee” headed by the Panchen Lama.”
800 Tibetan teachers and students?!! Wait, Western news media, tell me more! Who are these people, why exactly did they support this Chinese-sponsored change? Did they, like Comrade Bapa Phuntsok Wangyal, simply have different outcomes in mind and end up feeling misled, were they in the upper echelons of the New Order hoping to get ahead, or were they genuinely behind this? And how much did these people actually represent the greater Tibetan viewpoint? Was it just that those supporting HHDL WERE just in the minority and happened to be the ones who “all”escaped and started screaming really, really loudly out of soreness in India? (I doubt it, but let’s not rule this out this possibility either…)
I can’t say that I’m not a wee bit jealous that once upon a time, these newspapers were churning out more stories like this, that is, that Tibet was literally “on the map” in terms of news coverage, and that even reporters from relatively smaller Midwestern papers were still stationed in places like New Delhi. That said, by no means am I a romanticist when it comes to the news media – for all the crap we (oftentimes rightfully) may accuse today’s news media of producing, I fail to see how any the albeit more extensive reporting of the 1950s was by any means a “golden age” of the press. One quick look at articles proves otherwise. The reference I made to “smaller Midwestern papers” is namely a March 30, 1959 Milwaukee Sentinel article nestled between an Easter service story and another ironically (at least in my warped mind) documenting that the result of a gas explosion was the result of a lost missing plug in the pipe system (it was probably later replaced by another Panchen Lama), is self-explanatorily titled “Reds Set out for All-Out Rule in Tibet. But even before getting into the article that does contain some interesting information, let’s notice that, along with the fact that we’d never call China the “Reds”today, even if they still were a truly Communist nation. Even more (but all the more subtly) … it’s hard to say many mainstream papers would ever use the term “All-Out Rule in Tibet” much, certainly after 2008 (The Deseret News even contemporaneously described the failed 1959 uprising as “The Tragedy of Tibet”).
But let’s lift out a few gems from this article
#1. Chiang Kai-Shek’s opinion still matters, of course (it’s not the 1970s after all). And in this it documents that Chiang will provide funding for Tibet. Okay (remind me to have another post describing the modern Tibet-Taiwan connection) … but even within this section of the article the author speculates that Tibet’s “takeover” would be hindered more by geography than by actual resistance. …Again, what does this mean for how Tibetans ACTUALLY received the Chinese and the PLA specifically…?
#2. On page two, the article “Mao loses face in Tibet Revolt.” Aside from connecting the (still unresolved!) Tibet problem to the “similar propaganda blow over Hungary”that “the Russians suffered,” the paper makes no further detail into why it was Mao who lost face. Soo…regardless of whether or not Mao, et al (mostly et al…)gained control of the situation, he still diu mianzi le. Two more comments on this article: First, perhaps this explains Pravda’s opinions? I still find “Hungary= Tibet! Bam!” to be an unsatisfactory explanation, but perhaps it is one of many synthesizable arguments. Second, these articles can now foreshadow why the CIA would get involved in training Tibetans in the 1960s: clearly, Mao just looked kind of weak still in the eyes of the Western powers that be.
And back to that pesky journalism question:
Perhaps Mr. Hagel would agree with me on this, but once we take ourselves out of history and events, and observing it from afar and contextualizing it with the codes and philosophies we’ve assigned it, placing each event, story, and even news article into neat little boxes, we begin to think we’ve somehow “progressed.” Mmm…not really. Our journalism today may be quite short of “fair and balanced,” but we seem to turn a blind eye to Cold War and its biases whenever we glamorize the days of Edward R. Murrow.
Hence then the interest in Tibet, right? As I have said on some earlier posts, now that the U.S. is coming to terms with the fact that everyone might as well get along with China, except for some rather stiff, surprisingly unsensational accounts of the Kalong Tripa election or the recent Kirti monastery-related protests that have been reading more like airbag recall statements for a line of otherwise well-reputed cars, the only mainstream stuff coming out on Tibet is an occasional travel article or quaint – but largely apolitical – anecdote about the Dalai Lama.
Certainly, Tibet is not the only region in dispute whose reporting is reflecting the shifting sands of political alliegiance. We have a whole tiny little area known as the Middle East to do that for us, another geographic region peppeered with, well, political sensitivity to put it at its mildest. Now, Middle Eastern politics is something I will shy from analyzing in any more depth than this, because even if such a thing exists, while I am no Tibet expert by a long shot, I would even less claim familiarity with the Middle East and central Asia. But I will conclude for now with this thought: when you open the paper (or whatever news media you choose), how much more likely is it that you'd hear about an under-reported Middle Eastern dispute than one on Tibet? ...Exactly. In this world of ever-expanding media, the world may be getting smaller, but in the process, the big are getting bitter, and the smaller are getting squished.
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