Power, Piety, and People by Michael Dumper

Author:Michael Dumper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Response and Resistance

Such dramatic interventions into the monastic system have not occurred without side effects. The “blowback” has been persistent and at times deeply challenging to the Chinese presence in the TAR and Lhasa. It can be divided into two types: ideological resistance and active resistance. First, there has been a significant fall in the quality of monks and nuns. The sharp reduction in the numbers of monks and nuns through capping and expulsions led to a collapse of the college system, which had served to refine and sharpen the monks’ and nuns’ intellectual skills. It also led to the decrease in the pool of members from which senior monks and nuns can be selected. This decrease has been exacerbated by a “brain drain” of bright and able monks and nuns fleeing to India, where they can continue their studies and spiritual development unfettered. Concern over the poor quality of senior clergy was one factor that led the Chinese authorities to introduce the remedial step of additional training in specially designed courses in Beijing. On top of this, the reeducation campaigns have been largely ineffective in challenging the tenets of Buddhism.121 The poor-caliber Communist Party tutors display a profound ignorance of Tibetan Buddhism, often conflating it with other strands of Buddhism and folk religion. Ultimately, these efforts are thought to have been counterproductive in terms of influencing the beliefs of the monks and nuns they sought to convince.122

The second form of blowback is active resistance, mostly nonviolent but sometimes quite violent and bloody. Although some of this resistance has been provoked by a range of nonreligious factors, such as dispossession of property and the loss of traditional employment, and thus has involved ordinary lay Tibetans, the presence of monks and nuns and the use of religious rituals and symbolism have been striking features of the resistance to Chinese interventions.123 Lhasa has been at the forefront of this resistance. For example, in 1987 a group of thirty monks from the Sera monastery used the kora of the Jokhang Temple to stage a demonstration of loyalty to the Dalai Lama, chanting “Long live His Holiness, the Dalai Lama” and “Independence for Tibet.” Despite arrests being made, the demonstration snowballed when passers-by joined in large numbers. A few days later a similar demonstration took place, with Tibetan flags being flourished, and it attracted between 3,000 and 4,000 Tibetans, who overturned police cars before being broken up by police shooting into the crowd.124 Martial law was declared, but the disturbances carried on into the following year. In 1989, another large demonstration, possibly the largest since the Chinese takeover in 1959, took place in Lhasa, which triggered the further imposition of martial law. Despite Chinese efforts to integrate Tibet into China, it paradoxically was becoming increasingly a unique region with a special security status and, as a consequence, less accessible to Chinese and foreign visitors.

Although the Chinese security clampdown and suppression of political activity (known as the Strike Hard Campaign) led to a period of

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