Biden was wrong of course. Bioterrorism aside, Al Qaeda does not appear to be behind the latest outbreak of swine flu that has infected people in 20 countries as far flung as France, Canada, New Zealand and South Korea. The WHO has declared a “public-health emergency of international concern” and may well be compelled to raise that alert to a full-blown pandemic in coming days. If that happens, it would be the first pandemic of flu in 40 years, and the resulting crisis may yet be one of the toughest Obama is likely to face as president.

Every quarter century or so, a flu pandemic spreads from influenza’s heartland — Asia. In 1889-90, a virus swept westward from Asia to Russia, killing an estimated 250,000 people in Europe alone. In 1918, following four years of human misery caused by World War I, the “Spanish flu” wiped out 40 million people within a year, surpassing even the Black Death of the Middle Ages in mortality.

The last two pandemics, in 1957 and 1968, were relatively mild. Statistically speaking, therefore, we’re due for another scourge, which could well be catastrophic. No one knows when, where and just how the next pandemic will unfold. What’s certain is that it will. And it will have its share of surprises.

As with mass graves, the one rule about flu epidemics is to expect the unexpected. Who could have guessed, for example, that North America would be the epicenter of the current swine flu. Americans who blame Mexico — or indeed, Muslim terrorists — for it should note their own nation was the focal point of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. That infection did not come from Asia. Its first eruption was at a military barracks in Kansas during the spring; by September the virus had swept Boston, coastal France and Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. In Philadelphia, some 7,500 people died in two weeks, many within 24 hours. The city ran out of coffins and streetcars served as hearses. Those who narrowly escaped death spent weeks in delirium.

Still, when Westerners think of the flu, they tend to think of Asia. After all, that’s where poor people live in close, often intimate proximity to farm animals. But the proximity itself isn’t the problem. Neither is poverty necessarily to blame. The problem is poor farming practices — and the real scandal is that international financial institutions such as the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank do nothing to put an end to them.

When avian flu first crossed the species barrier from birds to humans in 1997 in China, the world was fed media images of domesticated pigs and ducks cramped into cages strategically located over ponds full of farmed fish. The caged animals are fed; the fish live off their feces. Think about that the next time you eat Chinese-exported carp or order “Chilean” sea bass at your local green restaurant.

This isn’t some clever way to recycle but a grotesque form of animal husbandry. And although it’s hardly limited to China, the world’s most populous nation is by far its biggest and most dangerous practitioner. In its ruthless pursuit of double-digit economic growth over the past two decades, China has neglected its rural areas so sorely that the poor often have no choice but to exploit animals to eke a living.

And with what devastating consequences for public health. At the University of Hong Kong, scientists have performed blood tests on birds, animals and farmers in Hong Kong’s semi-rural New Territories and in the Chinese mainland province of Jiangsu and the Pearl River Delta. Their finding: Particularly in the latter two places, farmers have antibodies that suggest they have been exposed to every single strain of flu found in animals.

As these viruses circulate among Chinese farmers, they will sooner or later pick up human flu genes, adapt and mutate. Once a new virus becomes capable of airborne transmission from one human to another, the results will be as devastating as the Spanish flu, which killed one in 60 of the entire world’s population.

So where does Obama — and the United States — fit into all these dire scenarios? Is there anything that the world’s most powerful human being can do to protect us from the vagaries of nature — albeit nature that humans have tinkered with?

Although it’s surely too late to reverse the damage done to the health of China’s farmers and to its ecosystems, Obama can certainly insist that China’s rulers pay more attention to rural development. Indeed, there has never been a better time. As the world grapples with the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, it hardly makes sense for China to continue to rely on an urban-centered export economy that’s not only unlikely to recover anytime soon but is one of the key reasons why we’re all in this mess today.

But that’s another story.

(Photo by Sari Huella. Used under Creative Commons license.)

Although the monsoons in the Indian subcontinent are still a good six months away, Richard Holbrooke, the new U.S. special envoy to South Asia, is likely to get soaking wet if he tries to broker a settlement between India and Pakistan over their longstanding dispute over Kashmir.

Holbrooke should learn a lesson from British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who suffered exactly that fate during a recent visit to India. In a January 15 speech at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel, one of the targets of last November’s deadly attacks that claimed 195 lives, Miliband suggested that the tragedy in India’s most cosmopolitan city was the result of New Delhi’s failure to resolve its conflict with Pakistan over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.

Miliband went on to denounce the post-9/11 “war on terror,” arguing that such nomenclature had done “more harm than good.” It was an odd admission for a dignitary whose government consistently supported the “war on terror,” particularly in Iraq, until as lately as a few months ago, and it raised suspicions that Miliband found it expedient to disown the war, now that a new administration in the U.S. favors a more nuanced approach to fighting terrorism.

Miliband’s remarks ignited a diplomatic row in India, not least because he also came off as disrespectful and patronizing in his closed-door meetings with Indian officials. The prominent Economist newsweekly observed that the fiasco “proved Britain’s continuing ability to cause offense,” and Indian commentators labeled Miliband’s visit the worst by a British foreign secretary since India’s independence in 1947 created Muslim-majority Pakistan, and with it, the festering Kashmir crisis.

In sharp contrast, Miliband’s February 3 trip to Washington, where he earned the distinction of being the first foreign minister to hold face-to-face talks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was by all accounts a success. Predictably, Kashmir did not figure in Miliband’s talks with Clinton, although Pakistan and Afghanistan did. However, Clinton, and especially Holbrooke, are likely to hear much about Kashmir when they visit Pakistan. Both would do well to note that the Kashmir dispute has historically been graveyard for conflict mediators.

Part of the reason lies in the potent ideological mix underpinning the conflict: Pakistan claims Muslim-majority Kashmir under the so-called “two-nation theory” that has always been Pakistan’s raison d’être — the idea that Muslims cannot coexist with India’s overwhelmingly dominant Hindu population. India counters that not only does Kashmir have a substantial non-Muslim population of Hindus and Buddhists but that the state is a crucial test of India’s secularism, which has allowed some 150 million Muslims to live in what is one of the world’s most pluralistic nations.

“Although I understand the current difficulties, resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms, and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the (Taliban) threat on their western borders,” Miliband said.

There are two key reasons why a resolution to the Kashmir conflict will not help contain terrorism. First, extremist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Tayiba, which is responsible for the Mumbai attacks and is trained and funded by Pakistan’s military intelligence wing, use Kashmir only to justify their violence. In reality, these groups are part of a global jihadi network and are less concerned about Kashmir’s welfare than, say, the average Texan is about misery in North Korea. (Besides, the genuine grievances of Kashmiris, of which there are many, are being addressed bilaterally by India and Pakistan over such issues as increased trade and contact among Kashmiris on both sides of the India-Pakistan border.)

Second, these groups aren’t Kashmiri at their core. The Lashkar-e-Tayiba, for example, comprises of Punjabis from Pakistan — and it strains the imagination to believe they would close their training camps and go back to work (that was never there in the first place) once the Kashmir dispute is settled. If anything, they are likely to unleash their violence elsewhere.

Although U.S. officials have clarified that Kashmir won’t be on Holbrooke’s South Asian agenda and that he will only try to encourage a dialogue between India and Pakistan over the Himalayan region, “the bulldozer,” as Holbrooke is nicknamed, may find it hard to stick to his brief.

Here’s why: When he pressures the Pakistan army to do more than it has been doing to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda at home, Pakistan’s generals are likely to make any such efforts conditional on Indian action over Kashmir. Of course, they will do this knowing full well that India won’t make any concessions — and then Pakistan will have an ostensibly justifiable excuse for not fighting terrorism as aggressively as it should be.

Photos by Rakesh Sahai.

What does Louisiana’s Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, have in common with the Democratic U.S. Surgeon General-designate Sanjay Gupta? They’re both Americans of Indian descent. Going by the title of a witty and insightful book by Vinay Lal, a professor of history at UCLA and an expert on Indian civilization who graduated from Chicago University and earned a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, they might be called The Other Indians, distinct in many ways not just from native Americans but also from India’s 1 billion people. Subtitled “A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America,” Lal’s book was recently published by HarperCollins (India). He talks to AsiaScoop editor Ajay Singh about the Indian community in the U.S. and geopolitical events in South Asia.

How do you think Barack Obama’s presidency will shape U.S. relations with India, and how would that relationship be different from the one under George W. Bush?

Though there maybe some jubilation in India, as there was elsewhere in the world, about Obama’s triumph, there is also a feeling that the Obama presidency may not be as much in India’s interest as the Bush presidency. There maybe ethical and political reasons for preferring Obama, but the political establishment in India is certainly divided and probably leans towards the idea of a Republican presidency. The reasons for this are manifold but the principal one is that even though there are people who are delighted over the prospect that Obama would get tougher on Pakistan, as he himself has said he would, they nonetheless fear that any escalation in Pakistan and Afghanistan would have repercussions on India. That’s the main consideration. Among other considerations is Obama’s promise to keep more jobs in America. If he keeps true to his promise, that has repercussions on outsourcing in India.

Much has been said in recent years about India as an emerging superpower. What kind of superpower status do you think India aspires to and what kind of superpower do you think it has the potential to become?

My view is a heretical view because I don’t think any country should aspire to a superpower status. A country that has a superpower status ought to have its strengths considerably diminished – and that holds true for the U.S. as well. We need a world with more equal nation-states; we don’t need a world with one or two or even three superpowers. I think India’s a long distance from being a superpower at this particular juncture. You can have a lot of talk, as there has been in India, some of which the rest of the world has accepted, about ‘India shining,’ – the fact that India has sent a space mission to the moon, that it has vast potential and that top corporate firms are relocating their businesses to India.

That’s part of the triumphant narrative of India in which a substantive middle class is rising virtually out of oblivion. But at the same time there is a remarkable amount of evidence that suggests the country is also in serious distress. Indian agriculture, for example, is in great distress. More than 100,000 farmers have committed suicide in the last 10 years. Recently, one of the government’s own organizations released a report that said 80 percent of the country’s population lives on an absolute pittance – a dollar a day roughly. So what kind of superpower status are we talking about here? There’s an enormous disjunction between the haves and the have-nots. At this point, assessments about superpower status are far too premature. Besides, being a superpower is not necessarily desirable. The desirable thing is to have some kind of dignity and distributive justice for citizens.

Do you think India’s potential to be a superpower is largely a media creation?

The media is part of it, but the desire to become a superpower is also part of the aspirations of the middle class, which is rising virtually out of oblivion – there was no substantive middle class in India 20 years ago. This middle class is seeing the kind of status that people of Indian origin enjoy in the U.S. and Britain, for example, and that creates an aspiration to see India acquire the standing that they think an ancient civilization deserves. India is after all one of the great continuing civilizations – in fact, besides China, it’s really the only one. The idea is that if you’re a civilization that can produce great artifacts of life – great literature, ethics, personalities – then why can we not also be a country that commands a certain economic, political, military respect. So part of the attempt in India is to exercise its muscle power – but the context here is that India is neighbored by China, and at this point in time comparisons with China are inevitable.

China has made a very conscious decision to pursue a superpower status. But India doesn’t know what it wants to be.

There’s always been that ambivalence in India, and part of it has to do with the legacy of Indian traditions, which, however materialistic, have also urged people to think about the fact that the ultimate human condition is not about material progress but about other things – the dignity of human life and human relationships. Put less abstractly, I think China has had to barter its soul to achieve what it wants to achieve. In India, there is still some degree of resistance to that. It maybe crumbling slowly among the middle class, but there are too many competing legacies – of Gandhi, of Indian saints, the resistance to British colonial rule. People are saying, ‘why ought we to achieve superpower status – what is so enormously desirable or interesting about that?’ In China, people have gone overboard and I think they will come to realize the folly of their ways.

Indians in the U.S. are not particularly known for assimilating in the nation’s mainstream. What do you think are the merits and demerits of this?

I’m not in favor of assimilation. By which I mean not that a group should make an effort to stand out and play identity politics, but there should be no onus on any ethnic group to assimilate with the dominant mainstream. You may have to do that to derive certain political advantages, but it’s incorrect to say that there should be a moral onus to integrate, which is how immigration used to be viewed through the older model of the melting pot, refined and redefined as the salad bowl. I don’t think that’s a very interesting – or political – way of looking at how migrants interact with others. The older immigration-based studies of American history looked at how people fit into the nation’s center – a centripetal view. But the more recent Diaspora studies look outward – the centrifugal view – in which people radiate outward and connect with other groups, in this case, both Indian and non-Indian Diasporas.

Your book offers many interesting insights about the rise of the Indian Diaspora in U.S. politics, business and in literature and the arts. In what important ways do you think these notable ‘other Indians’ differ from their subcontinental brethren?

One thing that ought to be said is that the Indians who came to the U.S. do not represent the entirety of India. The majority of them came from a relatively better class background: post-1965, they consisted largely of students and professionals. But that’s not true of the early migrations. In fact, between 1924 and 1965 Indians were effectively shut out of the U.S. – after 1945, only 100 Indians per year were allowed in. So you cannot view them as being representative of India in the same way as migrants from other countries.

You find larger support for Hindu nationalism in the U.S. than you do in India. The Hindus here are proportionately much more zealous in advocating the cause of Hindu nationalism than Hindus back home. One of the most phenomenal stories of Indian politics is the rise of the lower class through very unlikely electoral alliances between upper-caste and lower-caste parties in states like Uttar Pradesh. You do not see anything like that in the Indian population in the U.S., where there is more segregation than there is sometimes back in India. Another difference is that the majority of Indians in India are politically active. Among Indians in the U.S., there is relatively little political involvement. Maybe the Obama presidency will change that – or has already changed that, given how various young, ethnic groups voted in the recent election.

The rise of Hindu nationalism in India in the 1990s owes much to the support, both moral and monetary, of non-resident Indians in the U.S. Do you think the worst consequences of this phenomenon are already over, given that Hindu nationalists have failed to capture outright power in India?

A lot will depend on how things will play out in South Asia as a whole over the next two or three years. For one thing, Obama has pledged to escalate the war in Afghanistan. I think that’s complete folly. Leave aside the historical circumstance – that Afghanistan has been a quagmire for every foreign contingent that has gone there for the last 200 years. You also have to consider Pakistan. In the recent attacks in Mumbai, there is evidence of Pakistan’s complicity, which points to a silent coup by Pakistan’s army against their prime minister. When things of this kind happen, Hindu nationalists in India play upon it. They are waiting to see how this endgame comes about, and the endgame will determine to some degree whether they will be able to gain political capital. Of course, they are projecting, as Bush did in the U.S., that any assault on our territory has to be met with force.

What were the Mumbai attacks about?

Mumbai 2008 clearly had geopolitical ramifications. It wasn’t just about the injustices committed against Muslims in India, it had to do with the global status of the ‘war on terror,’ the disputes within Islam and the ascendency of terrorism movements across the world. What did Pakistan lose by being complicit in the attacks? Only some moral ground, but it never had much moral ground to begin with. You don’t have to be too cynical to agree with that. The Pakistan army, which has always jockeyed for power with the civilian establishment, wanted to reassert itself – and it has. Now Pakistan’s drumbeat is that the rest of the world is hounding us and we need to put all our options on the table. That’s why Pakistan has said it’s willing to engage in conflict, if necessary, with India.

The other day, G. Parthasarthy, the former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan, said that if Pakistan sponsored another attack against India, all bets would be off, meaning that nuclear war could be a distinct possibility.

Well, what are India’s options? It can attack the terrorist camps in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. But these camps are likely to be have been emptied out by then. Anything India does, by the way, is in consultation with the U.S. That itself is a very clear sign of the fact that India is not in a position to be a superpower. It doesn’t have the prerogative of shock and awe that a superpower has.

Do you think the old cliché about South Asia being a potential nuclear flashpoint has become more alarming than ever?

There’s always some mystification in such clichés. Part of it has to do with nuclear weapons, and partly it has to do with the way in which people have talked about South Asia for a long time. A very famous political scientist, Selig Harrison, wrote a book nearly 50 years ago, titled “India: The Most Dangerous Decades.” What dangerous decades was he talking about? The next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years? There’s also the cliché that India is going to fall apart. The British advanced it for a long time. Much of this talk isn’t persuasive. On the other hand, you can’t minimize the fact that South Asia has two nuclear-armed states and the arsenals could fall into the wrong hands. There are people who are willing to barter nuclear arms and crazy enough to take the risks.

It is clear now that the West was wrong on two counts. For one, it misjudged how China’s economy might perform in the aftermath. Second, it took an overly critical stance on the tactics Beijing has employed to manage various challenges, from the Tiananmen protest to the SARS scare to the torch relay protests.

Many feared that the government crackdown would launch a new period of economic stagnation. Inflation was rampant and the opening up of China’s economy, launched as a test in southern China in 1978, was still a gamble. In late 1989, few in the West could foresee the coming economic advances.

Real gross domestic product growth in China since 1989 has averaged 9% a year. Another 19 years of comparable growth is plausible; China likely will continue to move up the global ladder. Keeping this expansion going is crucial. Nothing would threaten social stability like a real economic setback. The Chinese people have decided, not surprisingly, that rich and growing is more satisfying than poor and stagnant.

In 1989, China made up only 3% of total world GDP and was no more than an afterthought on the global economic map. Today, that figure is 18% and rising. Real per capita income gains have averaged 8% a year. I have had many years in my career in which an inflation-adjusted 8% pay hike would have been welcome.

Since 1989, 300 million Chinese have migrated from the farms to the cities and are now earning 10 times (or more) what they previously earned. Employed in manufacturing, trade, construction and services, these ambitious people just want to be allowed to work, earn and consume.

China is the world leader in steel production, cement consumption, cell phone usage – the list goes on. It is a World Trade Organization member, and it’s becoming the manufacturing capital of the world. Every multinational corporation that matters is in China. In industries that Beijing regards as “strategically vital,” such as oil, China controls foreign companies’ involvement. Retailing, not considered a vital sector, is wide open to foreign companies.

In 1989, the country had no equity market. Last year, the Shanghai Stock Exchange, formed in 1990, saw the world’s biggest initial public offering in recent years. Private property rights – key to innovation – are now protected under the nation’s Constitution. Intellectual property rights are better protected than in the past. Granted, the institutional infrastructure to protect these rights remains immature, but progress has been made.

The public remains broadly supportive of how the government has handled the economy. And understandably: Beijing wants the economic music to keep on playing. Part of protecting these gains, from Beijing’s vantage point, is a continued focus on control.

The second misinterpretation of the Tiananmen Square events, then, is the still remarkable degree to which the West focuses on political or other non-economic developments. These courses of action, and their portrayals, should not take on a life of their own, threatening stability or economic advances. Beijing does not rule with the heavy hand of the past. The administration works to ensure that government officials are competent, responsive and accountable for their actions. That’s really all that the public wants.

But many events in recent years – and up to this day – reveal a new kind of response from Beijing: To address a problem promptly and preemptively. Additionally, it manages the public awareness of and reaction to a problem so that it doesn’t spin out of control. Beijing has not forgotten the lessons of 1989.

For example, during the SARS scare in 2004, Beijing’s response moved from denial to acceptance to real remedial actions. But all along, trying to manage or control the public’s reactions was crucial. And in the realm of food, product and drug safety, Beijing acted quickly in 2006 and 2007 when questions about manufacturing-quality standards, enforcement and monitoring threatened the “Made in China” label.

When demonstrations erupted in Tibet in March and during the Olympic torch relay in Europe and America, Beijing quickly reacted to manage the news so that only positive reactions to the relay were shown to the Chinese people. Most recently, after the May 2 earthquake in the southwestern Sichaun province, the government came out with an initial burst of openness and then lowered the visibility of public demonstrations against shoddy school construction and the potentially culpable behavior of public officials.

Just this week, the Beijing Olympic Committee published a list of 57 “do’s and don’ts” for foreign visitors to the upcoming Olympics. The message? Demonstrations, slogans and banners are forbidden. This is clear, advance notice of what constitutes acceptable behavior for its visitors.

Those of us who were saddened by the 1989 Tiananmen Square events, who favor representative democracies and are fans of a free press still harbor misgivings. We need to give Beijing credit for facilitating an unprecedented economic advance when no one in the West thought it could happen. But we should also remember that China runs China as it sees fit.

To all the outside advice coming in – and there is plenty – China is likely to continue to listen politely. Its officials will learn where they can, and accept that with which they agree. But ultimately China will decide what’s in its own best interest, as any sovereign would.

I am the sage of Tibet …
I have no preference for any country.
– Milarepa

In the spring of 1998, a 60-year-old Tibetan man named Thupten Ngodup doused his clothing with kerosene, lit a match and set himself on fire while participating in a fast-unto-death demonstration in New Delhi to call on the United Nations to debate Tibetan independence. “Long live the Dalai Lama,” he screamed, his body a mass of flames. “Free Tibet!”

Thupten’s tragic end may have been averted had New Delhi police not broken up the rally and prompted his self-sacrifice. (Since then, Indian cops carry wet blankets while policing Tibetan protest.) The activist died shortly afterwards, earning himself the distinction of being the only Tibetan to burn himself to death to protest Chinese rule over his homeland.

The Dalai Lama called Thupten’s gesture an act of “violence” that reflected the “frustration and urgency building up among many Tibetans.” The Nobel laureate, who was 63 years old at the time, then put forward a candid, if surprising, admission. “I’ve made every effort for the past 20 years for the self-rule of Tibetans,” he told his people. “But I’ve failed … I am confused … I have no alternative solution.”

Whenever Tibetan protests are underway — as they are these days — speculation mounts that China just might succumb to international pressure and perhaps relinquish its 58-year-old control over Tibet or at least give it autonomy in all areas of its administration except defence and foreign affairs. The furious rioting in Lhasa this past March, which resulted in the killings of several Han Chinese, has altered the China-Tibet calculus like never before. The Chinese leadership, eager to showcase China’s mighty economic achievements and avoid embarrassment or humiliation in the run up to the Beijing Olympics this August, has initiated talks with two representatives of the Dalai Lama.

Whether the negotiations will be “serious,” the Dalai Lama has responded, remains conspicuously uncertain. The fact that the talks were held in southern China and not in Tibet may offer a clue.

Dalai Lama sitting in his ‘Little Lhasa’ home

A free Tibet remains a fantasy. And the reason is not so much that Tibetan protests haven’t been forceful enough but because the Dalai Lama’s government in exile is weak, ineffectual and hopelessly adrift. This may come as a surprise to those who believe, as too many romantics do, that the god-king of Tibetan Buddhism wields some sort of esoteric “soft power” that will someday make China give in.

The truth is that the Dalai Lama has failed miserably to find a way forward from the impasse that he himself created when he unilaterally declared in 1988 that he favored partial autonomy for Tibet rather then outright independence. The Dalai Lama appears to have taken this decision as long ago as the early 1970s but it wasn’t until 1988 that he became the world’s first leading spokesman against Tibetan independence. And so it is that any hope of a free Tibet recedes with every passing Chinese New Year.

Among Tibetan exiles there has long been a vocal minority prepared to take up the gun and fight for outright independence. The Dalai Lama has tried to distance himself from such hard-liners — at least publicly. Two generations of moderate Tibetans have put their faith in the Dalai Lama’s unwavering credo of non-violence — but still have no real hope of seeing their motherland free.

Imagine for a minute that a handful of monks — and nuns — in flowing saffron robes commit mass self-immolations in Lhasa. (Suicide maybe taboo in Christianity but the practice was condoned by the Buddha under certain circumstances and many Buddhists consider it a legitimate response to persecution.) Or imagine this scenario: Tibetan suicide-bombers unleash death and destruction in China. Either event would likely result in a ruthless Chinese crackdown. And if Beijing doesn’t already have a revolution on its hands, it will be confronted with one, perhaps even something rivaling Tiananmen.

The spectacular 1963 self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc galvanized world opinion and called attention to the plight of Buddhists in South Vietnam

It is such fears that bring me to Dharamsala, a small hill resort perched on the western foothills of the Himalayan range that separates the Indian subcontinent from the high plateau of Tibet. The place has somewhat wistfully come to be known as “Little Lhasa,” for it is here that the Dalai Lama resides along with some 10,000 Tibetans, plus his government-in-exile. My aim is to find out if hardline exiles have been pushed toward militancy and how serious is the rift between them and the Dalai Lama’s moderate leadership.

GUNS AND ROSES

The headquarters of the Tibetan Youth Congress is located in a modest two-story wooden edifice on a road sloping uphill from the town square. The largest and most respected political organization in the exile community, it was the TYC that organized the 67-day hunger strike that culminated in Thupten’s suicide almost exactly a decade ago — and fired the first salvo against the Dalai Lama’s administration just after Thupten torched himself.

The TYC is intensely anti-Chinese but it isn’t anti-Beijing sentiment that drives it on a day-to-day basis. Rather, it is discontent with the Tibetan leadership. The youth organization was founded in 1970 by four young, English public school-educated Tibetans who were deeply disappointed with the Dalai Lama’s government because, among other reasons, it consisted largely of a bureaucratic clique of elites from Tibet that was not only intellectually impoverished but also too timid to pursue the aim of outright Tibetan independence.

By starting a non-governmental and democratically elected organization, the TYC’s founders hoped to intensify the political debate about Tibet’s freedom. And though the young men didn’t realize it at the time, they had created a kind of political opposition — the first in Tibetan history — that today has 65 chapters around the world.

The major irritant between the TYC and the Dalai Lama’s administration goes back to 1988, when His Holiness unexpectedly reversed his 29-year-old stand on Tibetan independence by declaring he would settle for autonomy. The TYC, which insists on full self-determination, charges that the Dalai Lama made the switch without consulting the Parliament-in-exile. Further, because the Dharamsala government is neither recognized by any country nor represented at the U.N., the Dalai Lama’s regime could not ascertain the crucial wishes of Tibetans back home.

Generations of Tibetan kids like this one have no hope of seeing Tibet free

Within its policy guidelines, the TYC can choose both violent and nonviolent programs. In public, the TYC offers the highest respect to the Dalai Lama, who fled his homeland with a thousand followers in 1959 after the Chinese brutally suppressed a CIA-aided uprising against nine years of Maoist rule in Tibet. Like all Tibetans, the TYC reverently refers to the Dalai Lama as “His Holiness,” and routinely tells journalists that it is out of consideration for him that it has abstained from choosing the violent path.

In saying this, the TYC is less than truthful. It is no secret that the TYC laid the groundwork for a militant movement, even if it hasn’t directly engaged in one. For several years until the early 1980s, it organized military training for young exiles in jungles surrounding Tibetan settlements in India. The TYC also expanded its ties with resistance groups in Tibet — which it continues to do today. At one time there were even reports, though exaggerated, of plans to target Chinese embassies and personnel overseas. But in the end, the militant thinking of most Tibetans has always been moderated by their unqualified devotion to the institution of the Dalai Lama.

The relationship between the Dalai Lama and his people is part of a great Tibetan paradox: Privately, many Tibetans favour a more open system in which the political role of their supreme leader is drastically reduced — or entirely eliminated. Publicly, however, they are wont to solicit his support for just about every decision outside their homes — never mind the distressing fact that it’s he who has driven a stake in the heart of Tibetan freedom. Phurbu Tsering, a middle-aged employee of the government-in-exile, explains how this practice affects Tibetans. “His Holiness is the only uniting factor that gives the public some hope,” he says. “But if you leave everything to him you naturally don’t grab at opportunities.”

Young monk at a monastery in Dharamsala

STUBBORN AS YAKS

“People always wonder how the hell Tibetans are going to have an effect on China — what’s the point? But they mustn’t forget Tibetans are very stubborn people. Our national animal is the yak and we pride ourselves on being unyielding.”

I am listening to Jamyang Norbu, a playwright and novelist who came to India as a young child and has long had an Indian passport. (”Mera Bharat Mahan,” he tells me only half-jokingly, quoting the Indian government’s ubiquitous advertisement that translates from the Hindi language as “My India is Great.”) Jamyang is a former director of the Amnye Machen Institute, an independent research and publication center whose stated aim is to address certain “imbalances and limitations in the intellectual, social and cultural life of Tibetan people.” But like virtually every other Tibetan exile organization, it also maintains links with resistance groups in Lhasa.

We are sitting on a breezy verandah at the institute. Jamyang is dressed in jeans and a black t-shirt with sleeves rolled up to reveal bulging biceps. A Che Guevara mustache and dark glasses accentuate his rugged, handsome face, making him look more like a guerrilla in his Sunday best than the intellectual he is reputed to be.

Jamyang Norbu: ‘Don’t stop the Revolution!’

Nonetheless, I am genuinely surprised when Jamyang tells me he was the first TYC member to join the Chushi Gangdruk, a CIA-trained resistance group that for two decades until the early 1970s waged a forlorn guerrilla war against the People’s Liberation Army from the Nepal province of Mustang. “Right now a lot of militant Tibetans are keeping quiet,” he says, outlining three reasons: a lack of opportunities to mount guerrilla operations in Tibet; the Dalai Lama’s insistence on non-violence; and “Westerners who put pressure on Tibetans not to oppose the Dalai Lama.”

Jamyang extends his right arm forward and flexes a pear-shaped tricep. “I’ve given lectures in which Westerners heckle me.” His voice is deep but soft: “‘How dare you criticize the Dalai Lama,’ they say.” Jamyang tells audiences that “not all Tibetans are the Dalai Lama and that I’ve met lamas who tell their followers that killing one Chinese is the karmic equivalent of building a thousand stupas.” Occasionally, ethnic Chinese in the West who hear Jamyang lecture tell him to relax. Tibetans are Chinese, they tell him. For Jamyang, this is enough to provoke a fight. “Look at my face!” he angrily responds. “Do I look Chinese?”

I am surprised that a community widely perceived to be spiritual and “passive” could foster such impassioned people. An exclusive emphasis on non-violence, coupled with the Dalai Lama’s renunciation of complete freedom for Tibet, Jamyang continues, are undermining the unity of exiles.

Jamyang Norbu, in black singlet, muscling up for ‘rangzen’ (independence) in Little Lhasa

“There’s no proof of a direct correlation,” he continues, “but when autonomy was suggested, divorce rates went up and children’s school grades came down. People are resigning themselves to their fate — they are giving up.” Indeed, the most potent proof of that is the admission by many young exiles that they may not return to Tibet if it achieves autonomy — or even “rangzen,” Tibetan for independence — because of the difficulties in beginning a new life there.

An increasing number of Tibetans also are questioning the authority of the Dalai Lama, who has said since the mid-1990s that his health may not allow him to play a prominent political role much longer. It is in such a scenario that radicals like Jamyang see a window of opportunity to help revive Tibet’s militant struggle.

In a recent article on a Tibetan website, Jamyang derided the Dalai Lama’s exiled government for trying to dampen the fierce human rights protests that recently erupted not just in large parts of Tibet but the Chinese provinces of Gansu, Sichuan and Qinghai. Dharamsala wants to limit the campaign to “candle-light vigils, circulating petitions, wearing black arm-bands and so on, actions which they hope Beijing would not consider provocative, and which would eventually tire and bore all the protesters and activists and get them to go home,” he wrote.

The brilliant sun rays in the Tibetan national flag represent the equal enjoyment of freedom and spiritual and material happiness. (Photo by Ashwini Bhatia)

The article, pertinently titled “Don’t Stop the Revolution!” pointed out something curiously absent from media reports: That Dharamshala has gone so far as to instruct NGOs and Tibetan support groups to stop using the term “FREE TIBET.” Evidently, it is the Dalai Lama’s hope that if the crisis abates, he and his bureaucrats could try to negotiate with Beijing. “In spite of all that has happened in Tibet our leaders completely fail to see that this will never happen,” wrote Jamyang, echoing his community’s utter frustration and disillusionment with the Dalai Lama’s leadership.

DESPAIR IN EXILE

Lhasang Tsering, an artist, bookseller, former TYC president and ex-principal of Dharmsala’s Tibetan Children’s Village school, will never forget his first encounter with a Tibetan minister three decades ago. He was in the 8th grade at the time and the Dalai Lama’s education minister was visiting his school. Lhasang asked him if he had thoughts on what the first generation of exiled Tibetans should do in life. “Whatever you want,” Lhasang recalls the minister saying. “He pointed toward the girls in the class and giggled, ‘you can become actresses.’” Lhasang was shocked. “What kind of leadership was this?” he cries. “At least we should have been given some direction!”

The situation isn’t much better today. Of the thousands of Tibetans who graduate from college every year, the overwhelming majority end up running petty businesses or joining the ranks of India’s unemployed. Not a few gravitate to drugs. The real tragedy, however, is not their ignoble fate but the fact that many of them could have gotten decent jobs if only they were better informed — by the Dalai Lama’s regime. An Indian law allows Tibetans who arrived in India before 1962, as well as those subsequently born in the country, to work in any government job save a handful involving high security. “But nobody seems to know about this ordinance,” says Lhasang wearily. “The government-in-exile needs to dig it up and remind Tibetans, but for some reason it doesn’t.”

Lhasang Tsering decries the lack of leadership and direction

Lhasang’s bitter experience with the Dharamsala administration has turned him into one of its most outspoken critics. “There is a growing sense of dismay and frustration,” he tells me. “Dismay at the lack of any meaningful progress on the freedom question, and frustration — especially among the youth — at the lack of direction for the independence movement.” The leadership, he adds with disgust, is “uncertain, fumbling — it has no goal.”

Author Ajay Singh interviews the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala

I mention something the Dalai Lama told me that afternoon. “We’re the most successful refugee community in the world,” he said, referring to the famed industriousness and relative prosperity of the exiles, as well as his government’s efforts to preserve Tibetan culture. “Our government is very proud of saying this, but after all these years it has yet to reassess its priorities,” Lhasang says gravely. “So far we have stuck together because of the hope of going back to a free Tibet. Once that hope dies, the disintegration begins.” For many Tibetans, it already has.

Winning hearts and minds — the Bush administration, foreign policy wonks, even the U.S. military agree that this is the key to any victory over global terrorism. Yet our public diplomacy program has made little progress on improving America’s image. Few seem to recognize that American ignorance of Islam and Muslims has been the fatal flaw.

How much do Americans know about the views and beliefs of Muslims around the world? According to polls, not much. Perhaps not surprising, the majority of Americans (66%) admit to having at least some prejudice against Muslims; one in five say they have “a great deal” of prejudice. Almost half do not believe American Muslims are “loyal” to this country, and one in four do not want a Muslim as a neighbor.

Why should such anti-Muslim bias concern us? First, it undermines the war on terrorism: Situations are misdiagnosed, root causes are misidentified and bad prescriptions do more harm than good. Second, it makes our public diplomacy sound like double-talk. U.S. diplomats are trying to convince Muslims around the world that the United States respects them and that the war on terrorism is not out to destroy Islam. Their task is made infinitely more difficult by the frequent airing of anti-Muslim sentiment on right-wing call-in radio, which is then heard around the world on the Internet.

Finally, public ignorance weakens our democracy at election time. Instead of a well-informed citizenry choosing our representatives, we are rendered vulnerable to manipulative fear tactics. We need look no further than the political attacks on Barack Obama. Any implied connection to Islam — attending a Muslim school in Indonesia, the middle name Hussein — is wielded to suggest that he is unfit for the presidency and used as fuel for baseless rumors.

Anti-Muslim sentiment fuels misinformation, and is fueled by it — misinformation that is squarely contradicted by evidence.

Starting in 2001, the research firm Gallup embarked on the largest, most comprehensive survey of its kind, spending more than six years polling a population that represented more than 90% of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims. The results showed plainly that much of the conventional wisdom about Muslims — views touted by U.S. policymakers and pundits and accepted by voters — is simply false.

For instance, Gallup found that 72% of Americans disagreed with this statement: “The majority of those living in Muslim countries thought men and women should have equal rights.” In fact, majorities in even some of the most conservative Muslim societies directly refute this assessment: 73% of Saudis, 89% of Iranians and 94% of Indonesians say that men and women should have equal legal rights. Majorities of Muslim men and women in dozens of countries around the world also believe that a woman should have the right to work outside the home at any job for which she is qualified (88% in Indonesia, 72% in Egypt and even 78% in Saudi Arabia), and to vote without interference from family members (87% in Indonesia, 91% in Egypt, 98% in Lebanon).

What about Muslim sympathy for terrorism? Many charge that Islam encourages violence more than other faiths, but studies show that Muslims around the world are at least as likely as Americans to condemn attacks on civilians. Polls show that 6% of the American public thinks attacks in which civilians are targets are “completely justified.” In Saudi Arabia, this figure is 4%. In Lebanon and Iran, it’s 2%.

Moreover, it’s politics, not piety, that drives the small minority — just 7% — of Muslims to anti-Americanism at the level of condoning the attacks of 9/11. Looking across majority-Muslim countries, Gallup found no statistical difference in self-reported religiosity between those who sympathized with the attackers and those who did not. When respondents in select countries were asked in an open-ended question to explain their views of 9/11, those who condemned it cited humanitarian as well as religious reasons. For example, 20% of Kuwaitis who called the attacks “completely unjustified” explained this position by saying that terrorism was against the teachings of Islam. A respondent in Indonesia went so far as to quote a direct verse from the Koran prohibiting killing innocents. On the other hand, not a single respondent who condoned the attacks used the Koran as justification. Instead, they relied on political rationalizations, calling the U.S. an imperialist power or accusing it of wanting to control the world.

If most Muslims truly reject terrorism, why does it continue to flourish in Muslim lands? What these results indicate is that terrorism is much like other violent crime. Violent crimes occur throughout U.S. cities, but that is no indication of Americans’ general acceptance of murder or assault. Likewise, continued terrorist violence is not proof that Muslims tolerate it. Indeed, they are its primary victims.

Still, the typical American cannot be blamed for these misperceptions. Media-content analyses show that the majority of U.S. TV news coverage of Islam is sharply negative. Americans are bombarded every day with news stories about Muslims and majority-Muslim countries in which vocal extremists, not evidence, drive perceptions.

Rather than allow extremists on either side to dictate how we discuss Islam and the West, we need to listen carefully to the voices of ordinary people. Our victory in the war on terrorism depends on it.

As the sun rises over the narrow lanes and alleyways of Liuyi village, the morning light falls on a land that time forgot. The houses in this tiny hamlet in China’s southwestern Kunming province are made from mud, hay and crushed sea shells. In this village of 800 families, there are few telephones and, on the streets, ambling cows are the most common cause of gridlock. It’s a place where even rusty, one-speed bicycles are considered high-tech.

But what makes this village unique are its elderly women – the last survivors in China to have bound feet. Through the bustling town square, past steaming tea houses, and around the lettuce and radish fields, they are everywhere: women whose feet are shockingly small, often no more than four inches long, tucked into almost comically tiny shoes.

Most of the 300 bound-foot women in the village are no taller than five feet and sport a variety of footwear, from mini rubber boots to doll-sized embroidered ballet pumps, which they sew themselves. Each of them was a victim of a Chinese custom that came into vogue in the 10th century, a time when having tiny feet was considered a sign of beauty, and when men would not dream of taking a wife with normal-sized feet.

The smaller the feet, the more erotic they were considered to be. Bound feet were seen as the most prized sexual organs, and women would reveal them only to their husbands. The practice is so painful that girls did not follow in the tradition of their mothers and grandmothers out of vanity – they were forced to do so by their parents.

The grotesque process required folding a young girl’s foot in half so that her toes touched the underside of her heel. Then her foot was tightly swathed in a length of cloth to stop any further growth. This excruciating procedure left millions of girls deformed and immobile. Those who did walk on their bound feet had to balance their entire body weight on their heels, inching forward with mincing and painfully slow steps.

In the early 1900s, the practice of foot binding died out across most of China. Today, it is almost impossible to find a bound-foot woman in a major Chinese city such as Shanghai or Beijing and social attitudes toward the barbaric practice have changed radically. (“This is a terrible episode in China’s history,” one Kunming official politely informed us, thereby diplomatically deflecting our request to interview the village’s bound-foot women.) But Liuyi is so isolated that the villagers had no idea the tradition had gone out of style. For at least 30 years after it fell out of national favour, families in Liuyi continued to bind the feet of their daughters.

As a result, hundreds of women, aged just over 60 to nearly 100 years old, still hobble along Liuyi’s quiet lanes. Some are recent entrants to China’s growing middle class and own an electrical appliance or two; others are so poor they must spend hours collecting firewood for cooking. Yang Zhaoshi, a 94-year-old who lives near the town square, is a typical example. Not only was she forced to endure foot binding but also had to support her opium-addicted husband while tending the family fields and raising their three children by herself. Today, she still looks after 20 family members.

But what every one of these women knows – and is almost proud of – is that she is a part of China’s history. Ma Pu, a vivacious 82-year-old with hoof-like feet stuffed into baby socks and tiny black cloth shoes, pithily echoes this collective pride: “After all of us Liuyi ladies die, you’ll never see anything like us again.”

Despite the pain they have endured, Liuyi’s bound-foot women have led astonishingly active lives. Many have fought hard for the survival of their families – and Ma Pu, whose feet were bound when she was seven, is one of these bound-foot warriors. As we enter the courtyard that leads to her house, she limps over the doorstep, pokes her luminous, smiling face out and shouts excitedly. “What kind of people are you? Where are you from?”

The question answered, Ma Pu invites us into her home, which she shares with three generations of relatives, a dog and several chickens. She is holding a cleaver in one hand and a stalk of celery in the other. Tonight, like every other night, she must prepare dinner for her elderly husband, the couple’s three sons and their wives, not to mention eight granddaughters and two grandsons. In addition to feeding 18 people, Ma Pu also works at a pickle factory in the village. “Every day I chop and sort vegetables from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon at the factory,” she says, adding with a grin: “Then I come home and make dinner.”

Asked how she manages, Ma Pu grins again. “I have lots of energy – maybe even as much as a big-footed lady,” she says, flashing a near-toothless smile. And then, without a trace of bitterness in her voice, she adds: “My husband prefers to sit around drinking in the tea house all day.” When her feet ache, as they often do after a long day, she soaks them in hot water – which has first been used to steam the family’s daily quota of rice.Ma Pu has three sisters. “All of us had bound feet,” she says. “That was what feudal society liked women to look like. But I would never ask my daughters to have bound feet. Nor would I do it again if I had the choice. Never. It is torture.”

Pain is part of the fabric of daily life for these women. Luo Liu, an 80-year-old with a dark, serious face, lives in a mud-brick house down the lane from Ma Pu. She has two sons, one of whom is the village doctor and who tends to many of Liuyi’s bound-foot women. She embroiders a handkerchief as she recalls the story of her life: “I used to work in the fields alongside my husband. For every moment he toiled under the sun or in the middle of a storm, I did, too. Life was not easy, especially with these small feet.”

Luo Liu’s son, Luo Zhao Yuan, the doctor, shakes his head when he talks about his mother’s past. “When I was a child we were so poor that my mother would climb three hours into the mountains to collect twigs and branches for firewood,” he recalls. “We didn’t even have a horse or a bicycle and mother would walk everywhere.” Intense pain accumulates in the heels of bound-foot women, he says, and they also suffer from twisted ankles, back problems and poor posture. Women who do not cut their toenails properly find them digging into the soft flesh of their soles.

Bound feet are hopelessly fragile and unceasingly painful. “Like delicate peaches,” goes an old Chinese saying. Women shriek if anyone so much as brushes up against their feet. Vindictive relatives sometimes exploit this vulnerability by inflicting pain on bound-foot women. “Whenever my husband was cross with me, he would stomp on my feet,” says one woman, wincing as she speaks.It’s a frosty winter morning and Luo Lin is seated on a teetering wooden stool, warming her hands over a metal pan filled with red-hot coals. She’s 80 years old but is wearing a pair of black suede lace-up shoes made for a three-year-old. Like all her foot-bound sisters, this good-natured grandmother was born with perfectly normal feet. “I used to play in the fields with my brothers, catch hens running through the alleyways, and climb trees,” she reminisces.

All that came to an end some 74 years ago, when Luo Lin was six years old. She will never forget the fateful morning her mother called her into the family kitchen and quietly announced that it was time to have her feet bound. She then told her daughter to prepare herself for the pain.The young Luo Lin was propped on to a chair and her feet placed into a bucket of warm water to soften them. Her mother then grabbed her right foot and slowly started to bend the tender flesh and bones backwards and forwards. Luo Lin shrieked and kicked with her free leg, but her mother persisted until, finally, Luo Lin’s foot was folded completely in half – the toes pressed up against her heel.

When she looked down, she saw that her new foot resembled a clenched fist. Only her big toe remained untouched, creating the requisite “point” that formed a properly bound foot. It may be a gross comparison, but the ideal bound foot looks like a lotus flower.

Her mother then pulled out a two-foot-long piece of white, cotton cloth and wound it around her daughter’s folded foot until it could no longer move. She then began working on Luo Lin’s right foot. At first, the pain was so great that Luo Lin could barely sleep through the night. Whimpering quietly, she would rub her feet together in an attempt to assuage the aching. During the day, when she tried to follow her brothers into the fields, she could walk no more than two steps before collapsing.

“I felt as if the bones in my feet had been smashed into a thousand pieces,” she says, cringing at the memory. In time, she learned how to release the bandages secretly, allowing her feet to stretch and her toes to wiggle freely. But her parents found out and, using a needle and thread, sewed her toes to her heels. Luo Lin’s defiant stunts ceased after that.

One day Luo Lin asked her mother why she had to endure such torture. “I do this because I love you,” her mother replied. “If you bind your feet, you can marry a rich man. If you don’t, no man will ever look at you and you’ll have a very hard life.” Luo Lin was told no family would agree to take a big-footed girl as their daughter-in-law. “If you had large feet, how would the servants be able to tell if you are a bride or merely a newly purchases slave?” her mother explained.

In Liuyi, such thinking was the rule, not the exception. During the first half of the 20th century, the town elders were so patriarchal that girls did not even have a proper first name. Most parents addressed their daughters merely as “daughter.” Only the children of the lowliest families were left with their feet unbound. Even today, Liuyi’s men are proud of their bound-foot women.“

Of course my wife has bound feet,” chuckles Liuyi’s 81-year-old village chief, a lively man whose gold and silver teeth glint when he laughs. “In the past, we believed that no matter how beautiful your face, if your feet were not bound, who on earth would want you?” Few men, he says, would deign to marry a girl with ordinary feet. Those who did were certain to become a source of ridicule for the whole town.

History has it that the practice of foot-binding began during the Tang dynasty, when one of the emperors kept a concubine who had naturally small feet. The emperor developed a serious fetish for them and she quickly became a favourite, performing elaborate dances in court, her feet bound with cloth. Soon, other royal concubines began to break and bind their feet in the hope of capturing the emperor’s heart. Tiny bound feet became the hallmark of the well-bred girl, a physical symbol of respectability. Over the last 10 centuries, hundreds of millions of girls were subjected to the custom.

A minuscule three-inch-long foot earned the coveted title of Golden Lotus; a four-inch foot was called Silver Lotus, and anything bigger was relegated to lowly Iron Lotus status. Bound feet were not only a symbol of beauty and refinement; they were also a means by which women were tightly controlled. Generations of girls were forced to remain indoors, languishing like flowers on daybeds, or practicing spinning and embroidery in the parlour. If women ventured out at all, they had to lean on canes. (Large gatherings of bound-foot girls were known as A Forest of Canes.)

For the most part, bound-foot women were utterly reliant on their fathers, husbands, brothers and servants – which was precisely the point. A bound-foot woman was at her most attractive when she was helpless and submissive, like a bird in a gilded cage. For male admirers, the tiny foot also became an erotic plaything – it was viewed as a sexual organ in itself, and possibly the most forbidden zone.

Men used to say that in tiny foot you could find a heightened form of female beauty: it was rounded like a breast, small like a mouth and more mysterious than any other part of the body. Some fetishists delighted in the musty odour that came from a bound foot. There were even gentlemen’s handbooks devoted to the most effective ways of arousing a bound-foot consort. One such technique was called Eating the Golden Lotus. A man performed it by placing a woman’s naked foot in his mouth – considered the pinnacle of erotic pleasure.

When Luo Lin is asked if her husband ever put her Golden Lotus in his mouth, she blushes and turns her head. But, dutifully, she answers: “No, he never did that. But when I got married, I would show my feet only to my husband. Throughout my life, I had to make sure that no other man could ever see them. They were so private that I could never wash them in public or go swimming. In fact, I could never hang my shoes or bindings in a public place where other men might see my feet. They were a special sight – only for my husband’s eyes.”

Most of Liuyi’s bound-foot women are not content to remain helpless daughters or erotic wives, despite their immobilizing condition. Luo Lin, for one, managed a passable hobble only two years after her feet were first bound. “By the time I was eight, I could resume my household duties,” she says proudly. “Every morning, I managed to take the family night-soil out to the fields for fertilizer.” And when the family fell on desperate times, it was Luo Lin who gathered together the household valuables and took them to the town market to sell.

Foot binding had begun to go out of style by the time Luo Lin’s sisters were born, so she was the only daughter who had to suffer. But she remains philosophical about her fate. “In time, I came to admire big-foot girls,” she says. “They were so strong and capable. But I can’t regret what has happened to me. I have to just let it be.

”From the way the women of Liuyi go about their business, you would never guess at the misery they have endured. Every day, at 6 a.m., some 100 of them gather at the town’s activity centre for the elderly, where they hobble into formation for the morning’s activities. Years ago, these women could barely stand upright – now they do t’ai chi, sword dancing, fencing, even disco dancing. They are fierce lawn bowlers, and have won several provincial competitions.

“We small-foot ladies even beat those with big feet,” says one elderly woman, toting a 1 kg bowling ball in one hand. “When I perform sword dancing, I think of so many things,” says an ebullient Luo Lin, as she waves her sword through the crisp morning air. “I dream of flying over the clouds and the mountains.” Sometimes, she adds, “I even dream of being a warrior.”

Photos by Roko Belic (www.wadirum1@aol.com)

The Search for Hindu Ascetics in the Himalayas

There are caves in India that lead all the way to China. So said the lanky man with a flowing black beard and a robust handlebar mustache that would have done Stalin proud. He called himself Pushkar Baba, meaning “the Sage from Pushkar,” that charming little desert town in western India known the world over for its mammoth camel festival. We met in the lush Garhwal region of the Himalayas. Pushkar Baba was on a religious pilgrimage to Gangotri, a popular destination for Hindus near the Chinese border.

I was on something of a holy mission myself – as a researcher, guide and interpreter associated with a documentary film on Hindu ascetics, or “sadhus.” There were three of us involved with the project. Our cameraman was Roko Belic, a young San Francisco-based filmmaker whose documentary film, “Genghis Blues” (about throat singers in Mongolia), was nominated for an Oscar in 2000 and won more than 20 awards around the world. The director was Folco Terzani, a Cambridge-educated ethnic Italian who often travels to India. His most recent film was on the life and work of Mother Teresa – the last documentary on the remarkable “Saint of the Gutters” from Calcutta. “That movie was about love,” Terzani likes to tell people. “This one will be about peace.”

There are probably tens of millions of sadhus in India, and they occupy a special place in the country’s culture. Devoid of caste and free to affiliate with any social group, they travel from one sacred site to another, singing hymns and reciting poetry about the unity of mankind. Traditionally, they sever all worldly connections in a quest to achieve moksha, or the liberation of the soul from rebirth.

Yet, it is not properly understood just what these mendicants are, leave alone what a civilization gains or loses by encouraging such large numbers to do no remunerative work whatsoever. It was our hope that a well-researched documentary film would shed new light on the paradox. The film’s title? “Twilight Men” — nomads who meditate in the wilderness but whose mental state lies somewhere between this world and that of the gods. At the very least, we hoped the film would provoke new ways of thinking, especially in the West. As the world’s leading consumers of just about everything, Americans, we felt, could particularly learn a lesson or two from the austerity of sadhus.

When we first met Pushkar Baba in a temple in the Himalayas, he looked every bit the classical sadhu: tranquil and possessed of a quiet dignity. His long matted hair was tied in a neat bun, and around his neck he wore a rosary of 64 beads, the well-known knobby berries of the holy Rudrakshi plant associated with Lord Shiva. He spoke in a courtly, sing-song manner, his words sounding strangely seductive and mysterious. “There are rishis (sages) 200 to 500 years old up in the mountains,” he told us, his soft brown eyes twinkling. “Naked, they live on wild herbs and leaves. I can take you there.”

We were hooked. Terzani and I had heard and read about ascetics meditating in Himalayan caves, blissfully detached from the rest of the world. Some of them are known to practice the most rigorous austerities for salvation. Well-documented examples include holding one arm over the head till it becomes so stiff that it can never be lowered. (Others hold up both arms so that they can’t feed themselves.)

The point of this hideous, unimaginable self-mortification? To prove that ease and comfort aren’t all that count in life. It’s a line of thinking so completely foreign to the West that it can only be understood by realizing that a spirit of renunciation, of which bodily degradation is probably the most extreme form, has always run through the fabric of Indian life. As the great German sociologist Max Weber commented as late as 1958: “Indian religiosity is the cradle of those religious ethics which have abnegated the world, theoretically, practically, and to the greatest extent.”

Pushkar Baba announced that the following morning he would take us to the caves leading to China. We were excited but also a bit nervous. Suppose that instead of meeting holy men, we ran into soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army? It was a chilling prospect: Two American citizens accompanied by an Indian face to face with Chinese troops. We would almost certainly be accused of being CIA agents and locked up for the rest of our lives in some horrible Chinese prison, condemned to make footballs or teddy bears for export to the U.S. Yet if we wished to take the message of Indian asceticism to the West, we would have to make sacrifices.

A rude shock awaited us the next morning. Pushkar Baba had disappeared, leaving behind a cryptic hand-written note in Hindi. “Meet me in the evening at Parmahans Ashram, next to Naru Guest House,” it read. We assumed he would meet us in Gangotri, a pilgrim resort where we were all headed. A six-hour taxi ride brought us to the place, a cluster of seedy ashrams overlooking the Ganges, India’s holiest river. As it turned out, we failed to find Pushkar Baba. This made us wonder if he had gone to Gaumukh, the source of the Ganges, 18 kilometers upstream.

So the following morning we set out for Gaumukh (literally, “cow’s mouth”) on foot – the only way to get there. Bogged down by camera equipment at an altitude approaching 4,000 meters, our breathing was slow and labored. After eight hours of huffing and puffing, we finally reached our destination, a rocky wind-swept wasteland of a valley that might have been a site on Mars. At one end, from the base of a muddy glacier, spouted the Ganges, its waters sparkling like diamonds in the sunlight.

It was a glimpse of the Himalaya’s famed splendour, a magical sight to behold. But disappointment soon got the better of us – there was still no trace of Puskhar Baba. By now, we were convinced that he was an impostor who had fooled us with his fantastic stories. And for the first time since we began our journey, it dawned on us that India’s famed spirituality might be a bit of a sham. I was tempted to let my indignation loose on the nearest sadhu I could find, but a cold night was rapidly approaching. As we had neither camping equipment nor food, the only option was to shack up with one of the three sadhus living in the area in canvas tents.Unabashedly, we ducked into the nearest one.

A short, frail man was seated cross-legged on the floor, pumping a gas stove. He offered us cups of steaming hot tea and then proceeded to tell us the legend of the Ganges. “This is not a river,” he said somberly, “but the great goddess Ganga.” We heard how she came down in the form of water to bring salvation to 60,000 princes who had been reduced to ashes by a sage’s curse.

Our hospitable host, Vyas Giri, was a native of the Himalayas. I asked him if he knew of any yogis in the vicinity. He smiled and shook his head. Meeting such realized beings is not easy, he said, echoing the well-worn spiritual axiom that only when the pupil is ready does the master appear. I asked Vyas why he wasn’t living in a cave, searching for life’s higher truths. “If you give me a million rupees,” he replied deadpan, “I’ll live in a cave. That’s what I really want to do.” Then, pointing to the boiling kettle by his feet, he added wryly: “This is not the life of a sadhu.”

We were stunned. What did money have to do with retiring to a cave? Vyas clarified his point: As long as he had to cook and worry about the constant flow of rations in such inhospitable terrain, he could hardly pursue spiritual matters. Even prehistoric sages, he told us, enjoyed the patronage of kings who took care of their needs. We were impressed by the man’s candidness. Though dressed in a holy garb, he had no pretensions of being a monk. On the contrary, Vyas admitted, he and his neighboring sadhus were nothing but businessmen who put up pilgrims for a fee.

We bid Vyas farewell two days later, struck by our failure to find even a single genuine sadhu in one of the holiest spots of the country. The closest thing to an ascetic in the area was a young Brahmin who had been living for the past four years in a flimsy shack – it wasn’t even a tent – at the foot of a glacier. But he was no sage.

Midway through our hike down the mountains, to our utter amazement, we ran into Pushkar Baba. He was trekking up to meet the goddess Ganga, full of gusto. He greeted us heartily with an impish smile and, as if nothing was amiss, launched into one of his spellbinding stories, this time about wild plants and miraculous cures. At this point we understood how inextricably linked myth and reality can be in the Indian mind.

For Puskhar Baba, it wasn’t important in the least whether or not those caves leading to China actually existed. What mattered was his belief in their existence, which was similar to his faith in Hindu gods who are said to be beyond the concepts of time, space and matter. To our great surprise, this insight proved to be strangely if fleetingly liberating. For several moments, as we listened to Pushkar Baba, it didn’t matter to us that his tales were entirely fanciful.

(This journey occurred at the turn of the last millennium. Twilight Men, surely one of the world’s most difficult films, remains a work in progress.)

In Nepal, preparing to run the Olympic Torch to Mount Everest (Photo by Soinam Norbu)

Ajay Singh: Was the West being romantically optimistic when it expected China to allow greater political liberalization and human rights because it is hosting the Olympics?

Richard Baum: There was a certain historical precedent. After all, in 1988, with the Seoul Olympics coming, the regime there did open up and democratize. So there was an expectation that the 2008 Olympics might do the same thing for China. The interesting thing is that the Chinese were aware of that expectation and played into it. The Beijing Olympics Committee made a point of saying that they would use China’s Olympics bid to help their development, their human rights and democracy.

Maintaining social and political stability at the cost of human rights has always been a characteristic of the Chinese government. What are the circumstances under which Beijing might permit greater freedom?

As the government in Beijing feels more confident in its progress, its ability to satisfy human needs and wants, I think it will begin to relax what you might call its pathological demand for stability and unity. Ever since the 1989 Tiananmen disturbances and the crackdown that followed, the Chinese leadership has been terrified of unrest and its potential for destroying everything they’ve ever created. So they tend to overreact to anything that smacks of political unrest.

You say ‘overreact,’ but isn’t that how the Chinese characteristically react?

Well, in some ways they called this down upon themselves by thinking that they could build this stage—the spectacle of the Olympic—and that only good things would be shown in the glare of publicity. That was naïve because there are a lot of problems in China that they generally try to sweep under the rug. One of the things they’re doing in preparation for the Olympics is that they’re shipping out all the migrant labourers. They are trying to create a bubble of law and order and social stability on the eve of the Olympics. That attitude—the idea that they can control the environment of an event—belies the problems that lie beneath the bubble and are going to burst through.

Chinese factory; Chinese airport (Factory photo by Polly Braden)

What kind of problems?

Tibet is one problem, human rights is another, their policies in Darfur yet another. The more they call attention to themselves and their achievements, the more other people are ready to say, wait a minute, look at this, look at that. So in a sense there’s a dialectic at work here. The more the Chinese want to preen in front of the mirror of international approbation, the more others are going to say that it’s an ugliness, not a beauty we’re seeing.

But isn’t one interpretation also that the Chinese just cannot stand perceived humiliation?

Oh, absolutely. Along with China’s descent from a great global power into the doormat of Asia in the 19th century, came a sense of humiliation and resentment. There’s always been a love-hate relationship between China and the West. The idea that you can publicly humiliate China and expect them to change their policy is unrealistic in the extreme, because of their sensitivity to slights, cultural and national. There’s even a name for it in Chinese—the guochi syndrome, or the national humiliation syndrome. When you look at the reaction to the Western criticism of China in the last few weeks, most Chinese are feeling very patriotic about defending their government. Regardless of how they might have felt about Tibet before all this happened, they feel that the West is using this as a way of punishing China and they’re reacting on the side of the government. The chat rooms, the blogs, the SMS text messages all over China are very patriotic and very angry at the West for stirring up this kind of a storm. And of course very intolerant towards the Tibetans, who they see as having manipulated this whole situation to China’s disadvantage.

Monks at Buddhist monastery in Dharamsala

Why is Beijing frustrated about Tibet?

They were over a barrel about Darfur and Myanmar when Mia Farrow called these the ‘Genocide Olympics.’ Then, just as they were making some headway in Myanmar and Sudan, Tibet blew up on them. And they didn’t know how to deal with that. At first, they just sat on their hands when there were peaceful protests for a day or two. Then the protests started turning violent and the overreaction occurred. Reports suggest that thousands of people have been arrested.

How does Beijing view the Dalai Lama?

The Chinese are tone deaf when it comes to the Dalai Lama. Just like they saw the Falungong as evil incarnate, they see the Dalai Lama as evil incarnate. They simply cannot deal with him. And it’s doing them no good because they can say all they want that he personally is calling for independence and instigating violence and terror, the truth is that it is not him who is doing that but radical elements in the Tibetan community who are angry and impatient with Chinese rule. To blame the Dalai Lama as an instigator is absurd. He is what he seems—a man of peace and reconciliation. And he’s asking for autonomy, not independence. And the Chinese can’t hear that.

Even that?

Because they see the Tibetan Youth Congress and the Committee for a Free Tibet as calling for independence, they lump that all together with the Dalai Lama and say it’s his fault. They also have convinced themselves—and this is erroneous—that they’ve done a lot of good in not just Tibet proper, the province of Tibet, but throughout the Tibetan Plateau, which covers three provinces in Western China. I’ve spent a lot of time on the plateau and there is an enormous amount of resentment against the Han-Chinese government there.

Tibetan woman in Dharamsala spins the ‘Wheel of Life’

Resentment against what exactly?

For years and years, it was not so much the naked violence and suppression of Tibetan culture but a condescending, infantilizing, arrogant treatment of the minority ‘other.’ The provincial party secretary of Tibet, a month ago, when these demonstrations started, said something that was appalling: That the Tibetans are like little children who need the leadership of the mother Party to show them the way. That Han arrogance angers Tibetan youth enormously. And the Chinese come back and say, ‘well, the Tibetans are so ungrateful—we’ve put so much money into the development of the West. How can they possibly be angry at us?’ Well, how did the southerners feel about the northern carpet baggers after the Civil War in the United States? Did they embrace them because they brought money? Of course not—they resented them as outsiders who were horning in and taking all the good jobs. The Chinese don’t know how to treat the Tibetans. And this is a leftover from the imperial times when the Chinese had a tributary system towards all outsiders, who had to come in and pay tribute to the Emperor. They had to bring in gifts and perform a kowtow or put their nose on the ground. As a supplicant, you couldn’t deal as equals with the Chinese empire—you were here and the Chinese were there. They still reproduce that in some subtle ways in their policies in Tibet, Xinjiang and elsewhere. So they’ve got a long way to go before they can claim any kind of progress in Tibet and there are a lot of historical overtones to what’s happening there. It was after all on the 49th anniversary of the suppression of the Tibetan rebellion in 1959 that these latest protests began last March.

How is the Dalai Lama handling the crisis?

He’s caught between a rock and a hard place. There are these militants who are constantly pushing him to stand up to the Chinese but on the other hand there is his Western audience, which expects him to be a man of peace, meditation, reconciliation and justice. I think that’s who he really is but I don’t think he can satisfy everybody. Everybody wants a piece of him. The Chinese of course see only the militants on one side and we see only the pacifist, meditating monk. And the Chinese are deathly afraid of what would happen if the Dalai Lama came back into Tibet. They are terrified of his popularity, which is latent now, underneath the surface. The Chinese are so afraid that people will rise up and see him as the real leader and throw off Chinese rule. That’s why they are terrified to even talk to him. They don’t want to give him any legitimacy by negotiating with him.

Aren’t Westerners better off not embracing Buddhism?

Some pundits say the Dalai Lama is politically naive and that China has used his failures to great effect over the years.

I think there is some truth to that. Truth is never the monopoly of one side of an argument, particularly a long-simmering historical argument. I think the Dalai Lama has allowed himself to be used on both sides of the issue. Hollywood has used him in a way that I find not very pleasant—there’s a wonderful book by Orville Schell called “Virtual Tibet,” which is all about the Hollywoodization of the imagery of Tibetan Buddhism, which is not a real image. And by the way, the Tibetan governance before the Communists came to power in 1950 was not all that benign. It certainly wasn’t democratic. It was very hierarchical …

Feudal?

It defies feudalism. It was a very primitive kind of serfdom, with a lot of wealth among the monastic elite and a lot of poverty among everybody else.

And the monastic elite are the same people in Dharmsala now.

That’s right. But I do think this traditional god-king idea of a church that is ruthless in its governance—I think those days are gone. I don’t think that if there were an independent or even an autonomous Tibet, you would have a reversion to the kind of serfdom or stratification that you had back then.

Buddhist monasteries in Ladakh, near India’s border with Tibet

Why are there so many unresolved issues between the Chinese and Tibetans?

The Chinese don’t know how to respond to the Tibetans. For one thing, they can’t acknowledge any problems with their governance techniques in Tibet. There’s such insecurity since Tiananmen among China’s governing elite that they can’t admit any wrongdoing or mistake at all. Their thinking is that if they give the Tibetans an inch they’ll take a mile. That’s one of the reasons why Deng Xiaoping never pushed through any political reforms after the early 1980s. He looked at what happened in Poland in 1980-81, when the Polish government removed all price controls and the price of meat and vegetables started rising dramatically in Poland. And the workers began to protest and demand that the government restore price controls. The government gave in, thinking that that would satisfy the workers. But it didn’t satisfy anything—once having taken to the streets, a long-suppressed list of grievances the workers had erupted into demonstrations. The government had to declare martial law or else face the prospect of a Soviet invasion. Deng, who was preparing to introduce political reforms in China, saw what happened in Poland and he decided this won’t work. So he took a gamble, thinking that we have to give people an economic opportunity first and with greater opportunity for improved livelihoods, people’s political demands will recede.

Plenty of personal freedom in China

What was Deng trying to save?

The party. He was worried about losing political control. Then came Tiananmen and it scared the hell out of the Chinese leadership. China was this close to anarchy. And the leadership was further spooked in 1989 when Ceausescu was not only overthrown but executed by the very crowds he had been trying to suppress. After that happened, the Chinese realized that they have to have a very tight thumb on social dissidence and opposition of any kind. That attitude makes them very nervous about Tibet. They know their legitimacy is very tenuous in Tibet and that the Tibetans have many grievances. But they can’t deal with them by accommodation. They have a trained incapacity to accommodate, negotiate, compromise. And so they continue to play this all-or-nothing game.

China monument

Tibetan radicals have been saying lately that the Dalai Lama wants nothing more than to suppress this ‘revolution’ that has begun in the background of the Beijing Olympics. The Dalai Lama says he wants an end to the violence; the Tibetan Youth Congress says it should continue.

That’s a real problem. Years of frustration have created a hard-nosed, bitter and militant opposition. The more time goes by the more desperate people have become.

Do you think the Dalai Lama says to the world outside Lhasa that the violence should end but that in fact he really wants it to continue?

He gives two messages—an internal message and an external message. This is in the National Public Radio interview this morning (April 15), by the way, with Robert Barnett of Columbia University. What he argued, and I think that he’s absolutely right, is that when the Dalai Lama is talking to his own people, he tells them to keep up the good fight.

He does?

Oh yes—the nonviolent resistance. He has never to my knowledge preached violence. But he does encourage his supporters to keep up the pressure on China.

Stubbornly muscling up in Dharamsala, inspired by the yak, Tibet’s national animal.

But isn’t there a link between peaceful protests and what recently happened in Lhasa? Angers explode.

The explanation that I find most convincing is that the peaceful demonstrations were certainly promoted directly by monastic authorities in Tibet and indirectly in Dharamsala. The protests started in the monasteries and then spread to the streets. I think that had the encouragement and support of the Dalai Lama himself. When he says, ‘keep it up,’ I think that’s what he’s talking about. Then, as happened in Tiananmen, there are people with their own ulterior motives and agendas who will take advantage of any breakdown in law and order—the absence of police in the streets—to being to push things in a different direction. Whether the violence was instigated or not I don’t now. But it didn’t take much to instigate.

So, knowing that a peaceful protest can be hijacked, why does the Dalai Lama continue to back such protests?

Good question. Depends on which part of his constituency he’s talking to. I’m not privy to those conversations, but he doesn’t give the same message to us that he gives to his own supporters. That’s clear. One argument, and I think Robbie Barnett feels this way, is that the Dalai Lama has to be very careful addressing his internal audience because he could lose them. They could just bolt and pick up the insurrectionary flag on their own if he can’t serve as a kind of credible restraint. He has to credibly both support them as well as act as a restraint. He’s in a very difficult situation because there are a lot of very angry people in Dharamsala as well as in Tibet who would like to make trouble.

Weaving carpets (left); threatened by AIDS in exile

But they can hardly take on the PLA.

The Dalai Lama knows that. I’m not sure these young rebels know that. I’m not sure the kids in Tiananmen knew they couldn’t take on the PLA. I think they thought that virtue and righteousness would prevail and that the People’s Liberation Army doesn’t shoot the people. That was the mantra two days before the crackdown.

On the other hand, if the PLA ends up massacring tens of thousands of Tibetans, it could be the beginning of …

A huge problem. A huge, huge problem.

Maybe leading to Tibetan independence?

It would take something along those lines to do it. But I don’t think the Chinese are stupid enough to do something like that. … We don’t know what’s going on in Tibet these days because of this curtain of silence. It’s a huge area—the Tibetan Plateau is larger than Tibet proper.

So it’s hard to cordon off?

Right. But the Chinese have choked off the traffic at all the transportation hubs leading to Tibet.

Essentially, the Tibetans have no friends. Everyone likes their cause, but …

Yes. That’s why Tibet is not likely to ever be independent. They don’t have oil, they’re not a strategic ally, they’re not on anybody’s trade route.

And India only goes so far in helping out.

That’s right. Tibet is in an unfortunate position geopolitically. They have very little bargaining power.

A Tibetan carpet depicts the homeland, watched over by holy deities

The only scenario in which the Tibetans could move towards independence is if India aids them in a military initiative.

But that kind of calculus is based on the idea that India and China are going to be at war at some point. And they’re a long way from there. It may get to that. But not now.

What’s the Chinese game plan in Tibet?

They’re trying to outlive the Dalai Lama—they would like him to die so that they can manipulate a successor.

What do you make of a spiritual leader who heads a government in exile?

That’s the problem—he’s a god-king in Tibetan Buddhism, but they don’t have god-kings in the secular world any more. He is heading a government but that’s what other people thrust on him.

The term ‘government in exile’ is not of his making?

I can’t say for sure whether that’s a term he uses or subscribes to. I would think he heads more of a movement than a government. But he is a symbol of many different and completely contrary things. To the Chinese he’s a devil who’s trying to shake them free from what they consider their historical claim to have ruled Tibet consistently for 500 years, which is not true by the way. For a brief time in the Mongol dynasty the Yuans ruled Tibet in the 13th century. Under the Ming dynasty the Chinese didn’t control Tibet at all—at best they had a tributary relationship: Tibet acknowledged Chinese power and paid tributes and treasures and kowtowed to the emperor in Beijing, and even married off some of the Tibetan royal family to the Chinese royal family to cement alliances, as was typical of European politics. But it wasn’t until 1781 or thereabouts that anything like Chinese dominance occurred within Tibet, wherein the Chinese told the Tibetans to behave or else … They didn’t govern directly but—to use a term that is very indefinite in meaning—they were the suzerain authority, not the sovereign authority: They were the dominant power in the area, just as they were in Korea and Taiwan until 1895. And that’s how it’s been in Tibet for most of the last 200 years, except that after the collapse of the Manchu dynasty there was no Chinese control over Tibet. That is, from 1911 to 1945, no Chinese government had control over Tibet. So the Chinese exaggerate a lot when they say that ever since the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century Tibet has been Chinese. It just isn’t true. But it has become part of their national myth.

Tibetan family in Dharamsala. Om mani padme hum

Why do you think Mao invaded Tibet?

Because he could.

There’s also the argument that no great power will allow a buffer state between another power—in this case India.

Yes, that’s true. There’s also the Great Game of the 19th century in which Xinjiang and Tibet were both pawns between the British and the Russians. I just think Tibet was there for the taking. The Chinese Nationalists tried to rule through warlords in the area and when their power broke down the Chinese had a vacuum they could enter. So they occupied Tibet in 1950. In 1959 the Dalai Lama and his clerics rebelled against China, aided and abetted by the CIA—clearly they were put up to it by foreign forces, and the Guomintang in Taiwan also had a role in that. But the rebellion was sort of like the Bay of Pigs in Cuba—they screwed up. They way overestimated the popular support that would be given and way underestimated the resistance of the Chinese military. So they lost badly and the Dalai Lama and about a thousand of his followers fled to India.

There was no popular support? But the Tibetans do revere the Dalai Lama.

Yes, but they had no weapons—they were literally fighting with sticks and stones. The CIA tried to do some clandestine arms drops. Half of the weapons were dropped in places where they couldn’t be reached. It was a real fiasco. And the PLA came in and put a quick and brutal end to the rebellion. A lot of people were killed, although the estimates have been way out in space—to say that a million Tibetans were killed is way exaggerated. But there is a legacy of hatred among Tibetans because of those events.

Kid monk studies scripture

What do you see as the other major failings of the Chinese leadership?

Three decades of rapid economic growth has allowed them to kick the can of political reform farther and farther down the road without having to act on it. They’ve had a cushion because of all this economic growth. Deng Xiaoping’s gamble paid off. If you compare Peking University in 1989 with Peking University four years later, when I taught there, you’ll see that by 1993 the students in Beijing were all about opportunities, all about careers, all about money. Deng bought ‘em off—it was a successful bargain that he gave them. And it’s still paying off. Three years ago I taught a course at Peking University, and the students were all about money and status and careers and partners, leading everything but a political life. They are politically dead. The only kind of political activity they take part in is activity the government condones—they can go out and protest against the Japanese, that’s fine. Also, certain environment issues are safe for students to participate in. So the lack of any real political protests by students has given the government a sense that it can get by with mere administrative fine-tuning rather than real structural reform.

Upwardly mobile in China

What about the argument that China needs to be guided by a firm hand that pushes economic reform and holds a huge and culturally diverse nation together?

The problem is that the authoritarian mentality that drives the Communist Party is really incompatible with what I would call the chemistry of a pluralistic society. There’s a great deal of personal freedom in China today—but freedom stops at the edge of politics. The Chinese leadership has continued to try to control social life, organizational life, mass media, public opinion—without allowing any kind of healthy pluralism, a healthy divergence of opinion and interests. They find interest groups to be a threat rather than a sign of health—and that’s why they have to control religion so tightly.

How long that can continue?

As China modernizes and globalization becomes more profound and pronounced, Chinese are beginning to push at the boundaries of what you could call informational freedom. I don’t think they’re crying out for elections—that’s a Western fantasy. What they do want increasingly is to be able to have their little social organizations, to be able to form NGOs, to be able to read newspapers that offer alternatives, to be able to respond to government policy in a way that officials have to listen to. Accountability, transparency, responsibility—I think those are the issues that are increasingly getting in the way of efficient, effective governance in China.

What effect does corruption have on the nation?

Corruption is a black box that nobody can see inside, and increasingly that’s costing the government a great deal in terms of social disruptions and disturbance. There has been a huge movement in the last five to 10 years against land seizures in rural areas. Huge fortunes are being made because the land in China is all owned by the government. There are private dwellings but no private land. In rural areas, the villages own the land. And real estate developers come in and offer big bucks to village officials who get rid of inconvenient peasants who happen to be living on the land the developers want. The officials give the farmers 10 per cent of what they get and ask them to go away and build themselves another house. The farmers have been a bit slow to realize that they’ve been screwed and are starting to protest and organize. There have been hundreds of thousands of public demonstrations and even riots in the last 10 years over just property and these sweetheart deals between developers and local officials at the expense of ordinary Chinese.

Consuming culture

The situation in the provinces is dreadful. Reminds me of the old Chinese saying, ‘The mountains are tall and the Emperor is far.’

By the time the Central Government’s authority gets to the countryside, it’s almost unrecognizable. That’s why corruption keeps breaking out no matter how many anti-corruption campaigns they have. I think the Central Government is doing a pretty reasonable job of responding to people’s needs—it’s the local government that people are angry at. But the problem is there’s no real accountability and no institutionalized safety valve for the people to sound off.

The government is trying to do something about that but it’s doing it through surrogates. For example, every county in China now has an electronic, government website, which is supposed to contribute to transparency by publishing all the rules and regulations and by allowing citizens to feed back their opinions. And the government is supposed to pay attention to this and respond. In a sense it is transparency, but there’s no real accountability because the government is like the Wizard of Oz—you can go and complain to it but you can’t force it to respond in any particular way. You can’t see what happens behind the black box and you have no way of influencing the outcome. You’re still a supplicant—the outsider who visits the Emperor, gives him a gift and hopes the Emperor will respond.

That’s the kind of neo-Confucian patronization and paternalism that is the essence of the government’s effort to avoid real pluralism, real democracy. They’re trying to go back to a neo-Confucian ideal of a benevolent leader who listens to his flock and has their interests at heart but nonetheless is an authoritarian leader. A good leader is supposed to be responsive. But then of course the Romans and the Greeks had the right question about that—who guards the guards? How do you ensure the reliability and honesty of people who have no one to check them. That’s the fatal flaw of the Chinese system.

The problems in society have to be aired. But the government tries to silence anything that’s contrary to official policy. The problem, as they’ve themselves put it, is that they’ve lifted up a rock only to drop it on their own feet. The long-term problem with this government is that they’ve let economic success allow them a certain luxury to not reform their institutions. And I think they may be running out of time.

China’s growth brings horrendous pollution

To what extent does the West, which consumes a lot of Chinese products, have a responsibility to make China set its house in order?

There are two conflicting views of sovereignty here. The Chinese view is that what anybody does in their own borders is nobody else’s business. That’s not something they’ve invented recently for their own convenience. They’ve had a doctrine of nonintervention since the People’s Republic of China was born. Non-intervention in domestic affairs is one of their ‘five principles of peaceful coexistence.’ Now, they’ve lately been moderating their view of absolute state sovereignty under pressure from the outside world, as they’ve become more multilaterally engaged in the world. For example, they’re participating in about a dozen peace-keeping missions around the world. They voted for resolution 1441, which authorized the United Nations to punish Iraq if it didn’t allow comprehensive weapons’ inspections. They voted for sanctions against Iran.

But even as they’re doing that, the West has to confront its own dilemma. The Westphalian notion of sovereignty, which has been in effect for 200 years, is the Chinese view of sovereignty—what countries do inside their own territory is no one’s business. The humanitarian intervention argument is a fairly new one, starting with, I guess, the Yugoslavian situation in the 1990s that led to the war in Kosovo. It took a lot to get the West to intervene—the first instinct was not to. Rwanda later was another case. But the inclination of Western countries not to intervene is becoming harder and harder to maintain because the information revolution has brought about such graphic imagery of suffering in so many places that consciences have been tweaked and political support is to be gained by at least professing support to underdogs and suffering minorities and so on.

Now, as to the question of whether the West has some responsibility for what’s happening in Tibet or China because we buy Chinese products—that’s a line of causation that I think is a bit too long. In South Africa we had the Sullivan rules about doing business under apartheid, a self-restraining pledge not to do business with apartheid industries and enterprises. But South Africa was a small country, with very few Western companies involved. With China, size matters. What do you do if you’re Walmart? Do you go to some other country where they have 15-year-old workers working 20 hours a day? In fact, Chinese working conditions are beginning to improve finally after a lot of external pressure. There’s a new labour contract law, which is going to force employers to pay workers’ wages on time. It allows workers to organize in a way that was never permitted before. And wages are rising in China. In fact a lot of the complaints you hear about China are really yesterday’s complaints. China is improving.

Chinese supermarket: All you can buy

What about human rights?

Most people aren’t dissidents in China. Most people are sort of satisfied to put one foot in front of the other as long as there’s a paycheck at the end of the week and an opportunity for their kids to have a better life. The human rights community in this country talks about thousands of political prisoners—there aren’t thousands of political prisoners in China. Maybe hundreds. There maybe 50 journalists in prison in China, maybe an equal number of Internet bloggers who have crossed the line of political dissent. In a country of 1.3 billion, that’s not so many. And in terms of the prison population, we are way ahead of the Chinese.

What’s really more important than the concerns of human rights activists are the thousands of petty indignities that occur every day to ordinary people—the corruption, getting thrown out of your house without adequate payment, the problems of dealing with corrupt, incompetent, local officials. That just makes people’s lives very difficult. The local governments are self-contained because Beijing can’t police everything and because it rewards officials who deliver on economic growth, stability and, at least until recently, one child per family. Those are the things that get attention—not whether people are happy or whether justice and equality are served.

“A Fine Balance”

“Allah O Akbar”
Muslim worshippers bow towards Mecca in a street where Urdu graffiti vies for space with the hammer and sickle.

“Celebrating Straw”

“Crackshot”

“Fun with Numbers”

“Gay Abandon”

“In the Company of Gods”

“Laughing Matter”

“My Pretty Ballerinas”

“Not by Bread Alone”

“Rolling Heads Burn”

“Slaying the Demon”

“Take My Breath Away”

“Torso Twist”

“Welcome Home”

“Bar in Kolkata” (#1)

“Bar in Kolkata” (#2)

“Bar in Kolkata” (#3)

“Bar in Kolkata” (#4)

“Bar in Kolkata” (#5)