Mick Hartley

Earlier today I posted on Chinese pressure on Sheffield Hallam University, trying to stop a professor there from publishing her work on the ongoing repression of the Uighur in Xinjiang. Now, from Aaron Sarin at Quillette, we hear about Tibet, that other country so brutally absorbed into the absolutism of modern China. The article’s about Zhang Yadi, aka Tara Freesoul, a Chinese student who vanished into police custody over the summer, after visiting home just before starting a course here at SOAS. Her disillusion with China started when she began to uncover the lies she’d been told about Tibet. She’s now been charged with “inciting separatism”.

Contrary to the charge she now faces, Zhang did not advocate separatism (those who do will hardly risk returning to China). Rather, she appears to have advocated dialogue. “We are committed,” CYS4T proclaims on Substack, to “understand[ing] Tibetan culture, deconstructing Han nationalist ideology, resolving ethnic antagonism and hatred, and promoting the transformation of ethnic issues into justice and reconciliation.”

Beijing sees much to fear in these goals. For the CCP, Tibetan culture merits no deep understanding, but rather a gradual ingestion by its coloniser, leaving behind only a desiccated husk: the tourism industry. Already, millions of Chinese travel every year to the monasteries and nomad camps and costume shops of Lhasa and Shangri-La, where they photograph each other cosplaying as “authentic Tibetans,” living out a romanticised ideal.…

Greater public awareness would lead to the dawning realisation for many people that Tibet represents, by almost any metric, a separate civilisation. It is hardly just another Chinese province. The Communist Party would also prefer to keep a thick veil of darkness over its own seven-decade terror campaign against the Tibetan people. It would be safer for those crimes to remain obscured.…

Perhaps most significantly, Beijing will be alarmed at the prospect of ordinary people “resolving ethnic antagonism and hatred.” As we browse the work of Tara Freesoul, we find certain themes woven through the politics, revealing her personal philosophy. At one point she refers to a love that breaks through racial barriers; at another she appeals to the interconnectedness of all human beings and all nature. Hers is a world of greater communication and clarity, more light in the dark; a world in which the obstacles that restrict understanding are surmounted. And understanding one another also means understanding and preserving the distinctions that mark our human variety.

I’m reminded of an old remark by Polish dissident Leszek Kołakowski, when describing the situation in the Soviet Union: “Each citizen, in all his relations with the state, faced the omnipotent apparatus alone, an isolated and powerless individual.” The Chinese Communist Party was a Soviet project from the very beginning (formed in 1921 under the direct guidance of Comintern official Grigori Voitinsky), and while some things have changed over the past century, others have not. Like its Soviet master, the CCP would atomise society. It wants each citizen standing alone in the dark, with the Communist Party their only recourse—their saviour and tormentor. When Chinese and Tibetans begin talking deeply and frankly to one another without turning to the Party for guidance, then the Party risks the exposure of its lies, and that means the weakening of its psychic hold over the nation.

Which is also why they see religions – whether Christianity or Islam or Tibetan Buddhism or indeed Falun Gong – as enemies to be destroyed, offering as they do different loyalties, and a threat to the “omnipotent apparatus” of the Chinese state.