Žižek, China, Tibet
April 16, 2008Slavoj Žižek has a letter (scroll down to the end) in the current issue of the LRB about Tibet and China. It’s the bit about Tibet that I want to focus on. He questions what he sees as a romanticized Western narrative of the Tibetan struggle for independence and says,
There are complications in this story of ‘good guys versus bad guys’.
In what struggle for national emancipation are there not?
It is not the case that Tibet was an independent country until 1949, when it was suddenly occupied by China. The history of relations between Tibet and China is a long and complex one, in which China has often played the role of a protective overlord: the anti-Communist Kuomintang also insisted on Chinese sovereignty over Tibet.
China played a similar sort of role in Korean history for many centuries and continues to play it today with regard to the DPRK. Would that be a valid justification for a Chinese takeover of the Korean peninsula ?
Before 1949, Tibet was no Shangri-la, but an extremely harsh feudal society, poor (life expectancy was barely over 30), corrupt and fractured by civil wars (the most recent one, between two monastic factions, took place in 1948, when the Red Army was already knocking at the door). Fearing social unrest and disintegration, the ruling elite prohibited industrial development, so that metal, for example, had to be imported from India.
So pre-1949 Tibet was a pretty shitty place. That’s a shocker. He doesn’t say what relevance this fact has to Tibet’s claim for independence now.
Since the early 1950s, there has been a history of CIA involvement in stirring up anti-Chinese troubles in Tibet, so Chinese fears of external attempts to destabilise Tibet are not irrational
Ah, the CIA. Great move to get in a mention of the boys from Langley, Slavoj. If CIA activity at some point in a country’s history is going to delegitimise its independence then we’ll to have to recognize a lot of countries as illegitimate .
As the TV images demonstrate, what is going on now in Tibet is no longer a peaceful ‘spiritual’ protest by monks (like the one in Burma last year), but involves the killing of innocent Chinese immigrants and the burning of their stores.
Since when did a national liberation movement have to be peaceful to be legitimate?
It is a fact that China has made large investments in Tibet’s economic development, as well as its infrastructure, education and health services. To put it bluntly: in spite of China’s undeniable oppression of the country, the average Tibetan has never had such a high standard of living. There is worse poverty in China’s western rural provinces: child slave labour in brick factories, abominable conditions in prisons, and so on.
Very interesting. The Tibetans have never had it so good. So ungrateful of them to rebel against the Chinese when they should be thanking them for the economic and social progress their rule has brought. I just wonder what the reaction would be if an intellectual of Žižek’s prestige made a similar argument about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
What Žižek doesn’t seem to understand is that all national liberation struggles involve a fair dose of myth, the imagining into existence of an “ourselves” as different and separate from “them”. And how very odd that he thinks that economic and social progress and the exercise of violence undermines the validity of the Tibetans desire to rule themselves.
