India, Algeria, Tibet

Anne Appelbaum makes the imperial comparison:

...Though we don't usually think of it this way, China is, in fact, a vast, anachronistic, territorial empire, within which one dominant ethnic group, the Han Chinese, rules over a host of reluctant "captive nations." To keep the peace, the Chinese use methods not so different from those once used by Austro-Hungary or czarist Russia: political manipulation, secret police repression, and military force.

But, then, modern China bears many surprising resemblances to the empires of the past in other ways, too. Like its Soviet imperial predecessor, for example, China encompasses both an "inner" empire, of which Tibet and Xinjiang are the most prominent components, and an "outer" empire, consisting most notably of its Burmese and North Korean clients. Like its French and British predecessors, the Chinese empire must wrestle constantly with nations whose languages, religions, and customs differ sharply from its own and whose behavior is, therefore, unpredictable. And like all its predecessors, the Chinese imperial class cares deeply about the pacification of the imperial periphery, more so than one might think.

For proof that this is so, look no further than the biography of Hu Jintao, the current Chinese president — and also the former Communist Party boss of Tibet. In 1988 and 1989, at the time of the last major riots, Hu was responsible both for the brutal repression of dissident Tibetan monks and dissidents and for what the Dalai Lama has subsequently called China's policy of "cultural genocide": the importation of thousands of ethnic Han Chinese into Tibet's cities in order to dilute and eventually outbreed the ethnic Tibetan population.

Clearly, the repression of Tibet matters enormously to the members of China's ruling clique, or they would not have promoted Hu, its mastermind, so far. The pacification of Tibet must also be considered a major political and propaganda success, or it would not have been copied by the Chinese-backed Burmese regime last year and repeated by the Chinese themselves in Tibet last week. Tibet is to China what Algeria once was to France, what India once was to imperial Britain, what Poland was to czarist Russia: the most unreliable, the most intransigent, and at the same time the most symbolically significant province of the empire.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at March 20, 2008 04:39 PM