Browsing through the pages of ‘China’s Tibet’—Beijing’s primary propaganda magazine on Tibet—one is likely to get an artist’s impression of a utopian Tibet—free and galloping like a wild stallion on the path of development.
However, in reality, through these colourful pictures and self-praising language, a chauvinist colonial Beijing masquerades itself as the only agent of liberation and modernisation for the very people it has occupied and colonised.
From time to time, Tibetans break this glassy shroud for the same Beijing to see the disgracefulness of its behaviour under the intoxication of its naked power.
This time, it is in Dege, in eastern Tibet, where local Tibetans have resisted non-violently in the face of an imminent displacement from their ancestral land as China continues with its insatiable exploitation of Tibetan rivers with dams and diversions.
China has planned to build a series of 13 dams on the Drichu River (Ch:Jinsha) on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River in eastern Tibet. These dams will, directly or indirectly, affect Tibetans living in Jomda in the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region, Yulshul in Qinghai, Dege, Markham, Bathang, Sershu, and Derong in Sichuan, and Dechen in Yunnan. All these sites selected for dam construction are areas where local Tibetans have lived for thousands of years as the Drichu River mothered their civilisation and sustained their lives.
Among them, the under-construction Kamtok (Gangtuo) hydropower station (229 metres) in Dege is the main reservoir for the South-to-North Water Diversion project to divert water from the Yangtze to the Yellow River. This dam is about to demolish at least two villages and six Buddhist monasteries, including the famous Wontoe monastery, whose murals date back to the 14th century.
In addition to their cultural values, these Buddhist monasteries and murals are even more precious in the context of the fact that more than 6,000 Tibetan monasteries and temples suffered destruction during the Chinese invasion in the 1950s and later the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).
Those monasteries that survived the ravages of both Chinese military and cultural violence hold special meaning for the Tibetans as cultural heritages that maintain historical and civilizational continuity for a people that continues to face cultural suppression.
The recent public gathering in front of the Dege county government on February 14 took place after the local Tibetans tried almost all the available legal means to prevent an illegal and unjust displacement looming over their villages and monasteries. We can see, in the videos from the scene, Tibetans, including monks and women, literally begging the officials with their thumbs raised to halt the dam construction.
In Tibetan culture, to request someone with one’s thumb(s) represents extreme humility to the point of self-humiliation. By using the most humble body language, the local people appealed to the human conscience of Chinese authorities to recognise the magnitude of the devastation that they were about to wreck on the local Tibetans. Many held the Chinese flag in their hands to show their desperation rather than defiance.
However, the manner in which Chinese authorities cracked down on the peaceful Tibetan petitioners, with mass arrests, beatings, and phone confiscations, reflects their colonial mindset. Many had to be hospitalised. A large armed police force is deployed for further suppression, as if there were an armed revolt.
The geographical area threatened by the dam is not some desolate region but a thriving fertile river valley that supports both nomadic and farming activities for the local people. Given the limited arable areas available on the high and dry Tibetan plateau, such fertile river valleys are too priceless to be wasted for a dam whose advantages are questionable and disadvantages are real and long-lasting—both for the people in the affected area and those downstream in China.
The narrative of hydropower stations as clean sources of energy whitewashes the reality of their negative impacts on the whole ecosystem. Often, their construction begins with the mutilation of mountains, the strangulation of rivers, the drowning of vegetation to death, and the mass displacement of vulnerable communities.
Speaking of displacement, who gets displaced for a dam is not merely a question of engineering necessity but power relations, like who is more displaceable in the eyes of dam builders by weighing the political and economic resources of a given community to defend their fundamental interests.
In today’s occupied Tibet, the existing political system makes Tibetans the most displaceable, if not disposable, people in the eyes of Beijing. For effective control and surveillance, China has transferred thousands of Tibetans, particularly nomads and farmers, from their ancestral lands to government relocation sites in the name of environmental protection or poverty alleviation.
Relocation, no matter how thoughtful, will never restore what the local people are about to lose—their land and way of life. But for China, it’s made clear that the livelihood or cultural heritage of Tibetans is cheaper than a 229-metre-high dam.
In a fundamental sense, terms like relocation or resettlement not only fail to appreciate but also underestimate the whole experience of violence, trauma, and humiliation that the people facing displacement have to suffer—to say nothing of their material loss and physical difficulties.
The displacement of the Tibetans from their lands is a form of colonial dispossession to disempower them, thereby making their ability to earn a living conditional on their political and ideological subservience to colonial Beijing. It is to control their thoughts and behaviour with a rice bowl.
After being kicked out of their villages and monasteries, the Tibetans in Dege, besides being colonial subjects, will become refugees in their own homeland like thousands of other Tibetans displaced from their ancestral lands under different pretexts.
Once built, these dams will stand as monuments to China’s colonial subjugation of Tibetan people and their land rather than representing modernisation or development.
