Two Years in Tibet & 11 Years in Nanjing

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name. – Kong-Fuzi 孔夫子, Confucius. To know a thing is to name a thing. What is its name? What is it?

Tennessee to Tibet…

While many Americans have lived in China, and many of those for far longer than the nearly 13 years I was there, far fewer have lived in Tibet for 2 years, and only 1 American, myself, has ever dined with now ‘Emperor’ of China, Communist Xi Jinping, in Tibet.  Among other things, I also played in a jazz trio while in China and underwent fully anesthetized surgery at a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) hospital. 

Mystical, forbidden ‘Roof of the World’  Tibet has always been one of the most remote, inaccessible places on Earth, sealed off by its elevation, the world’s highest mountains, the Taklamakan Desert and the vast central Asian geography.  Yet, since its Communist ‘liberation’, Tibet has become even more isolated, now politically so. News out of Communist China itself is severely restricted and controlled by the Party, so what information does the free world now get from Tibet?

Shot with a digital Canon 450D/Rebel SLR, many of these photos were taken at considerable personal risk and a few with internal difficulty which I was obliged to accept; as a holder of a BA in History I knew if I hadn’t taken these photos there’d be a corresponding lack in the historical record of the associated events. Photos are only a few samples of the many hundreds I took in Tibet and are lower resolution than the originals, including Cultural Revolution desecration, Xi Jinping, Communist-‘liberated’ monastery ruins, a few unknown Tibetan artists and some other material herein.  In some shots there are people wearing masks (this was 2009-2011); when worn by monks/lamas in their chapels, it was to prevent disrespectful breathing on consecrated images, when by the public, masks were for the cold, dusty, high-elevation air of Tibet’s very dry climate.  Mindful that I was a guest, an outsider in their world, unless otherwise acknowledged by or interacting with the Tibetans I was photographing, I tried to keep a polite distance zooming in with my camera to get closer being as unobtrusive as I could.  Yet there were occasions with Tibetans that I saw as telling moments which compelled me to take the photo regardless of impropriety or risk. 

Then there are the photos that are my Test Me, Why Don’t You Arrest Me Series, including a shot of a surveillance camera monitor (note screen date/time stamp) from one of the most politically sensitive buildings in the world, the Potala Palace, that I took during the same period I was getting shots of Xi Jinping and other top Chinese Communist Party and Tibet Autonomous Region officials rubbing shoulders as an invited guest. Also during this same period roughly 20-30 ? suspected CIA spies/sources in China, Chinese nationals, ‘assets’ compromised by CIA field officers, were being executed in one of the worst CIA intelligence security failures in decades.

While living in Nanjing just prior to leaving for Tibet the government issued, in the form of a ‘comic strip’ graphic of sorts, via phone SMS message blanket broadcasts and other means (this was prior to the now ubiquitous WeChat) a public warning, particularly to government workers, especially young women in the government, about getting involved with foreigners personally (romantically), that the foreigners may be spies. It was during this same time that a rumor, which I couldn’t verify, circulated among some of the Nanjing expatriate community of a young Chinese woman government worker who had been compromised by a CIA spy having been summarily executed by gunshot to her head outside her work office in front of her assembled co-workers as an extremely brutal, very clear warning not to get involved with foreigners.

How far can you push the envelope?  Until it tears, but then you’ve gone too far.

Crab Grass At 12,000 Feet

Born in 1959, the year H.H. The Dalai Lama fled Tibet, I am from Tennessee, a son of a WWII paratrooper, 1st Lieutenant, Co. H, 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 17th Airborne, Battle of the Bulge and Operation Varsity’s Jump Over the Rhine (Silver Star, Purple Heart, 2 Bronze Stars, etc.).  My mother was a Manhattan Project ‘calutron girl’  in Oak Ridge, Tennessee unknowingly helping create the Hiroshima atomic bomb.  An aunt served at General Eisenhower’s headquarters in London and an uncle served on the USS Colorado in the Pacific.

Not long after my birth, my Dad, who enjoyed putting pen to paper and appreciated a nice lawn, wrote an article, Socialism and Crab Grass, (1960), published in an industry journal remarking about fellow Chattanoogans at the time, “They do not wear pointed beards and carry autographed copies of Marx’s Das Kapital under their arms.”, and made a few speeches about the creeping, insidious intrusion of government into our lives, “the deadly poison of Socialism”, notably the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) at the time when he was advertising manager for the TVA’s local free-enterprise competition of sorts, the Chattanooga Gas Company.

With no especially notable status or station in life, I lived in China, primarily Nanjing, as a fully legal foreigner for nearly 13 years from 2/2005 – 2/2018 during which time I was deeply honored with great hospitality and sincere friendship by the Chinese, nearly all Han, and Tibetan people, including also some government officials personally.

Along with about 11 years in traditionally Confucian Nanjing I also went to Tibet (Xizang) twice via the world’s highest railroad, 16,000+ ft., (that I rode several times with at least one passenger on every occasion nearly dying from severe altitude sickness), first in 2006 for ten days about one month after the railroad opened, then from 8/2009 – 8/2011 under 24 hours a day 7 days a week military martial law when I lived and worked in Lhasa (12,000 ft) for two years, being there both before and after the events of 2008.

The only American in attendance, I was a VIP invited guest of now China President Xi Jinping at the two-day observance of the 60th Anniversary of the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet  in Lhasa in 2011 including dinner, a professional Broadway style stage production dramatizing Tibet’s Communist ‘liberation’, street parade past the Potala Palace with speeches, and an evening fireworks show all with Xi Jinping, a 59-member Communist Party & People’s Liberation Army top-echelon delegation, and some still-living important figures from throughout the Tibetan ‘liberation’  period.  Because of the cultural significance of the number, any 60th anniversary is observed with more pomp in China, as was the case here with two days of celebratory activities and an exceptionally rare visit to Lhasa by highest level Beijing Communist Party officials.

As the sole American present I was a sort of de facto citizen ‘ambassador’  representing our nation at this geopolitical occasion where I carried myself with polite discretion and dignified aplomb.  And as a son of the 17th Airborne & Manhattan Project, watching Chinese Communist soldiers march past in formation while seated right next to highest Chinese Communist Party and military officials directly in front of Tibet’s Potala Palace was a bit moving.  As Tibet wasn’t exactly friendly territory for rarely visiting Beijing top Communist Party officials the security seemed more that of occupiers rather than of fellow countrymen.  Along with numerous other locations and situations during my two years in Tibet I got photos, some sample shots herein, of the entire street (Beijing Lu) parade past the Potala Palace from the 2nd day’s events not otherwise publicly depicted in anywhere near such detail with nothing but young impressionable school children in the very front of the packed Potala Square crowd for a big dose of Communist indoctrination/education.

Italy-based Lama Gangchen, a proponent of the Buddhist deity Shugden dogmatically opposed by the Dalai Lama, was an invited guest at the 60th anniversary events, with whom I spoke and photographed, while the Beijing-endorsed 11th Panchen Lama, Gyaincain Norbu, was not.  Keeping the 11th at arm’s length, away from the events helped not to draw any greater attention to him as ‘Beijing’s man’  and his challenged legitimacy.  Sentiments about the Beijing 11th Panchen Lama among locals in Lhasa are a bit bifurcated; on one hand they generally don’t recognize him as the legitimate 11th, but do as a ‘rinpoche’  still worthy of their respect and supplication, conveniently satisfying Beijing.  Also, by having neither any Dalai nor Panchen Lamas present at this official public observance their offices’ secular authority is presented as irrelevant and inconsequential, obsolete bygones with little place in ‘new Tibet’.

In 2010, also in Lhasa, I had dinner with the then Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) Communist government leadership including Zhang Qingli, Lobsang Gyaltsen, Padma Choling, Wu Yingjie, Pagbalha Geleg Namgyal, Champa Phuntsok, a few PLA generals and other officials. In 2006 I met the then Chinese Foreign Minister, Li Zhaoxing, in Nanjing. And in 1995 I met His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama in Atlanta.

“Foreigners are poison”, a Chinese Communist Party official candidly said to me in Tibet…

When, via Mao Tse-tung, Marx’s Communists came to ‘liberate’  the Tibetans from themselves, the Dalai Lama chose to flee Tibet and his people, some of whom are my friends in ‘new Tibet’  now, including a few quite elderly who remember H.H., some of whom had been imprisoned and/or beaten for simply worshipping as they had traditionally done, an inalienable right for Americans.  Perhaps, like ‘reestablished’  Drepung Monastery, INC., the original of which is being encroached upon by new car dealerships in increasingly secular Lhasa, they can ‘reestablish’  themselves in foreign, sea-level India, as corporations.  Tibet is Tibet, not some exiled community in India, nor are Tibet’s monasteries corporations, nor is Tibet Confucian Chinese.

Historically tribal kingdoms of varying unity for the most part, Tibet as a country, as a sovereign unified nation with its own government & set, controlled borders and internationally recognized as such doesn’t exist today.  Certainly at least as long as the Communists retain power will Tibet be under Beijing’s control.  And what has H.H. achieved for the Tibetans or his ‘nation’ in all these long years, living comfortably as a free man, celebrity even, on CIA money for a time in chosen exile?  What have the American taxpayers gotten for their geopolitical investment?  What Tibet does H.H. now lead?  What is the Tibetan ‘government-in-exile’  in fact governing?

What of the many primarily Hui Muslims in Tibet, (and Qinghai, Gansu & Uyghur Muslim Xinjiang) many of whom are long-established, tribal, multi-generational families, relishing their own Communist ‘liberation’, who don’t give a damn about Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, Confucius, Marx, Mao or any other outsiders?  Where are they in H.H.’s Tibet, or the Party’s Xizang?  But though there are Muslim and Buddhist Tibetans, neither Islam nor Buddhism are indigenously Tibetan. 

His Holiness is long gone; a generation of Tibetans has grown up with his absence.  His Potala Palace home is a museum, in ‘Disney Tibet Zoo’  for “mainland” Chinese tourists to gawk at. Nonetheless, every day I would see Tibetans prostrating before its vacant shell while its Living Buddha former resident Dalai Lama was down in India or Holy-hobnobbing with various celebrities, including some from Chinese Communist Party-subservient, pedophile-infested Hollywood, attaining what exactly for his people or ‘nation’?  Yet, while the Dalai Lama has tried to act on his people’s behalf he is essentially alone and thus powerless in his efforts; the West has hypocritically sold-out its principles of freedom and rights for the quarterly statement bottom line.  ‘Save Money, Live Better’?   The Party already controls the Panchen Lama(s), both of them with the Dalai Lama-approved Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and his family under the, most probably lifetime however long that may be/may have been, ‘protection’  (house arrest) of the Party from Dalai Lama-supporting ‘splittists’ .  How much longer has H.H. The 14th Dalai Lama Avalokiteshvara, Bodhisattva of Compassion, left in this incarnation?  Sentiments are a bit varied today among some Tibetans in ‘new Tibet’ , among those who spiritually sold-out for a materially ‘better’  life, about the AWOL Dalai Lama after a generation of Communist ‘liberation’. 

With a long tradition of the world’s foremost experts in discovering a Dalai Lama’s reincarnation at his disposal and a primary deity being Vajrabhairava/Yamantaka, the Conqueror of Death (though not of bodily death), H.H., the human incarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Avalokiteshvara/Chenrezig, fled Tibet……fearing for his current human life?  The Anointed One didn’t flee.  What greater act of compassion is there than to take on the suffering of another, the sins/karma of the World? What of his countrymen that he left who, regardless of their worship of him, did fear for their lives and were summarily slaughtered by the furious Communists upon discovering his escape, and the many thousands of others killed during their Communist ‘liberation’ ?  The Dalai Lama says he is a “simple Buddhist monk”, yet “simple Buddhist monks” aren’t normally worshipped as incarnations of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Avalokiteshvara/Chenrezig.  Where was His Holiness’s compassion in fleeing, leaving others to great suffering and death, some of which as a direct result of his fleeing?

The onus of return is on H.H.; he chose exile.  The Dalai Lama speaks of “negotiation”.  Yet, why would Beijing negotiate?  The Chinese don’t want anything from H.H.; they already have it, a sizeable piece of prime real estate the inhabitants of which be damned, like Xinjiang or the Louisiana Purchase.  With China’s New Silk Road (One Belt One Road) passing along the immediate north, rivers providing source waters for a large percentage of the world’s population originate in Tibet.  And why would Beijing negotiate with anyone impudently coming to the table already with their own ‘government’, brazenly, yet powerlessly, brandishing ‘independence!’, regardless of H.H.’s ‘Middle-Way Approach’ position?  If H.H. were to instead draw on some ritual tantra coming to the table having manifested The Great Black One, Mahakala, in the minds of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee as they slept, then he’d be negotiating from a position of strength, rather than that of his politically naïve, impotent ‘Middle-Way Approach’.  Successful political negotiation is based on positions of perceived or actual strength, neither of which the lone, little-supported Dalai Lama or his irrelevant ‘government’  present.  Led by Fortune 500, Silicon Valley and globalist United Nations ‘running dog’  sycophants, the world now bends over backwards kowtowing to the Chinese Communist Party. 

Who sides with the politically impotent Dalai Lama versus Communist Beijing?  Who recognizes Tibet as an independent, sovereign nation, or Taiwan, or East Turkistan, Palestine, Kurdistan, Catalonia, Scotland, Ireland or other British Empire remnants, etc., etc.?  And what about the entire continent of Antarctica (& what is going on/has been discovered there!?!)? As far as Beijing is concerned there is no Tibet ‘issue’ and thus nothing to ‘resolve’.  What compulsion is there for Washington to negotiate ‘issues’  with powerless American Indians and their ‘nations’, with whom Washington flagrantly broke hundreds of treaties? The assertion of one’s freedom, the ability to independently exercise the right of sovereign choice, individually and as a community or people, comes down to actual or perceived power, and the willingness to use it.  Power is freedom; freedom is power.  With no power what meaning is there in “I am a free man”, “We are a self-reliant community” or “We are an independent nation”?

Maybe the Dalai Lama could ‘negotiate’, plead, beg for an ecclesiastical-only personal return promising not to engage in any counter-revolutionary reactionary rightist activities like those pesky, and courageous, Hong Kongers, strive to “be like Lei Feng”, and offer to pose for photos with “mainland” tourists, like Mickey in Orlando.  He could be free to meditate and dispense compassionate blessings to his heart’s content.  Overjoyed Tibet could be opened wide to the world; imagine the tourist dollars…err, renminbi, a wide-open Tibet could generate and international goodwill and ‘harmonious’  gratitude from the ecstatic Tibetans that could be made if H.H. were allowed to return, to let an old man go home for his final years.  His presence in his Potala home, and beautiful Norbulingka in the summer, would placate his people and help them economically.  Yet the political Dalai Lama, still at least of symbolic significance, would have to die first for the spiritual Dalai Lama to have any chance of return.  H.H. would have to leave his administrative robes in Dharamsala and the utterly pointless Tibetan government-in-exile, whatever it is ‘governing’, would of course have to dissolve into nothingness.  But his return wouldn’t save Tibet’s culture and society from apparently inevitable Sinicization/Disneyfication.     

‘Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer’.  Controlling the discovery of the Dalai Lama’s 15th incarnation would be easier for the Party with the current 14th in Lhasa under Beijing’s wing rather than freely running amok in the West.  Along with their hitherto command of the Panchen Lama, this would insure Beijing’s ideological dominance.  Regardless what happens with the 14th, and after 60 years in chosen exile it’s difficult to see anything substantive will occur, it’s the 15th Dalai Lama that will be pivotal in how or if the tradition endures.  Whether or not the 14th formally announces he will be the last Dalai Lama is of little consequence to Beijing.  They have the land firmly in their grip which is their only real concern.

Following a superficial façade of traditional reincarnation discovery ritual protocol, like with the current Beijing-approved 11th Panchen Lama, Beijing will then arbitrarily name their own 15th Dalai Lama with the Communist Party claiming a, non-existent, link with China’s past Imperial traditions and relationships with Buddhist Tibet.  Pu Yi to Mao?  Communism is openly antithetical to religion or anything ‘of the spirit’  as such institutions are ‘oppressive’.  Solzhenitsyn tells us what happened to Christianity under the boot of Marxist Leninist ideology.  What of legitimacy, of the homegrown heritage, with Tibetan Buddhist Mongolian influence, of the Dalai Lamas versus a proven failed foreign Godless ideology from a European Jew forcibly imposed by Han Chinese?  Though Xi Jinping’s wife is sympathetic to Buddhism and his father, Old Guard Xi Zhongxun, personally knew the 14th Dalai Lama and for decades the 10th Panchen Lama, Xi Jinping dismisses these things; Communist Beijing, unlike Imperial Beijing, has no sincere regard for the Three Jewels. 

Note the lack of any verifiable information about the 2018 Jokhang fire, including the cause.  Extensive damage is suspected at Tibetan Buddhism’s ‘Holy of Holies’, the Jokhang, which received scant media coverage from the Fourth Estate propaganda machine.  Though it is a veritable fire trap, I’ve been there many times, with centuries of built-up oily residue from daily burning of butter lamps throughout on all the surfaces of the already highly flammable wood structure along with haphazard electrical wiring, and so known to the Chinese via their prominently placed fire warning signs, the fire’s cause and damage extent aren’t openly known.  Godless Communism is openly hostile to religion.  Accident or not, Beijing would’ve been perfectly happy had this thorn in their authority’s side completely burned to the ground.  How many other monasteries did they in fact deliberately destroy during their ‘liberation’ ?  Let the Tibetans then raise hell in anger that the Communists will easily crush; who will stop Beijing?

The Communist Party says ‘Serve the People’, but it’s the people who serve the Communist Party, an entity unto itself whose paramount interest is its own power.  Marxist Communist ideologues, the Chinese Communist Party, especially at the very top, are Old World corruption Machiavellian totalitarian snakes in suits whose paramount aim is raw power.  Legitimizing and keeping power, existent only by virtue of having run Chiang’s Nationalists off the mainland a mere five minutes ago on the scale of China’s antiquity, (Yuanmingyuan, which I’ve seen, deliberately left in its ruined state to remind following generations of China’s disgrace at the hands of the West, and the Opium Wars marking the beginning of China’s ‘century of humiliation’, are not history but still current events, to the West’s peril), the Communists poach noble Confucian traditions, such as the value placed on the stability of a structured ‘harmonious’ society, manipulated, exploited into a ‘compliant’, ‘obedient’  society.  One ‘knows one’s place’  in Communist Confucian China.  Wearing a Confucian mask, the Chinese Communist Party’s Confucius Institutes subtly propagandizes and insidiously promulgates its Communist doctrine in Western schools.  Though the ideas of the post-Imperial Republican Era New Culture May 4th Movement including blaming the traditions of the establishment Confucian civil service mandarins for stifling China’s industrial, scientific and military status internationally, opening to many Western ideas including Communism and broad reform of written classical literary Chinese to a vernacular form making it accessible to the common people encouraging more populist, individual participation in the flourishing discourse of ideas at the time are pivotal in defining modern, post-1911 China, China’s traditional societal essence is Confucius.  Right next to the Kuomingtang headquarters/Presidential Palace in Nanjing, China’s original Ming Dynasty capital where Sun Yat-sen is entombed in a mausoleum surpassed in grandeur only by Mao’s, I’ve seen both, is Nanjing’s primary nightclub district, called ‘1912’,  where I’ve performed on guitar.  China has been Confucian since deep into its ancient past while Communist for only the past ‘five minutes’.  And though by far the most recognizable Western face in China today is Col. Sanders, it’s foreign, very recently imported Western Marxist Communism upon which ancient China’s government is based.  There is no ‘Mandate from Heaven’  for the Chinese Communist Party; Communists reject the religious notion of ‘heaven’ outright. 

The Chinese Communist Party is not nor represents the Chinese people.  Nearly all the Party members I knew said they were in the Party only because of the practical benefits, employment, housing, etc., of Party membership rather than any strongly held ideological camaraderie.  Party members, especially high-ranking, enjoy perks the common proletariat people don’t have; they are not ‘comrades’  and don’t ‘serve the people’  but rather are a separate, elite class ruling over the people serving their own interests in a milieu of ‘guanxi’ and Old World corruption with ruthlessly brutal thuggish suppression, including torture, imprisoned slavery and live organ harvesting including on children where the ‘patient’/victim is of course killed from the horrifically barbaric procedure, of any ideology or conduct the Party deems the slightest threat to its power.  Along with other institutions and businesses including those that do business with the U.S., Chinese universities down to departmental levels have Communist Party Secretaries to monitor and control ideological orthodoxy and conformity.  The Party’s People’s Liberation Army PLA hospitals provide highest level care to help keep the military on the Party’s side; I’ve undergone fully anesthetized (unconscious) surgery at one.  The Communist Party’s grip on the Chinese people is in some respects that of holding a tiger by the tail.  ‘Disturbances’  occur in China news of which never reaches the outside world.  Xi Jinping even fears Winnie the Pooh. What will be the fate of Hong Kong, which I’ve seen, and its great people now subject to the same Chinese Communist Party tyranny that the over 1 billion mainland Chinese people have suffered from since 1949?

WARNING: Graphic material, mob-killed cheng guan, hated CCP police-hired local ordinance enforcers, Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province

Chinese families, many of whom I know as friends, want and work hard for the same thing as American families, opportunity and hope for a better future for their children, a more dignified life for the next generation than they have for themselves now, something Communism doesn’t deliver.  Freedom provides opportunity, hope and dignity.  Marx’s Communist Manifesto is contemptuous of the family viewing it as another ‘oppressive’  institution.  Healthy families, with both the loving Mother and caring Father present in the lives of their children, are the foundational bedrock of a healthy society.  Look at what happens when a parent is absent, or replaced by the State.  The Chinese Communist Party employs the very effective practice of suppression of dissent by cracking down not only on ‘trouble-making’  individuals but by going after their family members as well, openly so the whole neighborhood knows and is warned, ‘killing the chicken to scare the monkeys’.

East is East, & West is West…’.  In comparison with ancient China, the United States has no ‘past’, we are still going through the birth pangs of a nation and society with no antiquity (other than, unfortunately, irrelevant, culturally disconnected, essentially non-existent American Indians) to look back on to help define us as a people, society and nation.  Not even 250 years have passed since 1776; individual Chinese dynasties have lasted longer.  Ancient societies know who and what they are because they long ago ‘became’ ; we Americans don’t know who we are because we are still ‘becoming’.  What it means to be Chinese is easier to understand than what it means to be American; Chinese society has more shared aspects than American society.  People come from the four corners of the Earth and by virtue of getting a piece of paper from the government that says they’re United States citizens they are now ‘Americans’  though ‘we’  and ‘they’  may possibly share no common culture (food, dress, music, customs, holidays), history, heritage, ethnicity, race, religion, language, morality, etc.  Over 90% of Chinese are homogeneous Han people with more shared, unifying aspects than dividing ones.  Americans today are heterogeneous, diverse, different, in either ‘an on-going healthy free discourse in a wide variety of ideas’, or ‘never-ending internal turmoil and divisive disagreement’.  And though while clearly articulated in the Bill of Rights, e.g. free speech, the inalienable right to bear arms and notwithstanding recent Wuhan Virus lock-down ‘orders’  our inalienable right to assemble, we Americans struggle to find unity on what our ‘rights’  are and what we have the ‘freedom’  to do, the very core ideas that seemingly define what it is to be American, the things that drive utterly disparate people from the four corners of the world to come here in the first place, the hope and dignity of liberty and inalienable rights, and the fairness of equality of opportunity rather than the injustice of equality of outcome. Granted, the noble ideal of equality of opportunity is not yet a full reality, thanks to our local school boards and Socialist/Communist-infested universities, but the United States is a brand new country; we’re still in our infancy. Will we make it, will we survive puberty, adolescence and the struggles of adulthood finally gaining the wisdom and depth of antiquity? Who cut America’s umbilical cord and slapped our ass into national consciousness? What will result from our great human experiment of freedom and diversity that is the United States of America?  What do we all share that define us as one people, as Americans?  What is an American?  E pluribus unum?  One somewhat unifying thing may be our great American music.  While having been a VIP invited guest, the only American, of now China President Communist Xi Jinping for dinner in Lhasa, Tibet was a distinction, a real, true honor while in China was the high privilege of playing in a 3-piece jazz trio, albeit short-lived, with a British drummer, an outstanding classically trained Chinese violinist and myself on guitar performing America’s greatest export, traditional jazz standards, for Chinese audiences, some of whose attendees had never heard of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, et al. 

While Communism is what fundamentally differentiates China and the United States politically and ideologically today, ancient Confucianism is the traditional societal difference between us. The notion of inalienable rights, as in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, placing the importance of the individual’s relatively unbridled freedom, ‘virtuously’  expressed or not, paramount above all else, including at the cost of, structured group ‘harmony’  or the public good/welfare (despite Wuhan Virus government ‘orders’ and ‘mandates’, such as the absurd, ridiculous masks, ostensibly placing the public welfare’s, the group’s, interests over those of the individual) isn’t Confucian and antithetical to Communist ‘critical theory’ group identity dogma.  And the idea that these rights are ‘inalienable’, intrinsically sacrosanct, as if from an authority higher than the Party or anything of Man, smacking of Communist-despised religion, challenging the Party’s own authority, is an abomination.  As they are inalienable, the United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights don’t ‘grant’  or ‘give’  the American people anything; one cannot be ‘given’  what one already inherently has.  The Bill of Rights are in fact curbs on government’s authority to limit Americans’ inalienable rights.  ‘Authorities’ detest the Bill of Rights because it limits their ‘authority’. Chinese people, and certainly the Tibetans, have no inalienable rights including absolutely no 2nd Amendment defense against a tyrannical government, emperor, khan or warlord.

‘Red Guard/Rainbow Guard’.  Communist China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution with its ‘struggle sessions’ and denunciation of the ‘Four Olds’, old ideas, old customs, old culture and old habits, shares a great deal with today’s ideologically coward American Progressivism, viz. a profoundly arrogant, authoritarian intolerance of views divergent from a condescending, fanatically zealous opinion of proper thinking and conduct, while in the case of American Progressives sanctimoniously preaching ‘tolerance’  and ‘diversity’, (at least the Red Guard weren’t the epitome of shameless hypocrisy), and contempt for a particularly stark example of the ‘Four Olds’, religion, notably Christianity, an ‘antiquated, obsolete, simple-minded, irrational, oppressive superstition’ with no place in today’s ‘modern, scientific, rational progressively liberating’ society.  A great number of American Progressives are in fact ‘useful idiot’ Socialists/Communists including in government or other positions of power and many academics in their tenured ivory towers.  Though claiming to speak for the proletariat working class common man Socialists/Communists are social or pseudo-intelligentsia elitists. Like creeping crab grass, Socialists/Communists move insidiously and deliberately as to be unnoticed in the present. Be they political, social or cultural, today’s actions appear benignly inconsequential, but are in fact subtle small steps to a greater long-term future objective as with the ideological subversion of Confucius Institutes noted herein, Communist/Socialist ‘critical theory’ infested American universities and public schools, mainstream broadcast/print and internet social media, ‘big tech’, other institutions and, though certainly not inconsequentially nor subtly, U.S. government officials on both local and national levels cowardly subverting our inherent, inalienable American right of free speech, mocking American traditions and objective truth itself, where reality is a childish make-believe subjective fairy tale, ‘What is a woman?’, advocating for the utter destruction of the ‘oppressive’ World as it is to make way for their fantasy Communist utopia. (The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name. – Kong-Fuzi 孔夫子, Confucius.) My own riskily, hastily (& bribed) photographed examples of Cultural Revolution desecration are herein, now happening here in America to our own heritage/history/culture, and religion, as Beijing with active involvement patiently and smugly watches its ideological adversary America destroy itself.

Communist ‘liberation’ via The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution….

Young Tibetan children of working professional parents primarily in the larger cities of Lhasa, Shigatse, Qamdo and Tsetang are required to attend school not locally, but many hundreds or often well over 1,000 miles far away in eastern Han provinces never seeing their parents for many months at a time depriving them of their parents’ values, moral influences and traditions while subjecting them to daily, constant State authoritarianism, Communist indoctrination and alien Han society and culture, all at near sea-level elevation.  Brainwashing of children is far more deleterious and permanent than for adults, in ideal alignment with long-term Communist goals.  Like with American Indians in the past, use by locally schooled Tibetan youth of their own language in schools today is forbidden, as is open practice of Buddhism by student youth.  Note also the deliberate Communist extirpation of Uyghur religion, culture and tradition via mass ‘reeducation’  and separation of Uyghur families in Xinjiang.  As in Tibet, such strategies alter the following generation profoundly.  Of the Chinese I spoke with including university academics about the Great Leap Forward famine when many tens of millions starved to death, the few that were even aware of it said the deaths were “not so many” and caused by “natural disasters” rather than the in fact direct policies of the Chinese Communist Party. A few that spoke freely about the famine described, when there was anything to eat at all, having only raw sorghum remains as food with rats first eating their dead family members’ eyes as their bodies rotted in their homes. Chinese, from all of the officially recognized 56 ethnic groups, Han, Tibetan, Uyghur, Hui, Zhuang, Manchu, Miao, Tujia, Mongol, Naxi, etc., are from their first days in school as young children with their red Party scarves taught/indoctrinated/brainwashed into loving the Communist Party even more than their own parents in Communist contempt of family and conflating the Party with China.  The Party is China and China is the Party; to love China is to love the Party.

An odd example of Communist cultural stealth in Tibet was the Abstract Expressionist advocate.  In some of the shops in Barkhor Square surrounding the Jokhang in Lhasa’s ‘old city’ were/are Tibetan paintings for sale for the tourist market depicting ordinary Tibetan life scenes portrayed in common more or less realistic styles (samples herein).  But ‘down’  by the Lhasa River (at 12,000 ft elevation nothing is really ‘down’  in Lhasa) away from the tourists was/is an art gallery with some works showing a different side to some Lhasa artists (photos herein) including a few works using images of the Buddha that were a bit controversial depicting the sacred in a profane manner.  Still, the works, which I thought were quite good, were all relatively realistic, though some with surreal and/or mildly expressionist unabstracted elements.  If not directly sponsored by the government itself, then surely with its endorsement as such an event wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, was a formal lecture at this gallery by a somewhat elderly woman visiting from California with slideshow where she went on about how great and wonderful Abstract Expressionist ‘art’ was, the same Abstract Expressionism championed by the likes of the Western culture and Christianity despising Frankfurt School ‘critical theory’ Marxist Communists, showing the audience of mostly young Tibetan artists the debased travesty of Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell, Kline, etc.  While the sensible audience was of course not impressed, the perverse seed of Marxist Communist design of eradication of established ‘oppressive’  moral, political, social and cultural, in this case artistic, convention was planted nonetheless as the Old Masters spun in their graves.  Consider instead the sublime divinity and exquisite aesthetic grace of Yongle or Xuande bronze Buddhist statuary. 

Arbitrary restrictions and strict control continue increasingly with more roadside and city checkpoints throughout Tibet than the already extensive level when I was there.  Universal freedom of movement within the TAR for Tibetans isn’t permitted.  The topography favors the government, in the mountainous areas attempting to avoid checkpoints by leaving the valley roads and travelling cross-country over gargantuan mountains isn’t at all feasible by vehicle and very arduous and slow, even life-threatening, on foot particularly if trying to liberate oneself from Communist ‘liberation’  by escape to India over Earth’s highest mountains.  Out on the wide-open high plateau distances are vast with desolation to the far mountainous horizon so, other than for nomads, leaving the roads here isn’t workable either.  Tibetan families that are traditionally nomadic are coerced/compelled/forced into permanent roadside housing where their now known whereabouts can be more easily monitored.  Han Chinese are flooding into Tibet leaving the Tibetans a minority in their own land living poorly on the fringes of their increasingly Sinicized society. Tibetans are taxed at significantly higher rates than Han Chinese in the TAR.  Job opportunities, especially with the local government, are purposely skewed against the local Tibetans with strict requirements such as demanding high levels of Chinese fluency/literacy that the majority of Tibetans don’t have as well as formal, open denunciation of any ideology, organization, government, or person, e.g. the Dalai Lama, the CCP arbitrarily opposes.  Many restaurants and other public areas are surreptitiously bugged for sound, mobile phones are tapped (including the ability to monitor conversations within range of their microphones even when turned off),  surveillance cameras are everywhere and plainclothes police, gov’t thugs and distrust and betrayal fomenting informants equal or outnumber the already profuse uniformed police and paramilitary People’s Armed Police Force (PAPF).  Certain classes of Tibetans are very strongly discouraged from openly practicing Buddhism, economically, occupationally or physically threatened, or worse whenever the government arbitrarily perceives religious conduct to be a threat, including severe permanently injurious beatings, unspeakably horrific torture and/or lengthy imprisonment, and arbitrary execution.  The Chinese Communist Party views Tibetans as ‘dirty, lazy & ungrateful’ for their ‘liberation’. Communist-‘liberated’  Tibetans, especially the youth, live empty, fake lives with hopeless futures.  

When a Beijing CCTV/gov’t camera crew, with bodyguard, was filming in Barkhor Square in front of the Jokhang, of whom I took a couple photos, one of them said to me chuckling, proud of his knowledge of the foul English pejorative, “Tibetans are niggers”.  I replied that was how some Westerners saw Han Chinese like himself whereupon with a sudden distant countenance his laughing stopped.  I’ve seen some Chinese tourists treat Tibetans like zoo animals.  Tibetans, Han Chinese, Hui Muslims and Uyghur Muslims generally self-segregate.  The Great Wall of China segregated ‘civilized’ Imperial China from the ‘barbarian’ northern foreigners in a natural xenophobic leeriness of the unknown, foreign ‘other’ that keeps one’s own safe and alive when that foreign ‘other’ doesn’t have one’s own best interests at heart. Some dairy products such as cheese and butter are not traditionally popular among eastern Chinese Han as these foods are common among ‘looked down upon’  non-Han western China peoples.  Steeped in an antiquity of self-perceived ‘superiority’ congruent with the Han self-perception as being more sophisticated, advanced, ‘civilized’, in part substantiated by the belief in Confucianism as the pinnacle of ‘proper’ social order, many Han Chinese ‘naturally’ look down on any non-Han people, Tibetans, Muslims, etc., including foreigners generally, (as well as Japanese – The Rape of Nanking(Nanjing), Unit 731) but unlike palpable animosity between Occidentals, in the Orient it is far more subtle though just as real.  Ancient, timeless China, Zhong Guo, the Middle Kingdom, the natural zenith of human civilization, around which the rest of existence revolves and is subordinate to with the Emperor in the Forbidden City, which I’ve seen, as the center of the universe. 

With no surprise or alarm, Tibetan locals shrugged off what we describe as UFOs as commonly existing with stories of sightings and an operating ‘alien’ base in the far west, high, utterly desolate Aksai Chin area north of personally visited Mt. Kailash, Tirthapuri and Guge.  I was also witness to an unforgettable double sky burial, an ancient funerary practice, at Drigung Kagyu Monastery nearer to Lhasa quite close to Tidrum Nyingma Kagyu nunnery which I’ve also seen along with Shukseb Nyingma nunnery, some of whose current nuns were imprisoned by the Chinese Communists, as well as numerous other locations with my highest attained elevation of nearly 19,000 feet circumambulating Mt. Kailash.  Tibet is one of the few places on Earth where you can reach such elevations by simply going around a mountain rather than to its actual peak.  Once while visiting a quite elderly Tibetan in a high-walled compound for pre-‘liberation’  Tibetans in Lhasa, he completely out of the blue but in a very matter-of-fact manner described how long ago before the Communists came he had seen a lama “flying through the air”, as translated to me by my relatively English fluent Tibetan friend who was with me.

While living in Tibet I was unexpectedly approached in public by a Tibetan man with relatively decent English fluency with whom I spoke on a few subsequent occasions who I surmised was possibly a government spy based on things in his conduct and speech.  In all my years in China I had never been so strongly approached by a complete stranger in public, and not diffidently to ‘practice his English’ as sometimes would occur, but to ‘be my friend’ whereupon he, not in a particularly friendly manner, aggressively probed me with personal questions including about my political views, highly unusual in such circumstances.  He also badgered me with phone text messages often wanting to meet.  Suspecting from the outset that his motivations weren’t benign, I eventually and politely broke off communication with him, but not before getting his photo. 

Then there was the time while passing through Lhasa’s ‘old city’ I came across a couple of foreign Western men sitting outside at a small café’s table who immediately struck me as being extremely out of place.  These two men were there during the winter, the off-season when no foreign tourists were around.  When I was in Lhasa there were very few year-round Western foreigners living there; we mostly all knew who each other was.  I overheard these men speaking American English but not what they were saying, and from their slightly military-looking physiques, hair, ages and behavior, especially when they saw me noticing them, I had a distinctly peculiar feeling about them.  Politely nodding, I walked on without speaking.

The vast majority of tourists in Tibet, 99.9% visiting during the summer, are ‘mainland’ Chinese relatively free to roam as they please.  The very few Western tourists, predominately Europeans with very few Americans at least during the two years I was there, are in pre-arranged strictly monitored tour groups always with their required ‘guides’ and allowed access only to their preset itinerary standard tourist attractions.  Even for longer term legal resident foreigners, leaving Lhasa routinely requires obtaining sometimes multiple types of temporary travel permits depending on the destination, with some areas of the TAR outright forbidden to foreigners.  Because of the topography, arbitrary unpredictable checkpoints and that there are ever so few Westerners, travelling throughout the TAR illegally trying to skirt regulations is next to impossible and extremely risky.  Locals caught helping whatever few illegal foreigners are severely punished, along with family members as arbitrarily deemed by local Party cadre officials.

Of the only very tiny handful of Westerners who live in the formal TAR for any extended periods, nearly all are either with their own businesses allowed to operate only by toeing the Communist Party’s line, a few Tibetan language students at Tibet University, or English teachers placed almost exclusively from a Christian missionary organization with an English teacher front façade at one of the three schools government authorized to hire foreign teachers, Tibet University, Tibet/Lhasa Normal College & the Tibet Academy of Social Sciences, at least that was the case when I was there 2009 – 2011.  The Communist government tacitly allowed these missionaries, who also kept their mouths shut politically, (which of course everybody did unless in praise of the Party) to discreetly operate including in the classroom presumably under the impression that anything that could possibly weaken the influence of Buddhism in Tibet to be a net benefit to the Communists’ grip on power.  Genuine, non-government sanctioned freedom of religion, any religion, is forbidden in Godless Communist China.  While living in Nanjing, not far from Shanghai, away from the Party approved, strictly monitored fake Christian ‘churches’  I would occasionally see small Bible study groups of 3 – 5 Chinese furtively meeting, at McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken for some extra crispy Sermon on the Mount.  Blessed are….indeed.

Also while in Nanjing just prior to my going to Tibet the government issued, in the form of a ‘comic strip’ graphic of sorts, via phone SMS message blanket broadcasts and other means (this was prior to the now ubiquitous WeChat) a public warning, particularly to government workers, especially young women in the government, about getting involved with foreigners personally (romantically), that the foreigners may be spies. It was during this same time that a rumor, which I couldn’t verify, circulated among some of the Nanjing expatriate community of a young Chinese woman government worker who had been compromised by a CIA spy having been summarily executed by gunshot to her head outside her work office in front of her assembled co-workers as an extremely brutal, very clear warning not to get involved with foreigners.

Again from Nanjing is the story of my friend ‘Daniel’, a pseudonym, I don’t recall his Chinese name.  ‘Daniel’ was a late middle-aged Nanjing local with excellent English, a smoker who spoke with a deep growl à la Louis Armstrong.  Unlike nearly all other Chinese I knew, ‘Daniel’ would openly speak of government officials, both Nanjing locally and Beijing nationally, with fearless disdain about their deep, ubiquitous corruption, not in an abstract manner critical of policy, but personally including their family members, such as how either Jiang Zemin’s, Wen Jiabao’s or  Hu Jintao’s family (I don’t recall but I think it was one of these) corruptly controlled many of the country’s main airports and was getting very rich.  He said he believed in and supported the Communist Party, but he would bitterly denigrate government officials personally, which in Confucian China is frowned upon.  ‘Daniel’ would speak like this in public in English to me and in Chinese to any Chinese friends also present, including during an evening out at a hotpot restaurant with another local Nanjing friend, which turned out to be the last time I ever saw ‘Daniel’.  Some time after that evening, I asked my friend about ‘Daniel’, who I hadn’t seen in a while, who said in a very deadpan but extremely chilling manner, “Oh, ‘Daniel’s gone.”  A bit taken aback, but also unclear exactly what my friend meant, “gone” to the store, “gone” out of town, or some other sort of “gone”, I pressed a bit about it.  I could sense both fear and sadness in my friend’s words, tone and mannerisms who made it clear that ‘Daniel’ was gone, and not coming back.  Though they were relatively close, my friend never spoke of ‘Daniel’ again; like 1984’s Syme, ‘Daniel’ was an ‘unperson’, like 1989’s Tank Man.

Absurd as it is, though it is the sort of thing he ought to be saying, with great conviction striving to “be like Lei Feng”, if he has any hope whatsoever of ever seeing Lhasa again, which is a near impossibility at best, the Dalai Lama is sympathetic to Communism, saying, “As far as socioeconomic theory, I am Marxist.”, meaning people are not mature enough, via self-established freely operating markets, to handle their own economic affairs, that they need the State to do it for them, that people’s natural, inherent freedom must be taken from them because they aren’t yet adults ready to be responsible for themselves and others unable to care for themselves, via mature self-generated authentic compassion rather than State-coerced fake ‘compassion’ under Communist/Socialist State control.  Karma is one’s own responsibility, not the State’s.

Globalist Communism/Socialism is an evil force as it is a Godless system where adults are treated as children.  The hallmark of adulthood, both individually and for a society, is the maturity to dutifully and civilly handle natural, intrinsic freedom such that an individual or society can take care of and be directly responsible for him/itself as able, and via compassion care for those unable as well.  Mature adults and societies are responsible and compassionate; immature ones are not. Freedom is walking the tightrope of life without a net, taking responsibility and accepting the consequences thereof; to fully enjoy the fruit of our successes and fully suffer the pain of our failures.  Relinquishing our responsibility to government, an employer, business, institution or any ‘authority’ deprives us of our adulthood, our humanity, turning us into child-things.  There is neither freedom, nor maturity, nor civilization under Communism/Socialism; Big Brother ‘cares’  for you and your ‘group’, at your expense…forever. 

I know, I lived under Communism/Socialism for nearly 13 years, including two years in Communist Tibet under 24/7 military martial law where I’ve had a Chinese PAPF paramilitary police soldier point his gun at me barking angrily in Chinese.  And I’ve had dinner with now ‘Emperor’ of China, Communist ideologue Xi Jinping, in mystical ‘Roof of the World’  Tibet, the only American ever to do so.

Yet right here in America, now with our own Cultural Revolution, there are those who are absurdly actually advocating for more Socialism, deplorably treating adults as children by suggesting that their suffering in life has little to do with their own choices and actions or isn’t their own responsibility, but that their problems are someone else’s fault and their misery and misfortune are because they are ‘oppressed’.

Americans are free to travel throughout the U.S. without ‘permits’ or ‘checkpoints’; we can cross city, county and state borders freely.  Tibetans do not have such freedom. Americans are free to walk down a public street with a sign proclaiming, “Death to America”.  Tibetans are not free to carry a sign saying “Death to China”. Americans are, relatively, free to openly worship as we please. Tibetans are not. Every day there are unfulfilled, good paying, dignified job opportunities in the U.S. (for which our schools are, supposed to be, the means of successful realization).  There are far, far fewer such opportunities for Tibetans, and only for those Chinese-fluent Tibetans who, via the ideological ‘purification’ of struggle sessions, openly and formally renounce any worship, allegiance, loyalty, respect or admiration for any ideology other than that of the CCP, determined arbitrarily by the CCP, including of any religious nature, specifically worship of H.H. The Dalai Lama.

Rather than ridiculous, cowardly stunts like ‘taking a knee’ at some football game, wantonly rioting or ‘beating up’ a defenseless statue, truly oppressed people do truly desperate things like rising up violently against their oppressors that Tibetans and Chinese can’t do with no 2nd Amendment gun rights, or immolate themselves, or more often less conspicuous suicides such as jumping off a building, which sometimes isn’t tall enough, and not as some political ‘protest’ spectacle before Western cameras but in utter hopelessness in their isolated village, one of whom I knew personally.  Other Tibetan friends, upon glimpsing my passport with the words “United States of America”, burst into uncontrolled wailing, tears pouring in anguish because they knew they were in a situation of genuine tyranny where they could never know the dignity and hope of our American relative-to-elsewhere freedom, while literally millions of foreigners illegally pour across our southern border in shameless contempt for our civilizing rule of law.  ‘For we shall be as a shining city upon a hill; the eyes of the world are upon us’.

Globalist Communism/Socialism isn’t liberation, liberty is.  If only all Americans could experience for a time what it’s like not to have the freedom and inalienable rights as articulated in our hallowed Bill of Rights that great Americans like my father believed they fought and nearly died for, then perhaps Americans would then not take freedom for granted understanding there is no guarantee of freedom and truly appreciate how fortunate we are to be Americans with our sacred Bill of Rights.  ‘Find the cost of freedom buried in the ground’.

Yet, political freedom isn’t real freedom, which is gained only from self-realization, awakening to the fact that we are actually asleep, deluded every waking moment by illusions of freedom and self-control over ourselves and our lives. Events, external stimuli, internal desire & wanting, the World, drive our thoughts, feelings and conduct.  We go through our days thinking we are in control of our lives, when it is our lives that control us.  Our task in this world of suffering, even for Godless Communists, is The Work, the struggle to the mountaintop to see the Promised Land of genuine liberation, realization of the true Joy of closeness to that which we call ‘God’, awakening to the natural way of Creation that is to ‘return’  to that from whence we came, seeing then we had never left but simply lived with our eyes closed in the sleep of delusion, to ‘God’.

Thank you. info@twoyearsintibet.com

Don’t just eat a hamburger; eat the hell out of a hamburger. WALSTIB

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