Dalai Lama in Northern Ireland: Notes on the Situation in Tibet [Updated]

Northern Ireland is a long way from Tibet.  But watching the Dalai Lama cross Derry’s “Peace Bridge” this past Thursday, one could be forgiven for imagining that the two worlds were, in fact, intimately related.

The Dalai Lama clearly has much inspiration to offer to Northern Ireland. However, the movement that he leads is experiencing massive stresses, and his peregrinations in Europe are just as important to him as they are for us.

The Dalai Lama is the head of the Yellow Hat sect, the fourteenth reincarnation of his office, and a “living Buddha.” As a child philosopher-king, he received gifts sent from Franklin D. Roosevelt, but made only desultory pushes for Tibet’s claims to sovereignty.

In 1951, the Chinese Communist Party broke Tibet’s isolation, occupying the plateau. 25% of all Tibetan males were monks, and the Chinese were ardent atheists, but efforts were made by both sides to accomodate the other. The Dalai Lama went so far as to meet with Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing. As Tibetans began to be assimilated into CCP’s matrix of “brotherly nationalities,” the Dalai Lama fled in March 1959, and has since led a government-in-exile based in Dharmsala, India.

Today, Tibetan-majority counties and regions are spread all over western China, an area targetted for heavy infrastructural investment. In Lhasa, the CCP pulls up stones worn smooth by decades of pilgrim prostrations, replaces them with new sidewalks and shopping malls, and expects gratitude. Similarly, the Chinese force nomads into new housing clusters that make surveillance easier. Police stations are built inside of monastic compounds and army soldiers do target practice within earshot of holy sites. Development is abetted by Chinese settlers, a new train from mainland China, and a host of new airports.

Tibetan writers are heavily censored; the most admired are sent to jail. Cultural erosion and “bilingual education” skewed toward Chinese is a particular sticking point. 2% of all men are monks, and they first need to undertake a secular state education. Riots are repressed. There are no discussions about the Dalai Lama’s return. The response by some Tibetans to these trends has been to bathe in gasoline and burn themselves to death in public spaces, more than 100 in the past two years.

The rise of self-immolations by Tibetans indicates that the Dalai Lama’s line for peaceful protest is beginning to erode. These acts, undertaken primarily by young Tibetans, underscore the attractions of more dramatic forms of protest. It is indeed shocking to speak with young Tibetans in China, who in one breath will laud the Dalai Lama, and in the next, talk about the need for gallant armed struggle against the occupiers.

Like the hunger strikers during the Troubles, the youth engaged in such protests have brought attention to underlying problems, but they also open up serious questions: What is the actual effect of the protest on the dominating adversary? How many martyrs does a given struggle need? The protestors simply want the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet, and the Chinese to leave, but these are incoate sentiments not to be confused with actual strategy.

Beijing has predictably responded with an uptick in policing, and harsh punishments for those who would abet the protestors. Beijing’s propaganda tags the Dalai Lama as the source of the self-immolations, asserting that he is directing a Tibetan resistance movement inside of China’s borders with the help of American and Indian intelligence organizations. It is difficult to have a reasonable conversation on these topics in Beijing.

Countries that allow the Dalai Lama to visit are occasionally held up for scorn, particularly when civic leaders meet with “His Holiness.” Mayors in Paris as well as Portland, Oregon, have been the targets in recent years of Chinese campaigns to stop so-called “splittist” activity, which can be defined as anything from meeting with the Dalai Lama to celebrations of non-communist-approved Tibetan culture. Accordingly, during the Derry visit, Martin McGuiness and Peter Robinson were nowhere to be seen, surely mindful of their upcoming trade mission to China.

The Dalai Lama is in Derry to celebrate dialogue, but his own movement is at an impasse. There are few viable paths forward for negotiations with Beijing, and the CCP seems merely to be waiting for the Dalai Lama’s death to step in and create a split in the search for his child successor. Radicalism is increasingly attractive to Tibetan youth.

Amid the complex passions of Northern Ireland’s identity politics, the Dalai Lama rings a bell of clarity and appeals for calm. But there are storm clouds over Tibet.

Originally published as “Dalai Lama struggles to retain influence over troubled Tibet,” The Irish Times (Dublin), April 22, 2012, p. 14.

Deviants at the Founding: Socialist Nostalgia in China and North Korea

Socialist nostagia is a powerful thing in northeast Asia. Kim Jong-un — or, perhaps more correctly, the committee who writes his speeches — evinces a key understanding of this nostalgia, and has wielded it at various times. The period of state consolidation, the years from 1945-1948, are a particular touchstone for the North Korean leader. Kim Jong-un’s land reforms, put forward in June 2012, are an echo of his grandfather’s reforms of 1946 and were expclictly interpreted in state media as such. His propaganda has described with some joyousness the parallels between himself and the optimism of the early liberation era.

Even the current notion that the leader needed to be protected from assassination is told today through the prism of the 1940s, through the celebrated anecdote of a Russian, who arrived just in time to save Kim Il-song from a hostile grenade on Sam-il, March 1, 1946, in the long wake of a student revolt.

Which brings us to another Russian not adverse to acts of generous bravery, or at least boldness: Dr. Lankov.

One of the great cautions that Lankov yields up in his work is the danger of hindsight, or of reading North Korean rebelliousness and anger at the state backwards.  The oft-repeated bromide that after the Korean War, the DPRK outstripped the ROK in terms of industrial output and other economic measures until the early 1970s still applies. The state’s grain supply for individuals lasted from 1957 until the 1990s. Complain if one must about foreign subsidies that propped this system up, but this was interpreted by the fed population, certainly, as a cornerstone of Kimist legitimacy, along with nationalism and a sense of siege identity.

Socialist nostalgia for the pure era of state conslidation is, of course, not merely a North Korean phenomenon  and it is shared in the region. Scholars in Chinese Studies are returning increasingly to the era of state formation in the People’s Republic of China, the state founded in 1949. (Here the North Koreans can legitimately pretend to be the elder brothers of the Chinese, as they were “present at the creation” of the PRC.  While the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) are seen as the great traumatic acts (the North Koreans scoffed at them throughout), increasingly attention is being turned to the early 1950s, and specifically how violent they were.

The DPRK had a war from 1950-53, but it had nothing whatsoever like the Chinese effective creation and repression of “deviant” populations. Most left in 1946, and those who had not left or were killed in the midst of the Korean War, like Cho Man-sik. North Korea has never had a society-upheaval massive purge along the lines of those unleashed by Stalin in 1937 or Mao’s chaotic variant. Apart from the massive rupture of the Korean War, North Korean society was remarkably stable, until the famine changed the equation. But is is still rather stable, if not, because one unhinged editorial in The Guardian wrote, because the people were all “brainwashed.”

Lankov is particularly well-suited to comment on such continuities because he is a historian, and a particularly talented one.

Andrei Lankov’s new text functions as a gloss on, and a distillation of, his previous work. In that sense it is rather like Bruce Cumings’ miniaturized The Korean War (Modern Library, 2011). This is not a text where a great deal of new research will be trotted out, nor is it clotted up with footnotes from the author’s new research. But taking the time to reflect, and having the ability to write with some salt, is worth a great deal.

Factionalism and purges are a vital element in Lankov’s contribution to the historiography, and this text revisits some of that work.  Kim Jong-un has seen his moment in history with Ri Yong-ho, but this is nothing compared to the long series of internecine battles — bureaucratic and otherwise — that Kim Il-sung had with his own cohort. These historical episodes, looking again at how Kim settled into power, are particularly useful to revisit today as a scattering of other new “competitor books” seek to reinterpret the Manchurian guerilla experience.

Before the Korean War, Lankov tells us, Kim Il-sung was “one of many North Korean Communist leaders, merely a primus inter pares in Pyongyang — one whose slightly special standing was largely, or even exclusively, derived from Soviet support.” That was in the years primary to the massive inflating of a historical personality cult, a task undertaken by Kim Jong-il for his own reasons. (Kim took a fateful trip up to the Chinese frontier in 1967, where he was haunted by the clangor of the Red Guards across the river as he sought to build the massive Pochonbo Battle Monument.)

There is an abridged explanation of the factional struggles and purges within the WPK that followed from 1953-1956, done in a style reminiscent of his 2005 text Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956. Revealing how many of Kim Il-song’s comrades were purged, Lankov notes dryly: “Only two of the ten members of that initial Politburo were killed by their enemies rather than by their comrades” (p. 14).

How useful is such a legacy for Kim Jong-un? Lankov chooses not to connect those particular dots. But while Kim Il-sung was surrounded by men who had commanded, in many cases, their own militia—Mu Chong, for example—today Kim Jong-un is surrounded by the descendants of the victors of those very purges. Family guardians, and myths of perfect unity existing since the early days, remain stronger than ever.

Further Reading:

Andrei Lankov, The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia (Oxford University Press). ISBN: 0199964297 (Forthcoming: May 8, 2013).

Andrei Lankov, Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005)

Andrei Lankov, North of the DMZ: Essays on Daily Life in North Korea (Jefferson, N.C. and London: McFarland & Co., 2007).

Adam Cathcart and Charles Kraus, “Peripheral Influence: The Sinuiju Student Incident and the Soviet Occupation of North Korea, 1945-1947,” Journal of Korean Studies Vol. 13, No. 1 (Fall 2008), 1-28.

Julia Strauss, “Paternalist Terror: The Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and Regime Consolidation in the People’s Republic of China, 1950-1953,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 44:1 (Jan., 2002): 80-103.

Meanwhile, On the China-Myanmar Frontier

Hatoyama in Nanking

Hatoyama Yukio [ 鳩山由紀夫]  is the former Prime Minister of Japan (2009-2010) and the grandson of Hatoyama Ichiro [鳩山 一郎].

Today, he continues on a somewhat quixotic but surely very necessary quest to calm Sino-Japanese relations.

And I’m reading student essays about the Nanking Massacre (Dec. 1937- Feb. 1938).

Further images of his visit by clicking the image above.

 

“Spit at the American Gentlemen” : North Korean State Media Rolls Out the Welcome Mat for Google

A short article released on January 10 in Pyongyang was fairly enervating, though no news media outlet seems to have picked it up yet. Nor, as Daniel Pinkston has pointed out already, has any Western media picked up on any of Pyongyang’s bellicose statements before, during, or after the Google visit. That’s an awfully odd way to report (or, more accurately, not report) on a country.

//Near the end of this Rodong Sinmun attack on US gun culture wherein modern things like skyscrapers and electricity are just means by which America’s “jungle nature” is concealed, there lies a very curious, and what appears to be a somewhat personalized, attack:

“It is too natural that people should spit at the American gentlemen who are crying for human rights.”

//I thought this was interesting, since “the American gentlemen” (as in, in English, a group of gentlemen) sounded like a reference to our favorite Google delegation which has been doing so much to advance the interests of open societies and mankind. Since I believe they departed the DPRK on the very day this piece was published, those gentlemen might themselves be looking for signs of hope from the great oracle in Pyongyang.

//Being a Sinologist and consumer of the often-rudely rigorous anti-American writing of the Huanqiu Shibao, I went to the Rodong Sinmun’s Chinese version first, where the sentence in question reads as follows:

“美国绅士们张口就像花柳病患者若叫那样，侈谈人权尊重“.

//After trying on a few different versions, I came around to rendering it as:

“Looking like venereal disease patients, those American gentlemen are prattling about their respect for human rights.”

//Now that’s not very nice, is it? Especially if such language were aimed at specific individuals who were prattling on about human rights in North Korea. Especially if such individuals were Eric Schmidt and Bill Richardson.

//But perhaps this was just accidental.

//So I did a bit more research and found that in the year or so since Rodong has been publishing in Chinese, they have never before used the phrase “these American gentleman,” though, in their defense, the phrase was used once in English back in June 2012 with reference to Osprey accidents.  Chae Il Chul  [蔡日出], the author of the Jan. 10 2013 editorial, has been responsible for other anti-American diatribes should you care to explore his indelicate oeuvre.

//This tidbit might be interesting since it indicates explicitly what was already fairly obvious: the North Koreans told Richardson and Schmidt to go bugger off.

//At least that is my take, having been through several permutations during the visit, during which a great many other important things occurred, like Chinese jets buzzing the Senkakus and great agitation of various kinds in my own partitioned archipelago, but that is neither here nor there.

//Now having read the article for the 15th time and successfully hypnotized myself, I can suppose the whole thing could be completely pro forma. While the staff at Rodong Sinmun must have known about the Google delegation (since they finally reported on it), we should never underestimate the unstoppable and wanton intellectual violence of any repetitive job, such as writing editorial content for Asia’s angriest newspaper must undoubtedly be. Which is to say the whole publication process could be numb to the kind of interpretation I’ve suggested.

//The citation, just to cauterize this while wondering if I shall ever set foot in Pyongyang with a German pianist, and what purpose that would serve as a scholar and a gentleman, is Chae Il Chul, Rodong Sinmun, “Hell on Earth,” January 10, 2013, reproduced now in its full bellicose Chinese glory:

民不聊生的世道

在枪击事件盛行的大温床美国，发生点缀去年年底的如同大决战场的接连不断的枪击事件，令人心惊胆战。

在美国俄勒冈州和康涅狄格州的初等学校，亚特兰大的一所高等学校和住房等三处，在纽约附近的消防队人发生的枪击事件等以枪击事件送旧迎新的不是别的，就是美国。

俗话说，亡羊补牢。美国当权者大惊小怪地组建管制枪击专门队、把武装警察派驻学校，手忙脚乱，闹得鸡犬不宁，连白宫也像被捅了的蜂窝，美国社会乱成一团。

美国统治阶层夸耀摩天大楼鳞次栉比，遮天盖日，好用“文明”之词赞美。但是，在城市里楼房里不时地传出你死我活，弱肉强食的刺耳的枪声。难道说美国是人所能生息的世道吗？

美国绅士们张口就像花柳病患者若叫那样，侈谈人权尊重。世人诅咒和嘲笑美国绅士们是理所当然的。

美国当权者动不动就对他国的人权状况说三道四。我们奉劝他们先必须驱散令人喘不上气的美国浓郁的火药味，还是对无时无刻发生的枪击杀人事件采取对策为好。

For a more constructive and far more creative set of proposals regarding Google in China, I recommend this essay by the never-less-than-brilliant duo of Peter Hayes and Roger Cavazos, both of the Nautilus Institute. I have the pleasure of working with Cavazos closely in the SinoNK group and this piece has got a great deal to recommend it.

Algorithms of Revolution and Control in Pyongyang and Guangzhou

An American entrepreneur arrives at the doorstep of a system that clearly sees digitization as a tool of social control.  North Korea is, as one wise man howled from the back of a long socialist queue, ”hell bent on controlling the market and its digital trappings.” So what is Eric Schmidt doing in the Democratic People’s Republic of Firewall? And is it really obligatory for us to cheer him on like a bunch of digital Jacobins, positing the man as a paladin, ”a champion of connectivity in the world’s most reclusive nation”? Perhaps North Korea is just looking for alternatives to its uncompetitive contract with the Egyptian communications firm Orascom, or, as Barbara Demick mused, seeking something interesting for Kim Jong-un to do on his birthday. Or perhaps policy is the point after all: the North Koreans have long sought the stripping away of draconian South Korean restrictions on North Korean content, and Schmidt would surely lend a sympathetic ear to the broad digital front in this suppressive conflict.

Meanwhile, in the Chinese-language press, the arrival of Eric Schmidt in East Asia is to be discussed lightly, if at all: Chinese journalists and netizens haven’t been this inflamed with anti-censorship emotion since, well, before the advent of the internet. Evoked on the streets of Guangzhou yesterday were two Chinese democracy movements (in 1979 and 1989, and their many forerunners) that did things the old-fashioned way, taking actions which weren’t live-tweeted at all, but that bristled with poetry, the cry of speech and song, the crinkling of paper and the swishing of the ink brush. A revolutionary movement without social media? Awfully bruising to the Menlo Park ego and its electronic tethers. Perhaps, since meticulous public documentation of social circles is damn near obligatory in the civilized world, it is Schmidt who should be lobbying the North Koreans to pressure their Chinese “friends” (status: it’s complicated) to finally leave Google alone and allow foreign journalists and businesspersons in Beijing the same access to Twitter and Facebook as they have today from high-rise hotels (and a few embassies, but not the Chinese!) in Pyongyang.

And let us not fail to mention the hostage, Kenneth Bae, for whom digital storage might have been his undoing. Note to future American tourists: Leave all your digital booty at the hostel in Beijing, stick to a notebook for once, and call the Swedish Embassy in Seoul before you go. But this is a topic better left alone: the last time Bill Richardson brought a prisoner released from North Korea back home to the Puget Sound, the young man (who was once an Icarus of the water, a drunken Yalu-swimmer) ended up killing himself with a handgun in a hotel room in Tacoma, Washington. How sad that he did not have the joy of writing an Oprah-approved memoir about his arrest and detention experience along with a famous sister who once visited the evil country.  How tragic that Evan Hunziker ended his life in the pre-Facebook era. In other words, there is more agony here than entertainment, and even a deux ex machina may not pixel over the welts, the destruction that may never be documented.

from “Googling North Korea: Technocratic Boost or Humanitarian Boondoggle?,” SINO-NK, January 8, 2013, [URL].

Ears Plugged, Fuses Lit

Just prior to the tolling of the bells that marked the turning of the year, I was fortunate to have an essay published in South China Morning Post on the subject of China’s leadership and the evolution of their attitudes toward North Korea. Written with two excellent co-authors (Roger Cavazos of Nautilus Insitute and Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga of London School of Economics), the full version of the essay can be accessed here with no paywall.

As with so many things (yet hardly all things) Sino-North Korean, once you dig deep enough, there is a Yanbian connection at work.

North Korea Does Not Believe in Unicorns

With Isaac Stone Fish (Associate Editor of Foreign Policy, and author of an award-winning series on drug use in China’s Korean Autonomous Region), I recently co-authored an article about the politics of history in Northeast Asia entitled “North Korea Does Not Believe in Unicorns.”  Read the whole thing at Foreign Policy. 

Moranbong: Following French Intellectuals to North Korea in 1958

Frame from the French-North Korean film production of “Moranbong,” c. 1958. Image courtesy National Museum of Singapore

As I’ve completed a long article on the subject of Sino-French relations in the mid-1950s with a focus on the 1955 journey of Simone de Beauvoir to the People’s Republic of China, the following press release, sent by Benjamin Joinau, interests me quite a bit: 

Re: Antoine Coppola’s ”Cine-voyage en Coree du Nord”
L’Atelier des Cahiers [link] introduces its latest publication about the fascinating trip of French intellectuals to North Korea in 1958: Chris Marker, Claude Lanzmann, Armand Gatti, Jean-Claude Bonnardot, Francis Lemarque – all of them were to become famous later. Marker brought back his unique photo book “Les Coreennes”, Lanzmann a broken heart after a short love affair with a North Korean nurse, Gatti and Bonnardot the first and only North Korean-French co-produced movie: “Moranbong”…
This book follows their journey in North Korea while assessing the historical context, then proposes a detailed analysis of the movie.

Résumé/présentation — Nous sommes en mai 1958, un groupe d’intellectuels français s’embarque à bord d’un avion en direction de Pyongyang via Moscou. À son bord, des hommes en quête d’horizons nouveaux : Armand Gatti, journaliste, futur cinéaste et dramaturge ; Chris Marker, écrivain-cinéaste; Jean-Claude Bonnardot, acteur-cinéaste ; Francis Lemarque, chansonnier, et Claude Lanzmann, rédacteur-philosophe aux Temps Modernes de Sartre et Beauvoir, et futur maître du documentaire moderne. Gatti et Bonnardot ramèneront de cette expédition un film unique en son genre Moranbong, un film à part, insoluble dans le réalisme socialiste stalinien, trou noir dans l’histoire du cinéma français, une comète chargée de toutes les interrogations et contradictions d’une époque, en Corée du Nord comme en France. Chris Marker ramènera un album de photographies commentées qui fera date (Coréennes), Lemarque, des vues éparses filmées au cours du séjour, et Lanzmann, une histoire belle et triste d’amour impossible qu’il relatera dans ses mémoires (Le Lièvre de Patagonie). Le nord de la Corée est alors sous le contrôle de Kim Il-sung, fondateur d’une république dite populaire alliée de l’URSS et de la Chine.

The book runs about 18€, according to a press release which includes a short interview with the author.  Chris Marker’s work in North Korea is described further here.

For more on the “Moranbong” film mentioned, an article by the French-North Korean Friendship Association gives essential background; the film was most recently screened at the National Museum of Singapore in an exhibition entitled “Visions of East: Asia through French Eyes.”

I’ll be in Paris in a couple weeks to pick up a copy and will endeavour to write at least a short summary/review in this space or on that other space for DPRK analysis, SinoNK.com.

North Korea, the Obama Trip, and China’s Dilemmas

AFP has a very worthwhile article which describes the very explicit diplomatic strategy being discussed on President Obama’s Air Force One en route to Southeast Asia:

“We’ve had a dialogue with the Burmese government about the need to reduce their relationship with North Korea,” Ben Rhodes, a US deputy national security advisor said on Air Force One as Obama flew to Asia.

“We’ve seen them take some positive steps in that direction. And what we’d like to see, again, is an end to the relationship that has existed between Burma and North Korea.”

For about an hour of discussion about these and other Asian issues by Ben Rhoads’ boss, the National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon, a CSIS speech is carried on C-Span.

And, lest we forget, the DPRK recently reaped food aid from Cambodia and Indonesia.

Chinese Ambassador Liu Hongcai reaps some symbolic grain outside of Pyongyang, October 2012 | Image courtesy PRC Embassy in North Korea

In the realm of China’s power transition, Damien Ma, a frequent contributor at The Atlantic and a fluent China analyst, breaks down a few dozen questions on Xi Jinping and China’s present and future.  This video runs about 36 minutes and is actually highly entertaining (a substantial portion of the callers seem to take Donald Trump as an authority on American foreign policy while believing that Damien Ma is representing the Chinese government, which he [referring to both Trump and Ma] is decidedly not!).

If textual exegisis is your thing, you might join me in reading Hu Jintao’s extensive work report at the 18th Party Congress. Here are a couple of sample quotes from the full text that pertain nicely to the current Myanmar dilemma that the PRC is facing:

Finally, with reference to the power transition in Beijing, having read a few thousand tweets by the Western reporters there in the Great Hall of the People at the 18th Party Congress, I thought this Xinhua page was apropos.  Of course, no one had better insight so far as I am concerned into the outlook for Xi Jinping than my friend Sidney Rittenberg, who happens also to be the first Westerner to have prognosticated that the now-purged (and perhaps hunger-striking) Bo Xilai might be in a bit of trouble.

Visualizing the Party Congress