Books
He ain’t heavy, he's my Buddha
by Joanna Nathan
Author Patrick French on what’s wrong with the West’s favourite human rights cause.
*TIBET, TIBET, by Patrick French (Harper Collins, $34.99).
At 16 Patrick French wanted to save the world. By 36, having spent much of the intervening years campaigning for Tibetan independence, he now believes that the world needs saving from people like him.
French argues in his latest book Tibet, Tibet that banner-waving Western liberals have done more harm than good to their cause, succeeding only in making the Chinese leadership even more intractable. What’s more, romanticising Tibetophiles, sophisticated marketeers, bead-clutching backpackers and publicity-seeking rock stars have long since obscured what they are supposedly fighting for.
In one of Tibet, Tibet’s most memorable passages we have actress Sharon Stone displaying a lack of understanding to match her more famous lack of underwear, introducing the Dalai Lama to a high-paying benefit crowd as: “The hardest-working man in spirituality … Mr Please, Please, Please let me back into China!”
There’s even a voluptuous New Zealander putting in an appearance, doing her bit for the sexiest cause around – by sleeping with as many refugees as possible up in Dharamsala, the Indian home of the Tibetan Government-in-exile.
“I knew that something had gone a bit wrong,” says French. “So I decided to go to Tibet to find out in a very practical way how people are living, and the compromises that they have to make … I just felt that the pro-Tibet movement in the West had become detached from what is happening in Tibet.”
Unafraid of controversy, French has pomposity-pricking and critically acclaimed books on the partition of India and Francis Younghusband, leader of the 1904 British invasion of Tibet, already on the shelves.
In person he seems both smiley and scholarly. In his writing he has honed a unique style of time-twisting montage, leavening the serious stuff with an eye for intriguing detail and an ear for a telling tale.
Thus in Tibet, Tibet we follow his involvement with the cause, which started with a teenage encounter with the Dalai Lama at a Catholic boarding school and included leading the UK’s Free Tibet campaign. This memoir is interlaced with historical vignettes, from descriptions of a woman-chasing, poetry-writing, 18th-century Dalai Lama to a short-lived CIA training programme for Tibetan rebels on a remote Pacific island.
In fact, the peace-loving image that Tibet now enjoys is demolished with tales of conquests throughout the surrounding region and a graphic description of removing eyeballs with yak bones, a gruesome form of punishment used as late as the 1930s.
Threaded through it all is French’s three-month 4023km journey under the chuba (undertaken in 1999 – incidentally, the same year that New Zealand police were hiding pro-Tibet protesters behind buses lest they offend the visiting Chinese President Jiang Zemin).
French encounters a woman who was subjected to public “struggle” sessions and spent over a decade in a prison camp for accidentally spilling ink when writing Chairman Mao’s name. Another weeps, remembering her youthful ideological fervour – as a self-appointed Red Guard – leading punishment beatings and taking part in the destruction of monastic
treasures.
There’s time spent chewing the tsampa with a nomad community that is now allowed to roam relatively freely after enduring slaughter at the hands of Chinese troops and forcible resettlement in concrete compounds.
These are all people who have experienced the horror of Chinese occupation and survived – any way they can. And bitter words directed at the Tibetan diaspora by one of the nomads who now acts as the community’s intermediaries with Chinese authorities ring throughout the book. “I say to them, if you want independence for Tibet, why don’t you come here and make a protest and see how far it gets you? It may make them feel good, but for us, it makes life worse.”
The interviews were conducted amid utmost secrecy, and the identities of sources disguised. French still looks furtive and uncomfortable when asked about the mechanics of his journey and he repeatedly emphasises that it was the people he spoke to who were taking the far bigger risk.
That said, two other undercover researchers were arrested during his visit, one of them leaving the country in a stretcher after having “jumped” from a window under interrogation.
Such fears seem very far away as we meet for lattes – French’s bindi-wearing son distracted by the latest Harry Potter – in the genteel southern English town where French lives and writes.
But that, he argues, is precisely the problem. The “generally nice, well-motivated” people behind pro-Tibet campaigns simply having no idea what they are up against.
“You see something and think, ‘I’m going to put that right’ and, growing up in England or New Zealand, you can do something to put it right. However, you should only get involved in someone else’s campaign if you are sure you are bringing something to it. Otherwise you risk encouraging people to do things that are not of great benefit to them.”
Protests that erupted in Lhasa between 1987 and ’89 were in part driven, he argues, by Tibetans not understanding that the Western support they saw on television would never translate into practical assistance, foreign governments being ultimately more interested in cracking Chinese markets than crackdowns.
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