给所有爱国的人，转自yurou

 

2008年4月21号到4月25号，哥伦比亚大学纪念伊拉克战争五周年，反战纪念周！呼吁所有哥大和纽约的朋友，加入反战纪念的活动和4月24号的游行！
如果一片红心只能授人以激进/盲目民族主义之口实；如果中国人欺负家乐福和藏人打砸抢汉人商铺，没有区别；如果Chatterjee说的第三世界nationalism的双重性（反现代性，尤其现代性中最启蒙主义欧洲中心的部分；以现代性标准为民族国家前提），还没有完全被遗忘。那国际主义路线，是不是当下中国人批判西方/反省自己，反抗双重强权（西方的，自己的）的起点？
伊拉克战争五周年。我们应该去游行。为伊拉克，为中东，为美国，为中国，为世界。
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ZZ From Bourbaki (posted in MITbbs)

昨天4月19号，伦敦、巴黎、洛杉矶等地都有华人的集会和静坐，让人感动。我不住在这些城市，无法去声援，很遗憾。如果我能去的话，我就会做一个不同的标语，表达一个让西方主流媒体不知所措的立场，而不只是向外国人重申
"我爱中国"，因为欧美人都爱他们自己的国家，这没有什么奇怪的。我认为，真正有力量的口号应该是 Oppose the Iraq War,
Not China! 。华人反对种族主义的声音应该让主流媒体听到，这是毫无疑问的。但是，采用怎样的声音，恐怕要动一下脑筋。除了爱国主义以外，中国几十年来还有另一个宝贵的资源，经常被我们忘记，那就是国际主义。如果华人反帝和反种族主义的唯一基础是爱国，那么新中国几十年来始终对世界上其他被欺压的种族和人民的同情和支持，又当何讲？美英发动的伊拉克战争马上就到了第五个年头，伊拉克人每天都在流血，还有巴勒斯坦人的命运...凡是有美英战争机器开入的地方都有无辜百姓在流血，这些都跟西方主流媒体袒护战犯的行为有直接的关系。我们华人能不能将自己的处境跟伊拉克人、阿富汗人、巴勒斯坦人的命运联在一起想？我们能为他们做些什么,
说些什么。我想，起码华人在集会上可以打出一些标语，比如：Oppose the Iraq War, Not China
等等，因为真正的爱国主义是重新发扬新中国的国际主义精神。诗人北岛在他的《午夜之门〉的那篇文章里，体现的正是这种精神。《午夜之门〉描述了北岛作为海外华语诗人随同国际作家议会代表团访问巴勒斯坦的一段经历，其中有一节讲到加沙走廊：'
途经拉法省民警交通局，稍停。这儿紧挨联合国驻地，不久前被以色列武装直升机的导弹击中，房子掀了顶，门窗残缺。省长闻风赶来。但我们要赶路，只好匆匆握手告辞。赶到哨卡，联合国专车走特殊通道，也还是得排队。而另一边通道挤得满满的，一眼望不到头。罗基擦了擦脑门上的汗，说："我活了四十八年，从来没这么绝望过。人倒不怕穷，怕的是侮辱。你想想每天过哨卡就是一种侮辱。"布莱顿指着窗外一个在罗基手下工作的小伙子，说他准是中国人。一问，果然不错。他叫李之怡，是出生在美国的中国人，父母来自台湾。他已经不太会说中文了。小伙子高挑个儿，长得挺帅，聪明伶俐。他在哈佛读社会学时，到印度做过义工。去年大学毕业后他来这儿实习，原计划三个月，一拖再拖，打算过了夏天再回哈佛读硕士。他说，他父母都是搞科技的，不太能理解他，整天担惊受怕的。我答应他回美国给他父母打个电话，让他们放心。他一边跟我聊天，一边跟几个巴勒斯坦小伙子说笑。他的阿拉伯语似乎很流利。我为他骄傲，没多少海外华人的孩子能象他那样脱离主流文化走出物质生活的边界。'
我相信，北岛碰到的李之怡这样的年轻人，别处一定还有，他们的正义感和国际主义已经超越了爱国主义，让我很感动。奥运会给我们了一个机会，中国年轻人应该向世界强权喊出这样的口号

比平息战乱更难的是处理留下的记忆和永无止境的“叙事”。但凡争论起，要想在无休止的谴责和偏见中发出自己的声音，可用的思想资源总是最难寻得。转贴一篇，最重要的问题都在那，没有什么可多说的。坚信这世上有是非黑白的人就不用看了。

Protests in Tibet and Separatism: the Olympics and Beyond

Barry Sautman

 

Recent protests in Lhasa and other Tibetan areas were organized to embarrass the Chinese government ahead of the Olympics. The Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), the major Tibetan exile organization that advocates independence for Tibet and has endorsed using violent methods to achieve it, has said as much. Its head, Tsewang Rigzin, stated in a March 15 interview with the Chicago Tribune that since it is likely that Chinese authorities would suppress protests in Tibet, “With the spotlight on them with the Olympics, we want to test them. We want them to show their true colors. That’s why we’re pushing this.” At the June, 2007 Conference for an Independent Tibet organized in India by “Friends of Tibet,” speakers pointed out that the Olympics present a unique opportunity for protests in Tibet. In January, 2008, exiles in India launched a “Tibetan People’s Uprising Movement” to “act in the spirit” of the violent 1959 uprising against Chinese government authority and focus on the Olympics.

 

Several groups of Tibetans were likely involved in the protests in Lhasa, including in the burning and looting of non-Tibetan businesses and attacks against Han and Hui (Muslim Chinese) migrants to Tibet. The large monasteries have long been centers of separatism, a stance cultivated by the TYC and other exile entities, many of which are financed by the US State Department or the US Congress’ National Endowment for Democracy. Monks are self-selected to be especially devoted to the Dalai Lama. However much he may characterize his own position as seeking only greater autonomy for Tibet, monks know he is unwilling to declare that Tibet is an inalienable part of China, an act China demands of him as a precondition to formal negotiations. Because the exile regime eschews a separation of politics and religion, many monks deem adherence to the Dalai Lama’s stance of non-recognition of the Chinese government’s legitimacy in Tibet to be a religious obligation.

 

Reports on the violence have underscored that Tibetan merchants competing with Han and Hui are especially antagonistic to the presence of non-Tibetans. Alongside monks, Tibetan merchants were the mainstay of protests in Lhasa in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This time around, many Han and Hui-owned shops were torched. Many of those involved in arson, looting, and ethnic-based beatings are also likely to have been unemployed young men. Towns have experienced much rural-to-urban migration of Tibetans with few skills needed for urban employment. Videos from Lhasa showed the vast majority of rioters were males in their teens or twenties.

 

The recent actions in Tibetan areas differ from the broad-based demonstrations of “people power” movements in several parts of the world in the last few decades. They hardly show the overwhelming Tibetan anti-Chinese consensus portrayed in the international media. The highest media estimate of Tibetans who participated in protests is 20,000 — by Steve Chao, the Beijing Bureau Chief of Canadian Television News, i.e. one of every 300 Tibetans. Compare that to the 1986 protests against the Marcos dictatorship by about three million — one out of every 19 Filipinos.

 

Tibetans have legitimate grievances about not being sufficiently helped to compete for jobs and in business with migrants to Tibet. There is also job discrimination by Han migrants in favor of family members and people from their native places. The gaps in education and living standards between Tibetans and Han are substantial and too slow in narrowing. The grievances have long existed, but protests and rioting took place this year because the Olympics make it opportune for separatists to advance their agenda. Indeed, there was a radical disconnect between Tibetan socio-economic grievances and the slogans raised in the protests, such as “Complete Independence for Tibet” and “May the exiles and Tibetans inside Tibet be reunited,” slogans that not coincidentally replicate those raised by pro-independence Tibetan exiles.

 

While separatists will not succeed in detaching Tibet from China by rioting, they believe that China will eventually collapse, like the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and they seek to establish their claim to rule before that happens. Alternatively, they think that the United States may intervene, as it has elsewhere, to foster the breakaway of regions in countries to which the US is antagonistic, e.g. Kosovo and southern Sudan. The Chinese government also fears such eventualities, however unlikely they are to come to pass. It accordingly acts to suppress separatism, an action that comports with its rights under international law.

 

Separatists know they can count on the automatic sympathy of Western politicians and media, who view China as a strategic economic and political competitor. Western elites have thus widely condemned China for suppressing riots that these elites would never allow to go unsuppressed in their own countries. They demand that China be restrained in its response; yet, during the Los Angeles uprising or riots of 1992 — which spread to a score of other major cities — President George H.W. Bush stated when he sent in thousands of soldiers, that “There can be no excuse for the murder, arson, theft or vandalism that have terrorized the people of Los Angeles . . . Let me assure you that I will use whatever force is necessary to restore order.” Neither Western politicians nor mainstream media attacked him on this score, while neither Western leaders nor the Dalai Lama have criticized those Tibetans who recently engaged in ethnic-based attacks and arson.

 

Western elites give the Chinese government no recognition for significant improvements in the lives of Tibetans as a result of subsidies from the China’s central government and provinces, improvements that the Dalai Lama has himself admitted. Western politicians and media also consistently credit the Dalai Lama’s charge that “cultural genocide” is underway in Tibet, even though the exiles and their supporters offer no credible evidence of the evisceration of Tibetan language use, religious practice or art. In fact, more than 90% of Tibetans speak Tibetan as their mother tongue. Tibet has about 150,000 monks and nuns, the highest concentration of full-time “clergy” in the Buddhist world. Western scholars of Tibetan literature and art forms have attested that it is flourishing.

 

Ethnic contradictions in Tibet arise from the demography, economy and politics of the Tibetan areas. Separatists and their supporters claim that Han Chinese have been “flooding” into Tibet, “swamping” Tibetans demographically. In fact, between the national censuses of 1990 and 2000 (which count everyone who has lived in an area for six months or more), the percentage of Tibetans in the Tibetan areas as a whole increased somewhat and Han were about one-fifth of the population. A preliminary analysis of the 2005 mini-census shows that from 2000-2005 there was a small increase in the proportion of Han in the central-western parts of Tibet (the Tibet Autonomous Region or TAR) and little change in eastern Tibet. Pro-independence forces want the Tibetan areas cleansed of Han (as happened in 1912 and 1949); the Dalai Lama has said he will accept a three-to-one Tibetan to non-Tibet population ratio, but he consistently misrepresents the present situation as one of a Han majority. Given his status as not merely the top Tibetan Buddhist religious leader, but as an emanation of Buddha, most Tibetans credit whatever he says on this or other topics.

 

The Tibetan countryside, where three-fourths of the population lives, has very few non-Tibetans. The vast majority of Han migrants to Tibetan towns are poor or near-poor. They are not personally subsidized by the state; although like urban Tibetans, they are indirectly subsidized by infrastructure development that favors the towns. Some 85% of Han who migrate to Tibet to establish businesses fail; they generally leave within two to three years. Those who survive economically offer competition to local Tibetan business people, but a comprehensive study in Lhasa has shown that non-Tibetans have pioneered small and medium enterprise sectors that some Tibetans have later entered and made use of their local knowledge to prosper.

 

Tibetans are not simply an underclass; there is a substantial Tibetan middle class, based in government service, tourism, commerce, and small-scale manufacturing/ transportation. There are also many unemployed or under-employed Tibetans, but almost no unemployed or underemployed Han because those who cannot find work leave. Many Han migrants have racist attitudes toward Tibetans, mostly notions that Tibetans are lazy, dirty, and obsessed with religion. Many Tibetans reciprocate with representations of Han as rich, money-obsessed and conspiring to exploit Tibetans. Long-resident urban Tibetans absorb aspects of Han culture in much the same way that ethnic minorities do with ethnic majority cultures the world over. Tibetans are not however being forcibly “Sincized.” Most Tibetans speak little or no Chinese. They begin to learn it in the higher primary grades and, in many Tibetan areas, must study in it if they go on to secondary education. Chinese, however, is one of the two most important languages in the world and considerable advantages accrue to those who learn it, just as they do to non-native English speakers.

 

The Tibetan exiles argue that religious practice is sharply restricted in Tibetan areas. The Chinese government has the right under international law to regulate religious institutions to prevent them from being used as vehicles for separatism and the control of religion is in fact mostly a function of the state’s (overly-developed) concern about separatism and secondarily about how the hyper-development of religious institutions counteracts “development” among ethnic Tibetans. Certain state policies do infringe on freedom of religion; for example, the forbidding, in the TAR (Tibet Autonomous Region), of state employees and university students to participate in religious rites. The lesser degree of control over religion in the eastern Tibetan areas beyond the TAR– at least before the events of March, 2008 — indicate however that the Chinese government calibrates its control according to the perceived degree of separatist sentiment in the monasteries.

 

The Dalai Lama’s regime was of course itself a theocracy that closely regulated the monasteries, including the politics, hierarchy and number of monks. The exile authorities today circumscribe by fiat those religious practices they oppose, such as the propitiation of a “deity” known as Dorje Shugden. The cult of the Dalai Lama, which is even stronger among monks than it is among Hollywood stars, nevertheless mandates acceptance of his claim that restrictions on religious management and practice in Tibet arise solely from the Chinese state’s supposed anti-religious animus. Similarly, the cult requires the conviction that the Dalai Lama is a pacifist, even though he has explicitly or implicitly endorsed all wars waged by the US.

 

The Dalai Lama is a Tibetan ethnic nationalist whose worldview is — in US terms — both liberal and conservative. He and many of his foreign supporters have a pronounced affinity for conservative politicians, such as Bush, Thatcher, Lee Teng-hui and Ishihara Shintaro, but they can get along well with liberals like US Speaker Nancy Pelosi, because they are virulently anti-communist and anti-China.

 

The Dalai Lama is far from being a supporter of oppressed peoples. For example, in 2002, when he visited Australia, the Dalai Lama, upon arriving in Melbourne, noted “he had flown over ‘a large empty area’ of Australia that could house millions of people from other densely populated continents.” The area is, of course, not wholly empty, as it contains Aborigines. To them, the Dalai Lama proffered the advice that “black people ‘should appreciate what white people have brought to this country, its development.’” (R. Callick, “Dalai Lama Treads Fine Line,” Australian Financial Review, May 22, 2002).

 

The development of the “market economy” has had much the same effect in Tibetan areas as in the rest of China, i.e. increased exploitation, exacerbated income and wealth differentials, and rampant corruption. The degree to which this involves an “ethnic division of labor” that disadvantages Tibetans is however exaggerated by separatists in order to foster ethnic antagonism. For example, Tibet is not the poorest area of China, as is often claimed. It is better off than several other ethnic minority areas and even than some Han areas, in large measure due to heavy government subsidies. Rural Tibetans as well receive more state subsidies than other minorities. The exile leaders employ hyperbole not only in terms of the degree of empirical difference, but also concerning the more fundamental ethnic relationship in Tibet: in contrast to, say, Israel/Palestine, Tibetans have the same rights as Han, they enjoy certain preferential economic and social policies, and about half the top party leaders in the TAR have been ethnic Tibetans.

 

Tibet has none of the indicia of a colony or occupied territory and thus has no relationship to self-determination, a concept that in recent decades has often been misused, especially by the US, to foster the breakup of states and consequent emiseration of their populations. A settlement between the Chinese government and Tibetan exile elites is a pre-condition for the mitigation of Tibetan grievances because absent a settlement, ethnic politics will continue to subsume every issue in Tibet, as it does for example, in Taiwan and Kosovo, where ethnic binaries are constructed by “ethnic political entrepreneurs,” who seek to outbid each other for support.

 

The protests in Tibet had no progressive aspect. Many who participated in the ethnic murders, beatings and arsons in Lhasa were poor rural migrants to the city, but the slogans there and elsewhere in Tibet almost all concerned independence or the Dalai Lama. There have been many movements the world over in which marginalized people have taken a reactionary and often racist road, for example, al-Qaeda or much of the base of the Nazis. The riots in Tibet also have done nothing to advance discussions of a political settlement between the Chinese government and exiles, yet a settlement is necessary for the substantial mitigation of Tibetan grievances. For Tibetan pro-independence forces, a setback to such efforts may have been their very purpose in fostering the riots. Tibetan pro-independence forces, like separatists everywhere, seek to counter any view of the world that is not ethnic-based and to thwart all efforts to resolve ethnic contradictions, in order to boost the mobilization needed to sustain their ethnic nationalist projects. They have claimed that China will soon collapse and the US will thereafter increase its patronage of a Tibetan state elite, to the benefit of ordinary Tibetans. One only has to look round the world at the many humanitarian catastrophes that have resulted from such thinking to project what consequences are likely to follow for ordinary Tibetans if the separatist fantasy were fulfilled.

 

它是一种矜持的嘲讽，也含着温暖的鼓励，鼓励我们在这个他既渴望又不屑的尘世中得过且过，苟安偷生。
——格非《蒙娜丽莎的微笑》

 

记不清是三年前还是更久，格非在课上讲到的那个从楼上翩然而下的“最后的贵族”，终于落到《蒙娜丽莎的微笑》中重生。我只是模糊记得，在课上讲起胡河清的笑话并没有掩饰住对于他的死的沉重。老实说阅读之中我几度怀疑这应该是一篇缅人的散文，到结尾的梦境时才确认这又是另一个关于格非他自己，关于绝望与希望的故事。在我自己的阅读中，老实说，格非写梦境早已无甚新鲜特别，人面桃花系列也反复出现，甚至近乎老套，“微笑”的隐喻早就被《伯格曼的微笑》所揭示。可是这一次再读“微笑”，从梦境中走出来，我竟有长长的怅然，郁郁不得解。和近乎揶揄地对待《山河入梦》的心情大为不同，莫非我真的老了？
原本我这个小说入门者无甚发言权。自《褐色鸟群》起我一直对格非的小说一知半解，迟迟入不了门，总觉得什么地方咯硬不顺畅。大约我读书常常见树不见林，过分拘泥细节，叙事学也念得太差。要我讲出一篇小说的好坏来我也只能支支吾吾退缩不前。可是我这个笨拙的读者却也发现格非变“笨拙”了，他收起了他擅长的某一面，开始了“执着”的笨拙，当然也不会讨着好。《人面桃花》系列某些沉重的部分常常和他的叙事互相牵制，过了，或不及。可是《微笑》却好像变轻松了，有了很多真正是“趣味”的地方，非常的亲切平易，也许这“轻”的底子才是让我怅然无法释怀的原因。
也许我也是被他的小说嘲讽和鼓励而苟且偷生的人。因此我愿意勇敢的说这是我看过格非小说最喜欢的一篇。推荐。