I have a television, but it stopped working a year ago, and it had probably stopped working long before that. I wouldn’t have known since I’d rarely turned it on. Discovering that it was broken was a mei banfa (what are you gonna do!) moment, the thought of getting it fixed never considered. I am quite happy to not have television. When the national day of mourning was declared for the victims of the Yushu earthquake I knew that it, too, would be a reading experience. I have heard from one blogger who participated in a moment of silence at the beginning of a conference yesterday that it was “unexpectedly moving.” I have absolutely no doubt that it was. But what I understand was missing from the official coverage were the monks, who, according to all eyewitness accounts not generated by state-run media, are the true – though officially unsung – heroes of the rescue operation.
But what is more disturbing in all of this are the reports concerning the expulsion of monks from Yushu. Yesterday I wrote
Tradition, ritual and good sense trumps any possibility of denying the monks access to the dead and the suffering. This is China being diplomatic for the much greater good. Yes, it is a potentially volatile situation – the proverbial tinderbox – but the alternative is a raging fire. No one – not the monks, not the Chinese officials, not the Tibetans or the Chinese people – wants that.
But this morning I read this from Alexa Olesen, AP – Tibetan monks ordered out of China’s quake zone:
Earthquake survivors say it was the Tibetan monks who helped first, bringing food, pitching tents and digging through rubble after disaster hit far western China a week ago, killing thousands.
Now the Buddhist monks who responded first are being pushed out of the disaster area and off of state media — apparently sidelined by Beijing’s unease with their heroism and influence.
Monasteries were given verbal orders the last two days to recall their monks. Amid hours of coverage for China’s national day of mourning on Wednesday, no monks were visible in the official proceedings.
It was a jarring omission in light of their contributions to the weeklong rescue and relief effort following the quake, which killed 2,064 people and injured more than 12,000 others.
And this from the New York Times: An Official Mourning in China for Quake Victims
In an interview on Wednesday, Woeser, an influential Tibetan blogger who is in frequent contact with people in the earthquake zone, said several monks told her that they had been ordered to leave Jiegu in recent days, although such accounts could not be immediately confirmed.
“I think the government sees them as competitors for the hearts of the people,” Ms. Woeser said.
Although she acknowledged that government relief efforts had been robust so far, she expressed concern that the lack of transparency might obscure any examination of whether the huge sums of government and donated money reached the survivors. After the Sichuan earthquake, she noted, several critics who pressed the issue of poor school construction, which may have contributed to the deaths of thousands of children, were jailed on charges of state subversion.
“A lot of money was raised with great fanfare after the Sichuan earthquake, but we don’t know how much was spent on the refugees and how much ended up embezzled,” Ms. Woeser said. “I worry the same thing might happen here.”
Perhaps I was being too optimistic, thinking that good sense and the commonweal trumps political agendas in the face of natural disaster. Though these reports are still, as yet, unconfirmed, the battle of dueling Plateau narratives has moved to the next – and potentially dangerous – level.
According to eyewitnesses in Yushu, Wen Jiabao’s presence was genuinely appreciated by the Tibetan victims in Yushu. Prior to his arrival there was apparently official chaos, with no one really knowing what to do. One of the criticisms was that the military response was 6-8 hours in coming, even though a large base was nearby. The first order of the military was to secure the base against the possibility of an insurgent attack. So, in stepped the monks who literally took matters into their own hands, taking the lead in rescue efforts, attending to the injured as well as the rapidly growing numbers of the dead. But the story radically changes after Wen departed the scene. The Tibetan story is that many of the official rescuers – not all – took a much more relaxed approach to recovery efforts. I cannot confirm this, but this is not about confirmation. This is about the narratives that will undoubtedly persist within the Tibetan community.
By excluding images of the monks in the official televised ceremonies, the CCP has spun their own one-sided narrative, which, of course, plays to a much wider and friendlier audience that watched the single official broadcast of the mourning event. I can only imagine that the Tibetans were wondering where all the monks had gone. The spinning of narratives will make an interesting future course in Approaches to Plateau History. But what is clear is that the ongoing battle for the “hearts and minds” of the people is actually a battle for the “hearts and minds” of two different peoples. If some or many of the monks were, in fact, expelled, the CCP has made a grave misstep. How that misstep will play out in the future, especially in the reconstruction phase, is not something I care to even think about now. If the accounts of expulsion are confirmed, a few days of “generosity” will be quickly forgotten as the next contentious chapter predictably unfolds.