The brave new Tibet
Exactly one day ahead of Vice-President Xi Jinping's arrival in Lhasa for the grand celebration of the 60th anniversary of Tibet's peaceful liberation, US President Barack Obama welcomed the Dalai Lama to the White House for a predictable duet of China-bashing.
Just weeks before, at the 17th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, there were accusations that human rights conditions in the Tibet autonomous region of China were the "worst of the worst".
Some people in Dharamsala, annoyed by the festivities across the Sino-Indian border, which climax on Tuesday with carnivals from the Potala Palace Square to the remote corners of Tibet, repeated their stale claims of "cultural genocide".
For these people everything under the Dalai Lama was good. No mention is ever made of the cruel realities of the savage serfdom that existed then.
The Dalai Lama has never lacked "sympathizers" overseas and they persist in denouncing the peaceful liberation of the land of snow as the beginning of "repression" and "genocide". Everything new is part of the plot of "ethnic cleansing".
It does not matter that the average life expectancy in the region has risen from a meager 35.5 years in 1951, when the region was liberated, to the present 67; or that most Tibetans have seen their lives improve with each passing year. Nor does it matter that the city of Lhasa has just put into trial operation its first waste-water treatment plant; or that Tibet has just inaugurated its first-ever expressway. What matters to these people is that the truth of present-day Tibet be concealed from the world, so that their meticulously cultivated nostalgia for the past does not fall apart in the face of current realities.
So that everything that may inspire positive feelings for a Tibet without the Dalai Lama can be denied, the Dalai-Obama duet cried out for "respect for human rights and cultural traditions in Tibet"; those in Geneva fabricated "systematic and pervasive human rights violations"; and those in Dharamsala attacked China's alleged desire to "eliminate the Tibetan cultural heritage".
But Tibet is what it is. Not what they claim it to be.
The resourceful exhibition of the region's achievements in the past 60 years on display now in Lhasa and the fancy parade today in front of the Potala may provide useful clues to the past and present of the autonomous region. But stronger evidence is to be found in real life.
The redoubled efforts for environmental protection, expensive projects of cultural heritage protection, unprecedented emphasis on public welfare in major government investment programs, and, most obviously, the unmistakable improvements in ordinary Tibetans' everyday lives testify to a Tibet dramatically changed for the better since its peaceful liberation.
There is only one Tibet on the roof of the world and it is not the one portrayed by the Dalai Lama and his sympathizers.
