Absurdity, Allegory and China

The May 5, 2009 Boston Globe’s editorial A talk with the Dalai Lama comments on a meeting between the Dalai Lama and “100 scholars from China” at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge organized by Lobsang Sangay of the Harvard Law School. By this account it sounds as if a civil time was had by all. The Globe’s conclusion was

The Chinese scholars who crowded around him afterward, snapping photos of themselves with the Dalai Lama, now know he is nothing like the figure depicted in Beijing’s propaganda.

Equating a post-event photo op with the negation of a half-century of official drubbing with the propaganda club is hardly a measure of scholarly enlightenment. Good that they are talking – and politely listening – but to make the great leap into knowing that “he is nothing like the figure depicted” in the Chinese finely machined version of history is, to say the least, premature and naive.

Also on May 5, 2009, a half-a-world and 12-hours  ahead of Harvard, a piece in the China Daily by Wang Linyan Dalai Lama visit may ‘affect ties’ focused on the upcoming visit of the Dalai Lama to France where “he could become an honorary citizen of Paris.” What is most obvious in this piece is the lack of shrill ‘splittist’ rhetoric that has punctuated official public dispatches regarding all issues “Dalai Lama.” Even the title heralds a softer approach by going subjunctive rather than imperial imperative. There is no mention at all of the scholars and the Dalai Lama’s Massachusetts getaway in today’s China Daily. I think we’ll have to wait for the private pictures to surface, which will, no doubt set off a nationalistic frenzy.

Whether this means that a positive step is in the offing is anyone’s guess, though it is hard to see this as anything more than a Ministry of Propaganda’s softer tactic, not to be confused with any sort of policy shift. This may be nothing more than a mopping up of the froth, which may only mean that they are listening to what everyone has been telling them: that their Cultural Revolution sloganeering sounds adolescently dangerous, at best, and extremely ignorant when used as the public expression of official policy.

What would herald any shift, for better or worse, would be the replacement of Zhang Qingli as secretary of the Party Committee of Tibet Autonomous Region. He walks his talk with a big beating stick. If that situation were to change for the better, then we can get all gushy over the possibility of substantive policy change. But nothing newworthy will happen until positive actions are taken from the Chinese side of the empty table. All the photos and softer words may, in fact, be prelude, but at the moment they are nothing more than what they are: softer public words and private photos. Is it a step in the right direction or is it just more a cleaning up of the act? Way too soon to tell.