Don’t Need No Re-Education
April 8th, 2008This article makes me angrier than words can express.
In an effort to quell unrest, Communist Party officials are ordering Tibetans back to school. Buddhist monks, civil servants and public school students have been instructed to attend special classes in the virtues of Chinese rule and the evils of their exiled leader, the Dalai Lama. In these classes, the Tibetans read and recite from texts that denounce the Dalai Lama as a “political reactionary” and a “betrayer of the motherland.”
Ideological training is an enduring feature of Communist life, but has taken a back seat in a country consumed with more modern pursuits, such as making money. But in Tibetan areas, the Communist Party is pursuing “patriotic education” with new zeal. But the campaign may be backfiring. Clashes that erupted last week in Sichuan province’s Ganzi prefecture (known as Kardze to Tibetans) were reportedly triggered when the head of the Tongkor Monastery objected to Communist Party teaching materials that criticize the Dalai Lama. Tibetan activists say eight people were killed in the April 3 incident.
Nevertheless, Communist officials insist that the program be expanded.
Touring a monastery last week, the deputy Communist Party chief for Tibet, Hao Peng, called for strengthening “patriotic education so as to guide the masses of monks to continuously display the patriotic tradition.” Besides the monks, Tibetan civil servants, party members and schoolchildren have attended special reeducation sessions, according to the Tibet Daily. At an elementary school, children viewed photographs of stores damaged in March 14 riots in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and sang patriotic songs.
“If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed those bad guys were so abhorrent,” the newspaper quoted a third-grader as saying. In a Tibetan village, an elderly party member was reported to have shouted criticism of what officials call the “Dalai clique” during an education session: “They are going to plunge us once again into the abyss of suffering. Their methods are despicable and cruel.” Tibet experts say the rhetoric harks back to the reeducation and self-criticism campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s, but is unlikely to be successful today.
“Getting people to denounce the Dalai Lama or to recite ideological statements shows a lack of imagination on the part of the Communist Party. There is no way they can force people into what they say is the correct way of thinking,” said Ronald Schwartz, a Canadian scholar[,]
and it is absolutely shameful to try. The arrogance of some human beings (not limited to Chinese autocrats) is astonishing.