Does Tibetan Resistance to China Feed U.S. Imperialism?

Amidst the recent international attention focusing on the riots in Tibet, the Organization Department of the Communist Party of China is looking to new measures in order to promote patriotism, loyalty, and social stability to the citizens in Tibetan lands.

Memos to the party organs throughout the Tibetan region has emphasized the role in promoting loyalty to the Communist Party and the state of the People's Republic of China as a necessary means in preventing the escalation of social unrest that proves costly not only to the state, but inhabitants as well. The new program instructs local organs of the Party to try and learn from the mistakes of the past and put together a re-education program against the secessionist sentiments.

The aims and objectives of this program seek to put an end to the destructive riots that have erupted in recent weeks. The Party has instructed its regional organs to remind citizens of the social, political, and economic progress that has been made throughout Tibet while under the Chinese control.

As for those responsible for perpetuating the riots and violence, the state does intend to take criminal action. An official for the Communist Party in Lahsa stated that more than 1,200 people would be prosecuted in the near future.

Though the Tibet issue has remained controversial internationally for some time now, there is a lot of confusion and ignorance regarding the situation in its entirety. People tend to forget how things were in independent Tibet prior to the takeover by the Chinese Communist Party. While many now protest over the "injustice" of Chinese rule, Tibet's history and the conditions for the average people in the feudal theocracy where political and economic power was yielded solely in the hands of the religious orders of monks seem lost. Prior to 1951, the vast majority of the population lived the intolerable lives of serfdom. While the Dalai Lama has expressed his desires for more autonomy from the Chinese government for the preservation of Tibetan culture, one needs only look to the not so distant past to remember what this culture of religious domination and economic deprivation includes.

The future of Tibet seems to be an important point of activism amongst many in the West. Failure to analyze the condition facing the average Tibetan, and the historical development of this issue is most responsible for this naïve calls for independence. Though, this lack of political education on behalf of protesters and activists is not entirely their own doing. The position of Western governments in support for Tibetan freedom has been used to undermine the growth and development of China, and the power-base of the Chinese Communist Party, for many decades. Those who espouse the rhetoric of human rights advocacy believe their convictions represent the best interest of the Tibetan people; a people whom they believe are oppressed and lacking self-determination at the hands of the militaristic Chinese. However, is this necessarily true, or rather the workings of the capitalist powered media on behalf of the bourgeois state?

The key issue at stake though, in the recent unrest, was that the Tibetan protests were not peaceful demonstrations of a people lacking self-determination, but rather destructive elements of an extreme nationalist movement that has been taken advantage of by the imperialist opportunists in the West. This perspective is perfectly clear with the increasing hostility as the economic development of the People's Republic of China has looked to take a larger piece of the global economic pie, at the expense of the traditional imperialist powers, notably the United States. Even the convenience of modern technology capable of recording events as they take place fail to encapsulate the "mass" support behind the movements. Thus, the question must be raised - for whom is the true benefactor behind disrupt in Tibet?

The antagonisms fueled by international provocation surrounding Tibet defies the concept of internal policy and the determination of one nation-state to handle its own affairs (regardless of the issue , something that the U.S. has historically defended when its sphere of influence has been threatened. As the sole watchmen for the interests of the Western World, the U.S. looks to a future where its grasp is securely fit around the Asian world as well.

The dichotomy between growing and expanding Chinese influence and global power and that of the traditional Western power, the United States, will certainly create an interesting and complex international political schema for many years to come. Skepticism in Washington focuses on the potential growth of another superpower that may contain the spread of American influence, much like the U.S. viewed the Soviet Union during the days of the Cold War. There are some in Washington who see direct parallels between the current situation and the experiences of the Cold War even today, though the economic benefits of investment in China inhibits acting on this intuition. Economically speaking, investors have much to lose in an unstable China; however, politically, the bourgeois state wants to monopolize the global community without the threat of an equally powerful counter-part. The explanation as to why America may appear more tolerant of the "human rights" abuses in China, versus those that were deemed so intolerable in many other, smaller states, is the fact that China is an economic benefit to U.S. capital (for the time being) and is militarily stronger than the U.S. military could overtake by traditional force. Thus, the puzzle as to the future relationship between the People's Republic of China and the United States of America will grow all the more complex and interesting once the relationship becomes more one-sided on behalf of the Chinese.

Thus, measures (such as the provocation of resistance in Tibet) to politically destabilize China are far less aggressive than those previously employed by the United States against potential competitors. This only further proves the power of economics over politics in the realm of the bourgeois state. The relationship is typically mutually incorporated into the idea of class-domination of both the economic sphere and political sphere, where the latter is upheld for the sake of the former.