Starting in 1989, the Chinese government developed a policy of population transfer, to move Han Chinese citizens from Mainland China into Tibet. They offered bonuses, financial and otherwise. Basically, they helped them get set up there. By 1995, everything in Lhasa had begun to have the Chinese look and feel, from the bottom up — store fronts, schools, whole neighborhoods. And there were profound cultural upheavals as well. The curriculum in schools, for instance, which was taught almost entirely in the Chinese language. I visited a couple of schools in Lhasa that Tibetan kids go to. They get instruction in the Tibetan language. But it's simply a class that is part of the larger curriculum.
So, you've had a generation of Tibetan children caught in this change that are now in their 20s, who've either been raised in these Chinese language schools inside Tibet or who were shipped off to mainland China to school and have since returned. They're speaking fluent Chinese, and have been brought up under the Chinese political system and its propaganda. So they've actually changed. They don't present the same portrayal of religion, spirit and energy that had fascinated so many of us on the outside when we had first encountered the Tibetan people some years ago.
I personally went from the experience of Lhasa years ago as a place that had a kind of underlying tension everywhere you went, where the religion was alive, where there was a fierce defense of it against very stiff odds, to a place that now suffers a clear sense of resignation. I felt this very strongly during my last two trips.
There's a point where you fight the system or you join it. People are making money now in Lhasa. You see cellphones. SUVs. Theme parks for children! Children dressed in frilly and colorful imported clothing.
TC: Are the Tibetans themselves allowed to buy into this new Tibet?
NJJ: Yes. Absolutely. For example, the woman who helped me obtain all the permits I needed during a recent trip I made — which would be a very tough thing for me to do alone, dealing with the Chinese government as an outsider — was a 30-year-old Tibetan woman who had started a travel business, speaks fluent Chinese, regularly shops in Hong Kong, whose parents still speak only Tibetan. She's not interested in the Tibetan traditions at all. She never goes to a monastery. She's not religious. She's an entrepreneur, and a very successful one. She goes to a Lhasa health spa in the evenings, where the better-to-do Chinese prostitutes go to work out. There are other wealthy Chinese women there, wealthy Tibetan women. She invited me to go there one evening for a massage. So I went. I was very curious.
TC: What language were the Tibetan women speaking at the health club?
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