The Wild West

Though this blog will focus on my time in Indonesia, my first entry is written from China, where I started the summer with two weeks of traveling, mostly in Gansu province.

It’s difficult to accept that I spent only two weeks in China. While there, I encountered a bewildering range of emotions, perhaps a spectrum that mirrors the diversity of human experiences in this vast country, full of romantic imaginings and struggling counter narratives.

My first impression of China on this trip was the Beijing airport. It is a strange, suspended space, massive in scale even though it feels utterly empty. The sun streams in through a tragic haze that mutes the character of the day. The travelers inside, caught in an ethereal light that refuses definition, are smartly clad in the idioms of the placeless global: slim fit black suits, iPads, angular eyewear. Starbucks. McDonald’s. These, I suppose, are the marks of global superpower-dom: formidable size, glittering technology, liminal foods.

Out west, past the massive city of Xi’an, the old imperial capital, we find other marks of superpower status. Arundhati Roy talks about how India is colonizing itself, and it would appear that China is doing the same. Xiahe—home to the Labrang Monastery, the second largest Buddhist monastery in the world—is on the frontlines of the Sino-Tibetan discord. In 2008, when protests flared up across the Tibetan plateau and were met with a violent crackdown, Xiahe was the eastern hub of resistance (second only to Lhasa in vigor). We met brave individuals there who were surprisingly open to detailing the cultural genocide. Names are changed (Sino-fied to be precise, and to be sarcastic) to protect the identity of these individuals, whose revelations to us are a bold and admirable form of resistance.

Wei Long, a Tibetan who made the perilous journey to India about 10 years ago in order to receive an education, evinces the strained relations between Tibetans and Beijing with his life experience. He’s been jailed and participated in protests. He and Feng, a young highly educated monk at the Labrang Monastery, detailed the most recent crackdown. Less than a month ago, when the Tibetan government in Dharamsala elected a prime minister, Chinese forces preempted any political activity. They arrived at Wei Long’s guesthouse before dawn and demanded that he kick out all foreign and domestic tourists within two hours. Then the army forces disappeared sixteen monks (only three of which have returned), and began reeducation classes in the monastery, teaching these brilliant Buddhist intellectuals reductive understandings of culture and sovereignty: “Tibet Is A Part Of China.” Despite setting strict limits on the number of resident monks at Labrang, and otherwise curbing the autonomy the monastery has in advancing Buddhist philosophy, the Chinese government is the direct beneficiary of fees paid by tourists to enter its gompas (we declined, in solidarity with Wei Long and Feng).

Wei Long surmises that the only hope for Tibetan people is a growing restive youth population in southeastern China, impatient for democratic reform. If the majority Han population can create a more open society, then perhaps Tibetans can make the appeal that has been so calculatingly squashed.

But the story of superpower-dom is not so uncomplicated. There are not clear winners and clear losers. Cities like Lanzhou and Dunhuang, in the northwest, left me neither awed nor angered. More curious. Lanzhou is a city that barely makes it into the Lonely Planet, but it is home to nearly four million people. One could tell lots of stories about the place. It maintains a solid reputation as the world center of beef noodles. The city is growing at an alarming rate, with Han Chinese rushing in behind capital investments. But Uighur Muslim culture still seems to inform street life. Lanzhou’s haze competes for worst in the country, but the streets are kept quite clean. Most of China lives in places like Lanzhou—urban, without glamour or fame, where development is good, and development is bad, where culture might be thriving, but also might be dying. Dunhuang is another such place. In a desert oasis on the outskirts of central government investment, the city has been transformed into a kind of Whistler in the Desert, where the night market was recently trebled and where every other restaurant seems to be serving its first customer. Dunhuang is the definition of a planned community—planned for the new domestic tourist, the upper middle class. The families that get down at Dunhuang’s glittering new train station are dropping $20 a person to walk on sand dunes and another $30 to visit the famed Magao Caves, a nearby UNESCO world heritage site.

China teaches that even about authoritarian governments, no unitary narrative can be written. There are so many ways to be Chinese today—proud, oppressed, yearning, thriving, resisting.