A lecture given to the Institute of Modern History
Seattle,
Canadian Union
March 26, 2173
Some people question the interest showered on the 150th
anniversary of the Sino-American War of 2023.
Isn’t it wrong to celebrate a war?
Well, we aren’t here today to celebrate war, which is always a terrible
thing, but to remember and take stock of those long-ago events that shaped the
world we know today.
Tibet
The fourteenth Dalai Lama,
Tibet’s supreme spiritual leader, was, at last, dead at the age of 87. The Chinese Global Times poured scorn on Western claims that he had been
murdered. “ The Dalai Lama always wore religious clothes while carrying out
anti-Chinese separatist activities, spreading false information and deceiving
the public,” thundered the Global Times, “If
China had wanted to kill this evil man, it could have done so anytime over the
last sixty years without waiting until he was 87. The Dalai Lama was a wolf in monk's clothes,
a devil with a human face.”
China’s claim to sovereignty over Tibet went back some six hundred
years. Enforcement of this claim over a
people ethnically different from the native Han Chinese was sometimes weak,
especially when China
itself was submerged in internal turmoil.
From 1912 onward the Tibetans were left to their own devices while the
Chinese wrestled with revolutions, competing warlords and invasion by the
Japanese. A succession of Dalai Lamas
ruled as both temporal and spiritual leaders of Tibet. This abruptly ended in 1951
when the Chinese army marched in, asserting China’s claim to complete and total
sovereignty over Tibet. The fourteenth Dalai Lama fled into an exile,
a hero and saint to his people, a separatist provocateur to the Chinese.
Tens of thousands of Han Chinese settlers poured into Tibet,
modernizing the country in the view of the Chinese, undermining native Tibetan culture
and religion in the view of most in the West.
How what the Chinese were doing to the Tibetans differed from what the
European and American did to the native populations of the North American
continent only a century earlier was one of those inconvenient ironies that no
liberal intellectual in the West ever wished to discuss.
Any talk of Tibetan independence was totally unacceptable to
China. The Dalai Lama’s death would not be permitted
to fan the flames of separatism. Fifty
nine arrests were made in Lhasa to combat what the Global Times called, “rumor-mongering,” and five arrests were
carried out in connection with the distribution of “cultural products
expressing politically separatist reactionary views which mislead the public” A
senior security officer explained the official position, “A civilized and
healthy environment must be created by curbing
the spread of decayed and backward ideology and culture, and by resolutely
resisting ideological and cultural infiltration and sabotage activities by the
Dalai clique and hostile Western forces.”
The Chinese government may have convinced the Han Chinese
colonists who were quickly coming to dominate Tibet that the death of the Dalai
Lama was due to natural causes, but ethnic Tibetans believed the worst. Word quickly spread that the saint had been
murdered by the Chinese. According to rumors
on the streets, Tibetan women, trained by Chinese agents, wore poison in their
hair, which contaminated the Dalai Lama as he touched the women’s hair during
blessings.
Trouble began when three hundred young monks from Deprung
Monastery, near Lhasa
started a peaceful protest demanding a full investigation of the Dalai Lama’s
death. A few of the monks were
immediately arrested. The next day,
monks from the Sera Monastery began a peaceful march. Protestors holding images of the Dalai Lama and
Tibetan flags marched through the streets.
More monks were arrested, some were manhandled and several were beaten
by Public Security Bureau officers. On
the morning of the third day, one hundred monks from the Ramoche Monastery
began to protest the arrest of the monks the day before. Increasingly harsh in their treatment of the
monks, security forces began severely beating the young protestors, which
enraged Tibetan onlookers. From then on,
the situation spiraled out of control as thousands of Tibetans raged through
the streets pillaging and savagely beating ethnic Han Chinese. The rioting rapidly spread from Beijing Road, the
main central thoroughfare of Lhasa,
into the narrow alleyways of the old Tibetan quarter. The throng was packed tightly in a
constricted area when Chinese troops appeared and machine guns opened
fire. The Tibetans were packed together
so tightly that one bullet would drive through three or four bodies. The people ran madly this way and that. When the fire was directed toward the center,
they ran to the sides. The fire was then
directed towards the sides. Many threw
themselves upon the ground, and the fire was then directed on the ground. The firing continued for ten minutes, and
stopped only when the ammunition was exhausted.
The Chinese marched away leaving 379 dead and 1,500 wounded. The crowd was unarmed and included many
women and children.
So much for peaceful protest, the Tibetan mob, now armed with
knives, stones, swords and an occasional gun rampaged through the narrow alleys
of the Tibetan quarter. The rioters battered the shutters of shops, broke in
and seized whatever they could find.
Some goods were carried away, but others were piled in the street and
burned. Almost every Han business in the city was burned, looted, destroyed, or
smashed into. When protesters burned a
police station, soldiers with machine guns once again fired into the crowds. Thousands
of Tibetans were slaughtered in a week of bloody insurrection. Hundreds of Han Chinese died as well, as the
Tibetans sought vengeance. The next week, Lhasa
was green with soldiers. Helicopter gun ships hovered over the city. But by then, violence had spread to Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu provinces, all
with Tibetan populations. Fearful Han
settlers, who had been in Tibet
for years, left the country. Chinese businessmen, who would normally come in
and out of Lhasa
by train, now feared that Tibetans would blow up the railway line and began to
fly.
The Chinese leadership announced new Tibet-specific policies
called “the Four Stabilities” to be carried out in the name of the slogan
“stability overrides all” (wending yadao yiqie) in order to “keep a tight hand
on the struggle against separatism.” In Lhasa
itself, two armored personnel carriers were permanently stationed in front of
the Jokhang temple, Tibet’s
holiest shrine. On the front of one of
the vehicles big red Chinese characters proclaimed, “Stability is Happiness”. On
the other a sign read, “Separatism is Disastrous.”
Washington
There were smiles all around at the China desk at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Inspired, positively inspired, the idea of
planting a story that the Dalai Lama had been murdered by Tibetan women wearing
poison in their hair. The idea was so incredible that it had become
credible…well, at least in Tibet. The Tibetans would rather believe that their
87 year old living God had been murdered than that he had died of natural
causes.
“Operation
Blue Mountain”,
the Tibet
operation, was the first fruit of the Agency’s new program of asymmetrical
warfare. “When you cannot confront a
powerful enemy directly,” Isaac Brown, the Director of the CIA said, “worry him where he is weak, wear him
down, and sap his strength”.
Frankly, many at the Agency and America in general felt that it was
about time for some payback. The Agency had long suspected that the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001
and most of those in the subsequent two decades had originated not in Afghanistan, Baghdad, or Tehran, but in Beijing. China had been
arming America’s
global adversaries and undermining the American economy for years. North Korea was overflowing with
Chinese arms. Somehow, Chinese-made
armor-piercing missiles fell into the hands of anti-American militants in Iraq. The
Iranians purchased sophisticated Chinese cruise anti-ship missiles to be used
to impede the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf.
China
provided Iran
diplomatic cover for its nuclear ambitions in exchange for oil and gas deals. China developed
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ports in Mexico. Using the economic shield
of the NAFTA agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada, China avoided U.S. tariffs by
shipping Chinese manufactured goods through Mexico into the United States.
This reduced Chinese transportation costs to the United States by fifty percent and
flooded the U.S.
market with more cheap Chinese goods, further weakening the struggling U.S.
dollar. American stores were stuffed with shoddy Chinese products while
American manufacturing companies, once the envy of the world, lay in ruins and
hundreds of thousands of American workers pounded the cold grey streets looking
for jobs that would never return.
China
was too powerful and too intertwined in the American economy to attack
directly, but China
had internal weaknesses that the Agency could exploit. If only the Agency could exploit China’s
internal weaknesses before America’s
own weaknesses brought it down. Every
year, America
came closer to dissolution. The nation
had been polarized between rabid liberals and rabid conservatives in equal
measure for over two decades, with only the tiniest of tiny minorities still
claiming the name moderate or independent.
Americans were no longer one people.
They no longer shared a common culture, common values, or even a common
language. Americans were now just an odd
conglomeration of people occupying a common geographic space fractiously
squabbling over economic crumbs, contesting every piece of history, every
educational curriculum, every code, tradition and belief. Americans aligned themselves in what were called
“red” and “blue” states, which in many ways still reflected the unresolved
tensions of America’s
civil war of the 19th century between the “blue” states and the “grey”
states. A few bold thinkers could
already see the forces building for the mass re-location of populations along
ideological and religious lines, the dissolution of old political bonds and the
emergence of new value driven nations on the ruins of the failed Republic. In short a new civil war.
Isaac Brown, the Director of the CIA,
was not one of those who intended to allow the Republic to fail. Brown knew America thrived when it had an
enemy to defeat. America needed strong
enemies, real or imagined. Such had always
been the case, whether it was the British, the Germans and Japanese, or the
Russians. Without a powerful external
enemy that threatened their existence Americans turned on each other. Within the Agency the belief was, “We must
destroy China
in order to save America…from
itself.”
Creating hostility towards China was not difficult. America, like an aging rock star jealous of a
younger and more vibrant challenger, rested on its past reputation, sneering at
the latest “flavor of the month”, even while stung in its pride. Certainly nothing had been more humiliating
than the Chinese manned moon landing in 2019, the fiftieth anniversary of the
first moon landing successfully accomplished by America. How humiliating to be reminded that America had
abandoned space and no longer had the will to reach for the stars.
Wars and Invasions
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