CONFUCIANISM AND THE SOLUTION TO

THE TIBET PROBLEM

The article looks at the situation of Tibet and the position of the Dalai Lama from the standpoint of Confucian ethics and the Buddhist “Middle Way”in order to find a solution to the problem. While acknowledging the legitimate grievances and aspirations of Tibetans, the author argues that the outside world plays an often negative role by seeking to interfere on the basis of subjective opinions and unverified assumptions. It urges the Chinese government to reach an agreement with the exiled Tibetan pontiff so that the latter may come back permanently to his country.

WEI WANG

China as a subject has come of age. One sure sign was the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) dedication of its Sixtieth Anniversary of Reith Lectures to it. Yale Professor of History Jonathon Spence, one of the world’s leading authorities on China, was the lecturer and “guide”, making “sense” of China, from the days of Confucius to the Beijing Olympics and the Sichuan earthquake. The BBC inaugurated the Reith Lectures in 1948 to mark the historic contribution to public broadcasting by Sir John (later Lord) Reith, the corporation’s first director-general. Each year, the BBC invites a leading figure to deliver a series of lectures on radio to advance public understanding and debate about a significant contemporary issue. In his second lecture, entitled English Lessons, Spence quoted the following from Citizen of the World, an eighteenth century novel by Oliver Goldsmith, to illustrate how a Chinese might feel about the British:

“You know, I think these British people are trying to reason me out of my own country. They’re trying to push their pressure on me to get me to lose my sense of what it is to be Chinese”.

Spence also commented:

“How often do we try to reason people out of their own cultures because of our analytical stance or our feeling of superiority or our sense that we have a different kind of skill than they do?”

Through the broadcasting might of the BBC World Service, Spence’s words reached millions of listeners around the world. Today, as we are living in the internet age, the Open University through a partnership with the BBC has been running a dedicated Reith Lectures forum, inviting listeners to participate in an online debate about any issue related to the lectures. After Derek Matravers, Head of the Department of Philosophy at the Open University began the thread on Confucius on June 4, 2008 and I as author of The China Executive: Marrying Western and Chinese Strengths to Generate Profitability from Your Investment in China (Bretton, Peterborough: 2W Publishing, 2006) posted my response, there were nearly 1,200 visits to the thread within a month, with others joining the debate and opening further threads. On June 16, 2008, I posted my comment on the second Reith Lecture, saying that Goldsmith’s words were the most beautiful description I had come across by an Englishman of how a Chinese feels about the British. Somebody

called BlahBlahDoh responded with the following words:

“Apparently Chinese school books claim that the western provinces Xinjiang and Tibet have ‘always’ been part of China. How about if you substitute ‘Han’ for ‘British’ and ‘Uighur’ (or ‘Tibetan’, etc) for ‘Chinese’ in the phrase above?” Given an issue as hot as Tibet, I had expected somebody to raise it at some point in time but not as eloquently as BlahBlahDoh had done. However, before discussing BlahBlahDoh’s question, we need to set an accurate, applicable context for discussion by replacing the word “country” with “culture” in Goldsmith’s phrase and in considering Spence’s elaboration as well. The overall message being conveyed is that it is not about territorial conflict or forced  immigration. A revised version would be as follows:

“You know, I think these British people are trying to reason me out of my own ‘culture’. They’re trying to push their pressure on me to get me to lose my sense of what it is to be Chinese”.

THE TRACK OF ABSTRACTION: THE TRACK THAT GETS EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

ollowing BlahBlahDoh’s post, somebody registered as weiminfuwu (meaning

“to serve the populace”) responded with the following:

“As regards Tibet and Xinjiang, it is of course reprehensible when a government fails to tell the truth about its country’s history. By the same reasoning, the Japanese authorities and many of its academics are at fault in failing to be truthful about their brutal treatment of the Chinese and others, during World War II. And British school books are notably silent about what Professor J K Fairbank described as ‘the most long standing nternational crime of modern times—the Opium Period’ (Cambridge History of China V10/1).”

The beauty of Blah Blah Doh’s first sentence actually lies in its setting a wrong track in trying to find a solution to the Tibet problem, that is, the track of abstraction. My immediate question for BlahBlahDoh was:

“How many such books have you read? Have you read even a single Chinese schoolbook yourself?”

I received primary and secondary education in China in the 1970s, but even then all I learnt was “China is made up of 56 nationalities”. Even if BlahBlahDoh has indeed read one Chinese schoolbook that says “always”, it does not follow that weiminfuwu can immediately jump to the conclusion he has drawn in his first sentence. By doing so, weiminfuwu is implying that he agrees with BlahBlahDoh’s earlier judgement. Yet, where is the evidence? Schoolbooks are numerous but how do we know which one is written by the government and which one is not? For primary and secondary school children, there are books that introduce a country’s history in very broad terms. Frankly, I would not want my eight-year-old son, to learn all the details of how the British attacked the Chinese during the Opium Wars. He will learn that bit of history when he grows up to an appropriate age.