Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Free free free Tibet! Shame on Chi-na, shame on Chi-na… China, China, China, out, out, out!

The free Tibet protestors outside Downing Street, tightly coralled behind crash barriers, made a colourful spectacle with their banners, bobble hats and flags. The Olympic torch relay, on the other hand, did not.

First, a float displayed five scantily-clad girls, obviously under orders to dance no matter what. They bopped without enthusiasm, and one poor girl seemed to be crying; presumably she had not signed up to be shouted at.

Then a load of yellow jacketed cops, some on horses and bicycles, appeared, followed by a squad of Chinese security guards in blue tracksuits. Just about visible at their centre a glum-looking athlete held a metal stick with a smear of flame on top.

As the torch passed protestors would jump the barrier to get at it and get wrestled to the ground. Photographers would surround them as they were cuffed. It was a piece of street theatre that made for dramatic news photos.

Just as numerous as the pro-Tibet protestors was the one China lobby, Chinese students waving flags and singing patriotic songs. They were herded in a separate area.

They, and most folk in China, are outraged that the recent anti-Chinese riots in Tibet should be seen in the west as some kind of noble insurgency. They saw the same pictures we did, and were sickened to see their compatriots being beaten up by Tibetan thugs.

They have a point there, of course. It’s just a shame that they never ask why the Tibetans are rebelling, and simply believe their government’s propaganda.

Tibetans have been appallingly treated for decades and from what I have see things there are only getting worse.

I first went to Tibet in 1998. On the very first day I was travelling in a taxi when the Tibetan driver pulled to the side of the road and began to shake so hard that he could not keep his hands on the wheel. A slow convoy of military trucks was approaching. I got out. We were on the busy main street in Lhasa, Tibet Road, and everyone had stopped to watch.

Prisoners were displayed on the open backs of the trucks. A soldier stood behind each one, pushing his shaved head down. Each truck had about twenty prisoners on it, and there more than twenty trucks. I assume they were charged with sedition – there had been riots the week before.

They would have disappeared, along with hundreds of thousands of other Tibetans, into forced labour camps. It is perilously easy for a Tibetan to find himself slung in one of those – just owning a Tibetan flag or a picture of the Dalai Lama, or talking inappropriately to foreigners, or mentioning a desire for Tibetan independance, can lead to hefty sentences.

Yet plenty of Tibetans are willing to take those risks, so passionately do they feel. In the Potala Palace – the stale and melancholy mansion where the Dalai Lamas once lived – a monk drew my aside from my tour group to whisper that the Chinese were destroying his country, and that everything my Chinese guide was telling me was a lie. He complained about the CCTV system that the state had just installed (I later discovered that it had been paid for from a UNESCO development grant).

In a cafe I met another monk who admitted he was about to make the arduous journey to India. Tibetans walk to India to study with the Dalai Lama’s government in exile or live as refugees. The journey takes weeks, and they have to carry all their food with them – he was taking a rucksack full of steamed buns. As well as frostbite and exposure they run the risk of being shot by Chinese border guards
(as you can see on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLN4KWxqZ-0).

I gave the guy a postcard of the Dalai Lama, and he secreted it in his robes, and gave me a kata, the Tibetan white scarf, in return. (I would not take such images into Tibet now, knowing the trouble that they can cause for the locals).

Another Tibetan I know of works as a school teacher. As this is an official position, he is not allowed to practise his religion, and risks losing his job when, every week, he disguises himself with a scarf over his face and circumnambulates Lhasa’s main temple, the Jokhang. He carries a bag of vegetables so that, if caught, he can argue he is only browsing the stalls. He has to teach, of course, in Mandarin Chinese; Tibetan is not taught even as a second language.

Everywhere you look, Tibetans are being subjugated. The great monasteries are largely empty. There are spies everywhere, and one Chinese soldier for every twenty Tibetans. Nomads are being settled into ghettoised camps and women forcibly sterilised.

The Chinese, like the colonisers of the Victorian era, sincerely believe in the superiority of their civilisation, and think it no bad thing for backward cultures to be given its benefits. Tibetans are seen as child-like and primitive, their extraordinary religious piety an inferior state of consciousness caused by insufficient education.

The old Tibet, they point out, was a feudal slum where slavery was tolerated (they are absolutely right on this, of course), and the Chinese invasion was, they sincerely believe, a liberation, a chance for the serfs to overthrow their masters. What repression they do acknowledge they see as the regrettable consequence of Tibetan ‘splittism’ by the ‘Dalai Lama clique’ – the feudal old guard.

My interpretation of recent events is that as a colony Tibet was muddling grumpily along – smouldering with discontent but workable; but now a huge and intolerable new pressure has been added that simply cannot be borne. The Han Chinese are moving to Tibet at the rate of thousands every month, lured by tax breaks, and the new railway line has massively speeded up this Lebensraum style resettlement program.

There are millions of Han there now. In Lhasa they outnumber ethnic Tibetans. They have brought with them that harsh Chinese version of modernity, where money is king, the lust for development trumps all other considerations, and governance and the law are for sale.

Tibetans, not a particularly practical lot at the best of times, are never going to prosper under such a system, and have become an underclass. There are very few Tibetan businesses; you might see Tibetans working as waitresses, say, but the boss is always Han.

Everywhere you look, Tibetans culture is being destroyed, its people brutalised and subjugated. They are up against it, and they are desperate, and finally even the calming words of the Dalai Lama, who preaches non violent resistance, are no longer enough to stop them lashing out.

Hooray, I am back in mellow Dali. What a brilliant idea to come here to write up my notes rather than slug it out in hot, sticky and expensive Shanghai. Much has happened since I was last here. For example, there was a rainbow invasion.

The so called rainbow people are all over Asia. They are uber hippies, wandering the earth, and they host regular rainbow gatherings, where they all get together and do hippy things.

The first rainbow people I met were in Kashgar, in Xinjiang, in the cheapest dormitory in town. These guys wanted to hitch hike to Tibet.

They were really very poor. They had come in on the bus from Pakistan where they had been living in a refugee camp.

They were okay, and good company, except when they decided to sing their dumb rainbow songs. I remember the songs in their entirety as each only had one line, repeated ad anuseum, with bongo accompaniment: ‘We all come from the goddess, into her we shall return,’ and ‘we are the rainbow people, stronger than before.’

One guy was Austrian, a prankster at heart, who didn’t seem that into any of the hippy shit, he just wanted a laugh. He dressed like an elf in green robes and a pointy green hat. He always carried a huge stick. He had a conch shell in his rucksack. He was still getting over the death of his monkey, in the refugee camp.

I went to the Kashgar bazaar with them, to buy provisions for this dangerous journey. I remember being bored and irritated, because they were only interested in the cheapest stuff, for which they bartered furiously. In the end, after a day walking around this enormous central Asian bazaar, they had each accumulated a bag of nuts. Largely on my advice, the bulk of this assortment was made up by stuff that I thought was almonds, only really cheap.

A couple of months later I bumped into them again, in Beijing, in, of course, the cheapest dormitory in town. Now the Austrian guy had Tibetan prayer flags tied to his stick. They had successfully hitch hiked round Tibet, with pilgrims and truckers, but it seems, nearly died of exposure on several occasions.

The almonds had been cheap for a reason – they weren’t almonds at all, just tasted a bit like them, and were toxic; eat more than a couple and you got stomach ache. And they had had to survive on these things for days and days, sat in the back of trucks that ground along unsurfaced roads.

They had got all the way to Mount Kailash, the holiest site in Tibet, and one of the world’s most remote travel destinations. You are supposed to walk round it clockwise, which takes three days, and it brings you good karma and improves your chance of a favourable reincarnation.

Walking clockwise is a big thing in Tibetan Buddhism. Nobody walks anywhere anti clockwise. It’s the first thing you learn. Anti clockwise is the way of Bon, the very weird pagan religion that predates quite weird Tibetan Buddhism.

I walked anti clockwise round a holy site once, for about an hour. I met, of course, all the pilgrims going clockwise, who reacted in horror – tutting, shaking their heads, barking at me to turn round quick. One guy drew a finger across his neck, poked out his tongue and made death rattle sounds. I don’t think he was threatening me, he was telling me I was accumulating bad karma and would die shortly. It was an uncomfortable hour.

Well anyway these mad hippies did the whole three day Kailash kora anti-clockwise, Bon style, backwards, and baffled and consternated thousands of pilgrims. It was a kind of knee jerk anti-conformism. I mean of course they conformed in other ways, but so far as they could they always did things differently. Mind, they said, it was shortly after the anti-clockwise kora that they had nearly died of exposure, so in retrospect they weren’t sure that they had done the right thing.

I started hanging out with the Austrian guy, who was good company. We heard that there was going to be a meteor shower visible over China and conceived a plan to sleep on the Great Wall and watch it. Only it was winter, so the temperature up there would be about minus twenty.

Me and him and this German girl took as much bedding as we could carry and got the last bus up to Mutianyu Great Wall. It was hard to get the Austrian’s stick, which was about two metres long, into a packed minibus, and when we did he was adamant that it not be laid down on the floor. So the stick went along the back of the seats, between the other passengers, who took this imposition rather stoically, I thought.

Having got to the wall the three of us hid on it until they had shut the ticket office and everyone had gone home. Then we made a camp in a guard tower and built a fire. As the temperature dropped we realised that without the fire we were going to get very cold indeed, so we spent hours stumbling around in complete darkness looking for anything that could burn. Still, we figured that this fantastic meteor shower, which would start any minute, would certainly be worth it.

Eventually, inevitably, the fire burned down and we had to huddle round the embers to sleep. And boy did we huddle, like kittens, as the temperature dropped and dropped. We wrapped a scarf round all our six feet to try and keep them warm.

I don’t think any of us slept at all. And we didn’t see a single meteor. Still, never mind, it was a good adventure.

I didn’t meet any more rainbow people until I was in India. They were a lot less interesting there than in China. Pragmatic, matter of fact China is such a non-rainbow country it was funny to see them trying to cope, and the place could frankly do with a bit of dippy weirdness and a bit less obsessive materialism.

But India already has too many western space cadets and new age wierdos for rainbow people to really add anything to the mix.

In Varanassi I had the chance to go to one of their rainbow gatherings. I didn’t bother but my mate C did.

He said that at the start, to kick things off with a suitably communal, anti-materialistic vibe, everyone was invited to put some object that was special to them into a pile and then they would all walk round the pile, hand in hand, and take it in turns to go in and pick something out from the pile. And that would be like, some kind of metaphor for giving up on who you are and accepting the power of chance and being all bonded and whatever.

So they did this ritual, but it did not quite turn out as intended.

Hippies who had contributed a flute and ended up with a shell started complaining that not everyone had taken communalism quite seriously enough. And people who had put in, say, a leaf, and were now the proud owners of a nice embroidered bag, were responding by saying that those other hippies should lighten up and accept their karma and why were they making such a big deal when everything belonged to the goddess anyway.

And the gathering grew so rancorous, and so many arguments started, that the whole thing was in danger of breaking up in a welter of ill feeling on this, its first day.

So it was decided that every object be returned to its original owner. And then they would do the ritual over again.

But now, all the hippies who had previously contributed bongos or jewellery or whatever and ended up with an acorn or an interesting shaped stone were buggered if they were going to be screwed over a second time.

So they put in sticks, stones, leafs or shells too.

And what they ended with was a renunciation-of-materialism ritual in which a bunch of hippies walked round in a big circle, hand in hand, and took it in turns to pick out stuff from a central pile of worthless crap.

Man, I so wish I had been there.

Anyway, Dali and the rainbow people. A bunch of French guys had shut down their bar, TOXIQUE, but there was still some time on the lease, so they said to some rainbow hippies who arrived in town in preparation for their gathering, ah, bien sur, stay here for free. You want to run it as a bakery? Why not.

And then more and hippies arrived, until the ‘rainbow bakery’ was housing around thirty people.

Down by the lake, the owner of the DRAGONFLY said that anyone who was living in a tepee could put it up and stay for free in his garden. Well, how many hippies fit in a teepee? Quite a lot, it turned out. Certainly enough to disconcert his paying customers.

The rainbow bakery did not turn out to be a going concern – the hippies weren’t washing, so perhaps it was the sight of filthy hands kneading dough that put off customers. As an alternative source of income the rainbow people started busking and begging.

Tensions between the hippies and the local community grew. But things came to a head when the media came down from Beijing to record what was going on.

The hippies had to go. A delegation of the resident foreigners was sent down to the bakery to ask them nicely to leave.

The hippies had something called a talking stick, and when they were all gathered as a group, only the person holding the stick was allowed to talk. So the residents sat with the hippies, and the stick was passed from one hippy to another, and a lot of crap was talked about vibes and energies until finally, one of the residents took possession of the stick and rather politely considering, told them please, just leave. Go, no, get out. If you don’t the police are coming.

And so the Dali rainbow gathering never happened, and the rainbow people made no friends or converts. The original hippy who had set it all up turned out to be charging rent at the bakery to all the other hippies. And when the owners of Toxique found out they got so annoyed they punched him and kicked him out of town.

And I suppose I would end there but yesterday I was reading a piece in the Guardian about the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The journalist who wrote it was saying, of course, nobody travels like that any more, the beat spirit is dead blah we’re all comfortable and middle class blah travel is just another form of consumption blah dreadlocks on the Koh San Road blah.

And it made me think about the rainbows. For all their faults – the bullshit and the cultiness – at least they’re in earnest. Some of them at least are truly out there, doing it, on the road, and they don’t give soundbites to Guardian journalists. And I felt a little fonder of them, the good ones anyway. I wished I could remember that Austrian’s name.