Mahatma Gandhi delivered a trenchant assessment of the British Empire in 1928. “The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains,” he wrote. Gandhi would lead India to freedom by 1947. But writing at a time when he was still surrounded by the squalid spectacle of imperial exploitation, he imagined a future when Britain’s destitute subjects sought, upon their liberation from foreign rule, to mimic the hoggish habits of their colonial overlords. If the masses of Asia “took to similar economic exploitation” as the West, he warned, “it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
Michael Buckley renders an important service in this outspoken book by alerting us to the fact that, for millions of Tibetans, the desolate future evoked by Gandhi has been a reality for decades. Buckley, a Canadian journalist and photographer, has been traveling to Tibet for more than 30 years. Here, he documents the calamitous consequences of China’s unsparing usurpation of Tibet’s natural resources. Since its violent annexation of Tibet in 1950, China has relentlessly disfigured the hypnotically beautiful plateau. It has mined and carted away Tibet’s mineral wealth, dammed and diverted waters from its bountiful rivers, herded innumerable Tibetans into what it calls “New Socialist Villages,” suppressed the expression of Tibetan identity, and annihilated whole ways of life. “Tibet,” Buckley reminds us, “is the largest colony in the world.”
Buckley is a keen observer. Seemingly minute changes in Tibet’s environment set him off on a quest to uncover their underlying causes. Stung by a mosquito in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, he is at first baffled: Mosquitoes aren’t supposed to be able to survive above 11,000 feet, and Lhasa sits at an altitude of 12,000 feet. Historically, Tibet has never been affected by malaria, still among the most fatal diseases in the vicinity. But, as China’s aggressive colonization degrades Tibet’s habitat, this may soon change. The railway line from Beijing to Lhasa — a feat of engineering and a fount of pollution — brings trainloads of Han Chinese tourists and settlers who, occupying the top tier of China’s ethnic hierarchy and indifferent to the local customs, increasingly resemble the British in India: foreigners seeking fortunes and adventure in an exotic outpost.
Despite his emotional investment in Tibet, Buckley’s prose is not weighed down by sentimentalism. He does not romanticize or exalt the victims. “Tibetans were not environmentalists,” he notes. “They had no concept of sanitation, plumbing, or garbage disposal.”
But unlike the starry-eyed Western observers of China who, enraptured by the glitz of Shanghai’s skyscrapers, have rushed to pronounce this the Chinese century, Buckley is mindful of the unfathomable human suffering on the periphery that underwrites the glamour of the governing elite who inhabit China’s metropolises.
As the worsening condition of dissidents from Tibet to Xinjiang demonstrates, Tibet’s fate now looks like a chilling preamble, rather than the coda, to the story of China’s ruthless race to the top.
COLONIZATION: DEGRADATION
Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia
by Michael Buckley, (Palgrave Macmillan)
