Published by: World Tibet Network News, Tuesday, October 8, 1996

By Jane Macartney

LHASA, China, Oct 8 (Reuter) - An inaccessible, romantic and mystic Shangri-la where Chinese police torture Buddhist monks is a common Western view of Tibet.

A mysterious, terrifying land where lanterns are made from human skin, skulls are used for goblets and slavery is a recent memory is a widespread Chinese view of this far-flung outpost of Beijing's rule.

Somewhere in between may lie the truth.

"Tibet is constantly used as a Cold War icon by anti-Chinese opportunists," said Robbie Barnett, who runs the London-based Tibet Information Network that specialises in providing data on the human rights situation in Tibet.

For Tibetans prostrating themselves before their beloved Buddhist shrines, buying chunks of yak meat in the Lhasa market or cycling to a disco in the evening, such issues seem far removed from their daily lives.

Tibet's capital Lhasa, one of the world's highest cities at 3,684 metres (12,087 ft), has the air almost of a Wild West town that is rushing to catch up with the rest of the world.

The tap of hammers and roar of drills signal a construction boom that is transforming meadows and wasteland on the edges of the ancient city into a Chinese town like any other.

Many Western human rights groups and pro-Tibet activists cry foul. They speak of the sinicisation, the Han Chinese invasion of a land that belongs to Tibetans. They say that wealth is being concentrated in the hands of a few Han Chinese at the expense of the indigenous people and Tibetan culture is being annihilated.

Beijing says Tibetans in the region number 2.3 million while Han Chinese total fewer than 100,000. No figure is given for the military presence in the strategic region that borders India, with which Chinese troops have fought numerous skirmishes in the past 40-odd years and last went to war in 1962.

Official figures show an economy growing by about 10 percent a year, with rural per capita incomes around 600 yuan ($72) while urban incomes are about 2,000 yuan ($240). Both are still about half the national average but are increasing rapidly.

China chooses to compare the present standard of living with the traditional feudal system of serfs, many now officials, that persisted until well after People's Liberation Army troops marched into Tibet in 1950.

One Tibetan bus driver boasted of earning 100 yuan ($12) a day, a princely sum even for a Beijing cab driver.

Western activists prefer to heed the cause of the exiled Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibet and winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize for his peaceful struggle for autonomy for his homeland since he fled after an abortive uprising in 1959.

"There are a lot of former hippies getting into something they think is an easy ride," Barnett said.

"I do think things are enormously oversimplified," he said. "But fundamental disdain in Tibet for Chinese rule is so prevalent and of such long standing that in many cases it constitutes the basic context or tone within which other events have to be placed."

Tibetan exiles report a revival of traditional Tibetan ways in rural areas, pilgrims come freely to worship in Lhasa and commerce involving Tibetans apparently thrives on almost every Lhasa street corner.

In the main square in front of Lhasa's Jokhang temple, the Tibetan holy of holies, ragged pilgrims with matted hair prostrate themselves in medieval religious fervour and warrior merchants from the eastern Chamdo region mingle easily and chat in the marketplace with plainclothes Tibetan police.

To the visitor, there is little immediate sense of the anti-Chinese tension that prompted angry monks to riot against Chinese rule in the late 1980s.

There is little doubt Beijing would move swiftly to crush political opposition, as it does elsewhere in China. Officials say they are determined not to permit any infringement of Chinese sovereignty and warn repeatedly of the threat from what they call the "Dalai Lama splittist clique."

"Tibetans are resigned to it and accept the way things are," said one foreign resident who declined to be identified.

"They put up with the situation," he said. "There's enough control here that it would cut off anything before it got started."

But any military presence is not overt. Few soldiers are visible in the streets, apparently keeping to their barracks on the city outskirts, as in other Chinese towns, where they can be seen planting trees and whitewashing walls.

While photographs of the exiled Dalai Lama are nowhere to be seen following a ban earlier this year, pictures of Tibet's second holiest monk, the late 10th Panchen Lama, and his seven-year-old official reincarnation are everywhere.

Rural Tibetan homes that in the late 1980s were required to fly the red Chinese national flag now appear free to fly just their own colourful prayer pennants.

Human rights groups say dissidents and monks languish in jail for demanding independence. Many Tibetans appear to have more immediate concerns, such as making enough money from new business opportunities to buy a colour television, build their own home or send their children to school.

Pro-Tibet activists in the West paint a much harsher picture of life in Shangri-la under Chinese rule, and a MiG fighter on display at the foot of the legendary Potala Palace, towering over the capital, could be seen as a symbol of what they would call Chinese occupation.

But shades of grey exist.

"One of the great misfortunes of the Tibetans has been that they have attracted a number of westerners or exiles who have simplified the issues and given the impression that Tibetans are averse to development," Barnett said.

"Most people in Tibet want modernisation but feel they are under foreign rule."