Published by: World Tibet Network News Issue ID: 97/10/23

Globe and Mail: Canada's National Newspaper

Editorial page

Wednesday, October 22, 1997

HONG Kong media outlets have for years displayed a weakness for self-censorship. Rather than risk angering Communist Party politicians in Beijing with unpopular views on contemporary Chinese history, human rights, democracy, freedom of religion and self-determination, they've chosen to sweep those views under the carpet. It was fairly predictable, therefore, that Hong Kong's private film distributors, now under China's political authority, chose not to screen Hollywood's latest films on Tibet's struggle against Chinese domination.

That's not to say the distributors buckled on Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt, and Martin Scorsese's coming Kundun, without the help of hints from Beijing. The foreign ministry's notoriously knife-tongued spokesman, Shen Guofang, announced late last month that the films would be banned in mainland China because they distort history and sing the praises of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual and political leader of Tibet. But Hong Kong is supposed to enjoy autonomy in such decisions about film distribution, not to mention free speech.

The Chinese foreign ministry also said it would retaliate against Walt Disney for producing Kundun. The film is a Hollywoodized chronicle of the Tibetan resistance against China in the 1950s, which was assisted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Seven Years in Tibet, meanwhile, is a rendition of an obnoxious Austrian mountain climber's encounter with Buddhism and the young Dalai Lama in the lead-up to China's invasion in 1949. The resistance followed the invasion and the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959.

There's no bigger thorn in the Chinese side than Tibet, the tiny Himalayan autonomous region whose popularity in Hollywood and worldwide, as well as its religiously motivated resistance to political domination and desire for self- determination, rubs atheist and chauvinist Beijing the wrong way. Beyond Beijing, though, Tibetan independence is a taboo subject for many Chinese of Han origin. And threats to the cultural and territorial integrity of the Chinese motherland, whether Tibetan,Taiwanese, Muslim, or from the Southeast Asian Spratly Islands, which are also claimed by China, are fiercely resisted by Chinese nationalists of all kinds. Most of all by the dictatorship in Beijing.

It's this chauvinist Han nationalism that makes China the bad guy in the eyes of Tibetans and their sympathizers. And there's no question that in Seven Years in Tibet, the Chinese are the bad guys, portrayed as conniving, strident and ruthless.

All the more reason for Hong Kong to have tolerated the films -- to show that the experimental, free Chinese city-state can take the criticism and refute it in open debate. But no such luck. Despite the protests of Hong Kong liberals, Hong Kong film distributors buckled under pressure from their overseers to the north.

There's a certain irony in one special Chinese region, Hong Kong, failing to identify with the experience of another, Tibet. But then again, magnanimity and brotherly love have rarely been characteristics of those who feel pressure bearing down upon them from above.