Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Meeting Hutong School and Tibet

Yesterday I finally got to go to the Hutong School itself and start to figure out what's what. Jan is still not there, so I'm not really starting the internship, but I got to meet a lot of the other students/interns and some of the teachers. I still have to arrange my Classes because they will be private lessons, and I'm still not sure what time they will be held or how often.

More interestingly, I went out to dinner with some of the other students and one of the English teachers. The teacher was really interesting because she is originally from Tibet. I am not positive, but I think that she must be Tibetan and not Han Chinese.

Anyway, this teacher has a lot to say because she comes from an autonomous region and she studied politics in University. At first, she insisted that she liked teaching as opposed to doing something related to her major because it is more fun, but eventually she admitted that the real reason she is teaching is because taking a teaching job was the only way that she would be allowed to stay in Beijing. The Chinese have what she described as a "stupid" system in which everyone has an ID that says where they are from and where they are allowed to go; unless they have a job that validates their living away from home, they are not allowed to leave their original province.

Naturally, once we all discovered that she was from Tibet, we began asking questions about China's treatment of Tibet and what she thought of Tibetan independence. As someone whose family lived through the Communists rough handling of Tibet, she had strong feelings about the questions. Nevertheless, she is not so unhappy with the Chinese that she supports independence. In her opinion, if Tibet became free from China, then it would just become dominated by another nearby country like India. The way things are now, the Tibetan government is technically autonomous. The Party only gets involved through capital investments and maybe back room type dealings--perhaps these types of involvement show a greater control than direct rule, but for the time being things are working out reasonably well.

Admittedly, the past was much more of a problem. We talked mainly about the Great Leap Forward. The teacher told us that a huge percentage of people in Tibet starved at that time, and that some even resorted to cannibalism. She started to talk about how family members tried to save their children, but we didn't get very far into that conversation.

The most telling part of our discussion was when she told us that during the Great Leap the government collected crops from the peasants--allegedly to repay their debt to Russia. However, the government really was not paying any debt (I may be wrong about the date, but it was around that time that Stalin died and China stopped its involvement with Russia). Meanwhile, the crops that were collected just rotted while the people starved! The governor(?) of Tibet feared for his life at that time. It seems that people threatened to eat him.

What strikes me most is that none of the people in Beijing even knew about these problems in the provinces. Beijingren only get their news through government sources, so the censorship is severe and people are kept ignorant of the governments dirty dealings in its own country. Today the censorship reaches the internet, and it's hard to say what people know, and more importantly what they believe. It seems that the only reliable source of information about Chinese history are the people who experienced it first hand.