Song & Silence

A traveler on China’s southwest borders in areas near Tibet is flooded with images of happy, singing and dancing primitives—the official view of ethnic identity sanctioned by the state and marketed to domestic and international tourists. But not all of China’s ethnic peoples recognize themselves in these primitivized, infantilized and often exoticized images. China’s radically different policies towards ethnic monks reviving their religious institutions in Yunnan and Tibet have created two different worlds living side by side, only a few hundred miles apart. While Tibetan monks and nuns have been jailed, tortured, and sometimes executed for their ethnic and religious activism, a smaller group of ethnic Tai Lue Buddhist monks in the neighboring province of Yunnan are given significantly greater freedoms to do more or less the same things.

Both Tibet and the region known as Sipsongpanna (in Chinese, Xishuangbanna) were formerly independent or semi-independent states in which the majority groups were Buddhist. Both groups are repeatedly told by government officials, including some of their own ethnicity, that indigenous religious traditions are “backward,” and that to attain modernization requires cutting off ties with the past and assimilating to secularized mainstream China.

But the similar rhetoric does not lead to similar policies. While Tibetan monks who wish to study in temples outside of China are strictly forbidden to do so, teenage Tai Lue monks go to Thai temples each year with official Chinese visas and government approval. While Tibetans who have contacts with external Buddhist organizations are denounced as puppets of a “Dalai Lama clique,” Tai Lues regularly invite prominent senior Buddhist monks from Burma, where they are honored by thousands of Tai Lue pilgrims.

In the past twenty years, Tai Lues have excavated, revived and reinvented their centuries-old Buddhist institutions. They have rebuilt and renovated 550 Buddhist temples in Sipsongpanna villages, and ordained thousands of boys as novices and monks. The novices, boys as young as nine or 10 years old, study the formerly banned classical Tai Lue script and scriptures in temple classrooms. The senior monks who are their teachers print Buddhist sutras and textbooks out on Macintosh computers owned by the temples, using a Tai Lue font developed in Thailand.

What is more, in the late 1990s, these same monks found a way to make the old written language and ethnic identity “cool” to teenage Tai Lues. As monks in Southeast Asia often do, the Sipsongpanna monks held pop concerts in which rock stars from Sipsongpanna, Burma, Laos and Thailand were pressed by chanting, happy crowds to “sing in Tai.” Some of the Tai Lue pop songs advocated for language use and environmental protection—rapid overdevelopment in Sipsongpanna has led to the wholesale destruction of the rainforests.

Most of this activity would be unthinkable in Tibet, where an ambitious grassroots program that aimed to rebuild Tibetan Buddhist institutions led to a brutal crackdown and the imprisonment of hundreds of monks and nuns in the mid-1990s. Tibetan young people are forbidden to enter Buddhist temple grounds or to own religious objects. According to work forthcoming by Columbia University’s Robbie Barnett, monks and nuns are not even allowed onto university grounds.

Tai Lues have not accomplished their ethnic revival without friction. The abbot of their main temple, Khruba Zhaum, said to me once in passing, “Every time the government looks at me, they think of Tibet. But Tibet is not the same.” Clearly. But I have yet to hear of any political prisoners in Sipsongpanna. There are three key reasons why Tai Lues have a different experience than their Tibetan Buddhist brethren: first, because of the flexibility offered by their crossborder connections; second, because Tai Lues have never demanded independence and have regularly ceded political ground when pushed to do so by the state; and third, because given persistent international criticism, China needs at least a few groups to hold up as an example of success in managing ethnic religion.

There are only one million Tai Lues in China, and most of these live in Sipsongpanna, on the southern tip of China’s southwest Yunnan province. Yunnan, a popular tourist destination because of its temperate weather, striking mountains and ethnic diversity, borders Tibet to the north, and Burma, Laos and Vietnam to the west and south. Sipsongpanna (the Tai Lue name means “twelve rice fields,” a reference to its past political structure) is hilly, subtropical and laid-back. Tai Lues are the dominant ethnic group in Sipsongpanna, and 13 other officially-recognized ethnic groups also live in the prefecture.

However, while a small group within Chinese borders, these Tai Lues are a member of a much larger Tai-Kadai language family that spreads across upland Southeast Asia and southwest China, numbering millions of people. Sipsongpanna has close linguistic, cultural and historical links with people in northern Laos, northeast Thailand, and parts of Burma’s Shan State. I conducted field research in Sipsongpanna from 1997-98, while studying the Tai Lue spoken and written language. I have supplemented this research with numerous additional visits and contacts over the following years.

Most ethnic regions of China have shared some similar experiences. In the years before the founding of the PRC, Tibetans and Tais were both promised the right to secede and declare independence after the nation was established. Both had their promises reneged upon, and instead were given the nominal autonomy that has turned out in both cases to be no autonomy at all. Both faced active government intervention in shaping their official and public identities. During the Cultural Revolution, both experienced the desecration of religious sites, forced secularization of monks, persecution of respected elders, and the wholesale destruction of temples. In the late 1990s, I met one young monk who carried around in his robes a treasured slip of paper on which his uncle had written a list of sacred sites that had been desecrated or destroyed.

Faced with government repression during the 1960s, many Tai Lues packed their belongings and slipped across the borders (often little more than a fence) to stay with Tai Lue cousins in Burma, Laos and Thailand. These flexible borders gave people who would have been dissidents a safe space to wait out the political storm.

Today, the ease of travel and contacts across the borders is beneficial in a second way for young Tai Lues who are interested in not only reviving the past, but in coming up with ways to be ethnic and modern. Today, as all four countries have lifted many restrictions on crossborder travel in order to promote trade, some of those who fled are returning. Young Chinese Tai Lues looking to retrieve their past visit frequently, bringing back texts and information that were destroyed in China. While Chinese official rhetoric often locates minority ethnic identity of any kind in the primitive past, and urges ethnic minorities to modernize by learning Chinese ways and leaving their traditions and languages behind, Tai Lues who travel to Thailand speak of seeing a country that has kept their language and religious traditions alive, and modernized anyway.

Lessons learned on trips to Thailand and Burma have fueled many late-night debates between younger and elder Tai Lues about how best to proceed in the future. These debates, some of which participants spoke to me about, have drawn on indigenous strategies that ethnic minorities have developed over the years to manage their dominators. This cultural strategizing is a second reason why Tai Lues appear to have ducked some of the harsher consequence meted out in Tibet. Tai Lue nobility joined the Communist Party during the revolution, and many high-ranking noblemen were appointed to positions in the local government after “liberation” in 1955. Activists in Sipsongpanna have been careful not to push beyond the limits of official tolerance, and the experiences of Tibetans have shown what those limits may be.

Thus, while Tibetan monks and laypeople have organized pro-independence demonstrations and faced harsh punishments for doing so, Tai Lues have been careful to never call for independence. Some of this is practical: as one Tai Lue activist put it, “Of course, we’ve discussed [independence]. Do you think we don’t know what happens in the rest of the world? But if Sipsongpanna were an independent nation, we would be like Laos or Nepal....No one would care what happens to us.”

Another said that the success of the Tai Lue religious and cultural revival has owed something to the care they have taken to avoid conflict: “We are not confrontational.” Conversations in the late 1990s about forming an organization of former monks to promote Tai Lue cultural revival led to a collective decision to not do so, after some Tai Lue elders pointed out what happened to similar kinds of groups in Tibet.

Such strategies may also owe something to the lessons learned during Chinese imperialism. During much of Sipsongpanna’s past, a Chinese official and a Tai Lue prince each governed the region from separate quarters—the Chinese official from his fortified barracks, the Tai Lue prince from his wooden palace. In this period, Tai Lues found, as Hsieh Shih-chung observes, that “The best strategy was to declare oneself a vassal first, and then do as one pleased.”

During research into Tai Lue Buddhist storytelling, I saw this done on numerous occasions—one memorable one in particular. Once, about halfway through an epic performance of a Buddhist legend to which thousands had come to see, the Communist Party Secretary, the highest-ranking party official in the region, was ushered into the courtyard. Slightly the worse for the many rounds of toasts he had shared at other village feasts, and astonished at the presence of a foreign woman with a tape recorder, he began to question me, loudly, in Chinese, about my presence and purpose there. The circle tensed.

Then the oral storyteller began to weave into his narrative some improvised words of praise for the leadership of the Communist Party, calling down blessings on the Party Secretary. The elders sitting across the circle leaned over and said, loudly, to the Party Secretary in accented Chinese, “He is praising you! He’s saying good things about you!” Pleased, the Secretary thanked them, folded his hands in a formal greeting to the singer, and then reeled out of the performance to go to another feast. By wining and dining official delegations and bestowing praise and gifts on them, Tai Lues gave face to Chinese conquerors while maintaining a parallel, subterranean political structure which was where local politics took place.

The Tai Lue ethnic revival has been built on many such small instances: a strategic combination of face-giving and the inch-by-inch retaking of political ground lost in the past. When ordered to stop doing something by the state—for instance, in 1999 they were instructed to stop holding rock concerts on temple grounds—they quickly back down. But their flexibility and tactful persistence has paid off over time—in 2004, they were authorized to construct a concert venue where performances could be held indoors.

Today, many of China’s ethnic peoples face similar challenges. Chinese government policies, though framed as support for economic development, has led to massive in-migration of Han Chinese into all of China’s contested borderlands, resulting in a loss of economic opportunities to local minorities and creating new threats to ethnic language and culture via a flood of Chinese-language mass media. The construction of large-scale infrastructure projects—in Tibet, a railway; in Yunnan, a superhighway linking Kunming to Thailand—may have brought some benefits to border regions. However, such projects have also sped up Chinese resource extraction from the borderlands, and have caused destruction of ethnic villages, destruction of historic and sacred sites, and displacement of impoverished ethnic peoples.

Hence, the third reason why Tai Lues and some other southwestern ethnic groups appear to get off a little more lightly than Tibetans. To minimize open dissent as it dominates and incorporates the ethnic borderlands, China has gradually developed a carrot-and-stick policy. The unspoken message goes something like this: Behave “well,” like the Tai Lue, Miao, Naxi and other southwestern groups, by never engaging in open critique of state policy and never demanding genuine autonomy or independence, and you will be rewarded. These rewards may include economic prosperity, flattering depictions and praise in official media, and a little extra political and social space on the ground.

But behave “badly,” like Tibetans and Uighurs, by organizing pro-independence demonstrations and resisting state control, and you will be severely punished with imprisonment, torture, even execution.

The Tai Lue are a small group, and the extent of their ethnic and religious revival may be anomalous, but like other ethnic peoples on China’s contested borderlands, they know the cost of every potential action and weigh it carefully before acting. No ethnic group in China dares to engage in any unofficial cultural or political activity without calculating how their actions might figure in the Tibet equation.