Traveling Can Make Current Events More Current

One of the great joys of travel is going to places where history has happened.  The Pyramids, Machu Pichu, Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois, the Capitol building in Washington, etc.  Seeing places like these can help you better understand history, as well as giving you a personal connection to events in the past.

But if you are lucky, travel can also take you to places where things are happening now or may happen in the future.  Seeing such places can make current events more interesting and personal and maybe even more understandable.  We were lucky enough to be in West Berlin and East Germany in 1979 and 1982, so when the protests arose and the Wall came down in 1989, we had an appreciation of what was happening that we might not have otherwise had. 

In November of 2018, we were in Paris when the Yellow Vest protests started.  While the protests did not affect our visit, we heard about them from the woman Jennie had lived with in 2004 while she studying in Paris.  We visited the woman the day after the protests started, and she talked about the problems she had trying to get back to Paris to see us (she was visiting her daughter in the countryside) because of roads being blocked by protestors.  When we got home and as the protests went on week after week, we could identify places we had been and we thought of Jennie’s “host mother,” which made the stories more interesting and personal to us.

Which brings me to our visit to Tibet in September of 2015.  I wrote a little about that visit here, when I compared the banners we saw in Tibet with the billboards we had seen in East Germany in 1979 and 1982.¹  But now, when I read about what is happening in Sinkiang and how the Chinese government is trying to control the Uighurs there, I think about our visit to Tibet, and I see the similarities between what we saw in Tibet and what I am reading about in Sinkiang.

Reports from Sinkiang talk about little police stations or fortified outposts every 250 meters.  I remember seeing these all over Lhasa.  (I would show you what they looked like, but I wasn’t so silly as to take a picture.) 

When we were in Tibet, we had a local guide in addition to the tour guide we had for the whole trip.  After we went through all the security at the airport in Lhasa (it was like going from one country to another), our main tour guide said that the extra security in Tibet was necessary because of the worry about “terrorism” (her word).  “Terrorism” is one of the reasons Beijing gives for what it is doing in Sinkiang.

On our bus ride from the airport to the hotel, we had a police officer traveling with us.  The tour guide said this was to make sure the bus did not exceed the speed limit.  I wonder.

The local tour guide was very cautious about things she said.  When she mentioned the Dali Lama, she called him the “former Dali Lama” (on the first day; she dropped “former” on the second day).  She noted that all of the extra flowers we were seeing were to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Tibet Autonomous Region, though she did not seem too enthusiastic about it.  She identified the 1951 so-called Monument to the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet only when somebody asked her what it was.  

When one of our group asked her privately if she had been able to travel, she said she had been to Beijing and Chengdu, but that was all.  People from Tibet could not get passports for foreign travel.

Around the plaza in front of the Jokhang Temple in central Lhasa, there were police on the roofs of the buildings.  (Once again, I did not take pictures.)

While I can’t be sure how similar Tibet and Sinkiang are, I have the feeling that having been in Tibet helps me better understand what is happening in Sinkiang. 
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¹ They also had those yellow on red signs in Vietnam, too.  Our tour guide there in 2017 called them “propaganda signs.”

Comments

[Susan Allen]

I also remember that I asked our local tour guide in Tibet if she celebrated the Chinese holiday- moon cakes,etc. They were everywhere in Tibet but that was Chinese (Han) tradition and she said no.