In the early days of the Russian Revolution, starry-eyed Western sympathisers made a beeline for Moscow to report on the glories of the 'Soviet paradise'. Lenin memorably referred to them as 'useful idiots', and exploited their naiveté to channel communist propaganda to the West. One such 'idiot', the American journalist Lincoln Steffens, went on a guided tour of the Soviet Union in 1919, seeing enough to gushingly pronounce: "I have been over into the future, and it works." We know what happened to that future.
After Western intellectuals became disenchanted with the excesses of Stalin, a new generation of leftist idealists turned to Mao and the Chinese Revolution for ideological succour. Like Lenin, Mao understood that he could turn their blind enthusiasm to his advantage, and used them to propagate stories that were wildly at odds with reality. Edgar Snow's account of Mao's heroics during the Long March has now been proven to be fiction. Tibet, too, suffered grotesque distortions of fact at the hands of China's handpicked Western acolytes. Roma and Stuart Gelder's Timely Rain came out in the early 1960s, when Tibet was reeling from its first-ever famine, a result of misguided communist policies. Han Suyin's optimistically titled Lhasa: An open city was written in 1975, at a time when Tibet was as closed to the outside world as North Korea is today. These writings have long been discredited, even as the horrific human cost of Mao's 'socialist' experiments has been exposed and the Communist Party of China has become capitalist in all but name.
And then we have the recent writings of N Ram, the editor of the massively influential Indian newspaper The Hindu, whose unashamedly one-sided reporting of China's rule in Tibet has about it the same ring of fervent admiration and suspended disbelief. In his eagerness to extol the virtues of Chinese policies in Tibet, Ram eerily echoes Steffens. After a week's guided tour of Tibet as an official guest of China earlier this summer, Ram confidently proclaimed: "A quarter century from now, possibly earlier, Tibet will reach the status of a developed society." He then went on to try and prove this contention in two long opinion pieces in The Hindu, and a detailed article in the paper's sister publication, Frontline, all of which came out this past July. Aside from his tour, Ram's only sources for such rosy prognostication were a litany of official Chinese statistics, the accuracy of which are debatable at best: "[Tibet's] economy … grew by no less than 13.2 percent", "GDP climbed to a level of 29 billion yuan", "foodgrain production touching 920,000 tonnes", "school enrolment covers 96.5 percent of children", "unprecedented 1.5 billion yuan package of environment protection measures", and on and on. The only Tibetan Ram seemed to have interviewed just happens to be the vice-chairman of the government in Tibet.
Is Ram really as naïve as he appears? Driving through Tibet, he breezily observed: "A surprise is how easily you can connect to the outside world: the GPRS on your mobile phone (or PDA) works along much of the Lhasa-Xigaze highway. While browsing the Internet for news of the outside world or answering your email, you can catch a glimpse of how the bulk of Tibetans live." Obviously he must not have tried to search for 'Tiananmen' or 'Dalai Lama', or any of the countless other words and phrases that have been deemed subversive by the Chinese authorities, or he would have had first-hand experience of the Great Firewall of China, the most efficient and sophisticated Internet-censorship system in the world. Or, more worryingly, is Ram wilfully trying to deceive his readership?