Forty years ago, as his followers revolted against Chinese occupation, the Dalai Lama fled into exile in India. Mark Abley explores the agony of Tibet in an essay

MARK ABLEY
The Gazette

MONTREAL, Sunday 7 March 1999

On Wednesday morning, this year as every year for more than a decade, a busload of men and women will leave Montreal and head for Ottawa. There, joining busloads from Toronto and elsewhere in Ontario, they will take part in an annual ritual: speaking, chanting, listening, praying, banner-waving, denouncing. The RCMP will doubtless keep a close eye on these people as they gather on Parliament Hill and march outside the Chinese embassy. Still, violence is improbable: the protesters will be Tibetans, or their friends and sympathizers, and Tibetans are famous for peace, not war.

Despite its yearly familiarity, this week's March 10 protest will have an unusually sad ring. How could it be otherwise, given that almost 50 years have passed since China's invasion of Tibet, and 40 years since the Tibetan people rose in heartfelt protest against the Chinese occupation? Almost 40 years ago, the Dalai Lama fled his palace, his capital city, Lhasa, his country. Forty years: long enough for the world to turn upside down.

And it has. Forty years ago, before Lester B. Pearson and John F. Kennedy were elected to power, before fax machines and home computers were invented, before a human being had orbited the Earth or set foot on the moon, before the end of the British Empire or the birth of the Parti Quebecois - 40 years ago, more than half an average lifetime, the Dalai Lama still lived in Tibet.

Not many people in the outside world knew much about him or his nation. Tibet was said to be a Buddhist haven in central Asia, governed by what authors often called "the young god-king," and ringed by some of the highest mountains in the world.

Hollywood, with its enticing image of a Shangri-la beyond a Lost Horizon, aided and abetted the idea. As far as awareness of Tibet was concerned, that was about it. Plus the odd yeti, of course. The image was distorted, though the mountains are real enough. But it survived for a couple of reasons: a powerful Western urge to believe in exotic idylls, and a powerful Tibetan urge to be left alone.

Call it ignorance or innocence or short-sightedness, call it what you will, but a couple of generations ago, most Tibetans genuinely seem to have believed that their universe would continue to unfold according to its own rhythms. The idea that their independence would be destroyed, their temples ransacked, their cities overrun, their entire culture besieged, must have appeared so unlikely as to lie beyond worry.

Butter mountains and surly mastiffs, wild azaleas and rhododendrons, sand paintings and nomadic caravans, bitter infighting in the monasteries: it was a world so utterly different from that of its great neighbour, China, that few Tibetans could have imagined the long subservience to follow.

But was Tibet part of China?

At the start of our dying century, many Chinese would have been startled at the notion. In his recent book Demystifying Tibet, an American historian of China, Lee Feigon, examined maps created in the Qing dynasty, which ruled the empire from Beijing's Forbidden City as late as 1911. Most of these maps showed Taiwan, Manchuria and Korea as part of China - but not Tibet.

"Before 1911," Feigon adds, "the well-known Chinese nationalist writer Zhang Binglin argued that Tibet and Mongolia were not part of China, though strangely enough he maintained that Japan and Korea were."

Feigon's book reveals how deeply - and, for Tibetans, how tragically - their country became implicated in the power struggles of imperialism during a period when imperialism was not yet a dirty word. History, the very thing that is absent from those romantic Hollywood visions of a lost idyll in the mountains, played Tibet a dirty trick.

In the late 19th century, history made central Asia a skirmishing ground for two expanding empires: the Russian and the British. China, understandably sensitive to foreign insult in the wake of the Opium Wars, feared that Tibet might fall under the domination of outsiders. The idea - the fiction, to be blunt - grew up that Tibet naturally belonged to China.

Sun Yat-sen, the great nationalist leader of the early 20th century, wanted China to become a "Republic of Five Nationalities." Tibetans were among the five. But this was not some early version of enlightened multiculturalism. On the contrary, Sun Yat-sen thought that Tibetans should be assimilated in a larger Chinese entity. In his own words, "We must facilitate the dying out of all names of individual peoples inhabiting China, i.e., Manchus, Tibetans, etc. â We must unite all races in a single cultural and political whole."

On a practical level, even so, Tibet remained stubbornly isolated, stubbornly different. The Everyman's Encyclopedia of 1932 described it as "a country in central Asia, nominally a dependency of China. â Once dependent on China, the real rulers of Tibet are the lamas, whose authority is vested in the Dalai Lama at Lhasa. â In 1917 a Chinese general, Peng Jih-Sheng, took advantage of a frontier incident to make war on Tibet, but was decisively defeated. Since then Tibet has thrown off China's yoke, and ... preserves her independence."

But the world turned upside down.

In 1949, Mao Tse-Tung and his upstart Communists triumphed in their long war to take over China. Determined to erase the humiliations of the past, Mao sensed a weakness in Tibet, that nominal dependency; and his battle-hardened army invaded.

Through the 1950s, the young Dalai Lama stayed in Tibet, becoming more and more a prisoner in a gilded cage; then, on March 17, 1959, a week after his people rose up in defiance, he seized the chance to escape across the Himalayas to India.

Whereupon the darkness fell. Darkness so terrible that words turn dry on the page: thousands of monasteries razed to the ground, only a handful spared; massive imprisonment, torture, murder. Language fails. My language fails.

In his heartbreaking book Fire Under the Snow: Testimony of a Tibetan Prisoner, Palden Gyatso describes how Chinese officials interrogated an old monk. Through an interpreter, one of the officials lifted a maroon gown from the monk's pile of possessions:

"'Where did this come from?' he asked sternly.

"'Wool,' replied the monk.

"The Chinese officer was perplexed by the simplicity of this answer. He assumed that something must have been lost in translation and looked toward the interpreter. The interpreter repeated the question.

"'Where did this come from?'

"'A sheep,' said the monk, who was beginning to cry....

"His answers were incorrect. He had failed to take into account the labour of the serfs. According to dialectical materialism and the theory of class causation, the monk should have replied that the source of the gown was the labour of the exploited serfs."

Palden Gyatso spent 33 years in prison. He was repeatedly kicked, punched, beaten and tortured. The instruments of his torture included cigarette lighters, whips, thumbcuffs, even electric cattle prods. He fled to India in 1992.

The devastation of what the Chinese like to call "liberated Tibet" wasn't all a matter of policy. Some of it was due to nothing worse than misunderstanding and insensitivity. The Chinese, large numbers of whom think of Tibetans as a backward people, were convinced that their agricultural expertise would benefit the ignorant locals. So they tried to stamp out nomadic herding, and insisted that wheat be grown in place of the native barley. The resulting famine surprised them. But they weren't the ones who died.

* * *

Why am I going over all this old ground? After Martin Scorsese's Kundun, after Seven Years in Tibet (or Two Hours of Brad Pitt), you probably know much of it already.

Compared with other oppressed chunks of the world - East Timor and Kurdistan, say - Tibet is no longer obscure. Writing about it, I can count on at least a minimal understanding; I no longer have to say, as I did in the 1980s, "Tibet, a Buddhist land now under Chinese rule." Unfortunately, that bare description remains true.

There was a brief period last year when, under the bright lights of Hollywood, Tibet was even sexy. I'm told that in Prague, where disaffected young people no longer give a damn about Czech politics, a "Free Tibet" movement thrives. Thanks in part to the commitment of American celebrities like Richard Gere, Adam Yauch and Harrison Ford, thanks also to the integrity and charisma of the Dalai Lama and the sheer rightness of his cause, Tibet has won the war of public relations.

It has the movies. It has the songs. It has the books and articles and videos and Web sites - and yet I can't help wondering if any of them have changed a damn thing.

The masters of Beijing are impervious to Richard Gere (sometimes I can't help admiring them for it). Over the next few years, they will no doubt continue to do what they've been doing since the 1960s: quash all traces of dissent within Tibet, tear down its old buildings, plunder its natural resources, encourage more and more Han Chinese settlement in Lhasa and other Tibetan cities, and wait for the Dalai Lama to die. China's rulers are not always subtle, but they can be extremely patient.

The Dalai Lama is now in his early 60s. From the innocence and isolation of his youth, he has grown into a political and spiritual statesman, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader who enjoys respect in most other countries. His Tibetan government-in-exile doubtless includes other people of strength and wisdom, perhaps other potential leaders, but none who commands the attention of the world. Or the devotion of a people.

And there's the rub. The Dalai Lama's predecessor, or previous incarnation, died in 1933; the present one was only 2 years old when traveling monks discovered him in a remote rural area in the late '30s. During the crucial years of his boyhood, Tibet was weakly governed, scarcely modernized and victimized by factional feuding.

Since the 1980s, the Dalai Lama has made efforts to encourage alternative leaders. In historic and religious terms, other lamas besides the Dalai were crucially important. But, as the Chinese fully realize, no contemporary leader has emerged who appears strong, intelligent, honest and versatile enough to transcend all the factions, inside and outside Tibet, and to bear the yoke of a people's aspirations.

To put it in Western terms, Tibetans feel so powerless, so helpless, that they often seem to be yearning for a Messiah. But the only Messiah on offer is the Dalai Lama - or, conceivably, the latest incarnation of the other great leader of historic Tibet: the Panchen Lama.

Ah yes, the Panchen Lama.

Among the demands that protesters will make on March 10 is the release of a boy named Gedhun Choekyi Nyima - the world's youngest political prisoner. In 1995, based on news he had gathered from inside Tibet, the Dalai Lama proclaimed the 6-year-old boy the next Panchen Lama.

Soon after, the Chinese came and arrested the boy. He has not been heard from since. The Chinese then picked another little boy and named him Panchen Lama. He is being educated, if that's the word, under Beijing's tutelage.

Foreign countries, including Canada, have asked for information about Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and have pleaded for his release. When Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, visited Tibet last fall, she asked to see the boy. The request was denied. Is he even alive?

And quietly, far from the eyes of the world (for China does not like foreign cameras or journalists in Lhasa), the repression continues. As recently as January, the Tibet Information Group in London reported that an 800-year-old nunnery, the Rakhor, was largely destroyed last year. The Rakhor had somehow survived the virtual extermination of religious buildings in the 1960s. Two years ago, 82 nuns lived there; none remain. The nuns' crime had been to remain silent when officials questioned them, and to leave "patriotic re-education" exam papers blank.

A familiar story. But Tibetans have been patient, so patient, endlessly patient. In the past decade, they've watched the Baltic states and other outposts of the Soviet Union regain a lost independence. They are watching now as Indonesia, racked by economic sickness, publicly talks of allowing East Timor its freedom. "When," they wonder, "when, when will it be our turn?"

The hard-headed answer is that only two things would help Tibet. One is to devise a means by which an unexpectedly enlightened government in Beijing could compromise on Tibet without seeming to lose face. The Dalai Lama is ready to compromise; against the wishes of many exiled Tibetans, he has long expressed a willingness to renounce the idea of full independence if only China would allow Tibet genuine autonomy. Echoing Deng Xiaoping's description of Hong Kong's place in China, the Dalai Lama even spoke of "one country, two systems." But Beijing, as always, said "No."

Tibet's other hope is for China itself to fall into chaos. Chaos would perhaps allow the empire's restive minorities (the Muslims of Xinjiang in the far west, the Tibetans, the Inner Mongolians) to rise up against decades of repression.

Chaos, however, is exactly what the West does not want. For all its fine words of sympathy about the plight of Tibetans, for all its noble sentiments toward the Dalai Lama, the West has a tremendous stake in keeping China strong and intact.

And so we conspire to turn Tibet from a nation into a myth - not a subject but an object, a commodity we pity and admire. Last night, for example, a group of monks from the Drikung Kagyu Institute in northern India was scheduled to perform at Massey Hall in Toronto. I have the press release in front of me now: "The Mystical Music & Dance of Tibet," part of a Royal Bank-sponsored season of international events.

The press release speaks of Massey Hall being "transformed into a Tibetan Buddhist monastery through the monks' authentic performance of the tantric practices." It says that their music and dance allow the audience "to experience Tibet's culture in its full richness, integrity and splendour."

I don't think so.

A culture exists in its full richness not in some foreign concert hall, but amid the grit and grime, the dogs and dust, of the country where it was born. A few hours of tantric practices, even authentic ones, are not enough to transform a Toronto stage into a Buddhist monastery. Indeed, how authentic can the performance be if its prime aim is to create a lavish spectacle for the entertainment of a paying crowd?

I don't blame the monks. Better that by touring the world, they should raise enough money to keep their monastery alive in India - their real monastery, not the fake one of Massey Hall. I don't blame the audience, either. The issue goes beyond blame.

It's really a question of our longing. We need Tibet to be what we imagine it to be. Those who love it are often guilty of making it seem unreal; unreal, because unblemished. In a broken world, we cherish the image of wholeness that a vision of Tibet conveys.

But what I hope, what I hope with all my heart, is that by some miracle of history, Tibet is given a chance to make mistakes again.

Then, if we care to watch, we'll probably be disappointed. Disillusioned, even. Tibet will have left the domain of myth and will have re-entered history; and in the realm of history, people make serious mistakes.

Now, on the other hand, Tibet is so helpless that Tibet can do no wrong. Tibet has become a pitiful ideal. Secretly, we like it that way. So does China.

[ Homepage ] [ NewsRoom ]



This site is maintained and updated by The Office of Tibet, the official agency of His Holiness His Holiness the Dalai Lama in London. This Web page may be linked to any other Web sites. Contents may not be altered.
Last updated: 8-Mar-99