By Ellen Bork
In the six decades since
People’s Liberation Army troops invaded Tibet, China’s Communist Party has been
unable to destroy Tibetans’ national identity or devotion to their leader, the
Dalai Lama. It is not for lack of trying. In the quest to transform Tibet,
China has launched Marxist campaigns against religion and the Dalai Lama
himself; tortured monks, nuns, and lay people; created a permanent military
presence; confiscated rare minerals and resources; and inundated Tibet with
ethnic Han Chinese. In the diplomatic arena, Beijing claims Tibet as a “core
interest” and rebuffs foreign concerns as interference in China’s internal
affairs. In neighboring Nepal, Beijing is trying to end Kathmandu’s historic
role as a way station for Tibetan refugees on their way to India and to clamp
down on Nepal’s own well-established Tibetan refugee community.
Beijing has effectively shut down the
Sino-Tibetan Dialogue, an on-and-(mostly)-off series of meetings between envoys
of the Dalai Lama and the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department.
Without a meeting since 2010, and faced with the deteriorating situation inside
Tibet, the Dalai Lama’s envoys to the talks resigned their positions in June
2012.
Nevertheless, China’s policies have
provoked rather than crushed Tibetan resistance. In 2008, demonstrations, the
largest in two decades, spread from the capital, Lhasa, into eastern Tibetan
regions that had not previously been associated with unrest. These areas are
now at the epicenter of a series of self-immolations—primarily by Buddhist
monks, but also by average citizens. There were forty-four such suicides
between February 2009 and July 2012, according to the International Campaign
for Tibet. In response, China has poured more security forces into the area and
into monasteries. After two Tibetans from Eastern Tibet set themselves on fire
in Lhasa in late May, Chinese authorities detained hundreds of Tibetans and
barred foreign tourists.
As protests in Tibet
intensify, a new trend has emerged—nuns and everyday women are now among the
forty people who have self-immolated since last March.
Chinese leaders appear to be waiting for
the current Dalai Lama, now seventy-seven, to die so they can install their own
candidate in this position that has historically combined political and
spiritual authority within Tibet. Ironically, in 2007, Beijing’s ostensibly
atheist Communist government issued an order called “Management measures for
the reincarnation of living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism,” making approval of
the Dalai Lama subject to approval by China’s State Council. Beijing has
previously demonstrated the lengths to which it will go to control the Tibetan
Buddhist hierarchy. In 1995, Chinese security agents seized a six-year-old boy
identified as the Panchen Lama, the second most prominent Tibetan lama, and
substituted an imposter who, now grown, is taking on a more public role. This
imposter lama attended a Beijing-sponsored Buddhist conclave outside the
mainland for the first time last April, in Hong Kong.
Beijing’s strategy of occupation has been
complicated, however, by two important developments. First, in announcing plans
for his successor, the Dalai Lama has explicitly rejected a role for China’s
leaders in the selection process. He has stated that his reincarnation may be
found outside Tibet. In a statement of September 2011, the Dalai Lama outlined
scenarios that include the identification of his emanation in an adult before
his own death. Such a prospect, writes Columbia University scholar Robert
Barnett, is based on “important but neglected elements of Tibetan Buddhist
tradition, framed pragmatically to address the key weakness of the
reincarnation system,” i.e., the interim between the identification of the next
Dalai Lama in a young boy and his age of majority.
The Dalai Lama has also separated the
temporal and spiritual powers of his office. A committed democrat, the Dalai
Lama announced in March 2011 that he would transfer his political authority to
the elected Tibetan government in exile. In late 2010, eligible Tibetans living
in South Asia, Europe, and North America elected Lobsang Sangay, a former
senior fellow at Harvard Law School, as kalon tripa, effectively
prime minister. In August 2011, Sangay took the oath of office in Dharamsala,
India, the seat of the Central Tibetan Administration, for a five-year term.
Tibetans had elected the kalon tripatwice before, but Sangay is the
first to serve under a Tibetan Charter amended by the parliament to give his
office final executive authority. Predictably, the Chinese government denounced
Sangay and the exile government, calling the latter “a separatist political
clique that betrays the motherland, with no legitimacy at all.”
So far, Washington has not
responded to these momentous developments. Throughout its relationship with
Tibet, the US has formulated its policies with other interests in mind, such as
the war against Japan, the spread of Communism in Asia, and, today, the desire
to cooperate with Beijing. The momentous changes under way in the Tibetan exile
leadership will force Washington to evaluate its interests once again. Until
the 1940s, America didn’t play much of a role in the affairs of Tibet, an
isolated theocracy perched on “the roof of the world.” The country was regarded
as a buffer and a pawn in geostrategic struggles between Russia, China, and
British India, great-power rivalries that undermined Tibetan sovereignty.
At the outbreak of World War II, the US,
allied with the Nationalist Kuomintang against Japan, tacitly accepted China’s
claims over Tibet. Washington also sought access to Tibetan territory to
resupply Chiang Kai-shek’s forces after Japan had cut the Burma Road, an
important supply route. During this time, America reacted tepidly to Tibetan
efforts to gain international standing, although the country had governed
itself from 1912, after the Qing dynasty collapsed, until the Communist
takeover in the 1950s. Its people, language, religion, and culture are distinct
and it functioned as an independent state. Prior to that, Tibet had been part
of an imperial system when China was itself subject to foreign control. “Under
the domination of the Mongol rulers of the Yuan dynasty,” according to
historian Elliot Sperling, Tibet “was not attached by them to China, much less
made an ‘integral part’ of China.”
Today, Washington asserts that it never
recognized Tibet’s independence. That is true, so far as it goes. After the
Chinese invasion, according to historian Tsering Shakya’s The Dragon in
the Land of Snows, the US drafted a diplomatic memorandum, which it shared
with Great Britain, arguing that “the Tibetan people has the [same] inherent
right as any other to have the determining voice in its political destiny” and
proposing that “should developments warrant, consideration could be given to
recognition of Tibet as an independent State.”
But in Asia, as Shakya writes, there had
been “a shift in the balance of power that marked the beginnings of the demise
of Tibet as an independent state.” The imperial era was over. Japan was
defeated and Great Britain had withdrawn. India’s new leader, Jawaharlal Nehru,
wanted to establish close ties to Beijing on the basis of anti-imperialist
solidarity and told the US that it “could be most helpful by doing nothing and
saying very little now.” Great Britain had concluded that Tibet was independent
but would not say so publicly. “What we want to do,” Shakya quotes Britain’s
ambassador to the UN cabling the Foreign Office at the time of the Chinese
invasion, “is to create a situation which does not oblige us in practice to do
anything.”
At the time, Washington’s policy deferred
to Delhi and London, and no one came to Tibet’s defense, rhetorically or
otherwise. Leading powers believed they needed Beijing’s help to resolve the
Korean War, and that too became a reason not to help Tibet. Nevertheless,
Washington still had interests to pursue in Tibet. Facing invasion and
occupation alone, the Tibetans negotiated with Beijing on an agreement
purporting to guarantee their autonomy under Chinese rule. Washington now urged
the Dalai Lama not to sign. Later, the US launched a secret program to supply
and train Tibetan rebels, not to reverse the invasion, but at least to tie down
Chinese communism in the region. Eventually, the program ended as Washington
maneuvered to use China as a Cold War counterweight to the Soviet Union. Only
in 1978, however, almost thirty years after the invasion, did the US formally
adopt the position that Tibet belonged to China.
Washington might have conceded Tibet
entirely were it not for congressional pressure and the growth of an
international movement in support of the Dalai Lama. After the Cultural
Revolution ended, the first Western travelers in years reached Lhasa and more
information about oppressive conditions under Chinese rule reached the outside
world. Interest grew in finding a solution that would allow the Dalai Lama to
return to Tibet.
For his part, the Dalai Lama abandoned the
idea of seeking independence and traveled to foreign capitals, including to
Washington, where the US Congress gave him a forum for a major peace proposal
in 1987, and Oslo a few years later, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. George
H. W. Bush became the first president to meet the Dalai Lama, a practice that
has been followed by Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama. In 1997, the Clinton
administration adopted a congressional proposal for a senior State Department position
on Tibet. In 2002, Congress passed the Tibet Policy Act, which among other
things stipulates the central importance of preserving Tibet’s unique religious
and cultural heritage and promoting the Sino-Tibet Dialogue.
But American support for Tibet may have
peaked. In the past three years, Washington’s resolve has ebbed in the face of
Chinese intimidation, and President Obama’s decision to postpone his first
White House meeting with the Dalai Lama until after his first trip to China
gave cover to Denmark, Australia, and other countries that have made
concessions on Tibet under intense Chinese pressure.
Washington’s response to
the Dalai Lama’s succession plan and the consolidation of Tibetan democracy in
exile will have a profound impact. A religion’s tenets and inner workings may
seem to lie outside the purview of government policy, but on the grounds of
religious freedom alone the US should acknowledge the authority of the current
Dalai Lama and the process he has put in motion for transmitting his religious
authority. Although taking this step would elicit anger from the Chinese, it
would boost Tibetan morale and possibly calm tensions when the Dalai Lama dies.
With the Dalai Lama’s devolution of
political power, Washington stands at a crossroads in its relationship with the
democratically elected Tibetan government in exile. Support for this body is
consistent with the US commitment to self-determination that President Obama
reiterated in a speech to the British Parliament only last year, and can be undertaken
without reopening the issue of Tibet’s independence.
Even if Tibet belonged to the multi-ethnic
Chinese nation, as claimed by Communist propaganda, a precedent exists for the
US to maintain unofficial ties with a democratic government representing
territory claimed by Beijing. In 1979, President Carter abruptly planned to
break relations with Taiwan, abrogate the defense treaty, and withdraw American
troops. Congress responded by passing the Taiwan Relations Act, and
establishing unofficial relations and a defense commitment. Over time, as
Taiwan democratized, US policy incorporated support for the island’s
self-determination, stipulating that any resolution of its dispute with China
should be made “with the assent of the people of Taiwan.”
Washington’s response to the Tibetan
democracy project has implications for China’s political development as well.
Chinese dissidents believe that what is happening in Tibet is intimately
related to their own struggle. “To cast the current Tibetan crisis as a conflict
between Hans and Tibetans is misleading and superficial,” the writer and Nobel
Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo wrote one month after the 2008 rioting and
protests began. “The real and deeper issue,” according to Liu, who was jailed
later that year, “is a conflict between dictatorship and freedom.”
Liu and other intellectuals, activists, and
human rights lawyers wrote an open letter calling for an independent
investigation of events in Tibet, calling for a policy of tolerance and
rejecting Beijing’s vicious attacks on the Dalai Lama as reminiscent of
Cultural Revolution–era propaganda. Authorities in Beijing recognized the
threat that the inclusion of Tibet in the demands of the indigenous democracy
movement represented. Several human rights lawyers who offered to defend
Tibetans charged with crimes were later denied renewal of their licenses to
practice. In 2009, when the Open Constitution Initiative, a small independent
Chinese think tank, issued a report critical of the Communist Party’s Tibet
policies, the organization was soon shut down.
Contrary to perceptions in the West of a
monolithic Chinese nationalism, it is not only dissidents who depart from the
party line toward Tibet. Ordinary Chinese have displayed a growing interest in
Tibetan Buddhism as well as respect for the Dalai Lama. Many donate to Tibetan
schools and monasteries. Anti-Tibetan prejudice, built up by Communist
propaganda, is now being broken down by efforts like the online dialogue
between the Dalai Lama and Chinese citizens facilitated by the writer Wang
Lixiong. Before the Internet project was blocked, some twelve thousand Chinese
Internet users voted on respectful questions to be posed to the Dalai Lama
about his position on independence and autonomy, relations between Tibetans and
Han, and the future of his office.
Religious freedom and democracy in Tibet
and China are just two of the issues at stake for the US. Equally important in
geostrategic terms is the way China’s occupation affects India, with which the
US has launched a new and possibly deepening strategic partnership. India has
disputed borders with China and is greatly affected by China’s control of
Tibetan waters, which make up the largest supply of water for the Asian region.
Over six decades, America has subordinated Tibet
to other concerns. In the meantime, Tibet has become, in the Dalai Lama’s
words, “Hell on earth.” The Dalai Lama’s plans for his succession, and the
consolidation of a secular, democratic government in exile, present Washington
with a challenge.
Whether and how the US responds may
determine Tibet’s fate, as well as the credibility of American commitment to
freedom and self-determination around the world.
NOTE— Ellen Bork writes
about Tibet and US foreign policy as director of democracy and human rights at
the Foreign Policy Initiative.
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