Such issues were on Zhu’s mind. That came clear when he answered a question on why China’s leaders reserve the right to use force in Taiwan by citing Abraham Lincoln as a model leader who used force to keep his country unified. And it was even more obvious when Chinese officials got so rattled by “Free Tibet” protests that they threatened Zhu would boycott a privately hosted gala dinner Friday unless Tibetan activist Lodi Gyari did not attend. To defuse the “awkward” situation, Gyari didn’t go.
It is Tibet, China’s actual bleeding wound, that bears the most similarity to Kosovo. Populated by a discrete ethnic minority that was once promised autonomy only to see it brutally revoked, Tibet is the one human-rights issue that China simply cannot be rid of. President Jiang Zemin encountered it again on his own badly timed European trip in late March. After the indignity of landing in Rome just as NATO warplanes were taking off nearby, Jiang went to Bern, Switzerland, where whistling, jeering protesters ambushed him with free tibet banners unfurled from rooftops. “You have lost a good friend,” the shaken Chinese visitor told his Swiss hosts.
More than human rights is at stake. Like the Balkans in Europe, Tibet occupies an Asian fault zone of clashing cultures and big-power politics. For centuries the empires of China, India and Russia have collided in Tibet while their spies circled each other warily. Now that India and Pakistan have detonated nuclear devices, any revival of the Great Game could have global consequences. Tensions are indeed growing. Tibetan activist Lodi Gyari recently warned that just as the spinoff of the Baltic states preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union, China’s further alienation of Tibet would lead to a “drastic” popular backlash “that could destabilize the entire region… We’re dealing with a time bomb and the clock is ticking.”
Some Chinese strategists, too, are looking at Tibet with fresh concern. Zhang Wenmou, an influential foreign-policy analyst, has suggested that the United States and India aim to split off both Tibet and the neighboring, Muslim-majority Xinjiang province–China’s two ethnic hot spots–to create “buffer zones” in the race to develop central Asia’s vast oil reserves. “South Asia is the biggest hidden threat to China’s security,” Zhang writes in Strategy and Management, a journal with military links. “If the world wishes to avoid a war in the Indian Ocean, separatist activities aimed at splitting Tibet from China should be abandoned.”
For their part, Indian officials publicly insist that their ties with China are just fine–partly because New Delhi’s nuclear test calmed Indian fears about China’s nuclear advantage. The Indians discount statements by their Defense minister, George Fernandes, a Tibet sympathizer who has cited the “China threat” as justification for going nuclear. “India’s nuclear program is based on our security needs and does not pose a threat to China,” insists Foreign Secretary K. Raghunath.
At the heart of the matter, Beijing’s difficulties in Tibet boil down to the Chinese leadership’s relations with one man: the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader in exile. From his headquarters in Dharmsala, India, the Dalai Lama has pursued a peaceful but relentless campaign for Tibetan autonomy–short of outright independence–in order to stop what he sees as the “cultural genocide” in his homeland.
For a brief moment last June, progress toward reviving a dialogue seemed within reach. At a Beijing press conference with U.S. President Bill Clinton, Jiang amiably said he was open to talks once the Dalai Lama had publicly declared that Tibet and Taiwan are unalienable parts of China–points that the Tibetan leader is ready to address, say his aides. But subsequently, China’s door to dialogue shut abruptly. Beijing’s attitude seemed to harden last fall, says the Dalai Lama, adding: “This abrupt change was accompanied by a new round of intensified repression.”
Jiang has had enough trouble keeping the lid on the Tibetans who are already under his control. The communist-authorized Panchen Lama, Tibet’s second most important “living Buddha,” has little support in Tibet itself–while the competing Panchen Lama chosen by the Dalai Lama remains under house arrest in Beijing. The sense of conspiracy and intrigue in China’s Tibetan communities grew last summer when three intruders, allegedly Chinese, reportedly tried but failed to assassinate the 14-year-old Karmapa, revered by Tibetans as the reincarnation of one of their top three deities.
The biggest shock was yet to come. Without warning to Beijing, Arjia Losang Thubten, 48, an abbot and senior living Buddha, packed up a few belongings last year and slipped away with a small entourage, apparently disappearing into thin air. That made him the highest-ranking Tibetan figure to defect since the Dalai Lama fled to India 40 years ago. Arjia had been seen as a model of accommodation with Beijing: some Tibetans considered him to be an out-and-out collaborator. Jiang had lent enthusiastic support to Arjia’s four-year, $5 million renovation of the Kumbum monastery, in Qinghai province, one of the four most important centers of Tibetan scholarship. Jiang himself had visited Kumbum. According to Asian diplomats, he was seen holding his hands together before a Buddhist deity in a sign of respect–sparking rumors that the Communist Party chairman has a soft touch for Buddhism.
Not soft enough, apparently. Arjia reportedly grew more and more uncomfortable with the government’s “patriotic education” campaign–especially its requirement that monks and nuns renounce the Dalai Lama and ban his photographs. More than two years ago, after several Kumbum monks had been detained, the living Buddha’s aides told NEWSWEEK that his phone was tapped. “He’s a prisoner in his own home,” said one. Arjia flew from his gilded cage after Chinese officials pressed him to host Beijing’s Panchen Lama at Kumbum, a gesture that would have put him in direct conflict with the Dalai Lama. A year after his escape, Arjia has turned up living quietly in California–yet another insult to Beijing.“Can’t you control those monks?” Jiang railed in a recent meeting with provincial governors.
Not the Dalai Lama. While much of the world honors the Tibetan spiritual leader and Nobel Prize winner, Beijing sees him and the other living Buddhas as wily adversaries in a power game. Beijing’s latest move has been to expand its crackdown in the traditionally Tibetan regions of Amdo and Kham that lie outside Tibet proper, in Qinghai and Sichuan provinces. “Evidence strongly suggests that protest and imprisonment are on the rise” in these areas, says researcher Steve Marshall of the Tibet Information Network. The Tibetans of Amdo and Kham, for their part, have a long history of fighting off Chinese invaders. It was a brave but motley assemblage of Kham guerrillas, trained and armed by the CIA, who staged a quixotic campaign against the communist Chinese occupation of Tibet in the 1950s and 1960s.
The secret story of those covert warriors is only now emerging in memoirs and a film, “Shadow Circus: The CIA in Tibet” (following story). The bloodstained revelations might “break down the myth of Tibetans’ being exceptionally nonviolent people,” says a Dalai Lama supporter. For example, one ex-guerrilla is quoted in the film: “When we kill an animal, we say a prayer. But when we killed Chinese, no prayer came to our lips.” Those sentiments may still be simmering in today’s Tibet, says Melvyn Goldstein of Case Western Reserve University, who cites several bombings in Lhasa as evidence of heightened militancy. For Beijing the real lesson of Kosovo may be stark: sue for peace while peace is possible.
