Resolving the Tibet question

The Dalai Lama is known the world over as the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and the embodiment of the Tibetan people’s struggle for self-determination against the Chinese government. When the Chinese People’s Liberation Army invaded in 1950, political and spiritual authority in Tibet rested on a 15-year-old boy (the sympathetic and precocious teenager depicted in the 1997 Brad Pitt film Seven Years in Tibet).

After attempted cooperation under the facade of “regional autonomy,” the Tibetan people rose up against their occupiers in 1959. In response, the PLA shelled their capital city. The Dalai Lama escaped dressed as a peasant, undertaking a harrowing journey through the Himalayas to exile in India, a thrilling story he tells in his 1962 memoir My Land and My People.

In the intervening decades, the Dalai Lama has traveled the world teaching on compassion and nonviolence and writing Oprah-style self-help books. His newest volume, Voice for the Voiceless (William Morrow, 256 pp.), tackles a more substantive subject: his multidecade engagement with Chairman Mao, Deng Xiaoping, and other Chinese leaders in hopes of resolving the Tibet question.

“The Tibet question” is a thorny and complicated one. It asks whether Tibet ever was a separate sovereign nation, whether its people today wish its return to independence, and whether China could accept Tibet as a self-governing region along the lines of Hong Kong or Macau (not that it’s worked out especially well for Hong Kong of late). In this slim memoir, which intersperses the blow-by-blow foreign policy account with occasional digressions into history and philosophy, the Dalai Lama accuses the Chinese government of intransigence despite his own openness to a “middle way” of semi-autonomy within China.

But China has no incentive to pursue such a policy. Never has Thucydides’ line “the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must” had more obvious application: China has the land and is importing Han Chinese into Tibet while waiting for the octogenarian monk to die and hoping his cause will die with him.

Personally, I doubt that will be the case. The religious freedom and cultural identity of Tibetan Buddhists is tied up with the Chinese government’s persecution of the neighboring Uyghur ethnic Muslim minority and of Catholic and evangelical Christians throughout China. The Dalai Lama has also set up structures for the Tibetan community in exile to move forward without him. Though perhaps fewer Hollywood stars will publicly champion the cause, his legacy will live on, not least through his written works. History may well credit him—much like President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II—with providing the powerful global voice for human rights that eventually brought down another communist regime.