Tuesday, March 18, 2008
The Dalai Lama
Many years ago I interviewed the Dalai Lama at Heathrow. He wore big brown brogues under his saffron robes, chuckled a lot and held my hand throughout. I was charmed; I still am. He has achieved two things. First, he has preserved the identity of Tibet while in exile in India. Secondly, he has exploited the mystique of Tibet to keep the injustice of its subjugation by China constantly in the minds and imaginations of the West. Now he says he will resign if the violence continues - I didn't know resignation was an option for the holder of his office - and the Chinese are saying he is behind the violence. I'm sure the Chinese have no evidence for this. The calls for a boycott of the Olympics will get louder. As I have said before, this would not be a good idea however flattering it might be to our consciences. If the violence continues, the boycott is a real possibility followed by an insulted China full of resurgent Maoist nasties saying 'we told you so' and the prospect of economic revenge on the West. Even the sale of a small proportion of her dollar reserves would make a bad situation much worse. His Holiness doesn't want this, he just wants a little more autonomy for his people so that they are not drowned by the tide of Han Chinese flooding into their territory. For some reason, the Chinese leaders can't get it into their heads that they can talk to him. One day, they'll have to.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Now that transportation and communication have improved to the point that they have, the Han migration will continue apace and they will in a short time (historically) predominate in Tibet. The same thing happened in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang.
ReplyDeleteThe Chinese government doesn't have to talk to the current Dalai Lama. Time, and demographics, are on their side. He's 73 years old and they can afford to wait until he dies and a new Dalai Lama is selected. They've done a lot of spadework already to insure that that selection, when it happens, will be difficult and controversial. While they wait, Han Chinese will continue to be encouraged to migrate there and it won't matter all that much in the end.
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ReplyDelete"Han Chinese will continue to be encouraged to migrate there and it won't matter all that much in the end."
ReplyDeleteI'm sure it will matter to the Tibetans and their ancestors as their whole culture will be virtually destroyed.
Just in case you aren't aware Bryan A C Grayling has posted an article savaging Gray in the Guardian comment is free section.
ReplyDeleteHas anybody else been watching an amazing series on BBC4 called 'A Year in Tibet'? The first programme showed some remarkable colour cine film shot in the early 1940s, I think by a Brit. I hadn't realised that Tibetan society up until that point had been utterly feudal, with a few ruling families who enjoyed unrivalled power and the rest of the population either in monasteries or grubbing around in the dirt. The visual images were overwhelmingly strange and beautiful. It must have offended Mao terribly that 70-odd days of the year in Tibet were given over to religious ceremony of one kind or another. And how ripe for modernization it must have seemed. But isolation is an amazing thing - it has bound the Tibetans together into a cohesive unit which is proving incredibly hard to unglue. Long may it continue to stick together. As I think you said about Burma, Bryan, "Go, Monks".
ReplyDeletebut are the chinese the sort to do something for a laugh?
ReplyDeleteI think if your thing is non-violence, chuckling keeps your mind focussed on the job. I don't have any explanation for wearing big brown shoes - I guess he is from out of town. Hey, how big exactly were the shoes?
"Power comes from the barrel of a gun" still seems default mode for the Chinese leadership. That and lying, like Wen Jiabao's accusation that the Dalai Lama had masterminded the violence. Anything less likely is hard to imagine, but it serves as a reminder that China is still run by communist-gangster types, though they are a lot more sophisticated in the front they put up than their cousins in Russia. I suspect Randy is correct: China can easily afford to wait out the Dalai Lama, and in a culture in which preserving face is valued so highly, talking to him is probably out of the question.
ReplyDeleteHosting the Olympic Games - dread words! - seems a great way to rain down curses on oneself. I wonder what our fate will be in 2012.
Apologies for a second post, but the occasion demands it.
ReplyDeleteI went to what I thought was my weekly meditation class tonight at my local Tibetan Buddhist centre, only to find that a special "service" (a puja) had been called. Every oil lamp in the building had been lit and set in a blaze on a table. I lost count at more than one hundred. And then the chanting began, in Tibetan, which I always find haunting and beautiful - there is quite a large Tibetan community here and they outnumbered the Westerners there tonight. Towards the end there was a chanted prayer for the Dalai Lama which was repeated and repeated and repeated.
It was very moving, and perhaps it takes even this small connection to appreciate just how much the Dalai Lama is revered. Strange: the Chinese leadership have spent their lives proving that it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. And yet the prince they fear, who in fact they cannot touch, has spent his own life practising the opposite. And the consequences are playing out as we watch. The situation is completely Shakespearian, in the sense that I can't think of anyone else who could take such elemental themes and make us live their inner workings.
The Chinese usually talk at, rather than to, you...
ReplyDelete