VOICE FOR THE VOICELESS

A subtly reasoned argument for a free Tibet after 75 years of Chinese occupation.

“The responsibility for the nation and people of Tibet was placed upon me the moment I was recognized as the Dalai Lama at the age of two.” When he became Tibet’s leader at 16, the year Chinese soldiers swarmed into the formerly independent nation, he entered into numerous discussions with Mao Zedong (“truly unlike anyone I had met”), Zhou Enlai (“clever and smooth-talking”), and other Communist leaders, one of whom warned him that he should flee because Tibet would meet the same fate as Hungary, freshly crushed by the Soviets. When it became apparent that Mao intended to absorb Tibet as a strategic buffer and as part of the symbolic restoration of “territories that had once been part of the Manchu Qing empire,” the Dalai Lama went into exile and, as he notes, has never since been able to return to his native land. “Mao probably realized that with me gone out of Tibet,” he writes, “China would struggle with the question of legitimacy both of their authority and their presence in Tibet. He was right.” Today, he adds, the regime of Xi Jinping is bent on assimilating Tibet, suppressing religious practices, and removing children to Mandarin-speaking boarding schools. Nevertheless, the Dalai Lama still finds hope for Tibet in the roiling undercurrents of Chinese society—the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989, for example, which, he holds, by no means “marks the end of the Chinese people’s quest for greater freedom, dignity, and democracy.” A surprising discovery is that the Dalai Lama has long been willing to leave Tibet within the People’s Republic of China, but with control over its own internal affairs and a democratic government.

An autonomous Tibet? As envisioned here, that would surely be the Dalai Lama’s greatest legacy.