TV REVIEW : ‘Red Flag’ Laments Lost Buddhist Tibet

History isn’t pretty when it tells of nations trampled into invisibility by more powerful nations, but that doesn’t make it any easier to stomach the trampling going on in the present. Surely because of the sheer personal charisma of the Dalai Lama (the 14th, named Tenzin Gyatso), Tibet has become the most favored trampled nation in the West. The bad guy, of course, is China, which aims for most favored nation trading status with the United States.

The topical question in Sinologist Orville Schell’s “Frontline” report “Red Flag Over Tibet” (at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, 8 p.m on KVCR-TV Channel 24) is whether the United States can establish trade ties with a China that has systematically denuded Tibet of its deeply uncommunistic Tibetan Buddhist culture and religious institutions while annexing the Himalayan nation as a part of greater China.

Chances are, considering that Bill Clinton appears to becoming the free-trade President, no red flags over Tibet are going to get in the way of trading with such a vast and increasingly capitalist market. Besides, China’s overthrow of Tibetan society should recall to Americans this nation’s domination of the old cultures and religions of Native Americans. It may not be plausible to preach morality to Chinese officials, who would ignore it anyway, reject U.S. conditions for Tibetan self-rule, then find trading partners elsewhere.

Schell’s grief over the destruction of Tibetan life is the honest expression of a man who has devoted his life to understanding Asia long before it became a major economic player. As cameras record and he recounts diary-style his recent, brief trip through Tibet, he seems to doubt with each passing day that it’s possible to turn things back after more than 40 years of Chinese rule. Lhasa, the capital, appears to him like a typical Chinese provincial city, while the monk population has shrunk by 90%. (An extraordinary montage of then-and-now film clips dramatizes how thoroughly Buddhism has been erased.) Over a million died in the Chinese invasion, according to the Dalai Lama. Perhaps most insidiously, Schell finds, is how a little of the old faith is preserved in the interest of tourism dollars.

This is very bad stuff, even as nation-states go. But this is one of the ways nation-states will go, and the greater their power, the lesser the chance that any other nation-state will stop them. Bullies often win, and China seems to have its prize for good. Schell sits on a hill overlooking Lhasa and can only shake his head. History isn’t pretty.