In Tibet, Dalai Lama Remains People’s Choice

Gyayang is 27, wears Chicago Bulls T-shirts and spends his evenings hanging out in a crowded, smoky cafe called Increase the Peace.

Lhamo is 59, wears traditional Tibetan garb and spends her mornings worshiping in a crowded, smoky temple called the Jokhang, Tibet’s holiest site.

The two are strangers separated by generation, lifestyle and piousness in this city perched atop the roof of the world. But on one thing Gyayang and Lhamo unequivocally agree: They want their exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, to come back.

Desperately.

“If I could just see him, then I could die happy,” said Lhamo, the tears welling in the crinkled corners of her eyes, her head shaven smooth in Buddhist devotion. “If I don’t get to see him. . . .” She stopped, too upset by the thought to continue.

“All Tibetans want the Dalai Lama to return,” declared Gyayang, who like most Tibetans goes by only one name. “But the Communist Party will never let it happen.”

Throughout this ancient city and across the barren Tibetan plateau, the story is the same: Despite half a century of Communist Chinese rule, most Tibetans still revere the one man Beijing cannot stand--but without whom a mutually acceptable solution to Tibet’s disputed status seems unattainable.

Therein lies the Chinese government’s dilemma as it tries to control a religious and ethnic minority that by nature seems threatening to the state, with its adoration of a leader other than the Communist Party. What to do with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama?

Removing the Dalai Lama from Tibetan culture, which is largely driven by its Buddhist beliefs, would be like trying to knock the pope out of Roman Catholicism.

To the Tibetan faithful, the 64-year-old Dalai Lama is not merely a sage but both a king and a god, the leading light of the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon. Supporters across the globe, including Hollywood notables, join in lauding him as an icon of nonviolent resistance, and in 1989 he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts on behalf of the land he has not set foot in for 40 years.

To Beijing, however, the Dalai Lama is a dangerous separatist, backed by foreign powers, drunk on celebrity and intent on breaking up “the motherland” to further his own political ambitions.

‘Splittist’ Activities --but Backdoor Talks

These sharply divergent views put Beijing and Tibetans on a collision course that observers fear could ultimately result in violence unless a viable alternative is found. Already, Lhasa’s deputy mayor said in a rare acknowledgment of local unrest, authorities have logged more than 100 incidents of “splittist” activities since an abortive uprising in 1989 put Tibet briefly under martial law.

Despite his government’s distaste for the Dalai Lama, Chinese President Jiang Zemin acknowledged last year that backdoor talks had opened up between Beijing and the exiled Tibetan leader, leading analysts to hope that an uneasy detente might eventually give way to a rapprochement.

But a few months later, Beijing cut off talks and returned to denouncing the Dalai Lama as a “tool of anti-China forces” that advocate Tibetan independence.

“Our central government’s policy toward the Dalai Lama is consistent and clear,” said Nyma Tsering, deputy chairman of the Chinese-appointed government of Tibet. “As long as he abandons his stance on Tibetan independence and stops all activities aimed at splitting off Tibet . . . the door to negotiations remains open.”

Hoping to find a compromise, the Dalai Lama has said he would concede Chinese sovereignty in exchange for being allowed to return to Tibet as his people’s spiritual leader and for a greater measure of autonomy for his homeland.

“I have repeated more than a hundred times that I am not seeking independence,” he said in a published interview in June. “But we want the Chinese government to give us meaningful autonomy and self-rule, which is the best guarantee for the preservation of Tibetan culture. . . . I have made clear that I would not participate in any form of politics.”

The Nobel laureate has even offered to hold a vote on whether to continue the institution of the Dalai Lama if he is first permitted to return to Tibet.

“I do not want to preserve the institution of the Dalai Lama,” he told Newsweek magazine in a disavowal of personal ambition. “But only the Tibetan people can abolish it.”

Whispers have surfaced recently that back-channel communications between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government might resume soon.

But Beijing remains deeply suspicious of the Dalai Lama’s intentions and hopes that time is on its side as the bespectacled leader ages and as factionalism begins to divide his “government in exile” in Dharamsala, India, to which he fled with 80,000 followers in 1959.

For now, the Chinese leadership seems content to pursue its policy of trying to buy Tibetan submission with hefty economic aid--the promise of a yak in every pot--and the meting out of harsh punishment to challengers of the status quo.

Mostly through direct grants from the central government, Tibet, the poorest province of China, has enjoyed 10% annual growth in recent years, higher than the national average. Living standards have steadily risen in this Himalayan region, particularly in the cities, where schools and hospitals have multiplied.

“Economic development can solve most every problem,” said Tang Wei, deputy director of Tibet’s foreign trade office. “And the problems are easier solved without foreign meddling,” he added, in a jab at the U.S. and other Western countries where the Dalai Lama is widely admired.

But the pocketbook is one thing, hearts and minds another.

The faith many Tibetans profess in their absent god-king is so fierce that it often transcends both economics and reason. Many believe that the Dalai Lama will be able to make everything right in Tibet, previously a feudal theocracy, simply by returning.

“If he comes back, all will be well,” said Gyashi, a street vendor who keeps a photo at home of his beloved leader.

Such private displays of the Dalai Lama’s likeness are allowed, in a tacit recognition by the Chinese government that stamping out such widespread veneration would be next to impossible.

Public displays, however, are illegal--which 20-year-old Tsetan’s family found out the hard way. When Tsetan’s sister was caught openly pledging her allegiance to the Dalai Lama, she was sentenced to four years in jail, Tsetan said. She has yet to be released.

Tsetan’s own religious fervor, which he does not hesitate to express to a visitor despite China’s heavy security presence in Tibet, remains unabated.

“The Dalai Lama’s return--that’s what I hope for,” he said.

The intense hold that the Dalai Lama has over the people here is the inescapable snag in Beijing’s plans to integrate Tibet and its people more closely with the rest of China.

Although critics--including the Dalai Lama himself--have accused the Communist regime of trying to commit “cultural genocide” against the Tibetans, the truth is that Beijing appears willing to let the indigenous culture live on but within strict boundaries set by the government.

The basic rule is that cultural expression--in manners, dress, customs and other practices--is generally permitted among China’s many ethnic minorities and religious groups as long as it does not challenge the state. The problem with Tibetan culture is that it is inherently threatening because it enshrines an authority figure over the Chinese government.

Chinese Try to Control Monasteries in Tibet

But the Beijing regime is trying to undercut the Dalai Lama’s influence, starting in what it considers to be hotbeds of Tibetan dissent and separatism: Buddhist monasteries.

For the past four decades, the Chinese government has maintained a firm grip on Tibet’s religious institutions, appointing “democratic management committees” to control each lamasery, banning worship of the Dalai Lama, reducing the number of temples and monasteries, and drastically scaling back the number of monks and nuns.

Where Tibet boasted 114,000 clerics in 1958, the number had shrunk to just 18,100 two years later. A small comeback in recent years has boosted the figure to 46,000, which the government deems adequate to serve Tibet’s population of 2.4 million.

“I think 46,000 monks and nuns satisfies [Tibet’s] religious needs,” said Tsering, the government official.

Some Tibetans believe that Beijing’s strategy for facing down their devotion is simply to wait for the Dalai Lama to die and then refuse to let another be named as his reincarnation, as Buddhist tradition dictates.

An official at the Potala Palace in Lhasa sidestepped the issue.

“That’s a future question,” the official said primly, surrounded by the trappings of centuries-long rule by a succession of Dalai Lamas--including the present one. “He’s not dead yet.”