Chinese rule a barrier to Dalai Lama’s ‘Middle Way’
As Canada feels China’s sting, spare a thought for Tibet. While Beijing’s hostage diplomacy incarcerates Canadian citizens, think of the entire Tibetan people held captive in their own land since the mid-1900s.
Repression and rebellion have long marked Chinese rule over Tibet. But for just over a decade, that cycle culminated with a wave of public suicides by 156 Tibetans, many of them young Buddhist monks.
These acts of self-immolation were cries of self-desperation. They were also a plea for recognition — and a realization, after all this time, that Tibet’s time is running out.
If Tibet is at a crossroads, it is not the Buddhist “Middle Way” that the Dalai Lama had long hoped would be the path to compromise. His appeals for autonomy under Chinese sovereignty have fallen by the wayside, brushed aside by Beijing, leaving no way out for Tibetan youth.
A new book by veteran foreign correspondent Barbara Demick chronicles their desperate sacrifices in search of headlines that would put their people back on the map: “Eat the Buddha — Life and Death in a Tibetan Town” is a narrative unlike most others that have come before it.
(Full disclosure: Demick and I overlapped in our postings in Asia and the Middle East and we remain friends).
This is not yet another narrative about the mysticism of Buddhism or the exoticism of Paradise Lost, but rather a closely researched account of the grim realities at ground level for ordinary Tibetans. It is set in the little-known town of Ngaba, briefly famous as the epicentre of self-immolations, but once again fading into obscurity just as Tibet has receded from the news.
When I slipped into Tibet in 2003, on assignment for the Star, the outlook was bleak but still not hopeless. China’s military invasion had long since been consolidated by colonization, with waves of merchants resettling Lhasa’s marketplaces in larger numbers than any armed force; bulldozers were tearing down Tibetan architectural heritage faster than any military tank.
Back then, Chinese sovereignty was unstoppable, but negotiations were ongoing for some form of peaceful coexistence. Later that year when I travelled to Dharamsala, India, to interview the Dalai Lama in exile, he lamented the ongoing “cultural genocide” but held out hope for delicate talks undertaken by his special envoy to Beijing, who was waiting to see him that very afternoon.
But his Middle Way ultimately came to a dead end as Beijing opted to cement its unquestioned hegemony with unrelenting hostility. Now, cultural genocide and homogenization have given way to hopelessness under the hard line rule of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Never mind democracy, autonomy is also not in Xi’s wheelhouse — whether in Hong Kong or Tibet.
Despite the title, self-immolations are but one chapter in the book’s longer historical journey, which also describes Tibet’s future challenges. The Dalai Lama is now 85, and while he has relinquished day to day governing duties to an elected parliament in exile, he remains very much the spiritual leader and embodiment of the Tibetan people.
As Demick notes, the success of his succession is no sure thing: “Of the many defects in Tibet’s theocratic system of government, the most glaring is the appointment of a head of state through reincarnation. In this construct, the new leader can’t be born until the old one dies, necessitating a long transition before the little boy … is identified and then raised to adulthood. In the interim, you have a power vacuum that makes your country vulnerable to external threats and infighting.”
An added complication is the competition for reincarnation, with China’s avowedly atheistic Communist Party overseeing its own rival selection process for leading lamas. A power struggle is unavoidable and — without the current Dalai Lama’s invocations of nonviolence — the aftermath is unpredictable.
“I don’t know that the imperative towards non-violence will continue,” Demick, who now writes for the New Yorker, told a Ryerson Democracy Forum that I hosted this month. “It could be very messy … It will also be much less stable.”
Demick says the Dalai Lama never openly condemned self-immolations, lest he diminish the sacrifices of young people, but he obliquely discouraged them — encouraging young people to draw on their wisdom instead. She draws a distinction between Tibetan self-immolations and so-called suicide bombings undertaken in other conflict zones that leave a trail of civilian victims — and hence are homicide bombings.
Bhutila Karpoche, Ontario’s first MPP of Tibetan heritage, told Ryerson students that Demick’s book painted a picture of a land she has never seen. Born as a refugee in Nepal after her parents fled, she remains a Tibetan activist.
“You don’t even have the same rights as the Chinese, you’re not able to speak your own language, you’re not even able to travel freely within your own country, and there’s rampant discrimination in terms of jobs and opportunities,” she lamented.
The idea of Tibet lives on in the diaspora, but Karpoche has no way of visiting the place her parents left all those years ago. Today, the land she never knew — documented in Demick’s book, but disappearing fast — is becoming the Tibet she may never know.