Tragic, Tough Tibet

During the last year, to protest Chinese rule at least 16 people, including monks and nuns, have immolated themselves in Tibet and ethnically Tibetan regions of neighboring Sichuan province. Fifty demonstrators across the street from the UN late this afternoon waved victims' photos and Tibetan flags and shouted angry denunciations of the Chinese communist government: "No justice, no peace!" "China kills!"

While Beijing insists that Tibet has always been part of China, Tibetans say the region was autonomous for much of its history. China reasserted control after the 1949 revolution and says it won't ever let go. It squeezes until it hurts. Along with hundreds of millions of Chinese, Tibet's people experienced the worst of communism's privations. Hundreds of thousands died during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward. Communist forces destroyed thousands of monasteries. The Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual and political leader, was driven into exile in 1959. Official state atheism notwithstanding, Beijing will prayerfully discern the name of his successor to ensure that he'll toe the line on Tibet's permanent status as part of China. The central government brutally suppresses all manifestations of separatism. Its forces have killed several Tibetans in crackdowns over the last week.

Although China's treatment of Tibet is scandalous, there's little if anything the U.S. can or will do. It does regularly register its concerns to China. Barack Obama even invited Beijing's ire last July by meeting with the Dalai Lama. But it's hard to imagine this or any administration risking a significant worsening of relations with Beijing for little Tibet's sake. China denounces all alleged inferences in its internal affairs. Being a dominant player in global and American markets buys a lot of deference. In Times Square, the bright red panel crowning this video tower, a potent symbol of capitalism, has been purchased by China's propaganda arm, the Xinhua News Agency, an ironic counterpoint to the demonstrators a few long blocks away, the types Xinhua calls bandits.

When two great peoples have interests in common, a numerically small people like the Tibetans will lose out. But China should understand that they'll probably never lose heart.

Don't Sell Him Out

In February, Secretary of State Clinton put human rights on the back burner when it comes to our relations with the communist nation holding $1 trillion in U.S. paper. This week, a Sino-Franco group hug, reports the New York Times:

[T]he French authorities seemed to have stepped back from their previous readiness to antagonize the Chinese leadership as the world confronts a global economic crisis in which France can ill-afford poor relations with a global economic power-house.

Last year, President Sarkozy’s support for the Dalai Lama angered Chinese leaders. In response, China postponed a meeting with European leaders that France was supposed to host. At that time, France held the rotating presidency of the European Union.

China strongly opposes any encounters between foreign government figures and the Dalai Lama, accusing him of harboring separatist ambitions for Tibet, which he denies.

As well they should, the French have reaffirmed the one-China policy. Enshrined in the Shanghai Communique as negotiated during the Nixon administration, the one-China policy is also the basis of Sino-U.S. relations. But support for the Dalai Lama's bid for Tibet's cultural autonomy conflicts with the one-China policy only if you conclude, as Beijing claims it has, that this deeply spiritual, plainspoken, patient man is lying when he promises that he's not seeking political independence for his homeland.

A core Nixonian principle is that great nations don't hector one another in public if they have an interest in ongoing constructive relations. We should never assume that U.S. and French leaders aren't taking a stronger line behind the scenes. Let's hope so, because it may be bad for the soul to sell out a holy man.

Dalai Lama: "I Have To Accept Failure"

Sometimes pragmatists prevail; but not always. Other times, they are ruthlessly and cynically played. As the Dalai Lama marks the 50th anniversary of his exile, in the "New York Review of Books" Pico Iyer recounts the Tibetan spiritual leader's anguished reappraisal of the moderate line he has followed on cultural autonomy for his homeland.

While in his carefully written article, Iyer doesn't come right out and say that Beijing accommodated the Dalai Lama and his representatives strictly for PR reasons in the run-up to the Olympics in the summer of 2008, it sure looks that way. China has now savaged him with the apparently unfair charge of promoting independence. Iyer writes:

"The situation inside Tibet is almost like a military occupation," I heard the Dalai Lama tell an interviewer last November, when I spent a week traveling with him across Japan. "Everywhere. Everywhere, fear, terror. I cannot remain indifferent." Just moments before, with equal directness and urgency, he had said, "I have to accept failure. In terms of the Chinese government becoming more lenient [in Chinese-occupied Tibet], my policy has failed. We have to accept reality."

Delay Lama

After a half-century in exile, the Dalai Lama, a holy man practiced in patience, begins to realize that the Beijing regime may be even more patient than he.