China Watchers - Will Dalai Lama Follow Brother's Tibet Visit?
Pacific News Service, Sandip Roy, Posted: Aug 27, 2002
For the first time in 52 years, the Dalai Lama's brother has visited Tibet, a friendly journey which has China watchers buzzing. They are asking whether a breakthrough over Lhasa is in the works, writes Pacific News Service Associate Editor Sandip Roy, what the visit bodes for Taiwan, and how the event will echo at President Bush's meeting with China President Jiang Zemin in October.
When Gyalo Thondup recently went home to Tibet, China watchers around the world sat up and took notice. Thondup, the Dalai Lama's elder brother, was setting foot in his homeland for the first time in 52 years. The trip has raised an intriguing new prospect. Could the Dalai Lama follow his brother to Lhasa?
The Dalai Lama has not set foot in Tibet since he fled to India in 1959 after an uprising against the Chinese failed. A return would have political repercussions from Beijing to Taiwan to Washington. In a culture where symbols sometimes speak louder than words, any movement on Tibet sets tongues wagging and observers guessing. In such a culture, movement on Tibet might also be about clearing the stage to deal with the much more vexing issue of Taiwan.
"In America, people don't really care where President Bush's brother goes," said Ling-Chi Wang, chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley. "But blood ties are seen differently in Asia. From the Chinese perspective this visit was rich in symbolism."
When China decided to allow Thondup to visit Tibet, the Dalai Lama's spokesman called it a "helpful measure." Thondup visited Lhasa as well as Qinghai province where their father's remains are interred. When the Dalai Lama's brother described some of the progress in Tibet he had seen under Chinese rule, he incensed some in the huge community of exiled Tibetans. "The Chinese government is using Gyalo Thondup as a part of its publicity campaign to project that everything in Tibet is okay to the outside world," said Lobsang Tsultrim Jeshong, editor-in-chief of the Voice of Tibet radio based in Dharamsala, India.
Nawang Rabgyal, the Dalai Lama's representative in North and South America, is more circumspect, emphasizing that the visit was not an official one. "The issue of Tibet is not about the return of Thondup or even His Holiness," Rabgyal said, but about "the millions of Tibetans." Chinese analysts, however, are upbeat. "The important thing is that now Thondup can tell the Dalai Lama the facts," said Larry Lee, editor-in-chief of the Overseas News Group of the Hong Kong-based Sing Tao newspaper.
Lee said there has long been a channel of communication between Beijing and Tibetans in exile and often the messenger has been Thondup himself, who was educated in China, has visited several times as an adult, and speaks a refined Chinese. After the Chinese took over Tibet, they wanted to make Thondup a ranking official. Instead, Thondup went to India, where he became involved with CIA-financed Contra-style operations seeking to oust the Chinese from Tibet. He remains respected by the Chinese, one of the few figures who enjoys credibility on both sides.
Thondup met Deng Xiaoping in 1979. Deng, anxious to mop up the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, said at the time that short of independence, everything else about Tibet could be discussed. But by the mid-eighties, the first student demonstrations broke out in China, followed by demonstrations in Tibet. By the time Tiananmen Square erupted in 1989, glimmers of hope about resolving the case of Tibet had faded.
Now with President Jiang Zemin scheduled to visit President Bush in October, China watchers think Beijing is anxious to show some movement on the Tibetan front. Thondup's visit as well as the recent release of some political prisoners -- including the longest-serving Tibetan dissident -- are for some, part of a public relations spring cleaning before the presidential visit and the Beijing Olympics.
Both the Chinese and the Americans know that while Tibet holds a romantic appeal for the West, strategically and geopolitically it is far less important than Taiwan. Tibet and Taiwan became linked after the Dalai Lama visited Taiwan in 1997 and 2001. Beijing demanded the religious leader declare that Taiwan is an integral part of China before they could discuss Tibet.
"Taiwan is something China must have. Tibet is something they can't give up," said a Tibetan official who has close relations with Dharamsala, the exile capital.
Roy (sandiproy@pacificnews.org) is host of New California Media's Upfront radio program on KALW-FM, San Francisco.
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