Obama Was Right To Snub The Dalai Lama

Today's Telegraph piece, on which comments are welcome over there as well as here:

How dare Barack Obama snub the Dalai Lama! After all, before 1959, Tibet was an independent state ruled benignly by the Dalai Lama and given over almost entirely to the pursuit of spirituality. Wasn’t she? Er, no, actually. Tibet was certainly ruled by the Dalai Lama, by the lamas generally, and by the feudal landlord class from which the lamas were drawn. Well over ninety per cent of the population was made up of serfs, the background from which the present rulers of Tibet are drawn.

That system was unique in China, and existed only because successive Emperors of China had granted the Tibetan ruling clique exactly the “autonomy” for which it still campaigns from “exile”. Life expectancy in Tibet was half what it is today. There has never been an independent state of Tibet. The Tibetans themselves migrated there from further east in China. Huge numbers of them never did and never have done; the Dalai Lama himself was born hundreds of miles outside Tibet. Likewise, the presence of large numbers of Han (ethnic Chinese in the ordinary sense) and other Chinese ethnic groups in Tibet is nothing remotely new. The one-child policy does not apply in Tibet, so the Han majority there is the ethnic Tibetans’ own fault, if they even see it as a problem. It is totally false to describe the Dalai Lama as “their spiritual leader”. Few would view him as such.

Just as pre-Communist Russia always remained the country’s true character, so very pre-Communist China remains the country’s true character. That character reveres tradition and ritual, upholds government by moral rather than physical force, affirms the Golden Rule, is agrarian and distributist, and has barely started an external war since China became China 5,000 years ago. It is especially open to completion by classical Christianity.

China has already moved from Maoism to the equal repressiveness of unbridled capitalism. A further shift, the reassertion of her own culture, is to be encouraged by every means of “soft” (in reality, truly hard) power. But economic, or any other, dependence on a foreign power remains totally unacceptable, as Barack Obama has shown he recognises by his deeds as well as by his words. Oh, for such a politician over here.