Political, Social, Economic, Cultural

Matthew Franklin Cooper writes:

The Dalai Lama is no longer a threat to any government, as far as the political climate inside China goes.  Most Tibetans within China do recognise that their lives today are much better off than they were under the old Buddhist theocracy, even if their economic condition remains wretched on account of the only-partial decollectivisation mixed with market reforms which has characterised the rule of the post-Deng CCP.  Tellingly, by unofficial polling most Tibetans simply do not identify with the Dalai Lama, the former lama-slaveowner-dominated ‘government’-in-exile, or with their political cause.  The only persons the Dalai Lama is capable of harming inside China seem to be the tragic souls who demand the Dalai Lama’s return to China, and who burn themselves to death in protest as a result.

In the Anglosphere and in Europe, the Dalai Lama’s political efforts are pernicious in a different way.  He serves as the lightning rod of all manner of politically dubious causes (including Uyghur separatism and, by extension, Japanese far-right militarism and territorial expansionism - at China’s expense).  Simultaneously, by way of his deft counter-propagansiding against a government as singularly inept at presenting its own case before a world audience as China’s, managed to have made of himself an icon of ‘nonviolent’ resistance to authoritarianism in the process.  Recently, though, his efforts at attracting Western sympathy have drawn some scepticism, and by no means just from Chinese netizen-fenqing with axes to grind.

More attention to the rights and dignities - political, social, economic, cultural - of the Tibetan people in China, is an urgent and, I would say, dire necessity:  if for no other reason than against the encroachment of the faceless, all-consuming cultural black hole which ‘reform and opening’ continues to, well, open.  But the idea that the Dalai Lama or his ‘government’-in-exile are the right people for the job seems to me to be slightly unwarranted.  Why not have leaders and advocates for the Tibetan people who were, for one thing, actually born in Tibet, and who have actually lived in Tibet over the last sixty years?