Tibet Struggles to Survive

The thirteenth Dalai Lama, Thupten Gyatso, the incarnation of Tibet's patron deity, Chenresi, "the Buddha of mercy," passed on to "the Honorable Field" in 1933, there to await rebirth as the present Dalai Lama in 1935. Toward the end of his long rule he was gravely worried by the communist suppression of Lamaist Buddhism in Mongolia, which for almost four hundred years had been dominated by the Tibetan form of religion. In creating a Mongolian nation on the Soviet pattern in the 1920s and early 1930s, Mongolian Communists destroyed almost all the monasteries which regarded the Dalai Lama in Lhasa as their spiritual leader, reducing organized religion to a few showpiece relics. The Dalai Lama warned his people that "unless we can guard our own country, it will now happen that the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, the Father and the Son, the Holders of the Faith, the glorious Rebirths, will be broken down and left without a name . . . the officers of the state, ecclesiastical and secular, will find their lands seized and their other property confiscated, and they themselves made to serve their enemies, or wander about the country as beggars do. All beings will be sunk in great hardship and in overpowering fear; the days and the nights will drag on slowly in suffering."

A quarter of a century later, his successor, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, fled from tightening Chinese Communist control of Tibet to exile in India. Now the prophecy has been fulfilled. The Tibet that long fascinated the world with its distinctive religion, its unusual religious government, the anachronism of its ways, has disappeared. The Cultural Revolution has brought destruction of even the showpiece relics of Lamaist Buddhism in its homeland. The inaccessibility which heightened the fascination of the high, mostly bleak land behind the Himalayan, Kun Lun and Tahsueh Mountains has been ended with the construction of roads and airports; yet by Chinese policy Tibet remains closed and largely unknown to the outside world.

The picture that emerges from Chinese publications, refugee reports and other sources is of a land being pushed into the modern world at great cost to its people. Electricity now lights some towns, intensified exploitation of the limited agricultural resources has raised crop yields, small industries have been built and mechanical skills taught. Modern communications at the service of a determined central Chinese authority have finally made it possible to begin integration of Tibet into the Han Chinese cultural world that has been slowly creeping toward it for several millennia. The non-communist world has watched this Sinization of Tibet with an uncomfortable feeling that a simple, helpless people are being abandoned to an undeserved fate. But the world's conscience has been assuaged by the widely accepted notion that despite the uncertainties surrounding their historic relationships China has the legal-if not moral- right to do as it pleases in Tibet. Pricking that conscience is the fact that a Tibetan Lamaist Buddhist church-government structure exists in exile and hopes some day to go back to its homeland. If it ever does, both will have been transformed-the land harshly modernized and the church-government broadened by close contact with modern democratic thought and action.

II

Over the years, the expanding Chinese and British Indian empires nibbled at the edges of the Dalai Lama's realm, making it difficult if not controversial even to define what Tibet is. In broadest terms, it is the area inhabited by persons speaking Tibetan or related languages and recognizing the spiritual leadership of the Dalai Lama. They believe in Lamaism, a mixture of the elaborate symbolism and magic formulations of the Tantric Mahayana form of Buddhism with Tibet's pre-Buddhist Bon beliefs in innumerable spirits and fierce demons. The ethnographic area includes the Ladakh, Spiti and Lahul districts of northwest India, the Tawang Tract in India's Northeast Frontier Agency, small parts of Nepal lying north of the main Himalayan peaks, the semi-autonomous Indian protectorate of Sikkim, the independent kingdom of Bhutan and parts of the present Chinese provinces of Tsinghai, Kansu, Szechwan and Yunnan. The heart of this area of some 750,000 square miles is today's political Tibet, much of which is a barren and thinly populated three-mile-high plateau north and northwest of Lhasa. In the river valleys around Lhasa, which lies 12,000 feet above sea level and has a temperature range similar to Denver's, barley and wheat are grown and fruit trees are cultivated. The land becomes forested as it slopes eastward to the steep valleys where three of Asia's greatest rivers, the Yangtse, Mekong and Salween, flow parallel only forty miles apart, through lowlands suitable for rice paddies.

Closest to the Chinese heartland, these relatively thickly populated eastern districts have seldom been under the political control of either Lhasa or Peking; their fierce independence is seen in today's Khamba guerrilla warriors. Parts of the Kham and Amdo districts in the east, including the birthplace near Koko Nor of the present Dalai Lama, have been so thickly settled by Chinese colonists that the Dalai Lama's own definition of Tibet now extends only as far east as Batang and Jyekundo, omitting much that was ethnographically Tibet. The 1953 Chinese census said there were 2.8 million Tibetans, but only 1.2 million of them-including some 180,000 lamas and monks-lived within Peking's definition of the country, which pushes the eastern boundary even closer to Lhasa than the Dalai Lama's definition. Encroachment of non-Tibetan peoples, particularly Nepalis in Sikkim and Bhutan, has also reduced the ethnographic area in the south.

The Dalai Lama, who is dependent upon India as his home in exile today, no longer mentions Tibetan claims (asserted as recently as 1947 when India became independent) to Himalayan areas like Sikkim, which British India detached from Lhasa's nominal control. But the Chinese have occasionally referred to these claims. In 1959 their spokesmen in Tibet asserted that the Tibetan "hand" should be reunited with its "five fingers": Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and the Northeast Frontier Agency. This claim is now dormant and the official Chinese position is unclear on all except the Northeast Frontier Agency and the Aksai Chin area of Ladakh (considered by the Chinese to be part of Sinkiang province rather than Tibet), which are involved in the Sino-Indian border dispute. But Tibet's history shows that the Chinese have a long memory for shadowy claims.

The modern Chinese claim to Tibet rests on four eighteenth-century Chinese military expeditions to Lhasa. By 1792 the Chinese had established themselves as supervisors of the government of the Dalai Lama, who had already held a peculiarly Eastern priest-patron relationship with the Chinese emperors. Tibet was, however, too distant, communications were too poor, economic rewards too small and the people too difficult for the declining dynasty in Peking to bother with much direct control. Control waned, allowing British India to send a military expedition to Lhasa in 1904 out of fear of Russian influence there, but in a final blaze of Imperial Manchu glory less than two years before the 1911 Chinese revolution, another Chinese army marched into Lhasa-the first to conquer the Tibetans rather than come to aid them. The thirteenth Dalai Lama fled to British India and Tibet's new rulers began to shape the area into a Chinese province, as they were doing in Inner Mongolia and Sinkiang. But by 1912 the revolution in China caused the disintegration of the occupation force, delaying for almost half a century the fate that has befallen Tibet in the last decade.

Not versed in the ways of the community of nations created in the West, unaware of the significance in international law of Tibetan military success in repulsing Republican Chinese attempts to reassert control, the Tibetan Government after 1912 simply wanted to be left alone. Its efforts to establish its formal independence of China were belated and weak; they were brushed aside by Britain, the most concerned bystander, which found it diplomatically convenient to continue to recognize an undefined Chinese "suzerainty" over Tibet even though China had no power there. For forty years Britain dealt with Tibet as a country with de facto but not de jure independence, and the United States also took this position during and after World War II. Even today international legal experts sympathetic to the Dalai Lama's cause find it difficult to argue that Tibet ever technically established its independence of the Chinese empire, imperial or republican, before the new communist régime moved in 1950 to reassert the old Chinese claim by force of arms.

III

During the four decades of de facto independence, Tibet was governed by the thirteenth Dalai Lama and then by regents until the discovery and education of the fourteenth incarnation of the religious leader, Tenzin Gyatso. Tibet, according to an official description, "is a country in which political and religious affairs [were] carried on simultaneously, with their chief aims the propagation of Buddhism and the seeking of happiness for all souls on earth." The Dalai Lama headed a dual structure of government officials, some from old noble families and some from a special corps of monks, and of monastic religious officials. From time to time a National Assembly was called, more as a way of rallying the opinion of the élite than for democratic consultation, but in general the country was run by an inbred aristocracy. Medieval intrigues ripped through Lhasa; during the nineteenth century five successive Dalai Lamas died mysteriously in their youth as regents maintained their power, and as recently as 1947 a former regent was apparently murdered in prison during a power struggle.

Both noble families and monasteries held estates. In theory they remained the property of the Dalai Lama, and were only temporarily assigned as rewards for service, but in practice much of Tibet's arable land and the peasants who worked it belonged to the lay and religious élite. While economic practices were primitive, what passed for legal practices were often barbaric: there was no central code of conduct, and no civil law governing how the land was exploited or how the peasants were treated; flogging was a common punishment and maiming was practiced despite a decree theoretically limiting it to punishment for treason and conspiracy against the state. Perhaps half the marriages were polyandrous, a woman's several husbands were usually brothers, and all children were legally considered those of the senior husband. This custom and the assignment of younger sons to monastic celibacy insured that land holdings were not fragmented and (aided by geographic and climatic rigors and the high prevalence of disease) kept the population static.

The Chinese Communists did not at first approach this social structure with avowedly reformist intentions. They called for "the peaceful liberation of Tibet," promising "regional self-government and freedom of religion" as they began to invade the country in 1950. Although they simply seized other remote parts of China militarily in consolidating control of the mainland, they recognized Tibet to be a special case. Holding it at gunpoint, they signed an "Agreement of the Central People's Government and the Local Government of Tibet for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet, 1951." While recognizing the regional government under the Dalai Lama, the agreement took the form of an internal, constitutional arrangement affirming that Tibet had long been part of China, rather than an international treaty adding Tibet to China. Under duress, the young fourteenth Dalai Lama and his advisers reluctantly accepted.

The agreement promised that "the central authorities will not alter the existing political system in Tibet . . . [nor] the established status, functions and powers of the Dalai Lama." "The religious beliefs, customs and habits of the Tibetan people shall be respected, and Lama monasteries shall be protected." "In matters related to various reforms in Tibet, there shall be no compulsion by the central authorities. The local government of Tibet should carry out reforms of its own accord. . . ."

However, the Chinese military administration in Lhasa moved quickly to assert its authority over the Dalai Lama's government by indirect means, which included forcing the removal of a prime minister who spoke out against Chinese violations of the agreement. Possibly spurred by communist talk of social and economic reforms, the Dalai Lama named a reforms committee which standardized tax payments and made some other minor changes. But the committee's proposals on the most critical problems- redistribution of the nobles' estates to the peasants and unification of justice under a central authority-were opposed by the powerful landholding nobles who dominated the Tibetan administration. These reforms were also blocked by the Chinese, who presumably wanted to get all the credit for land reform.

The Chinese, the Dalai Lama later charged, "did not lose any opportunity to undermine my authority and sow dissensions among my people . . . [They] commenced a reign of terror . . . forced labor and compulsory exactions, a systematic persecution of the people, plunder and confiscation of property belonging to individuals and monasteries, and execution of certain leading men in Tibet. . . ." Armed resistance began among the Khambas of eastern Tibet as early as 1954; by 1957 it had become guerrilla warfare, to which the Chinese replied by bombing and shelling monasteries and other centers of defiance. Both warriors and refugees had moved west to the Lhasa area by early 1959, heightening tension there over Chinese attempts to control the Dalai Lama's actions. A popular belief that the Chinese planned to kidnap the Dalai Lama led to mass meetings that repudiated the 1951 agreement and demanded freedom from Chinese rule. The Dalai Lama fled to India, and the Chinese crushed the Lhasa uprising of March 1959, in which some three thousand or more persons were killed.

IV

The dual civil and religious governmental structure which had been headed by the Dalai Lama was abolished by the Chinese after his escape. The governmental gap was filled by a "preparatory committee" which the Chinese had established in 1956 with Tibetan figureheads to ready the country for a conformist role in the Chinese governmental system. Until 1964 the figureheads were the absent Dalai Lama himself and subsequently the second most important Tibetan religious figure, the Panchen Lama. The latter was chosen by the Chinese and educated for their purposes, but this pathetic figure eventually cried out in anguish over the suffering of his compatriots and the destruction of his religion, and was tossed aside; he is now reportedly in a labor camp. His successor was Ngabo Ngawang Jigme, a noble official who became the leading collaborator in the 1950s and was rewarded in 1965 by being made head of the new government of the Tibet Autonomous Region. Created to signify the final elimination of a special status differing from that of other Chinese minorities areas, the regional government had little time to serve its ostensible purposes before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution pushed it into obscurity.

In the last three years the Tibetan people have been treated to the spectacle of the occupation forces fighting among themselves. In 1966 Red Guards began to challenge the authority of General Chang Kuo-hua, commander of the 1950-51 invasion forces and then the dominant military and political figure in Tibet. After fighting in Lhasa had spread to other Chinese garrison towns, Chang was transferred to Szechwan province. Fighting continued. Estimates of deaths in January and February of 1968 ran to 700, including 250 Tibetans. Some collaborators were reported arrested and tortured by Red Guards, but the few Tibetans involved in the internecine warfare seem to have been youths educated by the Chinese to administer Tibet on behalf of Peking. Finally, last September, the forces of Mao Tse- tung won or compromised-the latter appears more likely-with the creation of a Revolutionary Committee, headed by the military commander for Tibet, Tseng Yung-ya. Tibetan exiles report that all semblance of civilian administration has disappeared; the Chinese army controls everything.

The Chinese have created light industry in Tibet, put secular education on a modern basis and redistributed some land. Because of the disruption caused by the Cultural Revolution, the most recent information available on the reforms is that which was given out in 1965 at the time of the creation of the regional government, when the population was reported at 1,321,500. There were then said to be 1,682 primary schools and seven middle schools with more than 60,000 students being taught the Chinese language and other subjects. Fifteen hospitals and 149 clinics had been opened and about 60 small and medium-sized industrial plants (including a woolen textile mill, cement factory, match factory, paper mill, pharmaceutical plant and turbine pump factory) employed some 25,000 Tibetan workers trained by the Chinese. More than 460,000 acres had allegedly been redistributed, most peasants getting only 0.59 of an acre, however. Irrigated farmland had increased by 30 percent, and according to official claims grain and livestock production rose 45.7 and 36.7 percent respectively from 1958 to 1964 under a system of "mutual aid teams." Tibetan exiles charge that farmers have been deprived of the benefits by heavy exactions to support the Chinese garrison. Indeed, they say the Tibetan people are often hungry and sometimes face starvation. A rigid rationing system is tied to performance of road-work quotas for many Tibetans.

The most profound change wrought by the Chinese in Tibet is the obliteration of organized religion. When the Dalai Lama reached India in 1959, he reported that the Chinese had already destroyed some 1,000 monasteries in eastern Tibet. According to refugee reports, the Lhasa uprising led to Chinese attacks on the seventeenth-century Potala palace at Lhasa and the three big monasteries nearby and, later, against other monasteries. Their irreplaceable records and books were burned, religious statues smashed, icon-like thangka wall hangings torn down; the lamas and monks were killed, put on road gangs or sent back to their villages. A few old lamas were left in Drepung monastery near Lhasa for the benefit of the occasional East European visitor, and a few other monasteries survived in the early 1960s. But renewed assaults by Red Guards eliminated these, and in 1967 the Dalai Lama said that Buddhist practices had been almost completely wiped out in Tibet. More recently he accused the Chinese of "destruction bent upon obliterating Tibetan identity."

V

Lamaist Buddhism is being kept alive today by the Himalayan border regions- the "five fingers"-and by the approximately 85,000 refugees, including some 5,000 lamas and monks, who fled into these regions and to India proper, A former British prison for Indian independence leaders in the Bengali jungles has become one of their main religious centers. There learned men from Tibetan monasteries pass on their knowledge to young Tibetans, a process that has traditionally taken up to twenty years of verbal instruction but is now being modernized and accelerated. The prison-camp school of bamboo and thatched huts is typical of refugee accommodations. "There is, of course," commented the Tibetan Review published by refugees in India, "a total lack of any sign of opulence which one found in the bigger monasteries in Tibet. Even the poorest monastery in Tibet would seem palatial by comparison. But one feels that this is a kind of spiritual purification and has a value far more precious than gold and silk trappings." An Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies was opened in 1968 at the Sanskrit University at Varanasi (Benaras), India, and the Dalai Lama is planning a Tibetan National Library at Dharmsala, India, his home in exile. "Religion without learning is not possible," he says. Already foreseeing in 1957 an approaching danger, the Dalai Lama coöperated with the royal family of Sikkim in establishing the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology in Gangtok and helped it acquire Tibetan books. Some religious books were saved by refugees, some are available in monasteries in Ladakh, Sikkim and Bhutan, but some important texts may have been lost forever.

Secular education for refugee children in India is being financed almost entirely by the Indian Government. They are learning Hindi and English and normal academic disciplines. A number of foreign countries such as Switzerland, Norway and Japan are helping with scholarships to train Tibetans in the modern skills that a secular state would need. The establishment in 1967, with the Dalai Lama's coöperation, of a Tibetan Institute in Switzerland, where 700 refugees now live, drew a protest from Peking that it was "a gross intervention in the internal affairs of China, a political provocation which the Chinese people can never tolerate."

The adult refugees are predominantly farmers. India has settled 12,500 farmers on newly cleared land and Bhutan has provided for another 1,500. Craft centers have been opened in India and Nepal Gold and silver that the Dalai Lama sent out of Tibet in 1951 to be hidden in Sikkim for possible future need (the amount has never been officially stated but is estimated to be up to $3 million-a small fraction of the treasure left behind in 1959) have been invested in small-scale industries in India to earn money for the maintenance of the Dalai Lama's household. Between 18,000 and 20,000 refugees are building roads in the Himalayas for the Indian Government; they and some newly settled farmers are partially supported by U.S. surplus grain channeled through New Delhi.

In 1963 the Dalai Lama, acting as the head of an exile government, promulgated a constitution for the Tibet which he hopes will some day exist as an independent nation. The new constitution, he explained, "takes into consideration the doctrines enunciated by Lord Buddha, the spiritual and temporal heritage of Tibet, and the ideas and ideals of the modern world." Elected representatives of the people, he said, must be allowed "to play a more effective role in guiding and shaping the social and economic policies of the state." Ultimate powers were, however, reserved to the Dalai Lama. In March 1969, in a statement on the tenth anniversary of the Lhasa uprising, he said that "when the day comes for Tibet to be governed by her own people, the people will decide what form of government they will have. The system of governance by the line of the Dalai Lamas may or may not be continued. It is the will of the people that will ultimately determine the future of Tibet. In particular, the increasing political consciousness of our younger generation will be an influential factor."

This tendency toward democratization is partly a result of the exposure of exiled Tibetans to Western thought. Some might also take it as a response to Chinese Communist propaganda concerning their reforms in Tibet. But the Dalai Lama is opposing more than simply communists or militant atheists; he is opposing Chinese control, whether Communist or Nationalist. During the 1959 Lhasa uprising, Chiang Kai-shek sent a message to "fellow countrymen in Tibet" promising that, when the Communist régime fell, "our Government will meet your wishes in accordance with the principle of national self- determination." Refugee spokesmen in India, who remembered the Tibetan Army's defeat of Chinese Nationalist efforts between 1912 and 1949 to regain control of Tibet, found Chiang's attitude patronizingly insufficient. The Tibetan Review recently denounced Nationalist claims to have instigated and supported Tibetan resistance to the Communists and accused Taiwan of sabotaging the unity of the Tibetan refugees.

With Peking and Taipei in agreement that Tibet is part of China, the legal weakness of Tibet's claim to independence has deprived the Dalai Lama of the support he has sought from the world community. Tibet appealed to the United Nations for help at the start of the Communist invasion in 1950, when the United Nations was already engaged on the Korean side of China. The appeal was ignored, however, after Britain and India declined to support it on the grounds that Tibet's claim to independence was unclear. Appeals by the exiled Dalai Lama in 1959, 1961 and 1965 brought U.N. resolutions calling for respect of Tibetans' human rights-without naming China as having violated them. India, still striving for good relations with China before their 1962 border fighting, did not support the first two resolutions but in 1965 said that "the Tibetans have been subjected to a continuous and increasing ruthlessness which has few parallels in the annals of the world." The resolutions have been snarlingly rejected by Peking as interference in her internal affairs. The International Commission of Jurists tried to focus attention on the problem in 1960 with a Legal Inquiry Committee on Tibet, which found that Chinese policy had "included genocide against the Buddhist religious group and also the large- scale violation of the most basic human rights." But world opinion has taken little notice of such resolutions and findings; it has, instead, added Tibet to the sad catalogue of lost and virtually forgotten causes.

At one time the absent Chinese Communists were defended in the United Nations by the Soviet Union, which in 1959 asserted that Tibet was an internal matter for China and that the so-called revolt there was only the suppression of a reactionary clique of feudal landlords. But the Soviet attitude toward Tibet changed as hostility between Moscow and Peking grew and reached a peak during the Cultural Revolution. "The Tibetans fought for their national freedom and independence in 1959," Radio Tashkent said two years ago. "The Tibetans continue their struggle for their survival and independence, and their independence struggle, like that of other nationalities, will never be subdued." Kommunist, the Soviet Communist Party's theoretical journal, reported that some Tibetans are being resettled in the interior of China and that "in Tibet, where there were formerly hardly any Chinese, they now constitute about a third of the whole population."

The Soviet denunciation of Chinese policy in Tibet, after years of approval, aroused in Tibetan exiles a hope of powerful new support for their cause. It is an unpromising hope. The Soviets are using any handy stick to beat "Mao's clique," and this stick may well be dropped when that purpose is served. The Tsarist and Soviet Russians, who expanded into Moslem Central Asia and shaped it to a Russian mold, may find it difficult to chastise the Chinese for following an almost identical policy in Tibet.

Hopes of greater support from the Indian Government are also unpromising. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru initiated a policy of combining sympathy for the Tibetans with cautious detachment from their cause when he accepted Tibet's status as part of China in a 1954 treaty giving up India's old British-acquired special rights there. He refused to allow the Dalai Lama to proclaim an exile government in India in 1959. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is under little moral or political pressure to change this policy at a time when she is plagued by other and far stronger pressures. Besides, India is tightly locked in a dispute with China over India's Himalayan borders and is diplomatically unable now to argue that it is really Tibet's border which China has illegally perched upon.

VI

Amid accounts of the benefits which Communist rule has brought to Tibet, Chinese publications have hinted at trouble that goes beyond "the criminal schemes of reactionary serf-owners" and involves ordinary Tibetans. Popular opposition has undoubtedly fed the guerrilla movement, which never died after the Lhasa uprising. Chinese complaints of "robberies and demolitions" on the eastern and northeastern highways into Tibet and charges that the Dalai Lama "actively organized and trained remnant bandits who have fled abroad to harass frontier areas of the motherland" are testimony to the fact of armed resistance. But details are hard to come by. Red Guard publications said there were 100,000 guerrillas at the time of the Lhasa uprising. The Dalai Lama has quoted Chinese documents as saying 87,000 Tibetans, not all guerrillas, were killed between the outbreak of the uprising and September 1960, when Chinese military pressure had reduced the guerrillas to small units. All India Radio has quoted reports of popular uprisings last summer in two areas of southern Tibet, one led by students, one by farmers.

Peking has alleged that Chinese Nationalist planes from Taiwan began dropping American-made weapons to the guerrillas in 1958. But Taiwan is 1,800 miles from central Tibet; India and Nepal are geographically better located to aid guerrillas. At least until the 1962 Sino-Indian border fighting, India apparently was reluctant to get involved. Some sources say this attitude has now changed, but the only public indication of this comes from Peking. The Chinese Communists charged last January that the Indian Government has financed, armed and trained "Tibetan traitor bandits headed by the Dalai [Lama] . . . and sent them into Chinese territory to carry out harassment and sabotage activities." The United States was accused of being "the stage manager" of this disruptive activity. "Agents of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency constantly sneak into the dens of the [guerrillas] to engage in clandestine activities," Peking asserts.

Nepal's position is more difficult than India's. The 9,000 Tibetan refugees in Nepal include some in northern border areas beyond Kathmandu's effective control. Some are guerrillas who from time to time stage raids into Tibet. Peking, which is competing hard against India for Nepal's favor, has not raised any public objections to this situation.

Guerrilla activities are unlikely to change the situation in Tibet significantly. They constitute harassment rather than a liberation movement, although the Dalai Lama called upon Tibetan exiles in March "to strive toward liberation" of their homeland. He added that Tibetan independence "in the near future depends primarily upon our own efforts" but he did not spell out what might be done. Despite the Cultural Revolution, the Dalai Lama does not express much hope that 1911 will repeat itself with a collapse of the Chinese central government that would allow Tibet to regain control of its own affairs.

So the prospect appears bleak. But, with a spiritual serenity, the Dalai Lama believes that the outward appearance of a solid Chinese grip on his homeland might not represent reality, that perhaps all is not so black as the suffering of this life makes it seem. With a religious charity, he hopes the next generation of Chinese leaders might be "more reasonable." But he and his people now in exile know that, if ever they do return to Tibet, it will be a different place. The old Tibet they left behind has ceased to exist.