By Robert Thurman

THE BEIJING OLYMPICS HAS BROUGHT new attention to Tibet, as people, groups, and nations across the world have taken the symbolic running of the torch as an opportunity to protest China's imperialism. However the media's simplistic reporting and reliance on Chinese sources of in formation has clouded the issue rather than clarified it. In the wake of supposedly violent uprisings in Tibet, there is even a misconception that His Holiness the Dalai Lama has lost the support of his own people. Yet in looking past propaganda to better understand what has occurred in Tibet over the past months, it is clear that the Dalai Lama offers the brightest possibility for a lasting solution in the region.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama has not wavered from his fifty-year commitment to nonviolence in seeking an arrangement with the Chinese Communist government that will free his people from genocidal oppression at its hands. His "Middle Way" approach is well thought-out, strong, and realistic. His long-standing offer to the Chinese government, which he has extended for at least twenty years, is based on principles enshrined in the Chinese Constitution concerning the treatment of what that document calls "Minority Nationalities" within their Republic.

The essence of the Dalai Lama's offer is this: to have the Tibetan people consent legally by plebiscite to accept Chinese sovereignty over the Tibetan plateau, on the condition that all the Tibetan people in all Tibet Autonomous areas are left to be genuinely free to live on their own plateau, run their own affairs, govern themselves, control their own economy, and preserve their own culture and environment. Defense and foreign affairs would remain under China's control, and China could still invest in and profit from a Tibetan economy run sustainably by Tibetans, as long as mining and other extractive industries were conducted in a thoroughly green and clean manner. So all Tibetans would regain their practical freedom under genuine autonomy in exchange for granting China legitimate sovereignty, which in the post-UN Charter world cannot be gained by force of invasion and occupation.

A key point, sometimes hard for Americans to understand, is that the Dalai Lama's spiritual role is one he shares in general with other Tibetan reincarnate lamas: to represent a living exemplar of the Buddha, inspiring Tibetans that they too can evolve into enlightened beings, if they cultivate their good human qualities to a high degree. This role particularly in his case mandates that he take an active concern in social and political realities, since his incarnation carries the responsibility to safeguard the Tibetan Buddhist culture, which is designed as the arena wherein the Tibetans are guaranteed the maximum opportunity for the self-cultivation they aspire to. That culture is not just a by-product of the three-mile-high altitude, but is the heroic creation of thirteen hundred years of self-restraint, altruistic development, and intellectual achievement on the part of millions of Tibetans. That is why he always talks of the Chinese committing a "cultural genocide" rather than a physical genocide. It is his spiritual duty to protect the cultural matrix within which Tibetans can feel that they are making their human lives count for something meaningful--in the context of their evolutionary belief that they are close to their goal of buddhahood if they can invest most of their time in spiritual, contemplative, and intellectual cultivation. He has carried out this duty with great success with the community in exile, wherein among the approximated 150,000 Tibetan exiles worldwide, there are more than thirty thousand monks and nuns. This is an astonishing proportion of a population living as refugees in difficult circumstances. The key to his never giving up his struggle to get a hearing from the Chinese leadership and people is that he feels it necessary to restore this precious spiritual opportunity to all the Tibetan people, who absolutely depend on him to do so.

The media has made much of late about their idea that Tibetans are fed up with the Dalai Lama's "Middle Way" offer to accept autonomy within China, and want complete independence, going to war with violence if necessary and reducing the Dalai Lama's role to only a spiritual one. But this is totally inaccurate. Tibetans continue to love the Dalai Lama heart and soul and body and mind. They are only at odds with China's stubborn refusal to even talk about a solution. Even when they go against the Dalai Lama's advice and protest publicly at risk of life and limb, they strive to remain nonviolent and show their Buddhist heroism by not retaliating violently to the most extreme abuse. They are tired of being brainwashed, occupied by a harsh military, economically cut off from their own natural wealth like any colonized people, treated as racially inferior as in any apartheid-like system, and deprived of their religious and spiritual focus on Tibetan Buddhism and its practice. In expressing their anguish over their loss of spiritual teachers and dear family members going back three generations now, and over their own personal injuries and deprivation, they might say they wish they could fight more concretely in some way. But so far the vast majority have stuck to Gandhian types of protests. It is not that they are somehow exceptionally holy. It is that they are intelligent, and the Dalai Lama appeals to their intelligence. Any act of terrorism, any kind of serious violence, would only give the Chinese "hardliners" the excuse they are looking for to complete their genocidal extermination and assimilation of the Tibetan people.

In an August 14th article written for the New York Review of Books, Orville Schell seems to justify China's current treatment of Tibet as a part of a long time struggle against humiliation by the West. I found the following sentence particularly amazing: "In the past, feelings of injury have arisen from such events as the Opium Wars and the Japanese occupation; and most recently after the Tibetan demonstrations this spring and during the run-up to the Beijing Olympic Games." How can a military invasion by European imperialists in the nineteenth century to impose a debilitating treaty on the Imperial Manchu regime, which led to long term occupation of parts of China by Europeans, or the infamous imperial Japanese invasion and occupation in the 1930s and 1940s, which caused huge loss of life in the Chinese population for years, be listed in the same sentence--and thereby compared as if in same category--to a 98% nonviolent protest over several months by the aggrieved Tibetans who themselves were invaded and have been occupied by Chinese military forces for sixty years with tremendous loss of Tibetan lives and a documented huge cultural devastation?

Schell sets the stage for his apology for China's murderous reaction to the Tibetan protestors by favorably reviewing a film about a Chinese graduate student whose American academic advisers were disappointed with his dissertation and required him to do further work on it; instead of doing the work he bought a pistol and murdered the advisers and some university administrators! Schell notes that the script of the film is "surprisingly sympathetic" to the murderer, which he explains somewhat by the fact of the director's own ambivalent experience as a grad student in America. He gives the impression that "Westerners" are arrogant about Chinese and so they have some justification in being upset. But the Tibetans are not arrogant, and they are not Westerners, and so the parallel doesn't work.

Schell brings the Tibetans' "Western supporters'' into the picture as perhaps the real causes of the hurtful humiliation. Interestingly, this is just what the Chinese themselves do, when they try to pretend that the Tibetans on their own are just so happy with the Chinese colonization of Tibet and all the trouble is caused by what they call "the Dalai clique" of supposedly Westernized Tibetans and their supporters. The Dalai Lama also seems to be aware of the Chinese people's sensitivity, which is why he has supported their right to host the Olympics from the beginning, and why he himself did not call for any of the protests, either by exiles or any of the oppressed Tibetans in Tibet. But the fact that they occurred and were misinterpreted by the Chinese as acts of unjustified humiliation does not come from some psychic complex of theirs. All Chinese are not like the one psychotic physics student who shot his thesis advisers. Schell's whole argument simply repeats the common Sinologists' argument "Don't criticize China because they have a very fragile psyche, and are likely to go nuts; they can't take 'loss of face" the way we Westerners can"! This is a highly patronizing attitude to the Chinese, as it amounts to saying they are somehow psychologically deficient, and it also exhibits denial about our own problems with "loss of face," i.e. admitting mistakes or guilt. In point of fact, the Chinese over-reaction to the Tibetan protests comes from the fact that they are completely misinformed and confused by their government's restriction of accurate information and by their active propaganda. They have been taught that they have always owned Tibet, and that Tibetans are a type of Chinese, therefore have no right to complain or ask for their freedom. They have been taught that the Tibetans were backward and "feudal," etc., and that the Chinese occupation liberated them and improved their lives.

Schell himself participates in this misinformation when he talks about the Maoist "dream of reunifying China as a multiethnic state composed of Han (central Chinese), Man (Manchurians), Meng (Mongolians), Hui (Muslims), and Zang (Tibetans)." But none of the last four ever did or do now consider themselves Chinese, nor do Chinese people encountering them face-to-face in the street consider them fellow Chinese. The Manchurian Empire (Sinicised as the Qing Dynasty) was an imperialist construct, and the Manchus oppressed the Chinese terribly. In their revolution of 1911 the Chinese rose up to throw out the non-Chinese (and also non-Western) foreign Manchu overlords. Only after independence for the Chinese people in China did both Nationalists and later Communists decide they wanted to restore the conquest empire of the Manchus with themselves as the overlords. This is the history that the Chinese masses have not been allowed to learn. When they look at the Chinese red flag with the five yellow stars, one big one (the Chinese) and four little ones (Manchus, Mongolians, Hui or Uighurs, and Tibetans), they don't know that not one of those little stars wants to be there, not one of them gave their consent. They are not like the thirteen stars on the first American flag, for example, which represent the states that voluntarily joined the union.

Schell is more on target when he gets off the theme of humiliation by "Westerners" and touches on how the Chinese people are misled by their own government, tracing their confusion and malaise to the radical switches it has inflicted on them. "China's restless search for a more self-confident, less-aggrieved persona has paradoxically been made more complicated by other wounds not directly related to foreign attacks: for much of the past hundred years Chinese themselves have also been engaged in a series of assaults on their own culture and history." Here is a critical point: If China assaults its own persona by withholding a accurate historical information from its people, and rewriting its own culture and history to suit current needs, then this cannot be blamed on the West or on Tibet. And this leads to a conclusion that Sinologists, or Sinological journalists are very loath to draw: The real humiliator of the Chinese people at the moment is the Chinese communist government itself, which is enriching its own elite with total abandon, and trying to preserve its control by letting some wealth accrue to a small percentage of the people (the new "middle class") while ruthlessly suppressing the vast majority. It then seeks to divert the resentment for this ruthless pressure downward by directing attention outward to the "foreign enemy," which is primarily America but also Japan and "the West." So its tight control of the education system and the media, including the Internet, indoctrinates its people both on the "humiliation by foreign enemies" theme and on the "rabid nationalism" theme. This is a tactic we have seen invariably used by dictatorial and oppressive regimes: and it usually leads them eventually into war, if allowed to go too far.

Getting back to Tibet, Zhang Qingli, the current Communist Party Secretary in Tibet, is known for his harsh attitude toward the Dalai Lama and his hard line treatment of Tibetans. In Xinhua, he said, "We must have a more vigorous will to fight, a more tenacious style and do a more solid job of uniting and leading the region's various ethnic groups and throw ourselves into the struggle against splittism." His attitude is unremitting. "From beginning to end ... we must deepen patriotic education at temples, comprehensively expose and denounce the Dalai Lama clique's political reactionary nature and the religious hypocrisy of the Dalai clique," concluding that "The (mandate of) heaven in Tibet will never change. The Dalai Lama clique's pipe dream (of independence) will never prevail ... the country's rivers and mountains will remain red."

In an interview with Der Spiegel in August 2006, Zhang stated that, "Tibet is the home of the 14th Dalai Lama, but China is his motherland." His regime has intentionally goaded at least a few Tibetans in Lhasa to break out into violence ina riot setting, and he has since used that as an excuse for what they openly call "merciless repression." In a document, "Tibet Communications," circulated within the Chinese Communist Party membership and leaked through Hong Kong to Michael Sheridan of The Times of London, Zhang has promised that once the Olympics are over, the crackdown in Tibet--a further intensified extension of the ongoing cultural revolution--will go on unabated, in order to achieve the "final solution" of eradicating the Tibetan identity.

Last October, when H.H. the Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal Award, this same Zhang Qingli called the Dalai Lama a "devil" and said he was going to prove it to the world.

His forces were thus prepared in Lhasa at an emotional time for Tibetans: March 10th, 2008, the forty-ninth anniversary of the Tibetan uprising in 1959 against the Chinese invasion and military occupation of the Tibetan plateau. The Chinese politicization of the Olympics heightened the tension of this time by their extravagant routing of the torch, including a climb to the top of Mt. Everest. Tibetan exile groups planned to use the visibility of those moments to publicize their demands for freedom. The other intensifying factor was the collapse of the five-year long "dialogues" between the Tibetan Government in Exile Representatives and the Chinese United Front officials in charge of handling Tibetan affairs in Beijing. It became apparent that the Chinese side had never been serious about making any compromises, and the whole process had been merely a delaying tactic to get the Tibetans to try to stop all human rights demonstrations when Chinese leaders traveled around the world.

Zhang's plan was carefully thought out. His paramilitary People's Armed Police (PAP) arrested some monks well ahead of March 10, for the crime of having whitewashed the monastery building in the previous October to celebrate indirectly the Dalai Lama's Congressional medal. The PAP beat up the next group of monks who marched to demand the release of those arrested. Then the Tibetan lay people got involved in defending the monks. At that point, Zhang ordered a retreat of all his overwhelming forces, as if they were intimidated or confused, and he sent in plainclothes police, Tibetan collaborators as well as Chinese, some dressed as monks, some dressed as Khampas from Eastern Tibet. The combination of these agents provocateur and the absence of the usual swift crushing presence of the PAP incited some Tibetans to riot, and Zhang got the footage he wanted from his security cameras, which he had people stationed to defend. If it had been a real, coordinated Tibetan-instigated riot, the first target would have been the security cameras, which are omnipresent and very well known to the Tibetans.

But then things went wrong for Zhang's plan. Unexpectedly, monks and laypersons all over the Tibetan plateau began to stand up and protest, in over 170 demonstrations. Tibetans themselves were unarmed and resorted to violence only in two of these demonstrations, the ones in Lhasa, clearly stage-managed by Zhang. The PAP fired into crowds, beat demonstrators, arrested and tortured thousands, and so on. It still goes on. The Western media was confused, as they began to say "there seem to be a lot of Tibetans outside of Tibet who are protesting in solidarity with the people in Lhasa!" But those areas are not really "outside" of Tibet; they are on the high plateau which defines Tibet. In the 1950s, during the time when the People's Liberation Army was first invading Tibet, the Chinese Communist government divided the Eastern Tibetan provinces of Khams and Amdo into the eleven "Tibet Autonomous Prefectures" of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces. They created on paper an "Inner" and "Outer" Tibet in case the rest of the world protested and resisted their invasion of Central Tibet (now the "Tibet Autonomous Region"). These "Autonomous prefectures" constitute three-fifths of what was Tibetan territory traditionally, and two-thirds of the Tibetan people live in them. In fact the whole plateau, with an average altitude of 14,000 feet--the roof of the world--is the Tibetan people's natural habitat. So the uprising in spring of 2008 was all over the whole Tibetan region.

The uprising of the entire Tibetan people, overwhelmingly nonviolent in spite of harshly violent repression and assault by over a hundred thousand PAP paramilitary troops, was a great embarrassment for Zhang Qingli. He had been conducting his own new "cultural revolution" in Tibet for several years, forcing monks to denounce the Dalai Lama and pay homage to the Chinese selected puppet Panchen Lama, instituting compulsory "patriotic reeducation campaigns" and communist management committees in monasteries, arresting and beating lay people for possessing pictures of the Dalai Lama and the imprisoned true Panchen Lama, and so forth.

In fact he was implementing policies set up for Tibet by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao in the mid-1990s, when the then party boss of Tibet, Chen Kueiyuan, declared that Tibetan Buddhism itself was seditious, since it was that core aspect of Tibetan culture that made the Tibetans identify themselves as Tibetans and refuse to identify themselves as Chinese. So the Chinese occupiers of Tibet have openly proclaimed their intent to finalize a cultural genocide in Tibet. This is the third time they have engaged in this, the first being the 1950s when they were destroying monasteries and killing monks and pious laypeople in Eastern Tibet, the second being the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, and now this one, which really began in 1994 and has intensified in the last two or three years. It is this assault on Tibetans' spirituality and core identity that is the true cause of the uprising within Tibet this year. But sadly, Zhang has convinced his bosses in Beijing that his policies are not the problem, and that the Dalai Lama instigated all the trouble, so they are now doubling down on policies that have failed them for sixty years.

The question now is, what to do going forward? The Chinese are still not negotiating in good faith with the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Democratic Government in exile, in spite of the urgings of various national leaders like Gordon Brown, Nicholas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, George Bush, Yasuo Fukuda, Kevin Rudd, and Stephen Harper. They do not even recognize the exile government or the Dalai Lama as representing the Tibetan people, though every Tibetan inside and outside Tibet considers him their unquestioned leader. The Chinese government maintains a shrill, harsh rhetoric about the Dalai Lama and about Tibet, and uses false propaganda to mobilize a militant nationalism in their own people, conflating the Tibetans' natural wish for freedom and the world's people's humanitarian support of that wish with Western powers' "evil desires" to "harm" or "split" China. On the Internet, you can find Chinese citizens calling for more blood of the "barbaric Tibetans." Zhang obviously has succeeded, so far, in propagandizing his home audience.

So does this mean that all is lost, the Dalai Lama has failed, the Tibetan cause is finished? There is a pseudo-syllogistic argument circulated by various fellow travelers of the Chinese imperium that runs as follows: "China's control over Tibet is absolute and unshakeable, that is a given. Therefore, if you want to help the Tibetans, do not give them a false hope that there is any way they can regain their freedom. This only makes them resist re-education, protest against the Chinese, question the legitimacy of Chinese ownership of Tibet, and struggle against their rulers. This in turn makes the Chinese more insecure and therefore more oppressive towards the Tibetans. The logical conclusion then is, if you want to help the Tibetans, don't help the Tibetans; it will only encourage them and give them false hope, which will get them in more trouble, and you will be the false friend."

An answer to this was once made by a Tibetan friend of mine, when responding in a media interview to one of these fellow travelers. He said, "So you would recommend to a woman being raped that she not scream or resist the rapist, because that would only provoke him to treat her more harshly?"

My opinion is that the reason the Chinese leadership has not yet responded to the Dalai Lama's totally beneficial offer to help them solve the problem, giving each side what it most desires in a win-win solution, is that they are caught in the grip of fear, and are also in denial about the ineffectiveness of their current policies. What is needed is not less pressure from outside countries (which need to include India, the Southeast Asian countries, especially Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Mongolias, and the various Central Asian "-stans," so it is not just "Western") but friendly yet rock-hard insistence that Chinese leaders stop being paranoid, realize their own strength, relax their suppression of human rights and human rights advocates, and deal honestly and fairly with their minorities. They need to show that they are confident enough about the benefits of belonging to the Chinese union to loosen their grip and not treat their ethnic regions like colonies, and gradually stop imitating nineteenth-century Western imperialists on the excuse that they were once harmed by such imperialists.

The Chinese are a great people, with a great civilization of their own. However, they have totally lost contact with their past due to the disastrous communist miseducation they have suffered under for several generations. With Marxism they were mentally invaded by one kind of Western, fanatically materialist ideology, and with unbridled one-party-state controlled capitalism they are completing their own self-destruction under the control of the opposite kind of Western, fanatically materialist ideology. Our relationship with China is among the most important relationships of this century. Continuing on the present path of superpower competition will lead to planetary catastrophe. We must change that path by treating the Chinese like we do any other human beings, not as some special strange personalities who are intractable to normal human interaction, as many of our Sinologists would have us believe. They are our mature equals, as capable of reason and self-correction as we should be, and potentially excellent partners in making a better world for all. We must show true friendship. But true friends are not co-dependents, enabling their friends' addiction to self-destructive ways of being and doing. The Chinese must stop trying to conquer the world, as so many have tried before, and so many failed. They must join us in a twenty-first Common Era century, which must be based on mutual cooperation and altruistic creativity (sometimes called enlightened self-interest). This is not idealistic, but only realistic; war is obsolete and colonialism and slavery no longer acceptable in the community of nations. We must have an ethical revolution worldwide, to solve the dire problems facing all humans on this planet. This revolution has its outstanding exemplars--the Dalai Lama is perhaps the most well known worldwide.

The Dalai Lama is China's and our best ally in helping China get back to its own civilization (operating on the Confucian version of the Golden rule, rediscovering their Buddhist transcendentality, living by their Taoist harmony with the natural environment, etc.), re-kindling their own spirituality (while embracing their Muslims and Christians), and taking a responsible leadership role in creating a harmonious, economically viable, environmentally restorative, and politically peaceful world. Under the spiritual leadership of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetans have resisted the Chinese oppression mostly nonviolently for almost sixty years now. We can certainly invest a few more years in seeing this unique nonviolent liberation movement though to success.

Robert Thurman is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. He is Co-founder and President, Tibet House U.S. and author of Why the Dalai Lama Matters.