The Dalai Lama’s Testament

The fourteenth Dalai Lama has written scores of books, most of them about compassion, wisdom, happiness, and enlightenment, and two of them about his own life. Now, as he approaches ninety years of age in July, he has written what is likely his last book—and the most political, about Tibet and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). 

Named the next Dalai Lama at the age of two, he fled into exile in 1959 at the age of twenty-three. The “voiceless” people in Voice for the Voiceless are the people of Tibet, and here the Dalai Lama recounts his roughly sixty-five years of attempting to lead his people from his refuge in India. He tells the story of his efforts to negotiate with the Communist Chinese—and (though the term is perhaps inappropriate in this context) he pulls no punches. 

The term “Communist Chinese” appears in the very first paragraph of the preface to the book, and readers are left in no doubt about the nature of Chinese rule. As he puts it, “The simple fact is that in so far as the Tibetans on the ground are concerned, the Communist Chinese rule in Tibet remains that of a foreign, unwanted, and oppressive occupying power.“ He describes the brutal suppression of the Tibetan uprising in 1959 in searing words: “atrocities that I found difficult to believe for their levels of depravity…. forced sterilization, crucifixion, vivisection, disemboweling, dismemberment, beheading, burning, beating to death, burying alive…and other horrors.”

The Dalai Lama has tried, as he recounts here, to negotiate with the PRC government to improve his people’s situation. As a teenager, he visited Beijing and met Mao in 1954—who told him “religion is poison.” The young Buddhist leader was interested in the theoretical Marxist opposition to exploitation but concluded even then that “what is lacking in Marxism is compassion” and he could not accept “the deliberate promotion of hate through class struggle.” He met with Zhou Enlai several times in 1956 and was given many assurances that any “excesses” committed by Chinese officials in Tibet would be corrected. Moreover, Tibet could enjoy autonomy within the PRC. But he writes that “by midsummer (1957), it had become clear that virtually everything I had been told by Zhou himself and by him on behalf of Mao had been falsehoods and dissimulations.”

When the Chinese army seized total control in 1959, the twenty-five-year-old Dalai Lama fled to India, which has given him and the growing Tibetan exile community around Dharmsala safe refuge ever since. That was not the end of his efforts to negotiate with the PRC, a story he tells here. But as he writes, “there were only two substantial periods of discussions with Beijing.” The first was when Deng Xiaoping was the communist party leader, and Deng told the Dalai Lama’s brother in 1979 that “except for independence everything is negotiable. Everything can be discussed.” But the talks that took place proved that “there was no space yet for a substantive conversation.”

The Dalai Lama then, in the 1980s, made a historic decision to abandon any hope of independence for Tibet and promote instead his “middle way,“ which sought autonomy within the PRC. He told the European Parliament in 1988 that he was “expressing our willingness to remain part of the People’s Republic of China, but only with the guarantee of genuine autonomy.“ He also began to outline the evolution in his thinking about his own role, and stated that “it was my wish not to take any active part in any future government of Tibet…."

This period of engagement with the PRC ended with its crushing of the freedom demonstration in Tiananmen Square in 1989. “The process that had begun in 1979 with Deng Xiaoping’s statement to my brother… that apart from independence, everything could be discussed, had come to an end.“ Deng was the last Communist Chinese leader the Dalai Lama knew, and after 1989, there were few meetings. Over the ensuing years, the Chinese communist hostility to the Dalai Lama increased: in 1994 a complete ban on any photographs or portraits of him in either public spaces or even private homes was adopted. 

But a second period of dialogue began in 2002, with a new series of meetings between representatives of the Dalai Lama (led by Lodi Gyari, a key adviser of the Dalai Lama for decades) and the PRC. There were nine rounds of discussions, the last one in January 2010, but “at no point did the Chinese side present any substantive proposals.” There were further informal and confidential contacts through individual Chinese, all the way up to 2019. But, as he writes of these decades of efforts at serious discussions with the PRC, “looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I wonder if there was ever a genuine intention on the part of the Chinese leadership for substantive discussions…. What mattered to China was to be seen talking, rather than to actually talk.“ 

He also describes an interesting facet of his negotiations with the PRC: he was focused on Tibet, but the Chinese communist officials were focused mostly on him. That is, the Chinese were trying to get him to return to Tibet as if his return would suggest that the issue of Tibet was now resolved. As he puts it, from 1979 on, the Chinese position has been all about his own status “with no attempt at addressing the real issue—the well-being of the Tibetan people.”

The Dalai Lama candidly describes the situation today as “grim. The policies of Xi Jinping, who visited Tibet in 2021 (the first visit of a Chinese leader in more than thirty years) seem to be focused on "tightening of control and intensification of measures aimed at assimilation.” For example, young Tibetans are educated only in Chinese, so it becomes their first language. There is direct Communist Party control over monasteries and even more pervasive surveillance. “Increasingly the Tibetans inside Tibet are being made to feel that what is wrong with them from the Chinese authorities' perspective is simply that they are Tibetans.” 

I first came in contact with the Tibetans when I served as assistant secretary of state for Human Rights in the Reagan administration. Lodi Gyari, who then headed the office of Tibet in Washington, asked to come see me. I happily agreed and asked him to come to my office. This was shocking and unacceptable to the China Desk. The Tibetans could not be allowed in the building lest the Chinese Communists be offended, and I was told to call the meeting off. When I protested to the Secretary, the compromise was that I could meet with them— but not at the State Department. So, we ended up meeting in a hotel lobby.

Over the years, I kept up my contact with the Tibetans, especially with Lodi Gyari, and finally, when serving on the White House staff, I got to meet the Dalai Lama when he visited President George W. Bush. In fact, the Dalai Lama has met with both Presidents Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, though he was not granted a meeting with President Trump or President Biden. In the elaborate efforts to honor the Dalai Lama but not overly offend the Chinese communists, all these meetings took place in the White House but not in the Oval Office. The theory is that the Dalai Lama is not a head of state. But the real reason is a sort of kowtow to the PRC.

It is certainly correct that he is not a head of state, due to his own changes to Tibet’s political structure. At age seventy-five in 2011, he fully ended his own political role and established both an elected executive and parliamentary body. “I said that rule by kings and religious figures was outdated, and we had to follow the trend of the free world, which is toward democracy.” But numerous religious leaders get Oval Office meetings, so the refusal ever to grant one to the Dalai Lama is hard to defend.

In an interesting reflection on world politics, he wonders about the contrast between Mongolia, which maintained its independence, and his beloved Tibet, which lost its own. Could the outcome have been different? He knows that it is partly due to the Soviet Union’s backing for Mongolia’s independence from China and the pressure on Chiang Kai-shek to accept it. He also blames Tibet for not asserting its own independence at the international level after the First World War—not, for example, joining the League of Nations or, later, the United Nations. But that is water over the dam a century ago.

Now, the Dalai Lama writes of the future. He notes that there is now both a Tibetan political leadership and a substantial population of Tibetans living outside Tibet in the free world who can continue the struggle. Whether there will be a fifteenth Dalai Lama is a separate question. He reminds readers that “as early as the 1960s, I have expressed that whether the Dalai Lama institution should continue or not as a matter for the Tibetan people. So, if the Tibetan people feel that the institution has served its purpose, and there is now no longer any need for a Dalai Lama, then the institution will cease, in which case I would be the last Dalai Lama. I have also said that if there is continued need, then there will be the Fifteenth Dalai Lama.”

The problem is how that individual will be chosen. When the last Panchen Lama (the second most important Tibetan Buddhist leader) was chosen, he was immediately seized by communist authorities and has not been seen in thirty years. In an effort to avoid such a disastrous situation after his own death, the fourteenth Dalai Lama has said that only a reincarnation “done through traditional Tibetan Buddhist methods” can be accepted by the Tibetan people and Tibetan Buddhists around the world. Moreover, he has added that “since the purpose of reincarnation is to carry on the work of the predecessor, the new Dalai Lama will be born in the free world….” This is a pre-emptive rejection of anyone selected by the PRC or inside its borders. The “meddling” of the PRC in recognition of the next Dalai Lama is wildly inappropriate, he has noted, because the regime explicitly rejects religion. Here he comments (“half joking”) that “before communist China gets involved in the business of recognizing the reincarnation of lamas, including the Dalai Lama, it should first recognize the reincarnations of its past leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping!”

This volume ends with expressions of gratitude and an appeal to the world not to forget Tibet and its people. The fourteenth Dalai Lama, recognized at age two, has led his people well for three-quarters of a century. The independence of his country has not survived, but his leadership has ensured that its people, culture, and religion have remained visible—crying out against oppression, demanding attention, and seeking only peaceful support in their long struggle against what amounts to cultural genocide. The overused term is appropriate here, given PRC efforts to move Han Chinese to the Tibetan plateau and change its demography, combined with regime suppression of Tibetan language, culture, religion, and traditions. The PRC is not trying to kill the Tibetans, but to erase their identity as a people. 

As a Reagan administration official, I used to speak each year at “Captive Nations” events. Those were commemorations of the juridical existence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, whose forced absorption into the Soviet Union in 1940 had never been accepted by the United States. The attendees were usually aged couples, and I wondered if they thought—as I did—that my brave words about restoring the independence of the Baltic nations were neither persuasive nor very realistic. Yet it happened; all those decades of Captive Nations protests ended in freedom. Those who are demanding not independence but real autonomy for Tibet, with the ability to protect its people and their culture, wonder today when or whether their captive nation will achieve such freedom.

The fourteenth Dalai Lama, for so long a fixture of Tibetan and international life, will not live to see whether his efforts succeed. But he has, in his own life, achieved more for his people than could possibly have been expected, and if Tibetan identity survives, history will point to him as the key figure in that achievement.