NEWS UPDATE JUNE 2001
Tibet still a thorn in China's side
New Zealand Herald 1 June 2001
As Foreign Minister Phil Goff takes in the landscape, MATHEW DEARNALEY finds out why Tibet and the exiled Dalai Lama remain a thorn in China's side.
There was a time when the Dalai Lama of Tibet was welcomed into the Chinese capital as a divinity on earth.
China's Ming Emperor in the 17th century was said to have built an inclined pathway over his city wall to spare the Buddhist priest-king the indignity of entering Beijing through a gate.
The Fifth Dalai Lama, having assumed spiritual and temporal authority over the Himalayan territory of Tibet to the west, had set forth to the lowlands to demand Chinese recognition of his sovereignty.
Now, after more than 40 years in exile, a monk called Tenzin Gyatso roams the world as the 14th reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, seeking help from New Zealand, among others, just to gain an audience with China's communist leaders.
Although his constant appeal is for a peaceful solution to one of the world's toughest human rights conundrums, China calls him an inveterate troublemaker who poses a threat to its national security.
Which is part of the reason Foreign Minister Phil Goff is puffing his way across the so-called Roof of the World, most of which is at a higher altitude than Mt Cook, trying to get a feel for life there under Chinese rule.
What is Mr Goff doing in Tibet?
He is halfway through a four-day fact-finding tour of the Tibet Autonomous Region, which exiles say is only half of their original nation, at the invitation of Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan.
Human rights activists say he will get to see only what China wants to show him, but they welcome the trip as an opportunity for him to raise again the question of negotiations with the 65-year-old Dalai Lama.
Mr Goff says he has gone to Tibet with an open mind, and has a list of names of political prisoners whom Amnesty International would like him to visit.
He has yet to receive permission to see them.
As well as holding discussions with justice and security officials, he has visited Tibet's main Buddhist temple, Jokhang, and a palace which was shelled by Chinese artillery after the Dalai Lama fled from it in 1959 disguised as one of his own bodyguards.
But why has China invited Mr Goff?
Mr Goff is one of the most senior western politicians, and the first foreign minister from either New Zealand or Australia, to visit Tibet.
Like other countries, New Zealand says it is not challenging China's territorial integrity or its right to keep governing Tibet, which Beijing invaded between 1949 and 1951, soon after the Communist Revolution.
But New Zealand has joined others in raising human rights concerns about conditions in Tibet, which the Dalai Lama says has endured cultural genocide but which the Chinese insist is enjoying great progress.
The Dalai Lama is planning his third visit to New Zealand next year. On his last foray, in 1996, he appealed to a cross-party parliamentary lobby group for Tibet to do what it could to bring China to the negotiating table for a peaceful solution in his homeland.
Mr Goff took up that cause last year at a meeting with Mr Tang, and was rewarded with an invitation to see Tibet for himself.
China's consul-general in Auckland, Zhao Xiangling, says too many people make up their minds about Tibet on the basis of misinformation from the Dalai Lama, "but those who want to see the facts for themselves, we like them to do so."
He says China and New Zealand have a very good relationship, and Wellington takes a practical approach to its dealings with his country. "We recognise there are differences but we are able to communicate with and not confront each other."
How about the trade relationship between China and New Zealand?
China also happens to be New Zealand's fourth-biggest trading partner, whose bid for membership of the World Trade Organisation (headed by former Prime Minister Mike Moore) has won this country's support.
Mr Goff does not see the invitation to Tibet as some sort of reward for this position.
Victoria University international relations expert Terence O'Brien says New Zealand is gaining a reputation as a country which has started to put its own house in order with treaty settlements, and has a relatively independent foreign policy.
But he suspects that at the same time as respecting New Zealand for these reasons, China might consider us a minor enough player in international affairs for it to deflect any awkwardness which may emanate from Mr Goff's visit.
Why isn't New Zealand pressing for Tibet's independence from China, in accordance with the wishes of more than 100,000 Tibetans living in exile, including about 40 in this country?
China regards Tibet as falling within its ancient borders, and is highly sensitive about any challenge to its territorial integrity as shown by its bitter reaction to the United States' relationship with Taiwan.
Not even the United States Government is challenging China's right to govern Tibet, despite heavy Central Intelligence Agency support for Tibetan guerrillas in the 1950s and 1960s, and a congressional resolution that it should be deemed an invaded territory. Mr Goff told the Herald last night from the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, one of the lowest parts of the territory at 3647m (117m lower than Mt Cook) that it would be pointless challenging China's sovereignty in the current circumstances.
The question rather is how to encourage China to give Tibetan people more freedom to run their own affairs while protecting their language, culture and religion.
"About all we can do is ask China to make that word autonomous in its Tibet Autonomous Region have greater meaning in the practical sense."
What does the Dalai Lama say?
The western approach reflects a "middle-way" stance advocated by the Dalai Lama, which he says China must heed unless it wants to tempt his people back into a more direct struggle.
In a statement marking the 42nd anniversary of an unsuccessful uprising against Chinese rule, he said his position was becoming hard to maintain in the face of intransigence from Beijing.
This was because "the overwhelming majority of the Tibetan people have no doubts in their hearts and minds that independence is their historical and legitimate right."
"While I firmly reject the use of violence as a means in our freedom struggle, I respect the right of every Tibetan to discuss and explore all political options."
The chairman of the Friends of Tibet group in New Zealand, Thuten Kesang, admits some discomfort at the Dalai Lama's reluctance to push for independence.
Mr Kesang came to New Zealand in 1967 after his merchant father died, aged 35, in prison, allegedly from being hung upside down each night and put to hard labour by day. He says Tibet was an independent country for 2000 years.
But he says he accepts the Dalai Lama's push for genuine autonomy as a practical way of trying to save Tibetan culture before it becomes extinct under Chinese state control and the influx of new settlers.
He says 1.2 million Tibetans have died under Chinese rule, including thousands slaughtered during the 1959 uprising.
Consul-general Mr Zhao says many people were killed throughout China during the excesses of the 1960s Cultural Revolution, and Tibet was probably spared the worst of these.
Why won't China negotiate with the Dalai Lama if he is not pushing for independence? Mr Zhao calls the spiritual leader "a very tricky person," who has done his best to cause international trouble for China, cannot be trusted and was a most unworthy recipient of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize.
He says the Dalai Lama comes from a feudal tradition akin to the European Dark Ages, in which a few lords and religious leaders enjoyed fabulous wealth while hordes of serfs were made to "toil like animals."
Mr Kesang dismisses this as typically crude and outrageous Chinese propaganda.
"We value human life more than anything else in the world and we don't even kill insects," he says.
He accepts that Tibetans knew of no other existence than what others may have criticised as feudal, and in fact few were even aware of the Second World War in their isolation from the rest of the world, but says they lived in harmonious balance.
And he notes that the Dalai Lama is moving with the times, having encouraged elections for the first time this year for his Parliament-in-exile in Northern India, and even suggesting his own 300-year-old office be ended if Tibetans want that.
World Tibet News - 3rd June 2001