Indian authorities clear Buddhist leader in probe
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/11/AR2011021102048.html)
The Associated Press
Friday, February 11, 2011; 9:05 AM
NEW DELHI — Indian authorities on Friday cleared Tibetan Buddhism’s third most important leader in a probe into $1.35 million in cash discovered last month at his headquarters in northern India, a news report said.
Rajwant Sandhu, the top civil servant in Himachal Pradesh state, said the money found during a raid on the Karmapa’s monastery had been donated by his followers, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.
The Karmapa had no links to the money since the affairs of his trust are managed by his followers, Sandhu said.
“The Karmapa is a revered religious leader of the Buddhists and the government has no intentions to interfere in religious affairs of the Buddhists,” PTI quoted her as saying.
Sandhu could not immediately be reached for comment.
Last week, state police probing the case said the Karmapa’s followers violated Indian tax and foreign currency laws in collecting the donations.The Karmapa, 24, left Tibet in 2000. Since then, he has been living at the monastery in Sidhbari, just outside Dharmsala, which has been the headquarters of the self-declared Tibetan government-in-exile since the top spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled the Himalayan region in 1959.
Police and revenue officials searched the Gyuto Tantric Monastery and twice questioned Ugyen Thinley Dorje, the 17th Karmapa, and his aides about the source of the money.
The raid was unprecedented and particularly surprising since the Karmapa is revered by Tibetans and Buddhists across India. India has gone to great lengths to provide asylum to Buddhist leaders who have fled Tibet, including the Dalai Lama.
The Karmapa Office of Administration adamantly denied Indian media reports that the Buddhist leader might be a Chinese agent sent to India to control exiled Tibetan Buddhists who have made their home there.
China’s government reviles the Dalai Lama, accusing him of pushing for independence for Tibet and sowing trouble there. A boy named by the Dalai Lama as the second-highest Tibetan spiritual leader, the Panchen Lama, in 1995 disappeared shortly afterward and China selected another boy.

Dal-roti, Nalanda make me a son of India: Dalai Lama
TNN, Jan 31, 2011, 03.11am IST
BANGALORE: That it was a Sunday morning did not deter people from walking into St Joseph’s College (autonomous) to listen to the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetans. The entire place wore a look of Tibet. The dais was decorated in the Tibetan style with pictures of Lhasa andBuddha as the background. It was red and green all over. But the Dalai Lama said: “I am a son of India.”
Continuing on his theme India, he said: “Once a Chinese media person asked me why I call myself a son of India. I told them my brain is filled with Nalanda thought (Nalanda is an ancient centre of higher learning). My body is built with Indian rice, dal and chapathi. I am proud of it.”
When he came on the dais, the students were in for a surprise. Happily munching biscuits when offered, trying on a conical cap that was presented to him and teasing some, he was so child-like in his enthusiasm that he bowled over the gathering.
Clad in his signature maroon robe, he first paid homage to the Buddha’s photo. Then he greeted the crowd in his mother tongue but soon switched over to English. “That was the formal part and now to the informal one,” he said.And the informal speech was peppered with some one-liners. Like when asked about divorce, he said: “After all, we do not have much experience!”
He elaborated: “We Tibetans learn from Indians. Indians are our gurus and we are chelas. And history shows we are good chelas.” Asked how one could control anger, he said laughing: “The day before yesterday, I lost my temper. But my temper is like lightning, it comes and goes. If anger remains, it turns into hatred. One life is not enough to completely eliminate anger.”
After praising the Christian ‘brothers and sisters’ for their significant contribution in the field of education, he said that some missionaries were engaged in conversion. This, when the management of St Joseph’s College was sharing the dais with him. “Some get converted to Buddhism too,” he said.
“I am straightforward. While praising all this while, I have been critical too,” he added as the crowd burst into laughter.

Obama-Hu Summit: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly
ICT blog, January 21, 2011
by Todd Stein
Tibet
Good: when President Obama said: “The United States continues to support further dialogue between the government of China and the representatives of the Dalai Lama to resolve concerns and differences, including the preservation of the religious and cultural identity of the Tibetan people.” A positive affirmation of long-standing U.S. policy that gives support to the Dalai Lama’s efforts, and should encourage other countries to say the same thing, publicly.
Bad: when Obama said: “We, the United States, recognize that Tibet is part of the People s Republic of China…” While this is U.S. policy, it doesn’t need to be repeated and only empowers Beijing to press other countries for such statements absent of key language on the dialogue (as above).
Ugly: when President Hu said: “China is willing to engage in dialogue and exchanges with the United States on the basis of mutual respect and the principle of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.” This is code for ‘Tibet is ours, stay out,’ belied by the fact that what happens in Tibet could affect millions (as in melting glaciers and their affect on major Asian rivers and those downstream).
Human rights
Good: when Obama said: “The United States speaks up for these freedoms and the dignity of every human being, not only because it’s part of who we are as Americans, but we do so because we believe that by upholding these universal rights, all nations, including China, will ultimately be more prosperous and successful.”
Bad: when Obama said: “China has a different political system than we do. China is at a different stage of development than we are. We come from very different cultures with very different histories.” This expression of moral relativism essentially gives a free pass to Beijing, who justifies the gross mistreatment of its citizens on the false premise that there are eastern values distinct from western values.
Ugly: when Hu said: “China is always committed to the protection and promotion of human rights.” If there were a virtual asterisk above Hu’s head, it would have appeared at this moment.
Images
Good: Images of the Tibetan flag, Hu Jintao as a “failed” leader, and a “Tibet will be free” banner projected on the side of the Chinese embassy. See image above. Kudos for the clever work of our friends at Students for a Free Tibet.
Bad: Chinese television censored their own leader’s comments on human rights. As reported by the Washington Post, Chinese censors cut off the BBC broadcast of the joint press conference right after Hu said “a lot still needs to be done…” on human rights.
Ugly: The pomp, circumstance and 21-gun salute accorded a foreign leader with a horrendous human rights record. This is the first time in history that a Nobel Peace Prize winner (Obama) has hosted a person (Hu) who has incarcerated a fellow Peace Prize winner (Liu Xiaobo).
Actions
Good: Obama was proactive in signaling the importance of human rights in the bilateral relationship. Days before the summit, he invited five activists/academics to the White House to discuss “current challenges, prospects for reform, and recommendations for U.S. policy.” The White House also invited the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch to the state dinner.
Bad: The Administration failed to include any Tibetans (or Uyghurs or Mongolians) in any of the rights promotion activities before or during the summit. While theirs is a struggle for basic rights too, these peoples face additional suffering from Chinese assimilationist policies that are destroying their culture.
Ugly: Hu’s Communist Party continued to incarcerate (and possibly torture) Liu Xiaobo, Hu Jia, Dhondup Wangchen and Gheyret Niyaz for merely exercising their right to free expression, while Hu himself availed himself of full, free expression in the United States, where his words were broadcast across the United States, uncensored. See above about Hu’s own comments on human rights being censored back home.
[This blog posting and more can be found on ICT’s blog: Ideas, Advocacy and Dialog on Tibet]
Press contact:
Todd Stein
Director of Government Relations, ICT
Email: todd.stein@ictibet.org
Tel: +1 (202) 785-1515

Not made in China
Tithiya Sharma, Hindustan Times
January 30, 2011
He’s a warrior with a message of peace, a patriot barred from his homeland, a refugee in a country he was born in and an idealist living in a world disenchanted by anything without a price tag. If you know of Tenzin Tsundue, it’s probably because you watched him steal the visiting Chinese Prime
Minister’s media thunder in 2005. Tsundue unfurled a ‘Free Tibet’ banner sitting high up on the ledge of a building screaming “Wen Jiabao, you cannot silence us”.
Yes, you can’t silence the determined dissenter, but you can restrict his movements, throw him jail and make an example out of him to frighten others with lofty ideas of freedom, justice and righteousness.
Some estimates claim that almost a million Tibetans have perished in the struggle for a free Tibet. The next obvious question is… What does this one man hope to accomplish? With global icons at the helm of affairs, what can Tsundue really do?
He hopes to keep the “idea of a free Tibet alive”. Reminding the world that whether living under Chinese rule or in exile, the Tibetan people are still hoping, waiting and yearning.
In an era of armchair activism where people assume they’ve done their bit by wearing t-shirts with clichéd slogans and ‘sharing’ news about the horrors of war and exploitation in their virtual lives, Tsundue goes the extra mile.
When he’s not dangling precariously from towers, Tsundue is writing poetry about his life and his people’s struggle. He travels to every part of India with a Tibetan population- inspiring and binding them together in a peaceful resistance against “colonial China”.
He’s also open to spending time in jail- most recently in 2008, after being arrested by the Chinese border police for attempting to reach Tibet. Tsundue along with his compatriots wanted to stage a protest against the Olympics and human rights violations and the political propaganda that’s controlling Chinese citizens.
Tsundue says, “There can be no freedom for Tibet, till the Chinese people are free. Unless there is democracy and dignity for the Chinese citizens, there will be none for Tibetans. The only way to deal with a bully like China is through compassion, empowerment and support of it’s people.”
Tsundue was born in a tent besides a road, his mother, along with other Tibet refugee labourers, were constructing in Himachal Pradesh. His family was eventually settled in a refugee camp in Tamil Nadu, where he attended a Tibetan school and eventually went to a local university.
“Even though India has an over cautious stance where it comes to the Tibet issue, the country has given us a home. It has allowed us to continue in our way of life, to keep our cultural identity and to me that is the most valued support”, he stresses.
Tsundue’s brand of activism and his past endeavours require him to register with the police in Dharamshala each time he plans to travel and also upon his return. He must carry that ‘permission slip’ with him at all times. He feels no resentment and expects no special treatment. “Everything I endure is nothing new to any refugee anywhere, there is no room for ego here”.
Recounting his darkest hour in a prison cell, fearing being locked away and forgotten for a lifetime, Tsundue says that something remarkable happened. “I realised that there is joy in the simple things in life- a few moments in the sun outside my cell, a cup of hot water and a steamed bun for breakfast and the idea of a free Tibet.” Inside that jail cell, Tsundue had been released. Now, he carries that sense of calm with him always. He’s content with a Spartan existence, earning sustenance from his published work. Almost fearful of getting too comfortable, lest it distract him from his life’s mission.
He may have spent his entire life in exile, but Tenzin Tsundue was ‘Made in Tibet’.

Tibetan Parliament extend support to Karmapa
(Tibet.net)
[Sunday, 30 January 2011, 10:00 a.m.]
The English transcript of the statement made by the Tibetan Parliament’s Standing Committee during a press conference presided over by the Speaker at the Parliamentary Secretariat in Dharamsala on 29 January 2011 follows:
We would like to thank journalists from the Tibetan radio services and other media organisations for attending today’s press conference at such a short notice.
There seems to be different speculations in the Tibetan society on the issue of related with Gyuto Monastery of the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje. More importantly, we can not say what kind of news has spread inside Tibet. So in order to convey clear information to Tibet, we have organised this press conference particularly with reporters from the Tibetan media organisations.
On hearing about the issue yesterday, the Standing Committee of the Parliament had expressed deep concern as the members met in the afternoon of 28 January. As we discuss how the issue has originated, it was agreed to seek an audience with Gyalwang Karmapa. If it was not convenient to meet him, we thought it would be helpful to get a clear information by meeting with other leading officials of the monastery. Accordingly, Speaker Penpa Tsering accompanied by Geshe Thubten Phelgye, Geshe Monlam Tharchin and Lopon Sonam Tenphel of the Standing Committee visited the monastery at 3:30 PM. Many journalists were present at the monastery. We first met the monastic officials. Later, during our audience with Gyalwang Karmapa, we found him completely at ease, which clearly shows that he has nothing to do with any wrongdoing. We, the Standing Committee, conveyed our deep concern to him and to extend whatever cooperation if needed be to avert the occurrence of such issues which bring disrepute to Gyalwang Karmapa. The main objective of our visit was to show our solidarity with Gyalwang Karmapa.
During the audience, Gyalwang Karmapa said he has no knowledge about the issue since he does not interfere in such matters. His statement reinforces the confirmation of our belief that he has no personal connection with the issue. This has been our firm belief.
We have a system in our monastery based on which we can explain the source of the current amount of money. We firmly belief and we can say in definite terms that these come as religious offerings from the follower and devotees. As the Indian journalists raise serious doubts about the money’s source, we got the opportunity to clarify them. We clearly stated that the allegations of Gyalwang Karmapa as an “agent of Chinese government” and “possessing money through illegal deals” are totally baseless. Through this press conference, we want to convey this information to the Tibetan people living inside Tibet.
As far as Gyalwang Karmapa is concerned, he put his life at risk by coming into exile from Tibet at a tender age. During his stay at Gyuto Monastery in India, he has to live under the control of the Indian security officials and he has no freedom to move freely as he wishes to. This is the fact that we all know. All his programmes are being made under the supervision of the Indian government. Those who are seeking his audience have to obtain prior permission from the Indian police authorities. For instance, we were also frisked before our meeting with him yesterday. There is no reason to protest since the security officials are carrying out their duty. So the police have knowledge about every detail of the offerings made to Gyalwang Karmapa and it is not that they know nothing about the matter. Owing to the remarkable deeds of the Karmapa lineage, it enjoys the trust and faith of followers and devotees from across the world such as Singapore, Thailand, and western countries and in Tibet who make offerings. In our society, he is one of the spiritual head of schools of Tibetan Buddhism, highly revered and respected by the Tibetan people. Personally, he has been concentrating on his spiritual studies, promotion of Buddhism and world peace, and protection of environment, thereby making great service to Tibet’s political and spiritual cause. Hence there is absolutely no need to doubt and there exist no ground for that to happen. We wish to make this clear.
Regarding the monastery’s financial management, Gyalwang Karmapa does not make detail inquiry about what and how much offerings are being presented to him on the throne by the devotees. “I do not interfere in these matters”, he told us yesterday. All the financial matters are managed by the administrative staff. Their lack of knowledge about legal procedures has led to the negligence in maintaining proper account of the money. On the matter which is not in line with the country’s law, we have to respect the result of the ongoing investigation being carried out by the Indian government. Otherwise, issues arising out of this matter to denigrate the reputation of Gyalwang Karmapa are completely baseless.
The Central Tibetan Administration and the Kashag are making efforts on its part to extend whatever necessary help and cooperation to Gyalwang Karmapa. Similarly, the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile firmly support the truth of the matter and we are ready to offer whatever necessary guidance and co-operation until the issues become clear.

Chinese journalist says he was fired for being too outspoken about Tibet, corruption
By Alexa Olesen (CP) – 20 hours ago
BEIJING, China – A Chinese journalist known for being critical of the government said Friday that he’s been fired by one of the country’s most daring media companies for refusing to tone down his writing, the latest sign of China’s tightening grip on press freedom.
Chang Ping, a former editor and columnist for publications owned by the Southern Media Group, said the dismissal wasn’t linked to any single piece of writing but rather his consistently critical tone.
China’s censors routinely scrub domestic news and online content of material they consider destabilizing or threatening to the communist leadership, but the Internet is so vast and porous that forbidden information increasingly gets through to the public. This has emboldened many Chinese journalists and publications to push the boundaries in their reporting, a trend the government is trying to contain.
Chang’s employer confirmed he had been let go but wouldn’t say why.
“Chang Ping’s contract expired and it was not renewed,” said a woman surnamed Deng who answered the phone at the Southern Metropolis Daily, one of the papers Chang used to write for. She said editors were too busy to be interviewed and that the paper had nothing more to add about the situation.
Chang, 42, drew fire from authorities and other domestic columnists in 2008 when he wrote an editorial saying that foreign media should be allowed to report firsthand on bloody ethnic riots in Tibet and advocating dialogue between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama. He’s also written about corruption and China’s need for greater political and personal freedoms.
Southern Media Group’s two main publications, Southern Metropolis Daily and Southern Weekend, stopped publishing his commentaries six months ago, he said.
The Guangzhou-based writer said that he thought his dismissal was part of a Chinese campaign against free speech and press that has intensified since jailed democracy activist Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in November.
“I am very angry that I’ve been punished for my words,” Chang said. “The bigger picture, the background is that I am not the only one. There have been other editors recently with other papers that have been dealt with as well.”
He cited two recent incidents documented by the Hong Kong-based China Media Project, which keeps track of media reform trends in mainland China. The first was the firing of Long Can, a journalist with the Chengdu Commercial Daily in Sichuan who was dismissed last week after writing about official negligence and influence peddling related to the botched rescue of a group of university students in a remote scenic area. Because of mishandling, a police officer died in the rescue.
He also pointed to a separate China Media Project report about Peng Xiaoyun, an editor with Time Weekly, who was forced into involuntary leave after his publication came out with a list of influential people that included a jailed Chinese food activist and several people who had signed Charter ’08, a bold call for political reform co-authored by Liu, the Nobel Prize winner.

DAMMING TIBET TO SAVE CHINA:
HYDROPOWER’S COMING GOLDEN DECADE
Gabriel Lafitte, January 2011
China’s 12th Five-Year Plan, for 2011 through 2015, is about to become public.
The ongoing massive infrastructure investments typical of a centrally planned economy will persist, and perhaps even accelerate, as China continues to finance its infrastructure construction by borrowing from future generations. China’s growth remains state-driven, and tightly focused on creating the necessary preconditions for the elite to get even richer, with the state picking up the tab for putting in place the expressways, railways, power stations,cities and ports needed to enable profitable businesses to follow.
While the overall amount to be spent on infrastructure construction contracts to be won by the well-connected may be as big, or bigger, than in the previous central plan, the focus will shift, from the coast to the inland, and from encouraging energy intensive heavy industries to encouraging heavy industries whose intensive energy use is supplied
partly by “green” sources of power.
High on the list of construction programs, designed to distract attention from the massive program of building more coal fired power stations, is the increased use of nuclear power, solar power, wind power and hydropower. In order to maximise the impression that China is the world’s leader in renewable energy, the Party’s 12th Plan will result in maximum publicity presenting China as the global capital of hydropower and green energy. Although the 12th Plan will not be formally released until the 2011 session of the National People’s Congress in March 2011, already key media are publishing the core targets, and they are indeed ambitious, though hardly on the scale of the intensifying use of Chinese and imported coal, and the weekly commissioning of new coal fired power stations. China’s coal consumption is already around three thousand million tons and, even if every planned hydro dam and nuclear power station is built, will still rise to 3.8 billion tons as soon as 2015.
Since a high proportion of the new hydro dams are in Tibet, or on the edges of the Tibetan Plateau, how will China’s reinvigorated hydraulic economy impact on Tibet?
A GOLDEN DECADE FOR THE RED ENGINEERS
What is also becoming clear is that the Party leaders intend to sweep aside the growing strength of the environment movement in China, which in recent years grew in its ability to persuade Beijing to override local boosters of dams that would inundate areas of exceptional beauty or cultural significance. Not only is the party-state signalling its determination to vanquish the environment movement, but also the social unrest that frequently erupts when intensively farmed valleys are commandeered for inundation behind a dam wall, with farmers, sometimes hundreds of thousands of them, offered inadequate land and compensation in a country with no unused arable land left. The coming two Five-Year Plans taking China to 2020 are to be a “golden decade” for engineers. The rise and rise of the red engineers, who dominate the Politburo of the Communist Party to a remarkable degree, is not yet over, even if a new generation takes over in 2012.
Shanghai Daily reported on 6 January 2011: “WITH 2020 clean-energy targets to meet, China is set to accelerate the building of hydroelectric dams, reversing a long halt caused by environmental concerns and the social upheaval of relocating people living in the shadow of dam sites. The trend will create a “golden decade” for the nation’s hydropower sector, analysts say, as high fuel prices continue to squeeze margins of coal-fired power plants that comprise the bulk of
China’s electricity-generating capacity. Renewable energy sources like solar power have been slow to come on line on a big scale because of high costs and grid-configuration problems.
“The Chinese government now aims to have 430 gigawatts of -hydropower capacity by 2020, increasing its earlier target of 380GW, the China Securities Journal reported last month. ‘That means each year, the equivalent of one new Three Gorges Dam will be added in China over the next decade,’ said Shao Minghui, an analyst at China Post Securities, using the 2020 target of 380GW as a base. ‘The market is really sizable.’ The 18.2GW Three Gorges Dam, which spans the Yangtze River, is the world’s largest.”
Shanghai will be a major beneficiary of this renewed investment in diversified energy sourcing. Not only will the industrial belts surrounding Shanghai be major users of hydropower transmitted from afar, there will be less reliance on coal hauled from Inner Mongolia and elsewhere in northern China, and fewer bottlenecks on a rail freight system overloaded with coal shipments. Shanghai will proclaim its green credentials as a city that directly emits less greenhouse gases, by sourcing its hydropower from as far away as the fringes of Tibet, where arrays of dams will cascade down the mountain rivers that pour from the Tibetan Plateau.
The Tibetan Plateau is increasingly divided geographically between two different purposes, in the minds of China’s planners. One land use, covering big areas on the map, is conservation and watershed protection for China’s downstream users, preserving landscapes often called pristine and unspoiled by Chinese economic and tourism industry
planners. The other land use, concentrated narrowly in corridors of development, is concentrated urbanisation, industrialisation, minerals extraction and processing, and all the transport corridors that connect these zones of high productivity, high capital investment, and high immigrant population.
While these two kinds of land use pull in opposite directions, they could live side by side, if uneasily. But China has further decided that the nomads are to be sedentarised, emptying the land, leaving it officially designated only for conservation and watershed protection, with traditional pastoral use excluded. The displaced nomads are now becoming an urban fringe, dumped into high density concrete block settlements, with no skills, no livelihoods and few of the inhibitions essential to living in the urban crowd.
The land of Tibet is being pushed to contradictory extremes, with huge emptied areas badged to materialiseChina’s green credentials, while the engineering corridors and urban hubs monopolise almost all available investment. The existing corridors of highways, railways, optical fibre cables and oil pipelines across Tibet are to be joined by a new corridor, of hydro dams and high voltage power lines. The dams sometimes are to be in a cascade series, on Tibetan rivers, establishing the river system of Tibet, source of most of Asia’s great rivers, as a newly industrialised corridor comparable to the highways and railway. While there is little likelihood these mountain rivers will, in Tibet, be navigable, they can be made to generate enough electricity to see power pylons marching across Tibet, both to the new boom cities in Tibet, and far away to the east, to China’s major industrial cities.
The power of the hydropower engineers, far from waning as some have supposed, is reaching its peak. But the targets are, by any standard, ambitious; and will require massive injections of capital raised by issuing bonds to be repaid by future generations. Rather than encouraging domestic consumption, which would enable China’s factory workers to buy what they make, investment capital will, as usual, be primarily directed at massive projects that retiring leaders like to associate themselves with as their lasting fame.
But is it actually possible to add a Three Gorges dam once a year, for a decade? The reality is that Three Gorges, athwart China’s greatest river, the Yangtze, is unique, the world’s biggest hydro dam for good reason. There aren’t many rivers where a single dam of such wonder-of-the-world size could be contemplated. Instead, China will build an enormous number of smaller dams, and maps charting known sites on the Tibetan Plateau are now readily available online http://tibetanplateau.blogspot.com/search?q=dams&updated-max=2010-01-21T13:06:00-08:00&max-results
DWARFING THE THREE GORGES
But there is one river, or to be more exact one stretch of a specific river, in a far corner of China, that has the potential to be another three gorges, in fact to generate double or even triple the power generated by the Three Gorges colossus. This is the great river of southern Tibet, the Yarlung Tsangpo, in its gorge in eastern Tibet, pinned beneath towering ranges on all sides, as it curves in a great bend before plunging south into northeast India and Bangladesh, known better to the world as the Brahmaputra. The great bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo is so remote and inaccessible it was charted only in the 1990s. On paper, its potential for generating hydropower is extraordinary. Over a 300 km stretch, it falls from 3000 meters to just over 500 meters at the point it leaves Tibet. The gorge it has cut through the rising Himalayas is itself a channel for laden monsoon clouds to penetrate Tibet more than anywhere else on the plateau, resulting in heavy rainfall. Hemmed in by glacial peaks above 5000 meters, with the highest mountain of eastern Tibet, Namche Barwa, at 7760 meters, the whole area not only attracts moist monsoon clouds, but captures almost all of them for the river. In the 300 kms of the great bend, the Yarlung Tsangpo’s flow more than doubles. China’s hydro engineers calculate that two great hydro projects could be built, Metok (in Chinese Motuo), with 38,000 megawatt generating capacity, more than double Three Gorges 18,600MW; and Daduo, which could generate even more, 43,800 MW. Either of these projects would add more to China’s electricity supply than all the dams planned for other Tibetan rivers put together.
The idea is quite simple. Both involve diverting water from the river through a man-made short-cut that avoids much of the great bend, sending huge volumes of water straight across from intercept points where the river is just below 3000 meters, rushing down to rejoin the river on the far side of the bend, where it is only at 850 meters (Metok/Motuo) or 560 meters, at Daduo, an even greater drop. This makes maximum use of a drop of more than 2000 meters -2 kilometres- to drive enormous turbines and produce electricity on a scale that dwarfs even the Three Gorges. Not only have Chinese hydro engineers sketched such plans, they have published proposed routes for the ultra high voltage cables that would then step across the deep gorges of nearby rivers in order to reach the core cities of western China, Chongqing and Chengdu. China’s Xinhua newsagency published a map in 2003 showing power lines heading east to
the Sichuan basin.
Source: Scientific Atlas of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, 1990, map 80
Such projects would forever be linked to their progenitors, the engineers who dominate the CCP Politburo Standing Committee, as Three Gorges is a lasting monument to its patron Li Peng, otherwise known as the driver of the Tiananmen massacre. Either of these great Yarlung Tsangpo dams would also showcase the technical mastery of Chinese engineers, whose worldwide work building railways, oil pipelines and refineries in Africa, or mines in Latin America, extend China’s global reach. Three Gorges relied on imported turbines from Siemens in Germany as the high precision heart of making electricity from water; but a new generation of turbines can now be made in China, after western manufacturers were induced to transfer their intellectual property to Chinese partners.
Source: Scientific Atlas of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Geographic Publishing House 1990, map 2
China’s mapping of routes for these hyper mega dams makes full use of existing river valleys feeding into the Yarlung Tsangpo gorge on the downstream side. Rather than having to channel diverted water all the way along a 50km shortcut, the plan is to utilise as much as possible the existing fall of water as it rushes down to join the Yarlung Tsangpo not far from where it reaches India’s Arunachal Pradesh state, a state still contested by China, which loses no opportunity to remind India that China’s armed forces occupied Arunachal in 1962.
But there are enormous obstacles facing the prospect of ever building these dams. Between the sides of the great bend is a major mountain range, peaking at 7760m, the highest mountain anywhere in eastern Tibet or western China. The spine of mountain ridges is mostly above 5000m, a full 2kms above the river bed; and it is underlain by a deep fault line,
in a region subjected to enormous mountain building pressures and big earthquakes as pressures build and seek sudden release. The only way through would be to tunnel massive shafts on a down slope through the fault line, at a depth of 2kms or more, deep enough to be so naturally hot that water entering at close to freezing point might heat by as much as 50 degrees. No one really knows. So far it is all on paper, with little preliminary work done to test even the technical feasibility, let alone the financial cost/benefit case. Continuous tunnels would need to be up to 30kms long. In order to generate enough power, many parallel tunnels, each probably eight meters wide, would be needed. In addition, on a river that rages in the summer monsoon and slows greatly in winter, dams to regulate flow would be needed across the river. All this in an area so steep, jungled and inaccessible that the 1990s saw a Sino-American race to be first to actually traverse the full length. One result was a number of books, Ian Baker’s The Heart of the World: A Journey to Tibet’s Lost Paradise the best of them.
Source: Scientific Atlas of Qinghai Tibet Plateau 1990, map 138
The great bend occurs for a reason. This is the area of maximum thrust of the Indian subcontinent into the heart of Eurasia. What forces the river northeast, then east, and then southwest is a series of faults deep in the mantle of the planet, which are at right angles to each other. Across most of Tibet the fault lines run roughly parallel, trending from northwest towards the southeast, and it is these which force the Yarlung Tsangpo to turn south towards India and Bangladesh. But before reaching the walls of rock pushed up along these faults, the river must first find a path between other fault lines that are oriented southwest to northeast, resulting in parallel ranges trending the same way, that the river must squeeze between. This is a highly active seismic area, with deep-seated forces pushing in differing directions, not a secure environment for deep drilling on a massive scale. The risks are enormous.
Construction of the Three Gorges dam occurred in a highly populated area, with full urban services nearby, in fact the population that had to be removed as the dam filled was over one million people. From the perspective of the logistics of infrastructure construction the location was challenging, but workable, with ready access for the machinery needed to shift rock, blast and built the massive reinforced concrete walls. Everything needed, even huge and awkward items such as turbines, could be transported readily to the site, not least by large ships steaming upriver from Shanghai and China’s most industrialised belt.
By comparison, Metok county is the very last of China’s 2000 counties to be accessible by any road at all. It was only in December 2010 that Chinese engineers blasted the last rocks separating tunnels coming from both ends of a 3.3km shaft which is to enable road traffic from Pome (in Chinese Bomi) county to get through to Metok. Then road making machinery will be able to enter, and construct a road to Metok town, the county capital on the Yarlung Tsangpo. The tunnel is not big enough to handle huge items such as hydropower turbines, nor can they be brought up a raging mountain river via Bangladesh and India. The news of the road tunnel connection was reported in Indian media as further evidence of China’s threat to Indian rivers. The last thing India would ever do is to facilitate the portage of heavy equipment enabling China to dam the Tibetan river relied upon by north-eastern India.
Metok is also the last of China’s 2000 counties to have any Chinese, Han Chinese, living there. The official 2000 Census lists Metok (Motuo) uniquely as having no Han at all, and only a small Tibetan population of 1300. Most of the people are neither Han nor Tibetan but are officially classified as Lhoba (Luoba in Chinese), an ethnicity that counts as one of China’s officially recognised 56 ethnicities constituting China. In Metok and nearby counties there are 2500 Lhoba, and about 4000 over the border in northeastern India, where they are more often known as Mishmi and Tani. They were classified by Chinese ethnographers as living in the evolutionary stage of “primitive communism”, an egalitarian tribalism which meant they were spared the compulsory class warfare China forced on Tibet. In China’s rigid social evolutionary ladder, which all people must pas through, primitive communism is the lowest of all, prior to the feudal slave owning stage of history which is where Chinese investigators fixed the Tibetans, necessitating compulsory struggle sessions in which educated Tibetans were denounced and liquidated.
The Lhoba were spared, partly because the official Chinese ethnologists who decided how everyone was classified, resisted the pressure on them to radically simplify reality and lump many peoples together, for the sake of administrative utility. Elsewhere, people’s own preferred identities were ignored, but the Lhoba got to be one of only 56 minority nationalities, down from over 400 in the early 1950s. Rather than colonising Metok county with Chinese cadres, Lhoba children were taken to schools in China’s interior to be taught how to be Chinese citizens, and become the cadres transmitting Beijing’s policies to these rugged borderland gorges.
The Lhoba have been further beyond the reach of the Chinese party-state than any minority, living in small villages close to raging rivers, hunting, trapping and trading with Tibetan farmers. Should the world’s biggest hydro dams twice or thrice the power of Three Gorges, come to Lhoba land, the Lhoba will have no way of even expressing their true feelings to the world.
Undeterred by the multiple impracticalities of this paper dream of a double sized Three Gorges on the Yarlung Tsangpo, Chinese armchair engineers have fancifully proposed the use of small nuclear explosions to blast the necessary tunnels. This wildly improbable fantasy has been seized upon by Indian hawks who enjoy ratcheting up Indian fears of China, and their Tibetan friends who take all opportunity to portray all Chinese speculation as fact, all Chinese plans as malevolent. Perhaps the most popular retelling of the nuclearisation of the Yarlung Tsangpo is in the film Meltdown in Tibet, by Canadian film maker Michael Buckley. No evidence is presented to back the assertion that these dams are to be built, and nuclear explosions are a key construction method. The fashion for nuclear explosions as a tool of civil engineering was popular in many countries, which faded as reality dawned that blasting is no substitute for digging and tunnelling. In Australia in the 1960s mining entrepreneurs with a penchant for simple solutions to complex problems proposed nuclear blasting of canals to take seawater to the dry salt lake beds of the inland, or to blast a canal from monsoon northwest Australia to the parched inland rangelands of West Australia a thousand or more kilometres south. Such ideas were quietly dismissed, as not worth a second look. In China such enthusiasms still surface. In 1996 Scientific American reported a macro-engineering plan involving peaceful nuclear explosions bruited during the December 1995 Beijing meeting of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics, to excavate a 20 km long canal through an intervening mountain range north of the Yarlung Tsangpo in order to convey irrigation-quality water on its way far to China’s arid north. Somehow a number of reports have muddled two Chinese plans which both begin on the Yarlung Tsangpo. One is an extraordinarily ambitious plan, of which nothing has been heard for years, to divert water far to the north, all the way to China’s over-used Yellow River, to replenish its depleted flow. The nuclear option was mentioned as a way of dealing with intervening mountain ranges which stand in the way. Some reports, based on hazy knowledge of Tibetan geography, assume nuclear explosions deep underground, are also proposed, not for blasting a canal but tunnels to link the Yarlung Tsangpo with itself further downstream across the sides of the great bend. While both of these massive projects based on extracting water and/or electricity from the Yarlung Tsangpo do have their supporters, they remain too big even for the red engineers in charge of today’s China, with no sign for several years that either plan is under serious consideration.
THE GOLDEN DECADE OF DAMMING BEGINS
Perhaps these mega dams will be built one day, given that China’s modern hydraulic economy has, as a matter of revolutionary pride, built more dams than anywhere on earth in the past 50 years, displacing as many as ten million farmers in the way of progress. But that day is not soon. The Yarlung Tsangpo gorge does not go in a decade from being a heroic discovery of Chinese (or American) masculinity, to being an industrial worksite for a statist development project bigger even than Three Gorges.
Focussing on the impossibly over scale megaprojects distracts attention from the large number of smaller dams that are planned for Tibet. But even these are caught up in the chronic tension and suspicion in India about China’s intentions. The plan for a dam across the Yarlung Tsangpo, much upstream from the great bend, capable of generating electricity for nearby Tsethang town and the city of Lhasa, has been met in India with claims of Chinese malevolence. Supporters of India’s military establishment have even suggested that, in the event of hostilities, China could use the dam under construction at Zangmu as a weapon, opening the floodgates to inundate Indian towns downstream. The Zangmu dam will take a substantial portion of 12th Five-Year Plan funding, but it is not in any way designed as a water diversion dam, only as a generator of electricity, after which the water will be returned to the river. This does not reassure Indian critics, who depict the dam as massive, either depriving India of much needed water, or flooding it, or both.
Many dams will be built, and this is of great concern to the many southeast Asian downstream users of the waters of the Mekong, as well as Tibetan communities distressed at their powerlessness to in any way speak up for themselves or those downriver. The painstaking research pieced together by http://tibetanplateau.blogspot.com shows dozens of hydro dams under active consideration, or already under construction, around the eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau, and deep in Tibet, where dams are the primary source of electricity to power China’s urbanisation strategy for Tibet. Some are modest in scale, yet still raise issues of displacement of farmers, interruption of fish migrations, and risks of siltation as rivers swell in monsoon months and erode their course, then dump their load when water is slowed by a dam. Many concerns are raised by these dams, especially the bigger ones on the faster flowing mountain rivers of Tibet as they begin their descent from the Plateau.
But no debate is possible in Tibet. All contributions from Tibetan civil society are quickly criminalised, declared to be an illegal discourse, part of the “splittist” plot to destroy China’s unity and stability. Although the wider world may soon know which of the many proposed hydro dams in Tibet are to be constructed as part of the 12th Five-Year Plan, the Tibetan villagers most affected are neither told what to expect, nor given any public space to participate in decision making. While there is limited freedom for Chinese environmental NGOs to speak up for protection of Tibet, Tibetans themselves must remain silent.
International organisations are sometimes caught up in this untenable situation. UNESCO was persuaded to declare the parallel gorges of three great rivers leaving Tibet to be the Three Parallel Rivers World Heritage UNESCO protected area, but UNESCO allowed China to exempt from the protected area boundaries the actual rivers, leaving China free to build dams, while proclaiming the gorges rising above the river beds to be a global tourist heritage wonder protected by UNESCO listing.
China is now determined to roll back the advances in recent years of the environmental movement, in order to ensure there are no obstacles to the coming “golden decade” of dam building. Popular resistance to being displaced by development, and environmental objections are to be swept aside, as dozens of new dams are constructed all along the flanks of the Tibetan Plateau, proclaiming China’s credentials as a “green energy” power. China’s next Party Secretary Li Keqiang says of the 12th Five-Year Plan: “In the coming five years, China will vigorously develop the green economy and low-carbon technologies to bring down significantly energy consumption and CO2 emission per unit of GDP.” (Financial Times 10 January 2011) This is a carefully crafted formula to raise energy efficiency and reduce energy intensity while accelerating total energy use as production continues to increase as fast as China can manage. What this formula masks is that coal use in China, dug domestically and increasingly also imported, is set to rise and rise over the 12th Five-Year Plan. Between 2007 and 2035 China’s use of coal to generate electricity will triple, even if China fulfils all its “green” plans for hydropower, wind power, solar power and nuclear power installation.
Source: International Energy Outlook 2010, International Energy Agency
Much of the new 12th Plan dams will be in the heartland of Tibet, to power the copper smelters, ore concentrators, rock crushers, urban infrastructure and glossy tourist hotels of central Tibet, the essential power supply enabling the 12th Plan’s “leaps-and-bounds” development of Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) to be achieved. Even the great bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo and the several hydro dams well upstream of the great bend are all in TAR, where Tibetans are especially disempowered, under constant surveillance and suspicion of harbouring splittist tendencies the moment they speak up against dams or other environmental costs Tibet must pay. The harsh prison sentence given in 2010 to Karma Samdrup, a Tibetan businessman, environmentalist and community leader, indicates the price of speaking that questions Chinese governmental practice in Tibet.
GREEN TIBET, BROWN TIBET
Tibet has been offered to the world as a sacrifice for China’s greater good before. Tibetan nomads have been removed from their pasture lands, forced to lead idle lives in concrete block settlements, in order to grow more grass for protection of China’s upper watersheds in Tibet. These hundreds of thousands of “ecological migrants” are officially voluntary patriots sacrificing their lands and livelihoods for the greater good of China’s downstream. The creation of “paper park” protected areas covering large portions of Tibet’s alpine deserts has been engineered as a zero/sum game pitting wildlife conservation against the presence and life of nomads. Similarly, other official Chinese schemes for reforestation, converting sloping land to ecological plantations, “grain-to-green” and other slogan-led programs with international backing, invariably exclude Tibetan farmers and nomads from pursuing their livelihoods while also contributing to the conservation effort. Instead of enlisting local Tibetan communities as participants essential to the success of reforestation, degrading grassland rehabilitation and de-desertification, Tibetans are fenced out, declared redundant and are resettled elsewhere.
China makes much of its contribution to global campaigns to conserve biodiversity, mitigate climate change, step up investment in green energy, protect watersheds and reduce energy intensity and each time it is the Tibetan Plateau that is further disempowered, and divided into zones of exclusion, adjacent to zones of intensive investment in dams, highways, railways, mines and urban boom centres, all of which attract immigrants, adding to population pressure on a plateau the size of western Europe that has never sustained a human population of more than six million. China’s overall pattern of intervention in Tibet divides the plateau between areas developed intensively for production, and large areas mapped out of bounds for Tibetan use in the name of environmental issues. Excluded from the land use conversion zones and outnumbered in the urban production zones and dam construction sites, Tibetans increasingly have nowhere to live Tibetan lives, pursuing Tibetan livelihoods making extensive, mobile use of the whole plateau below the snow line of the Land of Snows.
China’s various slogan-driven “green” mass campaigns may each make sense taken in isolation, but what they add up to is an incoherent, deeply contradictory vision of Tibet as China’s salvation, providing China all at once with abundant clean water, minerals and hydropower, a mass tourism boom and green credentials globally.The new Tibet of the 12th Five-Year Plan is a patchwork landscape of intensive, exclusionary conservation; and intensive productivist development. China wants Tibet to be both pristine and unspoiled; and a productive supplier of hydropower, oil, gas and minerals to distant Chinese manufacturers and cities. It is this dual vision that has portioned Tibet into productivist brownand post-productivist green zones, chopping up a land which required no such interventions by state power until Chinese governmentality reached far into the rangelands in the 1950s, setting off a chain of policy failures that the 12th Plan golden decade of dam building greenwash is meant to correct.
Sweeping aside those displaced by hydro dam development, and dismissing the concerns of environmentalist objections to dams may not be as easy as the announcements in China’s official media suggest. Social unrest is growing, and rural Chinese are better aware of their legal rights. They are less willing to accept eviction from their farms, to make way for dams, when compensation for lost livelihoods and promises of better substitute land and higher incomes than ever prove yet again to be meaningless in practice. The rise of popular blogs exposing official expropriations of land is one sign of popular resistance among those most immediately displaced. But these days the environment movement in China attracts well-connected city dwellers, the sort of Chinese citizens who read the English-language Shanghai Daily and are not at all pleased to be informed that the state is about to end the “long halt caused by environmental concerns and the social upheaval of relocating people living in the shadow of dam sites.”
In Tibet protests are declared splittist, and are crushed. Who are the people most directly affected by the new dams on the Tibetan Plateau?

An open letter to Hu Jintao
19 Jan 2011
The Asian Age
Dear Hu Jintao,
As the Chinese leader most closely associated with Tibet, you have declared Tibet to be one of the most sensitive “core issues” in the US-China relationship. We expect that it will be high on the agenda of your discussions with President Obama this week.
Mr Hu, you began your rise to power as Party chief in Tibet (although you didn’t enjoy the altitude in Lhasa), and you have been instrumental in setting and implementing policy on Tibet. As the succession process begins in the Chinese Communist Party, what will be your legacy on Tibet?
Tibetans have not forgotten that you presided over that terrifying time of martial law in Lhasa in 1989 – and you were one of the first regional leaders to congratulate those who ordered the troops to open fire on Tiananmen Square three months later.
Today, there is a deepening crackdown in Tibet. Tibetans have risked their lives to express their loyalty to their leader the Dalai Lama and their anguish as a result of more than 50 years of suppression. Your response has been to strengthen the very measures that caused the largely peaceful wave of protests that swept across Tibetan areas of the PRC from March, 2008 onwards. You have tightened control to suffocation point, imposing new measures that weaken the institutions of Tibetan Buddhism and undermine Tibetan language, bedrock of its culture. Although you are leader of a Communist state that promotes atheism, you have even declared that Tibetan lamas cannot be reincarnated without
government permission.
Your actions point to profound contradictions in China’s leadership today. While you demonstrate increasing strength and aggressive authority in your assertions towards global leadership, you regard peaceful disagreement with the juggernaut top-down policies of the Communist Party as a threat to your nation’s “security”. The latter is not the approach of a strong state. As Tibetans, we are not alone in believing that the measure of greatness of a nation is not only based on turbo-charged mercantilism. We believe that ultimately if China is to achieve greatness you must lead with a moral authority and take into account the wishes and genuine grievances of the Chinese and Tibetan people.
The need for change is urgent. Your government and Party have engaged in a systematic attack on the rule of law and civil society. You characterise two of the most progressive and important voices for peace on the world stage today – our leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Chinese scholar Liu Xiaobo – as “criminals”. Tibet is under virtual lockdown, with ever longer prison sentences being imposed as ultimately futile attempts to silence the peaceful expression of views. Do you want the leitmotif of your legacy to be a hellish, constricting fear?
Mr Hu, you can no longer say that what happens in Tibet is simply a matter of China’s “internal affairs”. Tibet is a “core issue” for the world, not just for China. Tibet is the earth’s ‘Third Pole’ with the world’s largest reserves of freshwater outside the Arctic and Antarctic. The fragile ecology of the Tibetan plateau, the source of most of Asia’s major rivers including the Yangtze, is of critical importance to the water-dependent societies in downstream nations. And yet you have developed and are pursuing fast-track economic strategies and damning projects that are known to contribute to the adverse effects of global warming and risk devastation in downstream communities, including India.
Twenty-first century thinking requires us to move beyond 19th century nation-building based on the exploitation of natural resources. There is an increasing consensus among Chinese, Tibetan and Western scholars that your policy of settling nomads in Tibet is leading to environmental degradation and increasing poverty. Scientists say that the traditional ecosystem knowledge of Tibetan nomads protects the land and livelihoods and helps restore areas already degraded. The involvement of Tibetans is essential to sustaining the long-term health of the land and water resources that China and the rest of Asia depends upon.
Mr Hu, a new generation of leaders has a responsibility to listen to voices for change from Tibet and China, and to deal responsibly with Tibet policy.
It is not too late for you to take an important and historic step before the succession runs its course, with regard to another important succession.
The Dalai Lama is recognised by the world as the pre-eminent representative of the Tibetan people. The potential for instability increases, not decreases, after he passes away. Now is the time for a far-sighted Chinese leadership to engage with this moderate, influential leader – who is revered by thousands of Chinese, too – before it is too late.
We hope that your visit to Washington is fruitful.
Tencho Gyatso, Tsering Jampa, and Pema Wangyal are from the International Campaign for Tibet

Hu Pushed on Tibet Dialogue
2011-01-19 RFA
The U.S. president calls on his counterpart to restart talks with the Dalai Lama for greater Tibetan autonomy.
U.S. President Barack Obama raised the plight of the Tibetan people directly with visiting Chinese leader Hu Jintao on Wednesday, calling on Beijing to resume talks with the Dalai Lama on greater autonomy for the Himalayan region.
As Obama and his counterpart sparred over human rights at a rare press conference, the U.S. leader said Beijing should make better efforts to reconcile differences with the Tibetans, who complain their rights are being eroded under Chinese rule.
“Even as we, the United States, recognize that Tibet is part of the People’s Republic of China, the United States continues to support further dialogue between the government of China and the representatives of the Dalai Lama to resolve concerns and differences, including the reservation of the religious and cultural identity of the Tibetan people,” Obama said.
Some see Obama’s move to publicly raise the Tibet issue as an attempt to make amends for what was widely considered to be a snub of the Dalai Lama during the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader’s visit to Washington last year.
Obama finally met with the Dalai Lama at the White House in February 2010 after declining to meet with him during his previous visit to Washington in October 2009.
But some advisers had argued against the delay, which was widely panned at home as an appeasement of China. At the meeting that was finally held, the president agreed only to a brief meeting with the Dalai Lama that was closed to the press and held in the White House basement Map Room.
Little progress
The Dalai Lama’s representatives have met with Chinese officials a total of nine times to discuss Chinese rule in Tibet, but little progress has been made in the talks. The last time the envoys sat down with Chinese officials was in January last year, when the two sides met in Beijing.
Hu did not respond directly to Obama’s comment about Tibet, but did admit later that as a developing country with a large population and in the midst of reform, China could do better to protect the rights of its people.
“China still faces many challenges in economic and social development. And a lot still needs to be done in China, in terms of human rights,” he said.
He added that China would be willing to engage in dialogue and exchanges with the United States “on the basis of mutual respect and the principle of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.”
‘Make change happen’
Mary Beth Markey, president of the International Campaign for Tibet, said that while it was atypical of Obama to make such a strong statement about Tibet on the public stage, his message was “nothing new.”
“That is what the president has been saying to the Chinese privately. And yes, it’s enormously gratifying to have him say it publicly. But again, it’s not new … and it’s something that Hu Jintao would have heard many times before,” Markey said.
“It is Hu, and it is only President Hu, who has the authority to make change happen in Tibet. So it would have been much more gratifying to then have President Hu say something and … he was pretty dodgy on those human rights issues,” she said.
“[But] the Chinese do not like to appear to be acting at the behest of U.S. concerns for Tibet.”
Many Tibetans have chafed for years under Chinese rule, which they say has eroded their national culture and curbed their freedom to practice Buddhism.
The Dalai Lama has accused China of perpetrating “cultural genocide” in Tibet, and is regarded by Beijing as a dangerous separatist.
Call for concern
As Obama and Hu fielded questions at the joint press conference, hundreds of Tibetan and other demonstrators converged on Lafayette Park outside the White House, protesting against what they called China’s human rights abuses.
Some chanted “Who is a liar? Hu Jintao is a liar” and “Killer, killer, Hu Jintao.”
Two actors wearing 12-foot-tall skeleton costumes played out an attack on others portraying a Chinese dragon in front of a banner that read, “Hu has Tibetan skeletons in his closet.”
“We’re here to urge President Obama to raise the issue of human rights and freedom for the Tibetan people during his talk with President Hu Jintao, publicly and vigorously, because these are universal values and especially ones that us Americans … cherish,” said Tenzin Dolkar of Students for a Free Tibet.
Written by Joshua Lipes.

Transcript of Video-Conference with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Chinese Activists
TibetNet[Thursday, January 20, 2011 17:53]
Questions put forward to His Holiness the Dalai Lama by Chinese people from various cities in Mainland China.
1. Your Holiness, what is your view about Ngabo Ngawang Jigme? He was the representative delegated by you to negotiate with the People’s Republic of China and also the one who signed the 17-Point Agreement [in 1951]. Even if you had not granted him [plenipotentiary] powers [to sign the Agreement], you had later accepted that agreement. Eventually, most of the time, he stood against you and acted like the spokesperson of the Chinese government on the Tibet issue.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama: I knew Ngabo even before 1950. People who knew Ngabo at that time viewed him as an honest person, someone of integrity. I also viewed Ngabo as progressive and trusted him. He was then one of the main people who had my trust and confidence. After the signing of the Agreement, when I met Ngabo in Lhasa, he told me that they were compelled to sign that Agreement because, had they refused to sign, it would have resulted in an ‘armed liberation’ of Tibet. Thus, he felt that a ‘peaceful liberation’ was better than an ‘armed liberation’. He, however, also said that when they signed the Agreement, even though they were carrying the Chamdo governor’s official seal, they did not use it. They instead had to use a forged seal provided by the Chinese government.
Similarly, in 1979, after Deng Xiaoping displayed significant flexibility, I dispatched fact-finding delegations to Tibet. At that time, when my delegates met Ngabo, he told them to be aware about the fact that whether in times of the Qing dynasty, or for that matter, the rule of Guomingtang, places within the territory of Ganden Phodrang [Government of Tibet] never paid taxes to them. Ngabo thus gave a clear indication of his patriotism.
Similarly, in 1989, during a session of Tibet Autonomous Region People’s Congress, Ngabo refuted as factually incorrect the official Chinese paper claiming that the Nanjing government (of Guomingtang) made all the decisions regarding the enthronement of the 14th Dalai Lama, as well as on matters relating to the identification and recognition of the Dalai Lama. Ngabo said that the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama was recognized by the regent of Tibet in accordance with religious tradition and that there was no foreign presider at the enthronement ceremony. The aforesaid claims, Ngabo said, were not true as asserted by the Guomintang officials. Even though I was a minor at the time of the enthronement, I still vividly remember that there were representatives of British India, China, Nepal and Bhutan uniformly seated in one row. Thus, in these matters, Ngabo had done his best in clarifying the actual facts. Following his demise, we organized a memorial service. In fact, some of our friends criticized our memorial service for him as inappropriate. We all know it is a fact that people under fear are forced to speak diplomatically according to the given circumstances. This is the reason why I always had complete trust in him. Even though he has now passed away, I always pray for him.
2. Your Holiness, are you losing control over the behaviour of a few Tibetans in exile? What do you think if that happens and how are you going to work on this?
His Holiness the Dalai Lama: There are over 150,000 Tibetans living in exile, out of which perhaps 99 percent share common concern and sincerity on the issue of Tibet. Of course, there will be difference of opinions and it should exist since here we are following the path of democracy. I tell my people that they have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and they should express themselves freely. So there will be different opinions. Take the example of the Tibetan Youth Congress. They struggle for independence and criticize our Middle-Way policy. During my occasional meetings with them, I tell them ‘the Chinese government expects that I should arrest some of you’, but we cannot do such things here in a free country and I would never do such a thing.
3. My question to you, my teacher, is the struggle of non-violence and truth (non- cooperation) effective in confronting communist China? If yes, in what ways the Tibetan people are benefited by non-violence and truth?
His Holiness the Dalai Lama: I always tell the same thing to Tibetans. And I want to mention here that even though our consistent stand of middle-way policy based on the foundation of non-violence has not yielded tangible result through dialogue with the Chinese government, it has helped us in getting strong support from the Chinese intellectuals, students and those who are interested in and aware of the reality. This is the result of my efforts.It is difficult to deal with the Chinese government, but I think despite our inability to maintain extensive contacts with the Chinese intellectuals and public, our stand will win their support and it will continue to grow. It was some months after the Tiananmen event, I met some Chinese friends at Harvard University as I happened to be at that time in the US. After I explained to them our position, they said the entire Chinese people would support the stand of the Dalai Lama if they know about it.
4. Your Holiness, please explain how reforming the system of reincarnating lamas is permissible? Does such a reform contravene the Buddha’s teachings?
His Holiness the Dalai Lama: From the outset, I want to ask the questioner to read a little of the Buddha’s teachings as contained in Kagyur (teachings of the Buddha) and Tengyur (Commentaries by Buddhist masters). The custom of recognizing reincarnate lamas did not develop in India. Similarly, the tradition of reincarnation of lamas did not develop in many Buddhist countries such as Thailand, Burma and China. There is a system of recognizing someone as a reincarnation of an enlightened being, but the system of recognizing someone as Tulku or Lama does not exist. In Tibet, the first ever reincarnation was recognized after a little child who clearly remembered his past life and which was proved to be true. Later on, this system slowly and gradually nearly became a class structure in society. Because of this I have made it well known that there is a difference between Tulku and Lama. A Lama need not be a Tulku and a Tulku need not be a Lama or one could be both Lama and Tulku. The one who is qualified as a result of one’s own study and practice is known as Lama. A Tulku, even without such a standard of education, enjoys status in society in the name of the former Lama. And there are many who lack the Lama’s qualification and even bring disgrace. So I used to say since some forty years ago that there needs to be some system to regulate the recognition of Tulku. Otherwise it is not good to have many unqualified ones.I consider my interest in the system of reincarnation as a service to the Buddha’s teachings. In the case of the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation, the four hundred year old tradition of the Dalai Lama as both spiritual and temporal leader ended with the direct election of political leadership by the Tibetans in exile in 2001. In 1969, I made it well known in my official statement that whether the institution of the Dalai Lama should continue or not would be decided by the Tibetan people. In future, to decide whether to have the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation and if there is a need, it is not necessary to always follow the past precedence but we can act in accordance with the given circumstances. This conforms to the teachings of the Buddha and do not go against them. When I explain about the possibility of reincarnation of Lamas in general and that of the Dalai Lama in particular, some Tibetans from inside Tibet and as well as Chinese friends wonder if this is in line with our religious tradition.
5. At present there are a lot of people in China who have a deep-seated anger and animosity to you. What do you have to say to them?
His Holiness the Dalai Lama: At one point the Dalai Lama was called a demon. On a few occasions I was asked what I thought on the Dalai Lama being called a demon and I told them in good humor, “I am a demon. I have horns on my head”.
This is understandable since the Chinese people have access only to one-sided and distorted information. For example during the Olympic torch relay, I especially requested the concerned people that the Olympic Games were a matter of pride for the 1.3 billion Chinese people and that we must never create any problem. Moreover, even before the right of hosting the Olympic Games was awarded to China, when I was visiting the US capital city of Washington, D.C., some journalists asked me about my viewpoint. I told them that China being the most populous country with a rich cultural heritage and history was worthy of hosting the Games. This is a factual account.But still the Chinese government greatly publicized that we were creating obstacles for the Olympic Games. Because of such propaganda, the Chinese people are not aware of the entire situation and thus we cannot blame them.While on the other side, there are many people around the world who respect me. Therefore, I want to urge my Chinese brothers and sisters to examine the minute details and thoroughly research the information you receive from all sources. When I meet Chinese students, I tell them that being in a free country they should fully utilize both eyes and ears.
6. As far as we know, the central government of the Republic of China participated in the selection process and enthronement ceremony of the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. So, Your Holiness, do you recognize the Taiwan-based Republic of China and how much of an influence do you think the Taiwan government will again have in the reincarnation process?
His Holiness the Dalai Lama: It is similar to my earlier account of Ngabo’s story. Generally, when I am in Taiwan, I have supported the call for ‘One China’. But eventually it is up to the people of mainland China and Taiwan to decide whether they want to be united in the future. What is more important is that Taiwan’s democracy, its robust economy and Taiwan’s good standard of education should be properly safeguarded. This is what I usually say.Wang Lixiong: We have virtually seen the Dalai Lama, just that, as Your Holiness said we could not smell each other. Using the Internet in the 21st century, we consider this opportunity of interacting with Your Holiness as of fundamental importance. Thus, if interactions like these are deemed constructive for Sino-Tibetan relations and understanding each other further, then in the future I think and I hope that many Chinese scholars and concerned people will take part. Tashi Delek.His Holiness the Dalai Lama: Very good. If it is convenient for you, I am always available and fully prepared to interact using modern technology and clear the doubts of Chinese friends. I always say, “Han zang da tuan jie” (Friendly relations between Chinese and Tibetans).If we get the opportunity of frequently holding similar meetings and interactions, it will help build genuine trust and understanding amongst us. We will not be able to build trust by standing far apart. The clearer we discuss our issues the more trust we will gain in each other. If there is trust then there will be cordial relations and with cordial relations, even if there is a problem, we can solve it.
Can you see my face clearly? Can see my grey eyebrows? See you later.
Tashi Delek. Thank You.