What the Dalai Lama Should Do Now

[ellisonz]

Stephan Talty
Author, 'Escape from the Land of Snows: The Young Dalai Lama's Harrowing Flight to Freedom and the Making of a Spiritual Hero'
Posted: 03/31/2012 7:01 am

The Dalai Lama is now 76 years old and is fast running out of time. The leader of Tibet has repeatedly said that he will return to Lhasa again to walk the streets he knew as a boy. Millions of Tibetans dream of this happening. But every year that passes, there is less and less chance that it will.

By every metric, China has won on the issue of Tibet. They hold complete control over the ancient nation and are remaking the society in their own image. The language, culture and religion of the natives are under severe pressure, its dissidents jailed or in exile. Beijing is riding a wave of prosperity and power that makes it harder and harder to apply even the minimum pressure on Tibet.

With that in mind, I'd like to make a modest proposal. The Dalai Lama and his followers should march to the Tibetan border and demand to cross back into their ancestral homeland. His Holiness should be accompanied by some of the tens of thousands of Tibetans who fled with him after 1959, along with young men and women in their teens and twenties who have never even seen the dun-colored hills and valleys of Kham and Amdo.

They should all walk to the border and present the world with an image that should exist but doesn't: a Chinese soldier born in the provinces outside Tibet confronting the spiritual and secular leader of the country and telling him he can't enter. The Chinese can refuse, in which case His Holiness should then camp out, with the media in tow, and make the cruelty of the Chinese stance abundantly clear.

More: HuffPo Story

[scarletwoman]

1. It's an interesting thought, but I highly doubt that the Dalai Lama would want to

do something so confrontational.

I weep for Tibet and the Tibetans. A great wrong has been done, yet there's essentially no chance that it will ever be corrected - and it's pretty much too late anyway. What's been lost has been lost forever.