The Dalai Lama and the president
The Dalai Lama and President Barack Obama have finally met. The Thursday morning meeting was, by my reckoning, the Dalai Lama’s 10th visit to the White House. His holiness has yet to step inside the Oval Office, however. As a sop to China, presidents see the old monk in their residential quarters or some other “unofficial” spot, such as the map room.
So, like his predecessors, on Thursday President Obama walked a thin line between meeting and not-meeting. No reporters were present at the meeting that was not a meeting, but the White House released a nice photograph of the president and monk together. China grumbled, but so far Beijing’s only retaliation has been to snub the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, currently docked at Hong Kong.
He Who Must Not Be Met With is himself a man of uncertain status, a stateless head of state. He calls himself “semi-retired” from running the Tibetan government in exile, which now has an elected parliament and prime minister. Further, his role as a religious and political leader – a complex role, to be sure – is widely misunderstood. The Dalai Lama was once head of the Tibetan government but was never a “god king,” even in the old days before the invasion of China. Nor is the Dalai Lama the “Buddhist pope”. He has institutional authority only within Tibetan Buddhism, not all of Buddhism, and that authority is not absolute.
The bigger mystery, however, is why the mighty nation of China comes unglued over a softly-spoken Buddhist monk.
China has invested heavily in Tibet, building infrastructure, schools and housing, and expecting the Tibetans’ loyalty and gratitude in return. But Tibetans say China treats Tibet as a colony run by and for Han Chinese. Tibetans are economically exploited and locked out of most positions of authority in their own country, they say. And, of course, the repression of Tibetan Buddhism and exile of the Dalai Lama remain causes of discontent.
However, senior Chinese government officials have spent their entire careers blaming the Dalai Lama for Tibetan resistance. Beijing may have invested a lot of money into modernising Tibet, but it has invested even more in the failed theory that breaking Tibetan loyalty to the Dalai Lama is the key to unifying Tibet and China.
China will not bend, and so there is stalemate. The president of the United States decided he could do little else but meet with his holiness privately in the White House map room. After the meeting, the White House issued a brief statement, ending with “The president and the Dalai Lama agreed on the importance of a positive and cooperative relationship between the United States and China”.
And 75-year-old Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, filled the role given to him as a young boy and spoke on behalf of the Tibetan people. He has for many years has sought an autonomous, but not independent, status for Tibet, similar to the status of Hong Kong. If China had worked with him instead of demonising him, it is possible Tibetans now would be far more reconciled to being part of China.
But on Thursday the cautious non-meeting with the president came to an end. Snow still covered the White House grounds under a partly cloudy sky. And in a few days, his holiness will mark the 51st anniversary of his exile from Tibet.
