“We have to accept that Tibet will always be in the neighborhood of China. We cannot move it anywhere else.”
—His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
When Dianne and I first visited China in 1979, I decided to put in a request with the Chinese Mountaineering Association in Beijing for a permit to climb one of the Himalayan peaks from the Tibet side. I knew it was a long shot. My real hope was to get permission to visit Tibet, where foreigners were rarely allowed.
I figured a climbing permit wasn’t likely, given my friendship with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. I made my pitch to the head of the association. As my words were translated, the man scowled and appeared angry. He told me to put my application in writing. As a formality, I submitted a letter of request, and thought that would be the end of it.
A few months later, though, I was quite surprised—shocked, actually—to receive what appeared to be a clear signal that my proposal might be approved: I was invited back to Beijing. After the Chinese bureaucracy concluded an appropriate number of its functionary fingerprints had been placed on the documents, I was granted permission to lead a Himalayan climbing expedition. And not just on any peak, but on the highest of them all: Mount Everest.
A Chinese expedition had made it to Everest’s summit in the 1960s, but this was the first time the government had given an Everest permit to an American. The only climbing team allowed anywhere in Tibet prior to this was from Iran; otherwise, no foreigners had been allowed anywhere in Tibet for thirty years.
I was thrilled and excited to organize this historic expedition along with lead climber Louis Reichardt, and also to travel to Tibet, where I would have a chance to see how people lived and to experience the Himalaya from the other side. With my friend Bruce McCubbrey, an accomplished mountaineer, we put together a team including some of the world’s best: in addition to Louis (who today heads the prestigious Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative), John Roskelley, Sue Giller, George Lowe, Chris Jones, Dan Reid, Andy Harvard, Jim Morrissey, Eric Perlman, Kim Momb, Geoff Tabin, and Gary Bocarde. All had experience on the world’s most difficult peaks.
Kurt Diemberger, world-renowned Himalayan mountaineer from Austria, Michael Reynolds, and David Breashears were with us to film the climb for ABC-TV’s American Sportsman program. Sir Ed came as well. At age sixty-two, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see Tibet.
In all, our expedition numbered about twenty people, including climbers, guides and porters at base camp, and a hundred yaks for carrying several weeks’ supplies and equipment. Starting from Lhasa, riding in buses and trucks for the better part of a week, then trekking another five days, we were able to set up base camp by the end of August with hardly a wasted moment. Everyone knew the ascent had to be completed by early October, before the onset of potentially extreme blizzard conditions around the summit.
Before we left California, we agreed that climbing the Kangs-hung Face of Mount Everest, which had never been done, would be our expedition goal. After walking, we arrived at the end of August 1981 and the climbers set up base camp.
Day after day, for weeks on end, the expedition team made progress in fits and starts. They attached ropes and set routes for other climbers to follow to bring up supplies. The rock was poor for climbing, with constant slides. The snow was soft and knee-deep on the ridges. Avalanches were common. One was incredibly thunderous, with snow and ice collapsing more than nine thousand feet after cracking away not far from Everest’s peak, tearing through tents, and wreaking havoc in our base camp at 16,000 feet. Luckily, no one was hurt.
Some on our team argued for abandoning Kangshung and heading to the North Face. Sir Ed made a passionate case for continuing. He reasoned that our effort would stand as a triumph of the human spirit and a milestone in international mountaineering whether or not the summit was reached. Everyone voted, and, overwhelmingly, we agreed to keep going. (I felt like a high-altitude bureaucrat, administrator, and political negotiator in the midst of all this.) Yet, slowly, one by one, our numbers dwindled. Some left for medical reasons (intestinal parasites or injuries), and some because they were convinced the climb and conditions were too risky.
Finally, on October 5, Louis radioed back to Jim Morrissey at advanced base camp. “The summit looks so close, you could almost walk there,” he said. “But the conditions are terrible. We just have too few people. We’re going to get someone killed. We have to give up.”
While no one made it to the summit in 1981, our expedition did the heavy work for an ascent, forging a route and fixing ropes on the Kangshung Face. Two years later, another team—including Louis and five others from the ’81 effort—completed the ascent, with Louis, Kim Momb, and Carlos Buhler the first people ever to climb Everest directly along the Kangshung Face.
Being part of the team in ’81, and awaking each day to the serious concern that we could lose someone as our lead climbers made their way to twenty thousand feet and beyond, made a profound impact on me—in particular, on how I would gauge business situations going forward. After confronting the physical and mental challenges of a Kangshung, your ability to take on risks and not worry about the consequences goes up exponentially.
This historic climbing achievement has never been repeated. Dry weather brought by an El Niño across Tibet had melted away most of the cornices, so it was easier in ’83 to find a safe route along the ridges of ice. The team rapidly navigated the buttress, the most difficult part of the climb, in three days rather than battling it in four weeks as the ’81 team had. “We knew exactly where to go, and those ropes were a huge deal,” Louis said later.
I never learned why the Chinese allowed us to make that first attempt on the Kangshung. Virtually no foreigners had been allowed to travel anywhere in what became the Tibet Autonomous Region since His Holiness the Dalai Lama fled into exile in 1959. Over the years, I wondered if my request might have come at a time when the Chinese wanted to signal an easing of their suppression in Tibet. If so, perhaps I was chosen because of my connections with His Holiness, not in spite of them.
Leaders in China were also aware of the sister-city collaborations starting to gather momentum between Shanghai and San Francisco. Deng Xiaoping, who became China’s leader in 1978, was experimenting with modern China’s first steps toward capitalism in Guangdong province, north of and adjacent to Hong Kong (a citadel of free-market capitalism that would revert from a century of British control to Chinese rule in 1997). Our team at Newbridge Capital would seek and find appealing business opportunities in this and other parts of China some twenty years later, as described in chapter 7. At the time of the Kangshung ascents, however, China was on the verge of opening to outside investment for the first time in more than four decades.
Despite some improvements in creating a more open China in recent years, conditions for people in Tibet have lagged. These people have suffered more than sixty years from the oppressive policies of the Chinese government. At various times in the 1980s and ’90s, it seemed the tide might well turn in the Tibetans’ favor, but it was not so. Now, in the first years of Xi Jinping’s China, Tibetans’ prospects within the Tibetan Autonomous Region are as bad as we have ever witnessed.
As I’ve described, the Himalaya and Asia have been two of the biggest passions of my life now for nearly fifty years. During that time, no nation in the world has done more than China to help its people out of poverty. We should celebrate this. At the same time, no nation in South Asia has suffered more from mistaken Chinese policies than Tibet. We cannot accept this.
For more than thirty years, the people of Tibet and their plight have mattered greatly to me. Tibetans deserve better. And the Chinese deserve better too. Our message to the Chinese government is this: Oppression is never a final solution, and lies don’t live forever. If China wants to become a great nation, it needs to become a moral nation, and what goes on in Tibet is immoral.
I have maintained relationships with two of China’s most important recent leaders—Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji—and a close friendship with Tibet’s spiritual leader, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Does this sound like a contradiction? After all, how could I maintain these friendships, often in parallel, across the past four decades and still have such strong opinions about China’s abhorrent policies and actions toward Tibet?
It is a fair question, and I am comfortable with my answer. Our relationships with these men and key people near them over the years have given us unusual insights. I have had the opportunity to engage with Dianne in trying to convince leaders of the Middle Kingdom that it is in the long-term interests of the Chinese government to end oppressive conditions for Tibetans. Perhaps the biggest frustration in my life is this has not happened yet.
But I believe it still can.
China claims that it liberated Tibet in 1950 from a repressive, centuries-long feudal era and portrays the long line of Dalai Lamas as powerful rulers who enslaved the peasantry. Most Tibetans, however, view China as an invading force that has illegally occupied their country since the 1950 invasion.1 More than a million Tibetans have died as a result of the Chinese occupation (a figure the Chinese dispute). In truth, it began as a wholesale slaughter. Periodic protests over the years have been violently suppressed by the Chinese military, and often martial law is declared.
During the late 1980s, nearly four decades after the People’s Liberation Army’s stunning invasion, China’s leaders ruthlessly consolidated power in Tibet. They suppressed the Tibetan people and culture while launching various development programs over the next twenty-five years—new roads, airports, high-speed train, hotels, factories, and so on—promised to lift Tibet’s economy out of the feudal past. This largely has been achieved—at the macro level. Yet most benefits from a rising economy flowed not to what Tibetan exiles estimate are approximately six million indigenous Tibetans, but to an estimated 7.5 million Han Chinese. Most of the Han Chinese migrated permanently and with the government’s blessing into the Tibet Autonomous Region.2 Mandarin became the dominant language for commerce and education. Development only further marginalized and oppressed Tibetans in their homeland.
In response first to the resurgent occupation, and then to the influx of Mandarin-speaking Han Chinese, many Tibetans fled southward across the border into Nepal. They followed the same routes across the Himalaya that thousands of other Tibetans have taken since the 1950 invasion. Most who survived settled in India and Nepal.
When Vice President Fritz Mondale met Deng Xiaoping during an official state visit in 1979, their talks were more friendly and productive than Fritz had anticipated. But not on the subject of Tibet. As Fritz wrote in The Good Fight,
Deng was prickly on statehood for Tibet and on the Dalai Lama, whom he dismissed as “an insignificant character.” I assured him that the Dalai Lama was received in the United States as a religious leader, not a political figure. We also remained concerned about human rights and political freedoms in China, and I touched on that topic during my speech at Beijing University.3
Both before the Carter administration and since, most political leaders in the United States, on both sides of the aisle, have agreed about the Chinese mistreatment of Tibetans.
Over the years, Dianne and I have met several hundred Tibetans personally. Most were very poor in material wealth. They were exiles, living in refugee camps in Nepal, in northern India, and elsewhere in South Asia. Most were illiterate, working hard at subsistence farming or as laborers building roads because they had few other options. Even so, for most their inner spirit seemed to carry the gentle wisdom passed down in the teachings and rituals of Tibetan Buddhism. Still, Tibetans living in exile in South Asia, and especially those inside Tibet, are weary. Many are resentful, angry—and for good reason, in my opinion and the opinion of many others.
Tibetans have been deprived of their most basic human rights. Before and during the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s army brought to ruin most of Tibet’s monasteries, temples, and historic buildings. We passed by some of these sites on our 1981 expedition into Tibet to climb Everest’s Kangshung Face. What a tragedy. What a waste. By some estimates, Chinese soldiers destroyed more than six thousand monasteries, shattering icons and burning libraries of ancient texts. Fewer than a dozen monasteries remained at the end of the twentieth century. His Holiness has said many times that the survival of the Tibetans’ cultural and spiritual heritage continues to be at risk in the wake of this onslaught:
Without proper teachers and proper training, keeping up a religion is very difficult. Prior to 1959, there were outstanding scholars in Tibet. But most of them were arrested, some were killed, some fled … It’s not sufficient to ring a bell, you know. Monks have to master the doctrine and the meditation. They need to be good in both. This requires thorough training.4
I was visiting Kathmandu in the early 1990s with my daughter Heidi when a Tibetan activist living in Switzerland, Tsultim Tersey, asked for my help. Could I arrange for several monks and nuns who had been part of the 1989 exodus in the wake of a post–Tiananmen Square crackdown by the Chinese to fly to Zurich? As fellow mountain people, the Swiss shared a kinship with Tibetans, and many Tibetan exiles resettled in Switzerland after China’s invasion in 1950. Tsultim explained that these nuns would be welcomed and well cared for if they could arrange passage. Of course I agreed to help.
Before the group left Kathmandu, we asked one nun who could not have been more than twenty years old to tell us her story. What had happened to her before she escaped? In China or the Tibetan Autonomous Region, she explained, anyone who wishes long life to His Holiness is considered an enemy of the state. She was arrested for holding a puja, a Buddhist prayer service that included, among the group’s rhythmic chanting, an invocation of long life for the Dalai Lama.
The young nun was thrown into jail, beaten, tortured with electric cattle prods, and forced to lie for long periods of time on big blocks of ice in a freezing cell. When her jailers concluded she had no useful information for incriminating others, they pushed her out into the cold. “You don’t know anything!” one of her tormenters said.
A few months later, I was in Zurich and called Tsultim to see how the Tibetans were doing. He invited us to meet for dinner with a few of them, including the young woman who had told us her story in Kathmandu. Radiant with an optimism I had not seen before, she told me over dinner that she had woven two yak wool bracelets to focus her mind away from the pain and suffering she had endured in prison. “I want you to have these bracelets,” she told me. “One is for you, and one is for your daughter.”
Though her experience was a recent one, it reflected the truth of the government-sponsored terrorism that had been happening for decades. As a result, many thousands of Tibetan refugees live in settlement camps in India and Nepal. Some elders in these camps have lived there more than fifty years.
The American Himalayan Foundation supports these refugees in many ways: with homes for elders; a path for education, from day care to college; health clinics; and enterprise funding for improved farming methods and business start-ups. One young refugee from Miao, a refugee camp situated in the most remote jungles of northeast India along what is now the Myanmar (formerly Burmese) border, became the first member of his community to graduate law school, thanks in part to scholarships that AHF funded. A few years ago, we provided a small grant and interest-free loan to young Tibetans starting a cybercafé in Miao. The venture provides services over the Internet and other modern communications that could open opportunities for a better life. The proprietors serve other refugees in many ways, including by taking digital photos, printing health forms, and selling satellite dish subscriptions and cell phone minutes.
Yet life for the vast majority of Tibetan refugees remains difficult. Most Tibetans in Miao, for example, are subsistence farmers. They live just south of the eastern extension of the Himalaya, an isolated region where heavy rains bring summer flooding to farmlands carved from tropical forests. “It is a hostile environment,” says Tsedo, AHF’s Tibetan field director.
Tsedo himself is the son of Tibetan refugees who fled to Kathmandu in 1959 when the Dalai Lama escaped into exile to Dharamsala in northern India. The region has experienced long-simmering boundary disputes between China and India. Insurgent separatist groups in the area want to secede from India. “The Tibetans there still feel like refugees,” Tsedo says. “They are worried for their future, for their children’s future, and most important, for the people still living in Tibet.”
For more than twenty-five years, working with Lodi Gyari, the Dalai Lama’s chief envoy in Washington until a few years ago, Dianne and I tried to establish a sensible dialogue between the Chinese leadership and the Tibetans—the same kind of dialogue we’ve been able to have with those same leaders on many topics. Dianne very much shares my strong views on Tibet. A Chinese official in Beijing once accused me of brainwashing her. “Guilty,” I responded, quickly and proudly.
This is the Chinese leaders’ reasoning for not budging on the stalemate: Since Mao’s ascendance, Tibet has been seen by China’s leaders as having great geographic and strategic importance for China, and as a territory rich in natural resources. A land mass of more than 470,000 square miles, the Tibetan Himalaya and high plateau are a strategic buffer against any perceived military threats that might one day arise from India to the south. Furthermore, Tibet is often described as “the roof of the world,” with an estimated $100 billion in mineral wealth. It also is a vital source of water supplies for China and South Asia.
Chinese leaders say Tibet has been part of historical China “since antiquity,” meaning at least a few thousand years. Tibetans counter that the boundaries of Greater Tibet encompassed much of Sichuan and Qinghai provinces to the east and northeast for several centuries before the current boundaries of the Tibetan Autonomous Region were set in the eighteenth century. An estimated 250 million Buddhists live in China today.5
The Chinese government sees His Holiness as a rebel, a secessionist, and a schemer who secretly promotes violence and self-immolations of nuns and monks. This is nonsense. He has stated publicly many times that he does not support independence for Tibet, espouses nonviolence, and is deeply saddened by the self-immolations. His Holiness advocates a Middle Way that would allow China’s continued political control of Tibet but give cultural and religious autonomy to all Tibetans living there. His Holiness also seeks to return to his homeland.
In the Tibet Autonomous Region today, local government administrators seem to do what they want; Beijing policies are interpreted differently in different places, which often encourages corruption and brings to mind an old Chinese proverb: The mountains are high and the emperor is far away. The region itself is like an armed camp. But if you cross the border into an old Tibetan territory to the north known as Amdo, where millions of ethnic Tibetans live in what now is part of China’s Qinghai province, the atmosphere is more relaxed. You see pictures of His Holiness everywhere, and it doesn’t seem to matter to Chinese authorities. Many new temples are being built, funded significantly by Chinese Buddhists coming from Taiwan.
Dianne and I have always remarked to Chinese leaders that if they sat down with His Holiness, they would find him to be a man of peace. They could negotiate with trust. While Jiang was China’s leader, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter (then out of the White House more than ten years) raised with him the issue of Tibet. Lodi even organized nine meetings in Beijing between Chinese officials and Tibetan representatives, but they never led to anything substantial.
Lodi believes Chinese leaders fear that his message could inspire a pro-democracy movement among not just Tibetans but Uighurs (a Muslim ethnic group native to China’s far west region of Xinjiang) and hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens. Despite our efforts to mediate between China’s leaders and His Holiness, we have not been able to bring them together—yet.6
Dianne has long believed that personal relationships are essential for political leaders to govern creatively and effectively, especially in hammering out positive solutions to bridge deep disagreement. When she was mayor of San Francisco, she established a sister-city arrangement with Shanghai. It was a brilliant move, one that seized the moment as China began opening up to the world. Shanghai had been China’s center for international commerce before Mao, and San Francisco’s large Chinese population had close family and cultural connections there.
The sister-city pact called for each mayor to visit the other city in alternate years. Remarkably, few mayors have missed this opportunity across more than three decades. On several occasions when politicians in Washington and Beijing were in dispute on US–China issues, these friendships forged over the years among participants in the Shanghai–San Francisco alliance endured; we said to each other we wouldn’t let them be affected by high-level disputes. The fact that everybody was willing to do this is great. We have toasted our friendships again and again, and pledged that regardless of relations between China and the United States, Shanghai and San Francisco would always be friends.
This collaboration was an important step in China’s retreat from isolation and in raising living standards under Deng Xiaoping. “We had fifty different initiatives going at any given time,” Dianne has explained, “and a business training program with San Francisco corporations bringing midlevel Chinese managers over. We started a library in Shanghai of American resources. Our program was designed to benefit both cities.” We saw the first Chinese ships and planes come to San Francisco. She opened the first Chinese consulate in the United States. And Dianne and I became close to the first ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to this country.
Teaching Shanghai’s leaders how we do things has included showing them how we manage San Francisco’s operations, including transportation, communications, wastewater treatment, and health care, and sending our experts there to provide assistance. A plan from a lead engineer in San Francisco’s Department of Public Works, Jeff Lee, won a competition for a sewage treatment plant to help clean up the polluted Huangpu River that flows through Shanghai. The two cities have hosted scores of banquets, sporting events, trade shows, fashion shows, and other events for each other. We have exchanged business students and arranged meetings with business leaders.
We could not have appreciated at the start of this relationship that two of Shanghai’s successive mayors—Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji—who were regularly visiting San Francisco in the 1980s and early ’90s, would become two of China’s paramount leaders. Deng Xiaoping, China’s leader from 1978 to 1992, named Jiang general secretary of the Communist Party in 1989, a position Jiang would hold for thirteen years. Four years later Jiang’s power expanded when he also became China’s president.
Zhu served directly under Jiang as China’s vice premier beginning in 1991, pushing reforms that over the next decade made him what many consider a principal architect of China after Deng—the China we know today.7 Zhu believed in the need for markets in tandem with a strong authoritarian government—a tension he believed would provide checks and balances against excesses in each sector.
After Jiang became president, he elevated Zhu to premier (head of the government) in 1998. During Zhu’s five years in that post, China’s double-digit economic growth resumed. Zhu overcame skeptics among Communist Party leaders who resisted bringing China into the World Trade Organization in 2001. This bold step opened China to a historic wave of foreign investment.
When Jiang was Shanghai’s mayor, he didn’t strike me as likely leader material for the world’s most populous country. In his 2001 book On China, Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s secretary of state and advisor to many other presidents, described the same impression: “I would not have expected him to emerge as the leader who would—as he did—guide his country from disaster to the stunning explosion of energy and creativity that has marked China’s rise.”8 Jiang never anticipated becoming China’s most powerful leader either.
Jiang is a warm, gregarious man. At a banquet hosted by the sister-city committee marking his first trip to San Francisco in 1985, he waltzed with Dianne and sang the 1930s hit “One Day When We Were Young.” His English was pretty good, and he loved San Francisco.
After Jiang had been party secretary for a while, and before Dianne was elected to the US Senate, he invited Dianne and me to visit him in Beijing. We hadn’t seen him since he had become party secretary. He indicated he wanted to talk about human rights and Tibet, and we were delighted. We met in a historic fifteenth-century pagoda, a magnificent setting in a grove of willow trees on a little island near the Forbidden City, and dined in a gorgeous Qing dynasty home that had been recently restored. After exchanging friendly greetings, however, things went awry—badly awry. Jiang gave us the standard propaganda that Tibet is a historic part of China and that supporters of the Dalai Lama are separatists seeking to break away. I was more than irritated.
When we sat down to a dinner, I pointed to my right wrist. I was wearing the bracelet the young nun had woven during the time of her brutal captivity in Tibet. “Do you see this?” I asked Jiang. “It was given to me by a Tibetan Buddhist nun living in exile in Switzerland. She could have been your daughter; she could have been my daughter. I just want you to know what the People’s Liberation Army did to her.”
There were about a dozen of us in the room. Dianne was mortified, and gave me a swift kick under the table. Jiang noticed, laughed, and tried to lighten the mood. “Don’t do that,” he told her, smiling. Turning to me, he recited a quaint Chinese proverb whose translation is, basically, Don’t believe everything you hear. But my dark mood cast a pall over the dinner, and we soon went our separate ways out into the night.
A few months later Jiang’s son, Jiang Mianheng, came to the Bay Area for a dinner in Palo Alto. A PhD in electrical engineering and an old friend, Mianheng once worked for Hewlett-Packard and lived in the United States for many years before returning home as a high-ranking member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a leader in the Chinese space program. I drove down from San Francisco to greet him.
“You should come and see my father,” he said.
“I’m not sure your father wants to see me,” I replied.
“Why?” he asked.
“Do you know about our Tibet conversation?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I know all about it. We Chinese have a saying: Until you have had a really good argument, you can’t be true friends.”
A few months later I found myself walking into a room in Beijing, at Jiang’s invitation, where he was chatting with a mutual friend from Shanghai, a founder of those early sister-city programs, T. M. Chang. When Jiang saw me, he came over and hugged me like a long-lost son. Beaming, the first thing he said was, “We Chinese have an old saying: Until you have had a really good argument, you can’t be true friends.”
We talked for forty-five minutes about the government’s early efforts to sell state-owned enterprises, and he asked questions about the broader Chinese economy. (Jiang didn’t understand economics very well and often wanted to talk about it. He had a lot of smart people around him, and I was honored, frankly, that he sought my opinions.) Not a word, though, about Tibet from either of us. I finally asked, “How much more time have you got?”
“A few more minutes,” he replied.
“You wouldn’t expect me to come all this way and not talk about Tibet,” I said.
“Of course not,” he said. “Let’s talk about Tibet.”
A world leader, he could easily have dismissed me as the irritating spouse of a US senator. After my outburst, he never had to see me again. But he continued to hear me out over the years on my strong views about Tibet. “You can say whatever you want,” he told me on one occasion. I might not have liked what I heard from him, but he always was willing to have an open discussion with me about Tibet. This is one of many reasons I have great respect for Jiang.
The reason we were able to maintain our relationships with Chinese leaders despite our friendship with His Holiness was that we went with the intention of making friends first and built our relationships over time. I think we may have earned the respect of some Chinese officials because we expressed how we felt, we didn’t change our views, and we didn’t hide the fact that we were not changing our views. I’m also convinced many people high in the Chinese hierarchy don’t necessarily think we’re wrong on Tibet, but mostly they keep their thoughts to themselves.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama is a warm and open person with a sharp wit and an easy laugh. He is very bright. He had an excellent education as a child, having been tutored from an early age by several learned monks. He has a curious mind and a special interest in science and mechanical devices.
The Thirteenth Dalai Lama died in 1933. Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, was born on July 6, 1935—about three weeks before my birth. His Holiness sometimes jokes about our “karmic connection.” One day, when we were both seventy-six, in excellent health, and anticipating many more years in this life, he pointed out that a couple of centuries ago, a Dalai Lama said he, meaning Tenzin Gyatso, would live to be 113. I told him I planned to live to 108, the holy Buddhist number, and then say, “Bye-bye, I’ll see you in the next incarnation.” His Holiness laughed so hard, I thought he was going to fall on the floor.
It was the practice of the first thirteen Dalai Lamas to never or rarely leave Tibet. Few ever traveled even to neighboring India or China. His Holiness certainly is a man of his time, though. He travels widely. Although certainly not by choice, he has lived most of his life—more than sixty years—in exile in Dharamsala, India, and has visited many countries during the past four decades.
The Dalai Lama’s first trip to San Francisco in 1979 was a turning point in efforts to call international attention to China’s repressive policies toward the Tibetan people. After that, I began to see His Holiness more frequently and our friendship deepened. I see him at least two or three times a year now, either in the United States or in Dharamsala. I always feel privileged being in his presence.9
Buddhists don’t spend time with the question of whether there is a prime mover, an almighty power. Buddhists simply say that if your main goal in life is happiness, the most important thing you can do is genuinely care for and help other people. His Holiness teaches that in order to have a happy and meaningful life, money and power should be secondary. The most important quality is having a compassionate mind. “Too much greed brings restlessness,” he says. “And too much greed creates environmental and economic crisis.”
His Holiness has said that if traditional Buddhist beliefs conflict with science, he will side with science. He is particularly interested in neuroscience and recent studies showing that meditation can alter a person’s brainwaves. His Holiness believes that hours and years spent in meditation change the brain so that a person becomes kinder and more compassionate. I think that is essentially correct. I know that older lamas (Tibetan Buddhist monks) are among the sweetest, kindest people I have ever met.10
I totally agree with what His Holiness teaches, but I do not practice any religion. Although I was raised in a Jewish family, we always had the biggest Christmas tree on the block. I thought of Christmas as a seasonal celebration. San Francisco was a pretty tolerant melting pot, even when I was child. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as anti-Semitism until I was twelve and some of my friends joined the city’s swanky Olympic Club. One of my friends’ fathers told my mother that membership was “restricted,” but he could get me in. I didn’t think I’d be comfortable, so I didn’t join.
I see a lot in Buddhism that is beneficial. I believe that genuinely caring about other people and helping them is a good way to lead a happy life. And I consider myself a spiritual person who tries to do the right thing.
His Holiness has not been the official leader of Tibet’s exiled government since he announced in 2011 his intention to hand over his formal political authority to an elected leader. “In order for our process of democratization to be complete, the time has come for me to devolve my formal authority to such an elected leadership,” he said in a statement marking the fifty-second anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising.
As planned, His Holiness stepped down later in 2011, when he transferred his political authority to the Tibetan Parliament of the Central Tibetan Administration. I was the one foreign guest invited to Dharamsala for the event—quite an honor. For Tibetans, it was a historic day: the first time in a thousand years that a Dalai Lama would not be their political leader. Many were reluctant to see him make the change, but in reality he had not had a significant role in the administration’s functioning. Stepping down was more form over substance. Obviously, he remains Tibetan Buddhists’ spiritual leader.
The Chinese government has already staked out plans publicly to identify a Fifteenth Dalai Lama, a shameful ploy to inject state influence into the future of Tibetan Buddhism in China. His Holiness says he does not know when he will be reborn. It could be in a year or perhaps a hundred years. He has said that under the current circumstances, he would not want to be reborn inside Tibet.
At various times in recent history it has seemed that tensions might ease between China and the Tibetan people. Yet protests such as those in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and leading up to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing were searing setbacks for progress in easing China’s position on Tibet. The crackdown in Tiananmen Square was the worst thing that could have happened.
In the early 1980s, Chinese leaders who toured Tibet were shocked by the levels of oppression there, and repercussions in Beijing for a time were favorable. Zhao Ziyang, then a liberal force as China’s Communist Party leader, advocated improving cultural and religious freedoms for Tibetans and indicated he might be open to a thaw in relations between Beijing and the Dalai Lama. But he was ousted by Deng after Tiananmen Square, which is when Deng appointed Jiang.11
Zhao’s last public appearance was to support and warn pro-democracy students staging a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square of imminent military action. “We have come too late,” he told the protesters. Within hours of Zhao’s warning, hundreds of civilian and student protestors died as Chinese troops opened fire and army tanks rolled through demonstrators’ encampments near The Great Hall of the People. Several protest leaders and sympathizers later were executed. (An official death toll was never released by the government.) Deng feared more pro-democracy demonstrations would threaten the Communist Party, a reality far advanced by then in the Soviet Union, which collapsed five months later in November 1989.12
Nineteen years later, early in 2008, the Chinese were keeping a close eye on international protests against Chinese policies on Tibet and the Dalai Lama. I had expressed my strong views privately in meetings with Jiang and other Chinese leaders, until deciding to speak openly and candidly at pro-Tibetan rallies and elsewhere during the global Olympic Torch tour ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.
The demonstrators hoped to embarrass the Chinese government in the glare of international media coverage. They disrupted the Olympic Torch relay in Paris, London, Athens, San Francisco, and elsewhere. The demonstrations were a mistake, however, because they antagonized China’s political elites and emboldened Communist Party hardliners.
“Every Chinese, including ethnic Chinese around the world, saw the Olympics as a great historical moment for China rising as a global player,” Lodi Gyari has said. “People forget that the Chinese wanted to host the Olympic Games and were willing to make some concessions here and there. We should demonstrate as Tibetans when our interests are compromised or undermined by China. But the Olympics were about China as a nation. Reacting to the demonstrations, the leaders in Beijing reverted to their policy of no compromises.” The protests forced China’s leaders to dig in and defend their positions.
Dianne and I hand-carried a third letter from His Holiness to Jiang Zemin in 1997, just before Jiang was to leave China on an official visit to the United States, again asking for direct talks between the two of them. I told Jiang that if he announced before he left that he would meet with the Dalai Lama, he would receive a much warmer welcome in the United States. Otherwise, I said, he could expect to see a lot of protestors.
“When you go to someplace like Harvard,” I said, “there will be ten thousand bumper stickers that say, ‘Save Tibet.’ Do you know how I know that?”
“No,” he replied.
“Because I had them printed,” I said.
He laughed, but my prediction came true. I still remember the look on his face when he saw the bumper stickers and glanced my way. Blum! I should have known, he seemed to be thinking, and I sensed he was amused at some level as much or even more than he was irritated. He did not offer any concessions, however, and he ran into a lot of pro-Tibet protests.
Although we were not aware of this at the time, Jiang in fact had recently removed the Chinese government’s corrupt, reactionary administrator in the region’s capital city of Lhasa, a step that improved conditions for a while for at least some Tibetans. It was one of a handful of cases I recall where Jiang and other senior Chinese officials displayed a modicum of decency toward Tibet.
A Shanghai banker I knew with high-level Beijing influence for some time before this had been relaying to Jiang and his circle several of my descriptions from sources inside Tibet about state-sponsored terror and discrimination against Tibetans. “I believe Richard Blum. I don’t believe the United Front,” the banker told them. United Front is the group of hardline Communist Party military and political officials in the Forbidden City.
Of course, most government officials in Beijing who heard the reports were dismissive. They exaggerated their successes in Tibet for party leaders in Beijing and downplayed both how deeply the Tibetan people resented Chinese rule and how immense their devotion and loyalty remained to His Holiness. But Jiang secretly sent two trusted confidants into Tibet, disguised as tourists. Those men validated for Jiang that indeed there was widespread oppression. State police routinely broke into people’s houses in the middle of the night, arresting some and breaking artifacts—all for no reason.
“I didn’t know about this,” Jiang told me later. This was as angry as I had ever seen him. He knew he had been lied to and was embarrassed. “I certainly didn’t order this to happen. Sure, we want to keep control of the place, but we didn’t need to do this to Tibetans who weren’t causing any trouble.”
His decision to fire that administrator in Lhasa may be my major accomplishment on the issue of Tibet with the Chinese government. I am sure some officials in Beijing would be upset to read this. The party put out a face-saving statement at the time to mask what was in fact a major demotion. (The announcement said the boss was being transferred from Tibet after five years because of high-altitude discomforts.) The fact is, I had developed a relationship with Jiang, and he occasionally listened to me on Tibet.
The morning of January 20, 2009, Dianne and I were at the White House to join other members of the official inaugural party for Senator Barack Obama at a breakfast hosted by George W. and Laura Bush, one of their last official acts as president and First Lady.
It is a Tibetan tradition to present a silk scarf, or khata, as a sign of greeting when meeting someone. His Holiness had blessed and given me a beautiful white khata on his previous visit to the United States. I said to the president-elect during breakfast that His Holiness had wanted me to convey his congratulations, adding that I thought the khata would be a fitting gift and wanted to give it to him. I figured he would add the khata to the pile of inaugural gifts streaming in. “Who do I give it to?” I asked.
“Let me have it,” he said, reaching out. “I’m going to put it in my back pocket and keep it there while I’ve got my hand on the Bible.” And he did.
Not long after Dianne, who was leading the inaugural ceremonies, announced, “It is my great personal honor to present the forty-fourth president of these United States, Barack Obama,” word spread on pro-Tibetan websites and elsewhere that the new American president had carried a scarf blessed by the Dalai Lama while taking the oath of office. The White House wanted to avoid antagonizing China in the president’s first days in office and declined comment about the khata. I did mention the khata story privately but never confirmed it publicly—until now. My belief is that in reaching out for the khata by his own hand that morning, the incoming president was expressing his respect for the Tibetan people’s continuing struggle.
China’s leaders expect that His Holiness, who turned eighty in 2015, before long will become incapacitated and die. After that, they believe, Tibetan dreams of independence will fade and China then will control, without debate, the process for identifying the Fifteenth Dalai Lama as the leader of Tibetan Buddhism. Game over: The Chinese Communist Party owns the future of Tibetan Buddhism.
This scenario is flawed for at least three reasons. To begin with, Tibetans are not seeking political independence. They want to preserve their culture and way of life, while conceding political sovereignty to China. Next, the Dalai Lama is in excellent physical and mental health. He has an alert mind and a playful sense of humor. His physicians tell him he may live to be one hundred; the Dalai Lama himself says his dreams tell him he will live to be 113. Finally, as a matter of pragmatism and expedience for the Chinese, His Holiness is the best possible negotiating partner they have to avoid escalating social unrest over Tibet.
This last point is important in understanding why a resolution of the Tibetan problem is in the long-term interest of China and the Chinese people. Lodi has explained it well:
If the Dalai Lama is unable to return to Tibet before he dies or something happens to him, the Tibetan people for generations will not forgive the Chinese. There will be an incurable, untreatable cancer between them. The resentment of the Tibetan people will multiply.
Politicians will try to take over Tibetan leadership. Candidates will compete in making the most provocative statements, such as, “I want complete independence for Tibet” or “I want to start a resistance against the Chinese.” If you want to negotiate a settlement, you have to make compromises. In my experience, politicians have difficulty making compromises.
This is my single most important message to China’s leaders: When you eventually want to seek a solution, if the Dalai Lama is not living, there will be no one authoritative to deal with. I hope Xi Jinping is intelligent enough to see that the Dalai Lama is not the problem; he can be the solution. But personally I do not think there will be any major shift.
Are Lodi, Dianne, and I hopeful about Xi Jinping agreeing to meet with His Holiness, then permitting him to return to Tibet? Let me put it this way: There is no mission in my life on which I have invested so much time and energy and had so little to show for it.
“The great mystery about China’s policy is why it seems to have decided that its best hope lies with the next Dalai Lama, not this one,” The Economist says.
Unlike many Tibetans, he has accepted Chinese sovereignty. He has used his enormous prestige to urge Tibetans to refrain from violent resistance … To safeguard its internal security, placate its disgruntled Tibetan citizens, and improve its international reputation, common senses suggests China should start talking seriously to the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.13
We see plenty of evidence that China’s current policy toward Tibet is the harshest in many years. China has tried to stop the flow of refugees fleeing the country, by arresting or shooting anyone they find trying to cross the border. Although Nepal nominally has agreed to continue accepting refugees from Tibet, as it has done for more than fifty years, China has been paying Nepalese soldiers and police for years to round them up and send them back. Chinese soldiers have been on maneuvers near the border with Nepal and even crossed into Nepal near Mustang in recent years, according to Nepalese border guards we spoke with when we were there. Officials in Kathmandu claimed they knew nothing about it, but I am inclined to believe the border guards.
The last time I encountered these deportations personally was back in 2003. I learned then about ten young Tibetans the Nepalese police had arrested. We tried to get them freed and even appealed personally to King Gyanendra for their release. We received assurances that they were not going to be returned to China. But the next day they were driven across the border, where they were no doubt jailed and most likely tortured.
By the summer of 2015, the Chinese were stepping up pressure on foreign leaders quite effectively, too. Pope Francis and heads of state in Norway, Sri Lanka, and South Africa all rejected overtures from His Holiness for private meetings. The Chinese government continues to serve up tired propaganda. In April 2015, the government asserted that His Holiness had a “sentimental attachment to the old theocratic feudal serfdom” and should give up his goals of Tibetan “independence” and “dividing China.”14
We’ve heard this too many times over the years. Let me repeat: China’s arguments against His Holiness are just nonsense. In the first two of three letters Dianne and I personally delivered to Jiang Zemin, one in 1991 and a second in 1993, His Holiness said outright, “I’m not asking for independence.” It made no difference.
In 2007 China’s ambassador to Washington twice visited Dianne to request that she not carry out her plan to have the Congressional Gold Medal awarded to His Holiness. She told the ambassador she would agree only if the Chinese government said publicly it would meet with the Dalai Lama. China refused, and the award ceremony went ahead as planned in the Capitol rotunda with President George W. Bush and many members of Congress participating.15
In her speech honoring His Holiness, Dianne said:
This world is filled with conflict and strife. But the Dalai Lama transcends this world and inspires us with hope. To know him is to know compassion. To listen to him is to learn wisdom. To be close to him is to feel the presence of something very special … I truly believe that if the Chinese leadership were to sit down with the Dalai Lama, they together could work out a solution whereby he would be able to return to his native Tibet, which has long been his hope and dream. This has sadly been a lost opportunity.16
No one can say if and when talks with the Chinese about the return of His Holiness will resume. After talks collapsed in 2010, Lodi Gyari stepped down as chief negotiator for His Holiness. “There is nothing to negotiate,” Lodi said at the time.
Yet His Holiness and Lodi Gyari do retain a measure of optimism. They note that the initial priorities of Xi Jinping understandably have been fighting Communist Party corruption and consolidating personal power. “The new leader is not someone we should give up on,” Lodi has said, noting that Xi likely will remain in power through 2022, when the Dalai Lama would be eighty-seven years old.
His Holiness remains positive. He says that the Chinese leader “has Buddhists in his family. His mother even practices Tibetan Buddhism.” Does he believe he will return to his Tibetan homeland one day? “Yes, I am sure of that,” he told a journalist in 2014.17
Before His Holiness and I said good-bye in Dharamsala the day in 2011 that he stepped down from his role as Tibet’s leader in exile, he handed me three small gifts. One was a ring for Dianne. Another was a ring for me. The third was a lovely silver Buddhist wheel of life.
Dianne and I still have those rings, and I have kept that silver wheel mounted in my office. It sits next to an honor His Holiness gave me in 1999 for my work for Tibet, the Light of Truth Award. These gifts are constant reminders of our long friendship, and the sense of urgency I feel to do whatever I can to help Tibetans achieve a better life.