Shortly before the Communist regimes of Central Europe imploded and the Warsaw Pact vanished down the memory hole of history, a group of dissident intellectuals from Czechoslovakia visited the Globe. They expressed a wistful belief that the end of their collective nightmare was inevitable, but they expected only incremental changes for the foreseeable future. Trapped in the fog of history they could not imagine the longed-for liberation coming in their lifetimes.

New Englanders who will be attending the Dalai Lama's talk this afternoon at the Wang Center should keep in mind the hidden surprises of history. For no conquered people is more deserving of the world's solidarity than the Tibetans, who have suffered unimaginable horrors at the hands of their Chinese captors yet refuse to renounce their Buddhist devotion to the principles of nonviolence.

The Chinese Communists invaded Tibet in 1950 and in 1959 crushed a popular uprising with barbarous violence, forcing the Dalai Lama to flee his home. More than a million Tibetans have died at the hands of their colonizers. The invaders burned ancient Tibetan libraries and destroyed 6,000 monasteries. Beijing is encouraging Han Chinese immigration into Tibet, a policy that is transmuting the Tibetans into a submerged minority in their own land.

No recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize has been more suited to receive that award. Unlike other laureates, who were recognized for having tired of war, the monk whom his people regard as the 14th incarnation of the Buddha of compassion has never spoken the language of violence. He has answered the cold steel of Chinese imperialism with reasoned pleas for understanding and dialogue.

President Clinton and his advisers would be wise to heed the lessons to be learned from the Dalai Lama's long struggle to save his people from oblivion and China from barbarism.

The first lesson is that the current rulers of Beijing cannot be defined merely as unruly partners in a burgeoning commerce. They are also criminals in power.

Their recent firing of missiles into the waters north of Taiwan, their belligerent behavior in the South China Sea, their past propensity for making war against all their neighbors, their cooperation with the brutal military junta ruling Burma, their missile deals with Pakistan and Iran - these are patterns of behavior that were visible in miniature in the teardrop of Tibet.

Clinton is preparing to meet next month with Jiang Zemin, the boss of all bosses in Beijing. He should tell the Chinese head of state that Americans want Beijing to engage in a political dialogue with the Dali Lama - to act civilized. American policy should be grounded in an understanding that the culture of Tibet will outlast the tyranny in Beijing. As so often happens in history, the liberation might be rearer than realists believe.