Published by: World Tibet Network News, Tuesday, Jun 11, 1996

EDITORIALS

Sydney Morning Herald

May 23, 1996

THE Foreign Minister's commitment to meet the Dalai Lama when the Tibetan leader visits Australia in September might well upset Beijing. But for Mr Downer to have acted differently would have been an outrageous surrender to the Chinese Government's bullying. Mr Downer says others in the Government will also meet the Dalai Lama. It is to be hoped that includes the Prime Minister and that if Mr Howard does meet the Dalai Lama he will be unafraid to do so more publicly than Mr Keating did in 1992.

In Parliament on Tuesday, Mr Downer was careful to say that the Australian Government's policy since 1972 on the recognition of China "has implicitly recognised Tibet as part of the People's Republic of China". Nevertheless, he said, the Government, like its Labor predecessor, recognised the Dalai Lama as a "spiritual and cultural leader, a figure of very great international significance". Of course, that is not how the Chinese Government sees the Dalai Lama. At the time of his 1992 visit, the Chinese Embassy said he was not merely a religious figure but an exile "engaging in activities aimed at splitting China and undermining its national unity under the guise of religious activities".

The Chinese Government is right to fear the political power of the Dalai Lama. The rest of the world, though, is not obliged to keep him at a distance on that account. Nor does formal recognition of the People's Republic of China require that. Indeed, the very basis of China's claim to rule Tibet as it has been doing for 45 years is increasingly under question. China's attempt to turn a pre-modern tributary relationship, such as Tibet had with China in centuries past, into a territorial claim overriding Tibet's modern claim to independence has always been problematical. Even China itself has recognised the practical difficulty of absorbing a vast land populated by non-Han people by formally organising Tibet as an "autonomous region" in 1965.

There is not the slightest doubt that if the promise of autonomy in 1965 had been fulfilled on the Chinese side there would be nothing like the conflict and resistance to Chinese rule which persists in Tibet today and, therefore, none of the continuing irritation on that account in China's relations with other countries. When it suits Beijing, the autonomy of the Tibetan authorities is asserted. For example, in 1992 an Australian parliamentary delegation was refused permission to visit Tibet, ostensibly because Tibetan officials were too busy to receive the delegation. They could not, the Chinese Foreign Minister said, be overridden by Beijing. But when the rest of the world takes an interest in the actual condition of the Tibetan people under Chinese administration, there is angry talk by Beijing of interference in China's internal affairs.

It is true that before the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1951 - after which the young Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 - Tibet was a backward place where many suffered terribly under the feudal authority of the lamas. It is also true that there has been much material progress in Tibet under Chinese rule. But neither the sins of the Tibetans' own past ruling classes nor the positive aspects of Chinese rule since can justify the displacement of Tibetans from their own land by Han immigrants, the reduction of Tibetan culture and language to an inferior position and the maintenance of a virtual police state in which all attempts by Tibetans to assert their own culture and autonomy are treated as subversive and are harshly punished.