New York Times - March 19, 1997

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

[O] ne thing the Academy Awards will not have this year is a speech on Chinese repression in Tibet by Richard Gere, the actor who has led the way in Hollywood's growing concern for Tibetan rights. But in a larger sense, Gere banned as an Oscar presenter after his televised denunciation of China in 1993 -- no longer needs to steal a platform to advance his favorite cause. Whatever happens at the Academy Awards on Monday, Tibet is looming larger than ever on the show business map.

Last June, 100,000 people attended a two-day Free Tibet concert in San Francisco, where saffron-robed Buddhist monks talking about their imprisonment mingled with music groups including the Beastie Boys and Smashing Pumpkins.

In August, at an American Himalayan Foundation dinner in Los Angeles, Harrison Ford, Sharon Stone, Steven Seagal, Shirley MacLaine and other stars lined up to shake the Dalai Lama's hand.

And three weeks ago, at an anniversary benefit for Tibet House in New York, founded 10 years ago by Gere and Columbia University scholar Robert Thurman, the performers included Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass and Natalie Merchant. Honorary chairmen included Roy Lichtenstein, Henry Luce III and Thurman's daughter, Uma.

Most important, perhaps, the isolated mountain kingdom, for the last decade the concern of a relatively small group of scholars, human rights advocates and celebrities, is the subject of four movies being made. Two of them "Kundun," Martin Scorsese's movie based on the life of the Dalai Lama, and one by Jean Jacques Annaud are major productions that seem likely to draw worldwide attention to the Tibetans' plight.

"Tibet is going to enter Western popular culture as something can only when Hollywood does the entertainment injection into the world system," said Orville Schell, a China scholar who is writing a book on Western conceptions of Tibet. "Let's remember that Hollywood is the most powerful force in the world, besides the U.S. military."

Why Tibet rather than some other cause, whether the oppression of women in the Islamic world or the continued detention of the Burmese opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who like the Dalai Lama is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate?

What is it about Tibet, which has languished in obscurity for most of the last half century, that makes it the cause du jour for celebrities and noncelebrities alike?

The answer has several factors. There is the ferocity of China's actions in Tibet, and China's status in the post-Cold War world as the most important large country still holding another land in subjugation. But there is also the growing appeal of Buddhism in the United States, Tibet's remoteness and mysteriousness and the personality of the Dalai Lama.

For Tibet is not just a good cause. Tibet is also a state of mind, a distant place onto which Westerners have long projected their fantasies. No other cause just now contains the full mix of ingredients of the Tibetan plight: the size and growing power of the occupier, the reputation for spirituality of the oppressed, the country's continued image as a pristine place where spirituality takes precedence over materialism.

"The Tibetans are the baby seals of the human rights movement," said Thurman, who is in a sense the academic godfather of the Tibetan cause, a former monk turned scholar who has translated some of the Tibetan Buddhist classics into English.

The image is apt, suggesting the innocent, pacific and largely defenseless Tibetans being clubbed by giant, powerful, merciless China. Given the harshness of the Chinese occupation, Tibet is a legitimate and compelling cause.

In some ways, the Chinese occupation of Tibet is a very old story. It began in the 17th century, but since China put down an insurrection in 1959 and forced the Dalai Lama, Tibet's political and spiritual leader, into exile, China has sought to eradicate the Tibetan identity, to annex the territory culturally as well as physically, Tibetan activists say.

Chinese spokesmen retort that Chinese rule has brought modern ways to a poverty-stricken and superstitious land run by a kind of medieval theocracy. But human rights advocates accuse China of closing all but 13 of the small territory's 6,254 Buddhist monasteries, sending thousands of monks to re-education camps, banning the display of photographs of the Dalai Lama, and resettling tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese colonists on Tibetan land.

The argument is that Tibet's existence as a distinct culture is threatened by Chinese policies. And given the acceptance of that accusation in the West and the exotic appeal of Tibet itself, the surprise may be that Tibet took so long to become a celebrity cause.

"The fascination is the search for the third eye," said Melissa Mathison, wife of Harrison Ford and the screenwriter of "Kundun." "Americans are hoping for some sort of magical door into the mystical, thinking that there's some mysterious reason for things, a cosmic explanation."

Ms. Mathison, explaining how she became interested in Tibetan culture, said the first step might be a search for spiritual meaning, which is soon replaced by an awareness of the Tibetans themselves, especially of the personality and character of the Dalai Lama.

"Tibet offers the most extravagant expression of the mystical," she said, "and when people meet His Holiness, you can see on their faces that they're hoping to get this hit that will transcend their lives, take them someplace else."

In a telephone interview, Gere explained that he first became interested in Tibet more than a decade ago when he became a Buddhist and was introduced to the Dalai Lama during a visit to the leader's home in exile in Dharmsala, India.

"It became clear to me that the situation for the Tibetans was worsening, and they had no public voice, no contact with the media, no presence at the United Nations," Gere said. "They had been gobbled up by the Chinese and had no protector."

Gere denies that there is a "critical mass" of interest building on Tibet. Many of the same people who became interested in Tibet a decade or so ago, he said, are still working for the cause.

The work includes regular meetings in Hollywood and elsewhere, as well as support for institutions like Tibet House in New York and the International Campaign for Tibet in Washington, a lobbying group with close ties to the Tibetan government in exile.

To be sure, other perceived injustices in the world have long generated their own movements, from opposition to Indonesia's occupation of East Timor to the detention of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi. Indeed, there was a movie sympathetic to Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, "Beyond Rangoon," directed by John Boorman. But the military dictatorship of Myanmar, as Burma is now known, did not become the focus of a Tibet-style campaign.

The movies on Tibet, especially given their star quality, could now even become an issue in Chinese-American relations, making Washington's efforts to improve the atmosphere with Beijing more difficult. Last November the Chinese government warned Walt Disney Co. that it was jeopardizing its future business in China by producing "Kundun," leading 59 prominent Hollywood figures to call on President Clinton to resist China's efforts at censorship.

Others close to the campaign say public interest in Tibet is reaching a new high.

"The movement has had its ups and downs," said John Ackerly, director of the International Campaign for Tibet. China's suppression of student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 helped the cause, he said, because "that validated what the Tibetans were saying. Then it kind of faded, and now it's catching on again with these movies."

Tibet, in fact, has gone through several stages of fascination for Westerners. At various times it has served the European and American imagination as a place of remoteness and immensely high mountains, of unspoiled physical beauty and a life style uncorrupted by the rampant materialism of the West.

James Hilton's casting of Tibet as Shangri-La in his 1933 novel, "Lost Horizon," Schell contends, was born out of the anxiety leading to World War II, which fostered the yearning for a place apart, a peaceful realm divorced from the chaos of modern life.

More recently, other events have paved the way for greater public attention to Tibet, a territory of only 1.2 million people.

The end of the Cold War and the democratization of Eastern Europe removed the chief U.S. obsession overseas. The release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa and his election as president of a post-apartheid nation lessened another concern.

When the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, he became not just world famous, but the world's most famous symbol of a nonviolent, meditative philosophy of existence. He has turned out to be a man of quiet charisma and a shrewd, tireless spokesman for his cause.

At the same time, with political idealists searching for a focus, China suddenly loomed as the chief remaining repressive state.

"We're living in an era where self-determination has been acted out except in this one stark case," Schell said. "You add to that a whole revival of interest in esoteric individualism, people searching for a spiritual side. Next, enter the Dalai Lama, crowned as a Nobel laureate. Tibet has done some of the most extraordinary public relations I know of."