Asia Times, 27th March 1997

Shu-Ching Jean Chen, Taipei,

Fifty-seven years ago, a special envoy from China's Nationalist government held an official coronation ceremony in Lhasa for five-year-old Tenzin Gyatso, anointing him the spiritual leader of Tibet.

About 500 people witnessed the grand ceremony. It was a rare occasion of harmony between Tibet and a modern Chinese government, and a similar rendezvous would not occur for another half century. The baby who on that day became the Dalai Lama is now a 62-year-old leader-in-exile. On Thursday he will meet the present leader of the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui, ending a standoff that has lasted for over three decades.

His arrival on Saturday was not met with the official grandeur that would have greeted a state guest, but such an act would have enraged Beijing, which has accused both Lee and the Dalai Lama of being "splittists" trying to break up China.

The visit enraged Beijing, which regards Lee and the Dalai Lama as among its most hated enemies.

Besides, Taiwan considers the Tibetan spiritual leader to be one of its citizens, a position that would make it impossible for his arrival to be a state visit.

Relations between Tibet and the Kuomintang have been fragile since civil war broke out between the Communists and the Nationalists in the mid-1940s.

But even then, in a gesture of goodwill, the Dalai Lama's elder brother Gyalo Thondup was sent to attend a political college in the Nationalist capital of Nanjing, where he socialized with Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek and many other high-ranking officials and their families.

Since then Thondup, a fluent speaker of Mandarin Chinese, has managed to act as a lubricant between the independence-conscious Tibetans and the pro-unification Nationalists.

Thondup stayed in Taiwan for a year-and-a-half, shortly after Chiang and his army fled to Taiwan in 1949.

In 1950, Chinese troops marched into Tibet and declared it a part of China.

Taiwan's official contacts with the Dalai Lama were dropped in the late 1950s as calls for independence gained strength within the spiritual leader's Tibetan Administration-in-Exile and the Nationalists' staunch claim of sovereignty over Tibet became increasingly offensive to them.

The Dalai Lama's group was also irritated by the continued support the Nationalists were extending to other overseas Tibetan communities. The administration-in-exile saw this as an attempt to create ideological divisions among Tibetans.

Another sore spot in relations is Taipei's Mongolian & Tibetan Affairs Commission, which claims sovereignty over Tibet. Despite ideological differences, however, the commission has been trying to develop ties with the Dalai Lama through third parties, but to no avail.

The strained relations are one reason why Taiwan has a Tibetan population of only a few hundred people. Until the 1980s, Tibetan rinpoches, or Buddhist masters, were virtually unheard of in Taiwan, and those that did arrive were mostly from the Kagyud sect, one of four denominations in Tibetan Buddhism. Few were from Dalai Lama's Geluk sect.

The small size of Taiwan's Tibetan community "is a phenomenon intentionally created by the Tibetan government-in-exile", said Lan Chi-fu, senior research fellow at the Chung Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies. "They were angry about the invasion by the Han Chinese of Tibet, and they thought the Nationalist government was not much better [than the Communists in Beijing] because they took the same political position, claiming Tibet as part of China."

But as hopes of an independent Tibet began to fade, the Dalai Lama in 1987 proposed a five-point peace initiative to Beijing that tacitly terminated his long drive for independence. It was this soft-ening that gave the Kuomintang a glimmer of hope that it could bring the Dalai Lama under its wing.

In a position paper issued in 1990, the Mongolian & Tibetan Affairs Commission championed the idea of bringing the Dalai Lama to Taiwan as a "Tibetan religious leader".

A breakthrough came when presidential adviser Chao Tze-chi, president of the Taipei-based World League for Freedom and Democracy, visited the Dalai Lama in the Indian city of Mussoorie 1992. The following year, the Dalai Lama's brother Thondup revisited Taiwan after nearly 30 years.

"There were problems of misunderstanding between the Dalai Lama and our Mongolian & Tibetan Affairs Commission. In the early days, our government did not know [the Tibetans'] factional divisions and contacted the wrong ones," said Chao. "After my meeting with the Dalai Lama, the frozen river of communication was flowing again."

The Dalai Lama's historic visit would not have been possible without a change in the attitude of the Kuomintang, now led for the first time by a Taiwanese native, President Lee.

The president's office was instrumental in making sure the Mongolian & Tibetan Affairs Commission did not interfere with the preparations for the Dalai Lama's visit.