Beijing looks on in horror as Taiwan and the Dalai Lama steal the limelight in mutual admiration.

By Julian Baum in Taipei and Matt Forney in Beijing

From: Far East Economic Review, April 10, 1997

Newt Gingrich told them the way Al Gore didn't. As the highest-ranking American on Chinese soil since the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, Vice-President Gore tipped a champagne glass to Premier Li Peng, the very man who signed the martial-law order for China that year. The vice-president smoothed the easily-ruffled feathers of his new Chinese friends even as his speeches suggested, gingerly, that they improve human rights.

No such wiggling for Gingrich, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, who was also in China during Gore's visit. The outspoken Georgia politician said directly, publicly and repeatedly that China must improve human rights if it expects the world's respect:

"America cannot remain silent about the basic lack of freedom-speech, religion, assembly, the press-in China."

He might have added that China's leaders could have looked East that week for an example. While Gore charmed and Gingrich lectured, Beijing watched in horror as its rival government in Taiwan welcomed Tibet's exiled god-king, the Dalai Lama.

For Beijing, this had the makings of a nightmare scenario. It was, said the People's Daily on the day the Dalai Lama arrived in Taipei, "collusion between splittist forces in Taiwan and Tibetan independence forces to split the political system of the motherland."

Both Taipei and Tibet's government-in-exile benefited politically from the Dalai Lama's six days on the island. Yet their causes were served in markedly different ways. Taiwan garnered face in receiving a Nobel laureate, and drew a clear distinction between its liberal political system and Beijing's repression.

The Dalai Lama, however, highlighted the sameness of China and Tibet through his willingness to set foot on Chinese soil, and reiterated his desire to engage Beijing.

Beijing finds itself in a poor position to respond creatively. It is preoccupied both with preparations for Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese sovereignty on July 1 and a seminal Party congress late this year. Three days after the Dalai Lama arrived, China's chief negotiator with Taipei, Tang Shubei, announced in the state press that "early talks between the mainland and Taiwan have been ruled out."

The Dalai Lama had wanted to visit Taiwan since martial law was lifted on the island in the late 1980s. He received numerous invitations, but Taipei insisted on issuing them through its Tibetan and Mongolian Affairs Council-a relic of the days when Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang ruled China. Such an invitation was unacceptable to the Dalai Lama.

Until now, Taiwan, aware of Beijing's undoubted objections to such a visit, chose not to press for a visit in hopes of reaching compromises on cross-strait issues. But as Beijing remained inflexible, Taiwan's presidential office cleared the way for yet another public-relations victory.

Since Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui began his campaign to rejoin the United Nations, revised Taiwan's "one-China" policy and was re-elected by a landslide in Taiwan's first direct presidential election a year ago, his government has become less concerned with Beijing's reaction to a visit from the Dalai Lama. It has instead coveted the good publicity that the invitation assured. If Taiwan's independence activists wanted to use the Dalai Lama to underscore their own cause, Lee reasoned, he could stay above the fray by insisting that the visit was religious in nature, not political.

That's what happened. Two weeks before the Dalai Lama arrived, the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party celebrated the anniversary of Tibet's uprising against Chinese rule in 1959 by raising the Tibetan flag in the districts it controls and locked arms with more radical advocates of Tibetan independence. After meeting the Tibetan leader, party chairman Hsu Hsin-liang praised him as a "champion of nonviolence," adding that "we very much support his approach in dealing with China."

The contrast between Taiwan's willingness to engage the Dalai Lama and Beijing's shrill denunciations was obvious. No longer disputing pointless questions of sovereignty over territory it never really controlled, the ruling Kuomintang cleared away a raft of misunderstandings with the exiled Tibetan government.

In January, it agreed to allow the Dalai Lama's visit without preconditions, promised to allow a Tibetan affairs office to open in Taipei, and Taiwan's legislature began scrapping its outdated Tibetan and Mongolian Affairs Commission.

In its blanket coverage of the Dalai Lama's visit, Taiwan's state-controlled television contrasted Taipei's policies with those of Beijing. Most telling were repeated broadcasts of documentaries that lingered on graphic scenes of China's brutal occupation of Tibet since the 1950s-scenes that clashed with the Tibetan leader's nonviolent religious teachings.

Taiwan clearly wanted to show that a democratic Han Chinese society could befriend the Tibetans. With tens of thousands of Taiwanese attending the Dalai Lama's public lectures, the reception seemed overwhelming. "It was almost as if I were in my own country, among my own people," gushed one Tibetan journalist.

The Dalai Lama hoped to send Beijing the same message-that in engaging a government that claims to be part of China, he showed a willingness to engage Beijing as well. If that message was too subtle for some, he drove it home in frequent press interviews.

Despite insisting his trip was purely religious in nature, the Dalai Lama praised Taiwan's democratic reforms, and his political overtures to Beijing were unmistakable. He repeatedly stated that he did not support Tibetan independence and was seeking only autonomy under Deng Xiaoping's "one country, two systems" model-as will apply in Hong Kong. "In fact, I'm promoting unification. It's very strange that China regards me as a separatist," he said at his final news conference.

Yet these overtures might be coming too late. Many analysts think Beijing's strategy is to wait for the 62-year-old spiritual leader to die in exile. When that happens, the thinking goes, his comparatively uncharismatic followers will fail to unify the exile community's competing factions and support from abroad, particularly from Hollywood and Washington, will wane. Beijing has already set the stage for that scenario. In 1995, it orchestrated the selection of a six-year-old boy as the reincarnation of the second-most-important figure in the Tibetan theocracy, the Panchen Lama. Before doing so, it detained another six-year-old identified by the Dalai Lama as the true reincarnation-he now lives somewhere in China as the world's youngest known religious prisoner.

As the Panchen Lama will one day recognize the Dalai Lama's reincarnation, Beijing could control both lamas, and hence the very Buddhist pantheon on which Tibetan culture is based. At the very least, it won't have to worry about an organized separatist movement led by a figure who transcends politics and human lifetimes.

The Dalai Lama might have been forestalling such an event by showing his willingness to deal with Beijing. In that, his interests seem to converge with Taiwan's. The Dalai Lama's goal, ultimately, is religious freedom and cultural integrity in his homeland. Taiwan's goal is democracy and, perhaps, reunification with a democratic mainland.

China seems unwilling to respond constructively to those aspirations. Referring to the Dalai Lama at the end of his trip, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Cui Tiankai repeated the usual splittist rhetoric before noting that "this time he has run to Taiwan, apparently bringing along his political goals."

His desire to take a tough line on Tibet is clear. After all, the two causes have one important difference: If China does not see an opportunity to improve relations with Tibet, no country is prepared to defend it. Taiwan, however, is different, as Gingrich made abundantly clear. Speaking to Wang Daohan, a senior cross-straits figure and confidant of Party Chief Jiang Zemin, he said, "We understand that in principle, you will not renounce the right to use force. I want you to understand that we will defend Taiwan."