By Maura Moynihan

Wednesday, April 30 1997

The Washington Post

China, the decade's emergent superpower, rules one-fifth of the human race, is a manufacturing giant and has the world's largest standing army equipped with nuclear warheads. Yet China becomes hysterical at the mere mention of the Dalai Lama, a Tibetan monk who lives in a small hill station in Northern India.

Beijing has for years perpetuated a perverse obsession with the Dalai Lama. In 1959, after Chinese troops crushed a revolt in Lhasa that forced the Dalai Lama into exile, Chinese propaganda labeled him "a counterrevolutionary bandit" and "an incestuous murderer." This kind of agitprop is still very much in use; in 1996 Xinhua, China's official news service, referred to the Dalai Lama as "the chieftain of the Tibetan rebellious bandits, an executioner . . . with honey on his lips and murder in his heart" who used "30 human heads and 80 portions of human blood and flesh each year as sacrificial offerings when he held a religious service in India to curse the People's Liberation war."

This Stalinoid dementia is ludicrous, but it has obfuscated the Dalai Lama's message of nonviolence and reconciliation.

Most policy makers do not realize that the Dalai Lama is not seeking territorial sovereignty for his captive nation; nor is he asking to be reinstated as the head of the theocratic government that ruled Tibet prior to the Chinese invasion. In an address to the European Parliament in 1988 in Strasbourg, France, the Dalai Lama offered the Chinese control of Tibet's military and diplomatic affairs if they would allow the Tibetan people a measure of self-governance and non-interference in religion and culture. Beijing attacked the European Parliament for allowing the Dalai Lama to speak, imposed martial law and escalated population transfer of Han Chinese onto the Tibetan plateau. In September 1994 the Chinese Communist Party's Third Work Forum on Tibet issued the following decree: "Although sometimes Dalai speaks softly and says nice things to deceive the masses . . . even up to today he has never changed his viewpoint of trying to gain Tibet's independence. We must always have a clear view of the Dalai and rev

eal his double-faced true color . . . as the saying goes, to kill a serpent we must first cut off its head."

The Dalai Lama is trying to save Tibet from extinction. In a 1996 address to the Danish Parliament, the Dalai Lama said, "The reality today is that Tibet is an occupied country under colonial rule. . . . Tibet, an ancient country with a unique civilization, is dying." The Dalai Lama, an acclaimed author and teacher and a devout Buddhist who has followed a life of monastic discipline since early childhood, was awarded the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the only individual engaged with the Chinese Communist empire to have received this most prestigious honor. He repeatedly has offered to meet with Beijing's leaders without preconditions. He recently visited Taiwan, where he was warmly received by President Lee Teng-hui and cheered by hundreds of thousands of citizens. The Dalai Lama emphasized that the success of the visit made clear that he is not, and has never been, "anti-Chinese." Beijing's response was to say that the Dalai Lama and Taiwan "harbor evil intentions."

The Dalai Lama's international stature infuriates the Politburo. Through his actions and writings in recent years, the atrocities the Tibetans have suffered after China's "Peaceful Liberation of Tibet" have finally gained international attention. Under Chinese rule 1.2 million Tibetans have died through armed conflict, labor camps and famine. Buddhism has been labeled a "disease" to be "eradicated"; and more than 6,000 monasteries, the repositories of a millennium of scholarship and culture, have been looted and razed. The 1966-67 Cultural Revolution was especially cruel in Tibet. All forms of religion and folk culture, from dancing to incense burning, were banned; long hair, worn by both men and women, was labeled "the dirty black tails of serfdom."

And just last year, the Politburo launched a "Strike Hard" campaign in Tibet, wherein the methods and rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution have reemerged. On April 5, 1996, the People's Daily newspaper announced an official ban on all photographs of the Dalai Lama, declaring any kind of image of the exiled leader to be "reactionary literature."

Nonetheless, China has failed to extirpate the Tibetan people's devotion to the Dalai Lama. In Tibet his image still is worshiped in secret. The past decade has seen a second exodus of Tibetan refugees to join their leader in India. For the Tibetan people, the Dalai Lama is the embodiment of Tibetan nationalism a reincarnation of Chenrezig, Tibet's patron saint. In his 1962 memoir, the Dalai Lama wrote: "I am a mortal being . . . but [the Tibetans] believed the Dalai Lama represented Tibet and the Tibetan way of life, something dearer to them than anything else. They were convinced that if my body perished at the hands of the Chinese, the life of Tibet would also come to an end."

Despite its relentless campaign to discredit the Dalai Lama, China has failed to subdue and sinocize Tibet. China's insistence that Tibet has always been part of China has been rejected by many investigative bodies, including the International Commission of Jurists and the U.S. Congress. Perhaps the issue of Tibet is even more sensitive than Taiwan, because it involves ethnicity and the legitimacy of Chinese rule over non-Chinese people. A few days after Deng's death, a bomb exploded in Xinjiang, a restive western Chinese province with 20 million Uigher Muslims. The Dalai Lama could play a significant role in mediating ethnic and political disputes in China, given the chance.

In a 1996 speech, the Dalai Lama said: "I am of course concerned that a country [China] which is home to almost a quarter of the world's population and which is on the brink of epic change, should undergo that change peacefully . . . chaos and instability could lead to large-scale bloodshed and tremendous suffering for millions of people."

If the Chinese wish to hold to their ascendancy on the world stage with fair play rather than intimidation and bellicosity, they should sit down with the Dalai Lama and work toward a peaceful resolution of the Tibet question. If China's ancient neighbor, Tibet, remains in the grip of a vicious police state, why should its other neighbors trust the Chinese? Indeed, why should anyone?

(The writer, a consultant to Refugees International, has worked for many years with Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal.)