Published by: World Tibet Network News ISSUE ID: 97/10/21

Reuters, 20 OCT 97

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hollywood portrayals of Beijing's iron grip on Tibet will haunt President Jiang Zemin's coming fence-mending visit to the United States.

For Tibetan self-rule advocates, Jiang's state visit Oct.26 to Nov. 2, the first by a Chinese leader in 12 years, is perfectly timed. It comes just as public awareness of their cause is peaking nationwide.

``People keep asking can Hollywood save Tibet? Judging by the response so far, it's making a big difference,'' said John Ackerly of the International Campaign for Tibet, a Washington-based advocacy group.

Milking their moment in the limelight, pro-Tibet activists have organized a string of camera-ready protests for Jiang, including a candlelight vigil at the Chinese embassy on the night of his Oct. 28 arrival in Washington.

On the same night, U.S. public television will air ``Dreams of Tibet,'' a ``Frontline'' documentary about what its producers called ``the uncertain fate of this fabled country.''

The documentary's reporter is Orville Schell, a leading China watcher who is dean of the graduate school of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

The next day, actor Richard Gere, a longtime pro-Tibet activist, has invited fellow sympathizers Harrison Ford, Uma Thurman, Oliver Stone, Steven Seagal and Sharon Stone, among others, to join him at a ``stateless dinner'' timed to upstage and mock President Clinton's state dinner for Jiang at the White House.

The activists are hoping to cash in on publicity generated by two big-budget movies about Tibet, where Chinese troops brought a violent end in the 1950s to centuries of autonomous rule beyond the Himalayas.

``Seven Years in Tibet,'' which stars Brad Pitt as an Austrian mountaineer spiritually transformed by the young Dalai Lama, grabbed the No. 2 U.S. box-office spot after its Oct. 8 opening.

Martin Scorsese's ``Kundun,'' soon to be released by Walt Disney, also profiles the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Buddhist monk, who fled to India in 1959 and set up a government in exile after China crushed a popular uprising in his homeland.

In interviews ahead of his visit, Jiang has made clear that Beijing had no intention of compromising on Tibet, which he portrayed as free at last of a kind of feudal theocracy.

``... It was not until the Dalai Lama left that we eliminated serfdom,'' he said in a Washington Post interview published Sunday. Voicing a fondness for the emancipating U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Jiang added: ``The impression I get is that you (Americans) are undoubtedly oppposed to slavery, yet you support the Dalai Lama.''

Jiang's seven-stop tour is aimed at ending eight years of official U.S. frostiness after China's 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy forces in Tiananmen Square. The United States and China have been at odds over Taiwan, nuclear- and missile-related Chinese exports as well as Chinese repression of dissent and other alleged human rights abuses.

Pegged to the release of the new films, Time Magazine devoted its Oct. 13 cover story to a supposed U.S. fascination with Buddhism, said to be growing ``with the help of the movies, pop culture and the politics of repressed Tibet.''

Schell, who traveled secretly to Tibet for ``Frontline'' in 1994, said the entertainment industry's romance with Tibet could have an impact on policy by heightening popular awareness of the issues.

``So this is no small matter -- this arrival of Hollywood on the Tibet scene,''he said.

The Himalayan hoopla also could prove embarrassing for Jiang, who is expected to be met by human-rights demonstrators in Washington; Philadelphia; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Los Angeles and the three other cities he is due to tour.

The United States regards Tibet as part of China but regularly voices concern over threats to its ``unique religious, cultural and linguistic heritage and protection of its people's fundamental human rights,'' as the latest State Department human rights report put it.

Clinton promised the Dalai Lama when they met in April that he would press Jiang to open a substantive dialogue on their differences.

The heightened Tibet profile in the United States comes as the Clinton administration prepares to name a special coordinator for Tibetan affairs within the State Department.

In another twist of the Hollywood-Lhasa axis, Gere will get in his digs with the Oct. 31 release of ``Red Corner,'' in which he plays an American imprisoned in China on trumped-up murder charges.