Published by: World Tibet Network News Issue Id: 97/10/28

**Tonight on PBS in North America -- please check your local TV listing**

October 28, 1997

By WALTER GOODMAN

The news that some movie actors are into Buddhism may not cause you to sign up, but you don't have to live in Southern California to subscribe to Hollywood's current interest in China and Tibet. As Orville Schell, a veteran China watcher, reports on "Dreams of Tibet," Western movies have become the most powerful way to bring Chinese repression, particularly with regard to Tibet, to the world's attention.

Even as President Jiang Zemin, China's leader, arrives in Washington to talk with President Clinton about trade and human rights, the director Jon Avnet is delivering "Red Corner," with Richard Gere playing an American jailed by the Chinese. Already released is "Seven Years in Tibet," which got its director and star -- Jean-Jacques Annaud and Brad Pitt -- banned from China. And promised in December is Martin Scorsese's "Kundun," about the exiled Dalai Lama.

Although Tuesday's offering from "Frontline" seems at times to be a cross between a Hollywood promo and a travelogue, it finally gets beyond the picturesque and asks: Are American companies with an eye to the huge Chinese market frightened of speaking out about China's restrictions on freedom in general, and in particular on what this program views as its destruction of Tibetan society?

The program asserts that Tri-Star (a division of Sony), which put out "Seven Years in Tibet," "did everything possible to play down the political message of the film."

And to judge by a Charlie Rose interview shown here, Michael Eisner, the head of Disney, which financed "Kundun," is not likely to take on China soon again. Henry Kissinger, now an adviser on China for Disney, serves as Tuesday's main voice against coming down undiplomatically hard on what China has done to Tibet and to its own dissidents. He cautions policy-makers against interfering in China's "internal affairs."

While making little effort to sort out the complexities of Chinese-U.S. relations, "Dreams of Tibet" is implicitly critical of the Clinton administration, which came into office breathing fire about China's human-rights deficiencies but has since "delinked" trade policy and human-rights principles.

That, Schell concludes, has reduced Tibetan exiles to putting their faith in the generosity of entertainers and the power of the movies.

PRODUCTION NOTES:

'FRONTLINE'

Dreams of Tibet

9 p.m. ET Tuesday on PBS

A Frontline co-production with Ben Loeterman Productions. Produced and directed by Ben Loeterman; Nancy Fraser and David Breashears, co-producers; Orville Schell, correspondent. Frontline is produced by a consortium of public television stations: WGBH/Boston, WTVS/Detroit, WPBT/Miami, WNET/New York and KCTS/Seattle. Michael Sullivan, executive producer, and David Fanning, senior executive producer for Frontline.