Published by: World Tibet Network News Thursday, November 6, 1997

HONG KONG, (Nov. 4) IPS - Tibet has become a sensitive subject in Hong Kong in the months since its reversion to China, as Beijing seeks to push here its own interpretation of issues relating to the isolated Himalayan region.

Under new laws enacted since the Chinese flag was raised here during the July handover, demonstrators in Hong Kong may not advocate independence for Tibet.

That is anathema to the Beijing government, which has for decades been trying to quell resistance by Tibetan leaders and exiles to Chinese rule that they say is destroying their religion, culture, and democracy.

Some Tibetan leaders want complete self-rule for the mountain region, which has been ruled as an autonomous region by China since 1951. The Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader who has lived in exile in India since 1959, wants "genuine self-rule" but has been repeatedly rebuffed by China.

And during Chinese President Jiang Zemin's visit to the U.S., which ended yesterday, he called Tibet a former "theocracy" that China had freed from slavery practiced under the Dalai Lama.

Journalists and academics here also fear they may be silenced if they openly take up the Tibetan cause.

Indeed, film distributors have declined to buy the Hollywood movie "Seven Years in Tibet," and the Disney film "Kundun" directed by Martin Scorsese. Even video outlets here will not stock Western films on Tibet for fear of disapproval from Beijing, which maintains the films distort the "truth."

An uproar also emerged over the August screening on a local television channel of the 90-minute documentary "The Dalai Lama," made by China's state-owned China Central Television (CCTV). It portrays the Dalai Lama as a weak-willed figure concerned mainly with his own status and power.

While the film was of some historic interest -- much of the old footage of events in Tibet had never been released to the public before -- it seeks to show that Britain and the U.S. used their spies in the area to try to create an independent Tibet, and that the Dalai Lama collaborated with them.

CCTV maintains that agents recruited by the Dalai Lama's two brothers were trained in Taiwan to take part in "terrorist acts" in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. According to CCTV, 170 Tibetan separatists also received guerrilla training in the U.S.

This information is based on stories emerging from Nepal from some of the recruits flown in for training by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to bases in Okinawa, Guam and even Colorado. The testimony of one supposed recruit, Nawang Gyaltsen, has already been aired on television in the U.S.

"None of us knew how to fight the Chinese the modern way," he said in one film, "but the Americans taught us. We learned camouflage, spy photography, guns, and radio operation."

The recruits were ill-equipped against the might of the Chinese army, but Beijing seeks to portray them as a major subversive organization.

CCTV claims its production on the Dalai Lama is a "factual and objective" report of events in Tibet from the 1930s to the 1950s and says more than 20 historians, local officials, and religious leaders were interviewed.

But callers to radio talk shows and the letters pages of newspapers have decried Beijing's efforts to distort the Tibetan issue even before the public became aware that the film was produced by state-owned television.

It has "fueled local worries that the local electronic media are in danger of being degraded into a propaganda tool for Beijing," said political analyst Andy Ho.

"CCTV has us wondering whether 'The Dalai Lama' will prove the harbinger of more propaganda films to be rammed down our throats," Ho said, referring to fears here that China would use Hong Kong's free press for its own ends.

Fears that China wants only its own view of the Tibetan issue aired in Hong Kong are fueled by reports that the Hollywood films "Kundun" and "Seven Years in Tibet" will not be aired here.

The Chinese government has condemned "Kundun," which takes a sympathetic view of Tibet's independence aspirations, and threatened Disney, whose headquarters for its Asia-Pacific operations is in Hong Kong, telling it that all commercial deals will be off if the film is released.

"We are resolutely opposed to the making of this movie," an official of the Ministry of Radio Film and Television said. "It is intended to glorify the Dalai Lama and is an interference in China's internal affairs."

In Hong Kong, such threats against the powerful American corporation are not taken lightly. Local distributors have said they would not release the film here. "It's very sensitive," said Tony Wong of Cinemation Films International. "We are afraid to buy it. We don't want to get into trouble."

The propaganda attacks against the films and the Dalai Lama have already been stepped up. Beijing has seized on revelations by a German magazine prior to the release of "Seven Years in Tibet" that Heinrich Harrer, the Austrian mountaineer who taught the young Dalai Lama in the 1940s and is the subject of the film, was a member of the Nazi elite SS.

The Dalai Lama was a Nazi "dupe" who fell prey to the influences of the Hitler regime while a boy, said the official Beijing Review in a acerbic commentary, referring to the Dalai Lama's "fascist tendencies."

The authorities have condemned the film and insisted it would be banned from China's cinemas, although recent reports quote officials as saying there are no restrictions for showing them in Hong Kong.

Even so, amid the barrage of attacks from Beijing and with Chinese authorities making their interpretation of Tibetan history clear through "The Dalai Lama," local distributors are unlikely to take any chances.