Published by: World Tibet Network News Friday, January 2, 1998

By Dan Meyers

Denver Post Business Editor

Dec. 28 - You could see his words.

The college official was standing before a relief map of China that showed areas occupied by various ethnic groups. The locations were marked by cute little emblems showing a member of the ethnic group in colorful native garb.

Tibet, Luo Bu Jaing Cun was saying, is free and fine, if a bit underdeveloped.

"I really hope you have an opportunity to visit Tibet, because seeing is believing," said Luo, a Tibetan who is vice president of the Southwest Institute for Ethnic Groups in Chengdu, China.

The unheated room in which he spoke, part of a museum at the institute, was so cold you could see his words. Yet you could see right through them.

Tibet, where the Chinese government has squished religion and efforts toward independence, is not a place journalists can easily view for themselves.

Seeing is believing, they say in China. So Beijing ensures that little of Tibet is seen.

Journalists must get permission to travel there, as they must to venture anywhere beyond Beijing. For Tibet, that permission, rarely granted, often takes years. And then, reporters are given a sanitized, closely monitored performance.

Beijing, it became clear during a recent two-week trip to China, desires order, abhors "chaos." Even in Hong Kong, with garish Christmas lights on the buildings and carols blaring in the stores, no movie theater dares to show "Seven Years in Tibet" - and not for fear of boring the audiences.

There's simply no interest in the movie, a high-ranking official of the new Special Administrative Region of China, assured me. Right. So why did officials in Beijing publicly denounce the movie that very week?

That and other messages from the most populous country on the planet become especially poignant this time of year, when, between shopping sprees, we tend to ponder life and values and what's to come.

There will be more reports from the trip, in which I'll look at political and business changes in a country that's evolving rapidly.

But for now, with the holidays upon us and the new year looming, it seems a good moment to launch a discussion on questions about morality and human rights that China raises for all of us, very much including the business community.

Should we trade with, embrace, a country that imprisons dissidents, that proclaims freedom of religion and then assigns local bureaucrats to monitor the religious, even to the point of approving their leaders?

Or should we encourage economic interaction, hoping that free markets create free people faster than do lectures and isolation?

What roles, in other words, should morality and the marketplace play in our conduct, and how intertwined should they be?

It's tricky. There's right and wrong but life isn't always black and white.

The university official whose words hung in the air operates at the behest of the government. He does a lot of good, educating students from ethnic minority groups, helping them advance, taking on burdens others find too grubby. Or to cold.

Maybe he made a bargain with himself that we, too, would make.