World Tibet Network News Tuesday, June 9, 1998

San Francisco Chronicle, June 5, 1998

Two conflicting visions of Tibet were evoked by UC Berkeley journalism dean Orville Schell in a recent presentation to the World Affairs Council. In China's version, Tibetans are a poor, backward, superstitious people -- blessed to have been liberated from feudalism by the Communist Party in 1950. Tibetan culture and Tibetan Buddhism are just a curiosity.

For us, Tibet is the Shangri-la of ``Lost Horizon,'' or of Brad Pitt's ``Seven Years in Tibet,'' which Schell observed being filmed. Lhasa, Tibet's religious center and capital, had been re-created in the Andes, and Tibetans, some of them

``reincarnated'' high lamas, had been imported as actors and extras. In this virtual Tibet, at a copy of the Jokhang, their most sacred shrine, they prostrated themselves and wept. They were home, for the first time in decades, Schell says, ``only they happened to be in Argentina.''

When President Clinton goes to China next month, Schell says, he and China's President Jiang Zemin will have the last best chance to reconcile these opposing fantasies. If they don't make a start, Schell fears that Tibetans will commit more horrible acts of self-sacrifice in protest against China -- and that Tibetan youth, seeing nothing to lose, will turn to violence. If nothing

changes, Tibet will cease to be itself, except geographically: Its culture suppressed and its people purposefully diluted by ethnic Chinese, it will become just another province of China, as China insists it always was.

The paradox, Schell says, is that the more the Dalai Lama gains the sympathy of the outside world, the more suspicious China becomes and the more resistant to a possible compromise -- a Tibet within China but with real autonomy.