Theos-Talk Archives (April 1995 Message tl00069)

> Date: Fri Apr  7 16:00:06 1995
> From: wtn-editors@utcc.utoronto.ca
> Subject:      World Tibet Network News 95/04/07  21:00 GMT

       World Tibet Network News
   Published by:     The Canada-Tibet Committee
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                     Nima Dorjee <tibet@acs.ucalgary.ca>
                     Conrad Richter <conradr@utcc.utoronto.ca>
                     Tseten Samdup <tibetlondon@gn.apc.org>
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       Issue ID: 95/04/07 21:00 GMT Compiled by Thubten (Sam) Samdup

       Chinese Step Up Attack on Dalai Lama

       From: Tibet Information Network <tin@gn.apc.org>

LONDON, April 7, 1995 (TIN)
The Chinese authorities in Tibet have launched a major campaign
attacking the Dalai Lama in person and accusing him of blasphemy,
forgery and distorting Buddhism.  The campaign, last tried on
this scale 20 years ago, has already sparked off a number of
rural protests, including four by monks from a major Buddhist
sect which had previously avoided political confrontation.

Using virtually unprecedented language, official government
documents are describing the exile Tibetan leader and his
officials as the "head of a serpent" which must be chopped off.

The new campaign seeks to discredit the Dalai Lama as a religious
figure, unlike previous attacks which only criticised his
political activities.  "How much trace of a spiritual religious
leader is still left in him?" Tibet TV viewers were asked by a TV
news reader earlier this week.

The TV attack on the Dalai Lama was broadcast on the main evening
news on 30th March in an item described as a "TV Forum" entitled
"Is Dalai still the spiritual leader of a religion?" The
broadcast, an unattributed speech implicitly issued by the
authorities, indicated that the anti-Dalai Lama campaign is now
to be aimed at ordinary people, and that the campaign will be
carried out throughout the Tibet Autonomous Region.

Until now the campaign has been targetted at officials and party
members, who were asked the same question in a lengthy article
published in Tibet Daily, the regional Party newspaper, on 10th
March, according to the BBC's Summary of World Broadcasts.  The
TV broadcast this week gave official party endorsement to the
newspaper article, which had been signed by an unknown Chinese
named Xuan Wen in order to suggest that it did not at that time
represent official policy.

Both the TV statement and the newspaper article say that the
Dalai Lama has "forged" Buddhist texts, "altered" the teachings
and "violated" the principles of Buddhism.  Buddhism, the
articles insist, advocates detachment from worldly affairs,
whereas the Dalai Lama has allegedly told his followers to
support Tibetan independence as part of their religious practice.

Tibet Daily describes this as "wildly attempting to use godly
strength to poison and bewitch the masses".  It accuses the
"so-called spiritual leader" and "separatist chieftain" of
incorporating "Tibet independence" into his sermons.  "Such
flagrant deceptiveness and demagoguery constitute a blasphemy to
Buddhism", says the paper.

The Dalai Lama's followers are accused of "demanding" that
Tibetans hang the Dalai Lama's portraits in monasteries.  Foreign
tourists who have visited Tibet say that they are constantly
asked by Tibetans for Dalai Lama photographs.

Individual attacks by the Chinese on the Tibetan leader have been
extremely rare, especially since September 1987, when the Party
last criticised him personally after he addressed a group of
congressmen in the United States.  The brief propaganda drive
sparked off a series of street demonstrations in Lhasa which are
still continuing.  Since then Party propagandists have been
careful to criticise the "Dalai Clique" rather than the Dalai
Lama himself.  A TV broadcast on 11th February referred to
"splittist elements headed by the Dalai", a derogatory term
indicating that a change in tone was imminent, but such remarks
are extremely rare in public statements.

   - "Administering" and "Adapting" Religion -

The current campaign against the Dalai Lama is exceptional
because it attacks his spiritual abilities, for which the Chinese
have since 1979 allowed people to show respect.  A senior Party
figure contacted in Tibet confirmed to TIN that such language had
not been used since the Cultural Revolution, which finished in
1976.

The decision to attack the exile leader personally, which
involves considerable risks for the Chinese, was made last July
at a major policy conference in Beijing called the Third National
Forum on Work in Tibet.  According to initial publicity, the
Forum, which was attended by all China's top leaders, was
dedicated to raising 2.3 bln yuan for investment in the economic
development of the Tibet Autonomous Region, but since November it
has gradually become clear that its main purpose was to launch an
attack on religion in Tibet.

In technical terms the Forum decided that the attack should be
divided into two aspects: administration of religion and reform
of religion.  "On the basis of law we should enhance the
administrative work in the field of religion, and guide religion
to be an appropriate practice according to the socialist system,"
said deputy secretary Raidi at an internal speech on the Forum in
September 1994.

The practice of "enhancing administration" was clarified in
articles in the Tibet Daily on 25th November 1994 and in great
detail in the 10th March article, which announced strict quotas
on the number of monks and nuns in each monastery, limits on the
construction of any new monasteries or nunneries, and the
expulsion of any monks or nuns over the quota or under 18 years
of age.

The November article, which was extracted from an official
handbook on the Third Forum's decisions called "the Golden Bridge
to A New Era", had given a vague indication of the second aspect
of the religious campaign: "Tibetan Buddhism must self-reform and
adapt itself to the socialist system, and this must be taught and
guided.  They must adapt themselves to suit the developments and
stability of Tibet."

The current propaganda implements this plan to reform Buddhism,
which turns out to mean that under socialism Tibetan Buddhists
are allowed to be religious but are not allowed to regard the
Dalai Lama as a religious leader.

"The main spirit of the Third Forum is to adapt Tibetan Buddhism,
to reform it, and to separate the Dalai Lama from Tibetan
Buddhism", a Tibetan party member in Tibet told TIN.  "It is
impossible.  It is like trying to say that the Pope is not the
head of the Catholic Church," he added.

 - "To Kill a Serpent, We Must First Chop off its Head" -

The instruction to attack the Dalai Lama in person was printed in
"Golden Bridge to a New Era", the official handbook of the Third
National Forum, published in October 1994.  "We must always have
a clear view of Dalai and reveal his double-faced true colour as
much as possible.  The force at the fore of the fight against
separatism is the fight against the Dalai clique," says the book.
"As we say, to kill a serpent, we must first chop off its head,
and if we don't act accordingly we can not succeed completely in
this struggle," continues the handbook, leaving it ambiguous
whether the threat applies just to the Dalai Lama or to the exile
Government as a whole.

In his key briefing to the Tibet Party Committee on 5th September
1994 deputy secretary Raidi also called for the head of the
serpent to be cut off, but the phrase was omitted from the public
text of Raidi's speech, published in Tibet Daily the following
day and issued in translation by the BBC's Summary of World
Broadcasts on 26th September.

   - Tibetan Responses -

The TV broadcast of the anti-Dalai Lama statements indicates that
the campaign will already have been initiated in most government
offices, and that government employees will have to attend
meetings at which they will be asked to state their attitude to
the official statements.  Opinions are divided over whether
Tibetans, who regard insulting the Dalai Lama as the most
offensive form of Chinese polemic, will accept the new campaign.

"No-one in Tibet will believe these things but I don't expect
anyone to stand up and say they don't agree," said one Tibetan
from Lhasa.  "Anyone speaking out will be knocking against a
rock.  Nobody will be foolish enough to give their own opinion.
If they do they will be finished," he said.

However so far this year there have already been more
demonstrations than in any equivalent period for five years, most
of them in monasteries and nunneries in rural areas outside
Lhasa.  The rural incidents, details of which are still nuclear,
could be a response to early attempts by party work teams to
implement the new rulings.

Teams of officials from the Public Security Offices, the
Religious Affairs Bureau and local leaders were sent in the
beginning of December 1994 to monasteries and nunneries near
Lhasa to impose the new restrictions, according to unofficial
sources.  Similar work teams had been sent out three months
earlier to set up the new policies.  The December teams are said
to have demanded responsibility contracts from the heads of
monasteries, as well as from parents and monastery sponsors,
guaranteeing that their members would not take part in protests.

"After that the monks and nuns were forced to put their
fingerprints on a written document which stated that they would
not join the splittists, and their photographs were taken," said
the Tibetan, who said that in some areas the monks had refused to
co-operate.  Two protests in December, both by monks from
Sang-ngag Khar monastery 25 km east of Lhasa, are known to have
been sparked off by demands from visiting work teams.

Last May, two months before the new hard-line policy on religion
was approved by the Beijing leadership, a Tibetan politician
warned the Chinese authorities that a crack-down on religion
could be counter- productive.  "We shouldn't forget that during
the Cultural Revolution, atheism was publicised on a large scale
amongst the masses, but got the opposite result," Rongwo Lobsang
Dondrup told a session of the Tibet branch of the Political
Consultative Conference, according to documents seen by TIN.
"Instead of accepting atheism, the aftermath amongst the masses
had grave consequences.  It is time for us to learn these
lessons," he said.

  - Provoking Sectarian Strife -

The official campaign against the Dalai Lama repeats well-used
Cultural Revolution propaganda describing him as a feudal serf
owner "who must use the skulls of human beings to recite
scriptures".  But it introduces a new attack: that the Gelugpa
school, which the Dalai Lama leads, is not the leading sect in
Tibetan Buddhism.

The splittists are trying to inflate the status of the Dalai Lama
"by arbitrarily describing him, one of the leaders of the
Dge-lugs-pa, in turn one of the four main sects of Tibetan
Buddhists, as the common leader of all Buddhist sects in Tibet",
adds the Tibet Daily.

The argument appears to be an attempt to incite factional rivalry
between the major Buddhist sects, and follows extensive efforts
by the Chinese authorities to elevate the standing of the
Karmapa, leader of the Kagyupa school of Tibetan Buddhism.

The Karmapa, who lives at Tsurphu monastery 50 km north-west of
Lhasa, was officially recognised as an incarnation by the Chinese
state in 1991 and has since been lavishly praised by the official
Chinese media and government leaders.  He was taken to Beijing to
be a guest of honour of the Chinese president during the parade
marking China's National Day on 1st October 1994.

On 21st October officials in Lhasa announced that Tsurphu
monastery had won an award for its "outstanding patriotic and
law-abiding performance".  "The government respects religious
affairs and cares much about the Garmaba", Xinhua said on 25th
October.

Attempts to promote sectarian conflict have previously been
confined to academic articles which were not intended for public
distribution.  "Power should have been in the hands of the Geju
[Kagyupa] sect and should have had nothing to do with the Gelu
[Gelugpa] sect (Dalai), who were therefore illegally in power in
Tibet" during the Republican period, a Tibetan historian wrote in
the internal Bulletin of Tibet Communist Party History in 1988.

  - Protests by Kagyupa Monasteries -

The current attempt to promote the Karmapa as an alternate leader
to the Dalai Lama has already run into difficulties.  When
Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, quoted the Karmapa last
year as saying he was a patriotic lama who wanted to unite the
motherland, the statement was ridiculed by Tibetans.  "The
Chinese taught him to say this; he doesn't know what patriotic is
and what uniting the motherland means," one Tibetan in Lhasa told
TIN, pointing out the farce of citing political statements by the
Karmapa, who is only 11 years old.  "The Chinese think that the
Karmapa will become a Chinese Lama, but the Karmapa will never do
that, because he is a Tibetan Lama," they added.

The comment has an unexpected veracity, because in the last three
months the general view that Kagyupa monks would not join the
dissident movement has been shattered, with protests taking place
in at least four monasteries with Kagyupa affiliations.

Kagyupa dissent emerged, for the first known time in recent
years, in early January this year, when a pro-independence
protest was staged by monks at the monastery of Yamure, 99 km
north east of Lhasa.  The protest, reportedly sparked off by
officials demanding that photographs of the Dalai Lama be banned,
led to a raid on the monastery by over 100 troops.

On 28th January eight Tibetans, including three monks from the
local Kagyupa monastery, were arrested from Katsel, a village 65
km north-east of Lhasa in Meldrogungkar county, after
pro-independence posters were put up or dissident books were
found in their rooms.

In February seven monks from the monastery of Taglung, 65 km
north of Lhasa, were arrested.  Taglung, like Yamure, is
affiliated to a branch of the Kagyupa school.  The monks had
travelled to Lhasa to stage their protests in two groups, one
group demonstrating on or around 11th February and the second on
15th February.

But most surprising is news of protests against the Chinese
manipulation of the Karmapa by five monks from the Karmapa's own
seat at Tsurphu.  In December or January four of the five men
fled from the monastery after they were accused of putting up
dissident posters, but were arrested in Shigatse as they tried to
escape to India; the fifth escaped.

The monks are said to have left letters in their rooms accusing
the Chinese authorities of taking advantage of the child Karmapa.
The letters also said that the anti-Dalai Lama campaign was
unacceptable, according to one source.  Three of the detainees
were senior monks at Tsurphu, including Kyigen, the main chant
master of the monastery, as well as another who acted as chant
master and one who was the monastery's "ge-yok" or deputy
disciplinarian.  The five men are said to be held in Toelung
county prison.

Although much of the pro-independence activity inside Tibet has
been led by monks and nuns from Gelugpa institutions, there has
been intense dissident activity among monasteries and nunneries
of the other sects, such as the Nyingmapa nunnery at Shungseb and
the Sakya monastery of Dunbu Choekor in Chideshol.