Theos-Talk Archives (April 1995 Message tl00081)

> 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
> Reply-To: WTN-L@VM1.MCGILL.CA

       World Network News
   Published by:     The Canada-Tibet Committee
   Editorial Board:  Brian Given <bgiven@ccs.carleton.ca>
                     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.