Read Online Escape from the Land of Snows by Stephan Talty - Free Book Online

turned to religion as his guiding philosophy. “I had still had no theoretical training in the intricacies of international politics,” he recalled. “I could only apply my religious training to these problems, aided, I trust, by common sense.” While Mao had grown up internalizing Sun Tzu and
The Art of War
, the Dalai Lama sought out the loving Buddha.
    Not everyone agreed with the Fourteenth’s approach. He was simply too soft, it was felt in certain circles, too much the representative of Chenrizi, the compassionate one.“His Holiness isvery humble and has a bit of a child nature,” one senior Tibetan official told him during a conversation about the Chinese intent. “Chinese are brazen and will not hesitate to exploit this.” The Dalai Lama often behaved like a lama trying to redeem his people, not a politician trying to lead them. “He thought people were so good,” admits Choegyal, his younger brother. “But what the Chinese were saying and doing were not the same thing. They wanted to destroy Tibet.”
    His Holiness was facing, in Mao Zedong, a leader who seemingly had strayed as far from his mother’s devout Buddhism as it was possible to. “Absolute selfishness and irresponsibility lay at the heart of Mao’s outlook,” write his biographers Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. The Chairman himself knew Buddhism; he’d been raised in the religion. But he lived by a different moral code. “Of course there are people and objects in the world,” he wrote, “but they are all there only for me.… They have nothing to do with the reality of my own self.” And when it came to violence, the Chairman was enthusiastic: “We must kill.… And we say it is good to kill.”
    One of the Dalai Lama’s daily contemplations was the Buddha’s teaching that enemies make the finest teachers. But how to balance the word of Buddha with what was happening around him, to face evil and call it evil? In his first encounter with the Chinese, the Dalai Lama came away as a naïve boy. He had a great deal to learn.
    After the first shock of invasion, the Chinese entered Tibet on cat’s feet. Chinese officials and soldiers were told to avoid “big nationality chauvinism,” to speak to the Tibetans gently, to pay for everything they requisitioned, and to strive to make the natives happy. An order published in the
People’s Daily
on May 26, 1951,told those traveling to Lhasa and beyond to “truly respect the Tibetan people and serve them in order to get rid of the huge gap left by history between Hans and Tibetans and to win trust.” Mao’s takeover of Tibet displayed an almost infinitely delicate touch and a sense of what individuals in a distant land would accept in an occupying force. The Chinese Communists didn’t yet have a sympathetic base in Tibet and the PLA didn’t have the infrastructure or the troop strength to dominate the country, so Mao persuaded, instead of terrorized, his new subjects.
    Every effort was to be taken to mollify the Tibetans. “When the Chinese first came, they spoke very sweetly,” said one monk from Kham. “They said, ‘We have come to bring development. We are the same … same race, same color. We are brothers. We have come to help you. After we have done that, we will go back.’ ” The Chinese also spent lavishly on everything from barley to houses to labor. “We had a saying,” commented a Tibetan government official. “Communist Chinese are grateful parents—incessant rain of cash.” Marxism was barely mentioned; the silver coin, not the hammer and sickle, was the emblem of those first years of occupation.
    The Chinese’s strategy in Lhasa was to draw His Holiness into their camp. “Make every possible effort to use all suitable means to win over the Dalai Lama and a majority of the upper strata,” Mao instructed his officials in Tibet, “and isolate the minority of bad elements in order to achieve long-term goals of transforming Tibetan economy and polity gradually