A gathering of leading Tibetan exiles last week witnessed a rare debate on the future of their movement, but failed to bring the dream of a free Tibet any closer to reality, analysts said.
The unprecedented conclave in the exiles’ Indian base of Dharamsala wound up on Saturday with the nearly 600 delegates backing the Dalai Lama’s long-standing policy of seeking autonomy, rather than independence, from China.
If that was a victory for Tibet’s spiritual leader, it was one that will cause few sleepless nights for the Chinese authorities, said Barry Sautman, a Tibet expert at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
“It’s all words in the air to them,” Sautman said. “As far as they’re concerned, the exiles can huff and puff all they like, but they’re blowing no one’s house down.”
“The bottom line is still the same: Unless China suddenly collapses, Tibet will not be independent, nor will it be granted any meaningful autonomy on a par, say, with Hong Kong,” Sautman said.
The week-long Dharamsala meet had been presented as an opportunity for younger, more radical Tibetan exiles to voice their frustration with the Dalai Lama’s “middle way” of seeking concessions from Beijing through talks.
Their voices were not only heard but also credited in the conclave’s final report, which noted the “strongly expressed” views of those who insisted that complete independence should be pursued if existing policy continued to yield no results.
The pro-independence Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) took this as tacit admission that the “middle way” was making no headway.
“It is a gradual shift that has come from a collective, democratic set-up,” TYC vice president Dhondup Dorjee said. “This was a good beginning at a critical time.”
Srikanth Kondapalli, a Tibet analyst at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said he had been “impressed” by the level of open debate in Dharamsala, which he stressed was unprecedented in Tibetan history.
While extremely pessimistic of any concrete results emerging from further talks with China, Kondapalli said he was optimistic about the health of the Tibet movement.
“China would like the movement to become more extreme so that they can denigrate it in the eyes of the international community. In that sense, Beijing might be disappointed with the outcome in Dharamsala,” he said.
The Chinese government has always vilified the Dalai Lama as a scheming separatist with a covert independence agenda supported by a clique of like-minded advisers.
Most analysts agreed that the 73-year-old Tibetan leader, who fled Tibet in 1959 following a failed uprising against Chinese rule, had been strengthened by the conclave which reaffirmed his core role in the leadership of the Tibetan movement.
“It was a strategic move,” Dibyesh Anand, a Tibet expert at Westminster University in London, said of the decision to call the meeting in the first place.
Anand said the Dalai Lama had registered the growing sense of frustration within the Tibetan community and the need to provide it with an outlet before it boiled over untended.
“He knows he must do his best to secure the future stability of the Tibetan movement before he dies or has to step down,” Anand said.
Whether his position was strengthened by the meeting or not, the Dalai Lama must now return to the challenge that he has struggled with for decades for so little reward.
His options appear as limited as ever, faced with an implacably intransigent government in Beijing and an international community which, while sympathetic, remains extremely wary of expressions of support that might anger China.
“A lot will depend, as it always has, on what happens inside Tibet itself,” said Martin Mills of Aberdeen University in Scotland.
In March, protests against Chinese rule in Lhasa erupted into violence that spread to other areas.
Tibet’s government-in-exile said more than 200 Tibetans were killed in China’s crackdown.
“Events in Tibet tend to drive the issue and serious unrest in the future could bring new factors into play, especially with a new president in the White House,” Mills said.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past