Nonetheless, French's respect for the Dalai Lama's towering morality remains unshaken, even though he feels that Tibetan philosophy, a great tool for the development of spiritual peace, has turned out to be woefully inadequate when it comes to the matters of statecraft and diplomacy. He calls for sensible international action and believes that the current sympathy for the Tibetan cause has failed to translate into concrete action for change.
The book is well researched and his scholarship shows throughout, though he carries his erudition lightly -- the book is full of lively insights and humor. Some chapters can be unbalanced, as in one chapter in which he combines a conversation with a Tibetan untouchable, a Rakyabpa, with an interview with an exiled freedom fighter.
French relies on sources in exile and within Tibet, and takes pride in the fact he is able to avoid using "the usual contacts." His intimacy with the exiled Tibetans is put to good use in close interviews with independent writers and intellectuals based in India. On several occasions, he quotes from the Tibetan Review, an oft-ignored but authoritative and incisive monthly, published out of Delhi by the Tibetan exiles.
While he thinks the current Tibetan movement is getting nowhere, French ends the book with a weak and jittery conclusion. Despite his criticisms over the passivity of the current leadership, French's own proposition for the future of Tibet turns out to be almost a mirror image of the "middle way approach" -- no independence, but genuine autonomy -- that the current exiled Tibetan government is adopting.
"My sense was that the only realistic hope for the future was for Tibetans to work within the Chinese system, to try to get as many of their countrymen as possible into good positions, and wait for the day when there was reform in Beijing, in the hope that Tibet would then be permitted genuine autonomy and a reassertion of its own identity," he writes.
By linking the hope for the future of Tibet with that great variable -- autonomy -- French, like most observers, has resorted to the laziest and most common tool in the analysis of East Asian politics: putting all the hopes on a possible change in the minds of the leaders in Beijing. And this is the weakest portion of this otherwise superb book of history and travelogue on Tibet.
RSS