This blog posting is inspired by delegations of Tibetans, sent by the Chinese Government, that are currently visiting Europe, Australia and New Zealand. One is led by Jampa Phuntsok, the head of the Tibet Autonomous Region’s People’s Congress in Lhasa, while the other is led by Tanzen Lhundup, a scholar at the China Tibetology Research Center in Beijing. As I monitor their trips, I am beginning to mentally...

As His Holiness the Dalai Lama arrives in town today, I pose a question: Is tomorrow’s meeting between the Dalai Lama and President Obama getting greater attention than it would have had it been held last October? I think, indisputably, YES, even without the benefit of a time machine to test the hypothesis. Jump back to last summer/fall. We knew two things: (1) the Dalai Lama was scheduled to come to Washington,...

On the eve of their self-proclaimed, self-serving “Serfs Liberation Day,” Chinese officials are once again comparing their emancipation of Tibetan serfs to the U.S. abolition of slavery. In most ways this is offensive and wrong.  But in one way the analogy is exactly right: for decades both governments continued to sanction or tolerate discrimination against those they proclaimed emancipated (black Americans...

Two developments in Tibet and China in 2008 have revealed the aptness of one of the International Campaign for Tibet’s core competencies, the Chinese Outreach program. The pan-Tibetan public demonstration of people’s continued resentment against the Chinese government’s policies indicated that the situation in Tibet was far from being satisfactory. However, the Chinese government’s response...