Ashwin Verghese

“It’s in keeping with the philosophy of nonviolence. That’s what the movement was always about, to have the capacity to forgive and move toward reconciliation.”—John Lewis

For obvious reasons, the timing of John Lewis’ death last week felt like a heavy blow. Not only have most of our lives ground to a halt in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, but our country is also in the midst of a massive reckoning over racial injustice. And now we have lost the light of one of the last remaining luminaries of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. (The Rev. C.T. Vivian, another high-profile figure from the movement, died the same day as Lewis, July 17, 2020.)

As a believer in the Dalai Lama’s nonviolent activism, I lament the passing of Congressman Lewis. I often fear that great moral leaders like Rep. Lewis, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and their forebears are a rare species in our modern world, which—for whatever progress it has made—is also more fractured and imperiled than it ever has been in many of our lifetimes. The death of John Lewis only makes this frightening landscape feel a little dimmer.

Prayers from the Dalai Lama

Given everything Lewis stood for (and got beaten for) during his lifetime, it’s no surprise the Dalai Lama mourned his death in a statement this past weekend. “Through his principled adherence to the fundamental democratic values of liberty, equality and justice, Congressman Lewis won admiration even among those who did not share his political outlook,” His Holiness wrote. “In the course of many years of public service, he inspired many Americans to take up the cause of justice and peace through nonviolence.”

The Dalai Lama’s website also shared a photo of the Tibetan Buddhist leader clasping hands with Rep. Lewis—a striking image of two beaming avatars of wisdom and compassion. Lewis supported Tibet during his decades in Congress, including by signing onto several letters calling for greater US action to advance Tibetans’ rights.

In his statement, the Dalai Lama also connected Lewis to other icons of nonviolence:

Whenever I talk about nonviolence, I cite the examples of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Dr. Martin Luther King. Congressman Lewis not only knew Dr. King, but also gave him crucial support. Although I did not have the privilege of meeting Dr. King myself, in meeting Congressman Lewis, I feel [I] have made a direct connection with him.

The power of forgiveness

I’ve written before on this blog about my admiration for Gandhi (as well as, of course, my love for His Holiness). But as an Indian immigrant in the US, I feel simultaneously proud that the civil rights movement borrowed methods and ideas from Gandhi’s “satyagraha” campaign and indebted to Black leaders like Congressman Lewis and Dr. King, who suffered horrific abuse—and even death in King’s case—so that people of color could have the same freedoms as their fellow citizens. I know the opportunities I’ve had in this country would not have been possible without those visionary activists, so I will forever be grateful.

Yet as inspired as I feel by how much Lewis, the son of Alabama sharecroppers, managed to achieve in his 80 years on this Earth, I am perhaps just as moved by how much he was willing to forgive.

As Michael A. Fletcher recalls in an excellent piece for The Undefeated, the beatific Lewis once faced criticism from his peers for having too much anger. At the legendary 1963 March on Washington where Dr. King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, the 23-year-old Lewis—who was one of the “Big Six” organizers of the event and the last one to die—had to tone down his remarks at the request of King, A. Philip Randolph and others, who feared the oration he planned to give was too divisive and combative.

Years later, Lewis fully embraced the need for forgiveness and reconciliation. According to Fletcher, he forgave “Bull” Connor, the notorious former public safety commissioner of Birmingham, Ala., who unleashed firehoses and attack dogs on peaceful protestors.

The capacity to change

Perhaps most strikingly of all, Lewis even forgave George Wallace, the man who famously pledged in his 1963 inauguration as Alabama governor, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Growing up decades after the fact, I knew Wallace only as a caricature of midcentury racism. What I did not learn until years later was that during the final stages of his life, Wallace—who by then was bound to a wheelchair following an attempt on his life—expressed remorse for the damage he caused African Americans. He met with Lewis in 1979 and with other civil rights leaders too.

Many people felt—and still feel—that Wallace’s about-face on racism was less than sincere. Yet in an astonishing op-ed he wrote for The New York Times the week Wallace died in 1998, Lewis said the Wallace he got to know “was a changed man.” “When I met George Wallace, I had to forgive him,” he wrote, “because to do otherwise — to hate him — would only perpetuate the evil system we sought to destroy.”

Lewis went on to say that Wallace “should be remembered for his capacity to change.” “I can never forget what George Wallace said and did as governor, as a national leader and as a political opportunist,” he wrote. “But our ability to forgive serves a higher moral purpose in our society.”

The effectiveness of nonviolence

Lewis was also willing to forgive less well-known figures too. In one of the most startling examples of his grace, he forgave Elwin Wilson, a Ku Klux Klan member who viciously beat Lewis and a fellow Freedom Rider at a bus station in the early 60s—Lewis and the other activist refused to fight back or press charges—before seeking him out to apologize and make amends decades later.

Lewis beautifully recalled their meeting about 10 years ago in Washington, DC: “He started crying, his son started crying, and I started crying,” he said. The quote from Lewis at the top of this post explains why he never hesitated to accept Wilson’s apology.

For his part, Wilson, who wanted to set things right with his God before it was too late, had wisdom of his own to dispense. “[M]y daddy always told me that a fool never changes his mind, and a smart man changes his mind,” he said. “And that’s what I’ve done and I’m not ashamed of it.” He and Lewis made several TV appearances together over the next few years, and when he died in 2013, Lewis issued a statement saying he was “very sorry to learn of Elwin Wilson’s passing.”

“He demonstrated the power of love and the effectiveness of nonviolent direct action,” Lewis said, “not only to fix legislative injustice but to mend the wounded souls in our society, the soul of the victim as well as the perpetrator.”

Hope for Tibet, hope for tomorrow

Though I’m sad that Congressman Lewis no longer walks this Earth with the rest of us, reading about him over the past few days has refocused my belief in the Tibetan cause and the vision of the Dalai Lama. Lewis’ success in changing the world, and changing individual people, renews my hope that change can come to Tibet.

I’m not saying it will be easy. Do I believe that Chen Quanguo, the architect of mass atrocities against Tibetans and Uyghurs, will undergo the same change of heart that Wallace and Wilson said they did? Not really, no. As Lewis himself noted in his op-ed, Wallace’s conversion was a rare feat for a politician.

Many of you probably also question whether it even matters to convert or forgive people like Wallace and Chen, given the immense harm they’ve caused. On top of that, even though I’ve followed the Dalai Lama and other nonviolent leaders for many years now, I’m still never sure how to put their teachings into practice—how to combat injustice and stand up for what’s right without becoming unjust or unkind myself.

I can also assure you that I have many of the same fears that many of you do about the coronavirus and its effect on our health, our economy, our future. There’s also the threat of climate change, the rise of authoritarianism and numerous other concerns to worry about.

Spirit of healing

Yet I know that whatever the next few months, as well as the next few years and decades, bring, I would prefer to face them with the spirit of compassion, nonviolence and healing that Lewis embodied, rather than with anger and vindictiveness.

That’s a big part of what drew me to Tibet in the first place, and I suspect it’s what drew many of you as well. It’s not about achieving victory over the Chinese, but about creating conditions for Tibetans and Chinese to live together peacefully, the way Lewis and his peers hoped different races in the US could live as equals.

Below is His Holiness’ full letter about the loss of Congressman Lewis. I hope you take a moment to read it, and I hope you stay committed to the cause of nonviolence and peace.

RIP JOHN LEWIS.

“As I stood there I wondered what wise counsel the Mahatma would have given me if he had been alive. I felt sure he would have thrown all his strength of will and character into a peaceful campaign for the freedom of the people of Tibet.”

—The Dalai Lama in his autobiography “My Land and My People,” on his visit to Gandhi’s cremation site in 1956

Today, Oct. 2, 2019, the world marks 150 years since Mahatma Gandhi was born. But for those of us in the Tibet movement, it’s perhaps more important to remember when he died.

Gandhi, a revolutionary of staggering political, spiritual and philosophical insight, was shot dead by a Hindu nationalist on Jan. 30, 1948—in other words, the year before the Chinese Communist Party came to power and subsequently invaded Tibet, beginning its ongoing, brutal occupation of India’s historical neighbor.

Though the Mahatma and the Dalai Lama walked the same Earth for about 12-and-a-half years, they never interacted. Instead, a young Dalai Lama visited India years after Gandhi’s death for the 2,500th birthday of the Lord Buddha. While there, on his first morning in New Delhi, he visited Gandhi’s memorial, Raj Ghat. Thus, on one short pilgrimage in the midst of China’s savage conquest of his land, His Holiness came into spiritual communion with arguably the two greatest minds the Indian subcontinent has produced: Gandhi and Buddha.

Three years later, the Dalai Lama was forced to seek refuge in India when Chinese troops forced him to sneak out of the Norbu Lingka Palace in Lhasa to escape likely imprisonment or death. Nearly ever since, His Holiness has been perched in the northern Indian outpost of Dharamsala, from where he continues to guide the Tibetan people to this day.

Though Gandhi did not live long enough to advise the Dalai Lama on his struggle, as His Holiness seems to have wanted, the Mahatma’s imprint can be seen all over the Tibetan movement.

Indeed, one could argue that in exile, the Dalai Lama and his followers have practiced their own form of “swaraj,” one of Gandhi’s core concepts. Swaraj means “self-rule,” and the Mahatma sought to implement it in myriad ways, including “swadeshi,” or self-reliance—which he most famously demonstrated by spinning his own clothes; the image of the spinning wheel now adorns independent India’s flag—health and education programs, and peacekeeping between India’s multifarious religious and communal groups.

While Tibetans’ swaraj has not completely replicated Gandhi’s blueprint, it has deployed several similar strategies. For one thing, Tibetan exiles have shown an astonishing commitment to education. In 1960, the Dalai Lama established the Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamsala. Today, TCV is a network of schools across India that help keep the Tibetan language and culture alive while also introducing young Tibetans to other important academic subjects. No doubt this would impress Gandhi, who once said that swaraj “means national education, i.e. education of the masses.”

In addition, the Dalai Lama has echoed the work of the Mahatma in striving to keep the Tibetan people together. In fact, there is arguably greater unity among Tibetans in exile today than there was in Tibet before the Chinese invasion. During that time, the Dalai Lama was viewed as a spiritual authority across the Tibetan Plateau, but political authority was fragmented among the different regions of Tibet. In India, however, the Dalai Lama has been able to keep Tibetans united so they can present a unified front against Chinese malevolence. The Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile, which was formed with the encouragement of the Dalai Lama, includes representation for each of Tibet’s three provinces, as well as its different religious schools. It’s no surprise, then, that the Dalai Lama has written that Tibetans are “one of the most successfully resettled refugee groups in the world” with their own political and cultural institutions.

Like Gandhi, His Holiness has embraced wise reforms for his millennia-old society, and what’s remarkable—but less-often recognized—about both men is not simply their courageous leadership of resistance movements, but rather their deep commitment to community self-improvement and purification.

Many historically victimized peoples have responded to their oppression by seeking to emulate and outdo their oppressors—what Gandhi pithily dismissed as “English rule without the Englishman.” For instance, China, the Dalai Lama’s lifelong antagonist, has strived to prevent a recurrence of the “century of humiliation” it suffered at the hands of European and Japanese imperialists by becoming a mighty imperial power itself, adopting the Western notion of sovereignty (as opposed to the priest-patron relationship it once had with Tibetans) and claiming it over Tibet and East Turkestan (Chinese: Xinjiang) while eyeing the forced integration of Hong Kong and Taiwan with the Chinese mainland.

This kind of modeling of the behavior of one’s bully is understandable, but nevertheless tragic. However, it is largely the opposite of what Gandhi and the Dalai Lama preach. Like other leaders of the colonized, they recognized the need for their societies to self-strengthen, but they sought to do that by preserving and refining the best aspects of their cultural traditions, not by acquiescing wholesale to Western or Chinese ways. Though both Gandhi and the Dalai Lama assimilated the most useful and meritorious ideas of the invaders’ cultures—Gandhi was heavily influenced by the Christian gospels and by Western thinkers like Edward Carpenter—they rejected the militarism and acquisitiveness that brought outside powers to their countries in the first place.

Indeed, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama are most recognizably linked in their devotion to “ahimsa,” or nonviolence. Neither man was willing to accept violence or hatred by the victims toward their victimizers. And both see ahimsa as a crucial part of the ideal society they wish to create. In his Five Point Peace Plan address to the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1987, His Holiness even went as far as to say that Tibet should become a “zone of ahimsa” from which all troops and military installations would be removed. As the threat of violence between India and China looms ever present over border and water disputes, Indians might wonder how much better off they’d be with Tibet as a peaceful buffer state between them and the belligerent Chinese Communists.

I see another surprising connection between the Dalai Lama and Gandhi. For the Mahatma, achieving independence from Britain was insufficient; he was adamant that India should not become a modern state in the vein of England or the United States. (It’s worth noting that several of China’s leading intellectuals at the turn of the last Century believed the same thing, but their voices were swallowed up by the march of the Communist regime.) Instead, he believed the best organization for India was a web of self-sufficient village republics. This concept no doubt seems radical to many modern commentators (though I personally find it very appealing), but it reveals the extent of Gandhi’s commitment to nonviolence and equality, as well as the depth and reach of his ideas. (To say Gandhi was merely an independence activist is a bit like saying Buddhism is merely the practice of meditation.)

Similar ingenuity can be seen in the Dalai Lama’s proposal of “genuine autonomy” for Tibet, rather than full-fledged independence. Stopping short of asking for Tibet’s freedom is no doubt at least partly a calculated move by His Holiness, designed to bring the Chinese to the table for a mutually acceptable compromise. But it also shows that, like Gandhi, the Dalai Lama is not limited by modern ideas of the homogenous nation-state and political sovereignty.

For me, this political and ethical imagination is a big reason why I wanted to join the Tibet movement in the first place. It’s not for me to decide whether genuine autonomy or “rangzen,” total independence, is the better option for Tibetans. But witnessing the social upheavals that have roiled the world over the past few years, including in the heart of the progressive West, I feel the need to consider totally different understandings of human life that are more compassionate and more ethical. Gandhi offers that, and while the Dalai Lama differs from him in manifold ways, he carries on Gandhi’s legacy of providing a moral and spiritual voice to correct the waywardness of modern civilization.

As we celebrate “Gandhi Jayanti” today, I am touched by the reminder that the Mahatma died believing himself a failure as he witnessed India descend into horrendous violence following Britain’s unconscionably reckless and hasty retreat from the Subcontinent. “I am in the midst of flames,” Gandhi wrote bitterly toward the end of his life. “Is it the kindness of God or His irony that the flames do not consume me?”

It seems Gandhi would be unsurprised by the rise of strongmen in countries around the world today. As the Indian author Pankaj Mishra notes, “Gandhi predicted that even ‘the states that are today nominally democratic’ are likely to ‘become frankly totalitarian’ since a regime in which ‘the weakest go to the wall’ and a ‘few capitalist owners’ thrive ‘cannot be sustained except by violence, veiled if not open.’” Indeed, China has shown that, contrary to the prognostications of some in the West, authoritarianism and the market economy can fit together hand in hand and fist in glove.

Despite the crushing blows of India’s Partition and bloody nation-building, Gandhi was not defeated. As Dwight Macdonald wrote in a deeply pained but ultimately inspiring obituary after the Mahatma’s assassination, Gandhi “was killed after his most profound ideas and his lifelong political activity had been rebuffed by History,” but “he was still alive and kicking, still throwing out imaginative concepts, still ‘in there fighting.’ Macdonald added: “The ideologue is baffled, but the human being—and by this sentimental phrase I mean the acute intelligence as much as the moralist—is not through; he has plenty of inspirations and surprises in store for us.”

More than 70 years after Gandhi’s death, his work is not yet done. During his life, Gandhi provided the template that numerous other civil rights activists would follow. For example, in 1935, he met in India with the African American minister Howard Thurman and told him, “It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.” Thurman went on to serve as a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. One can only imagine how fruitful a discussion between the Dalai Lama and the Mahatma would have been had the course of time allowed it to happen.

Gandhi’s mission to create a better world continues all around the globe today, including in the person of the Dalai Lama and the cause of Tibet. Today, as we experience the rise of authoritarian china, as well as eruptions of nationalism and neo-fascism in even supposedly liberal societies, not to mention the apocalyptic threat of climate change, we need that mission to succeed more than ever. That’s why I’m grateful to be part of the movement for Tibet, and to be serving the salvational legacy of the Dalai Lama and Gandhi.

There are many ways to define privilege. One might be who gets to go where.

If you’re Roisin Timmins, you get exclusive access to Tibet, one of the world’s most geographically and politically secluded countries, which is currently in the stranglehold of China’s stringent isolation policies.

Having brutally occupied Tibet since 1959, China now has the region on complete lockdown. A recent report from the US State Department says the Chinese government “systematically impeded travel to the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and Tibetan areas outside the TAR for US diplomats and officials, journalists, and tourists in 2018.”

No doubt the same was true for citizens of other countries—except Chinese citizens, who increasingly make tourist trips to Tibet, where they are presented with a Disneyland version of Tibetan culture and history.

The situation is worst of all for Tibetan exiles, including thousands of Tibetan American citizens, who are cruelly denied the right to visit their ancestral land. Since I began working for ICT last summer, I’ve been dismayed by the number of Tibetans I’ve met who’ve never been allowed to set foot on Tibetan soil.

This exclusion is also extreme for international journalists. In March 2019, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China released a position paper noting the TAR is the only region of China that journalists need government permission to enter, and that such permission is rarely granted.

So how, then, did Timmins—who described herself as a journalist in a 2018 interview with her alma mater, Leeds Trinity University in England—enter Tibet earlier this year?

The answer is easy: She took a job as a correspondent for Xinhua, an official Chinese state news agency, leading to this fiasco of a video report filed from the TAR.

If you want to spare yourself six minutes of wasted time, let me assure you: The video is trash. In it, Timmins conjures the profound insight that “There’s much more to Tibet than yaks and temples” and sets out to show how, under Chinese rule, Tibetans have “modernized their education, their healthcare, their whole way of life without losing their identity.”

Of course, that thesis itself is sheer nonsense. More than 1 million Tibetans have died as a direct result of China’s invasion and occupation of their land, and Tibet’s rich and ancient culture is slowly being devoured by China’s assimilationist regime.

But to back up their bogus claim, Timmins and crew interview a number of Tibetans—who might have felt horrific pressure to say the right things as state media cameras filmed them—and regurgitate a set of Chinese government talking points, all of which are easy to rebut. For example:

• Tibet’s population is 90% Tibetan. According to the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), ethnic Chinese outnumber Tibetans in Tibet. China has also implemented policies incentivizing intermarriage between Tibetans and Chinese, hoping to breed out Tibetans in a kind of slow, covert genocide.
• China brought democratic reform to Tibet. There is no democracy in Tibet or China. China is a one-party authoritarian regime. If Tibetans ever did get to vote freely, surely they would vote to kick their repressive Chinese leaders out.
• Schools are helping to preserve Tibetan culture. In July 2018, Chinese officials banned Tibetan schoolchildren from taking part in religious activities during their summer breaks. Buddhism is at the heart of Tibetan culture. So if anything, China’s control of the education system is helping to eradicate Tibetan heritage, not protect it.
• China is bringing jobs to Tibet. Just a few weeks ago, Radio Free Asia reported that a Tibetan graduate student whose essay on declining government job opportunities for Tibetans went viral was hauled out of class and has been detained ever since. As I tweeted, this is the reality of China’s economic development in Tibet. Tibetans are discriminated against in the job market and viciously punished when they complain.
• China is helping to preserve Tibet’s environment, including by hiring Tibetan herders as forest rangers. Put aside for a moment the mining, bottled water production and reckless development policies China has unleashed in Tibet. Chinese authorities have also forced Tibetan nomads off their ancestral lands and onto ill-fitting settlements. Not only is this stunningly inhumane, but scientists everywhere (including in China) have reached a consensus that indigenous stewardship is crucial for the health of ecosystems, making China’s approach to Tibetan nomads both savage and environmentally destructive.

Apart from the obvious inaccuracies, Timmins’ piece is problematic in a more foundational way. Timed to distract from the media attention surrounding the 60th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s forced exile from Tibet, the video claims the anniversary actually marks “Serfs’ Emancipation Day,” the Rubicon moment when Chinese troops freed the Tibetan people, who, according to this narrative, lived as serfs in a feudal order.

To set the record straight, the Dalai Lama has acknowledged that Tibet had many problems at the time of China’s invasion, when he was just a teenager, and insisted he would have enacted reforms. Indeed, in exile, His Holiness helped set up the CTA to provide democratic representation for the Tibetan diaspora. This transition to democracy was completed in 2011 when the Dalai Lama retired from politics, fully severing church and state.

But no matter what injustices took place in Tibet decades ago, none of them could possibly justify China’s ravenous annexation of the country. In fact, Beijing’s claim that it took control of Tibet to liberate the Tibetan people is sickeningly reminiscent of the propaganda past imperial powers have used to defend their crimes.

Case in point: The British Empire consumed India, my country of birth, looting its abundant resources, restructuring its economy to serve English commercial interests, exacerbating religious divisions that eventually led to a bloody Partition and dehumanizing the Indian people, all while claiming to help them.

Like Tibet, India had its share of social plagues, the untouchability of the caste system high among them. But a violent conquest by foreign profiteers was hardly the right cure. Every civilization has its particular ills, and every empire uses them as a pretext for invasion and plunder. To avoid creating as much damage as it’s intended to fix, social reform needs to come from the bottom up, not from the barrel end of a colonizer’s gun.

My outrage at India’s subjugation and despoiling by the British is part of the reason I wanted to join ICT in the first place. As heir to a history of oppression, I felt the need to speak out against colonialism wherever it occurs, even if it’s perpetrated by Asians like me.

Of course, China too was touched by the heavy hand of foreign domination during the bygone age of imperialism. Beijing is right to decry the humiliation it faced from Westerners and Japanese in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and its continued anger and paranoia are understandable. But unfortunately, as so often happens, the onetime victim has now become a swaggering bully. Rather than demonstrate solidarity with its Tibetan neighbors, who were themselves once invaded by England, China has instead imposed on them a form of settler colonialism that is shamefully similar to the sufferings inflicted on indigenous peoples throughout the world.

By producing a video purporting to show the progress benevolent Chinese have bestowed on backward Tibetans, Timmins is serving as apologist for an evil empire. Yet I feel incensed by her work not just as a native of India but as someone who—like Timmins herself presumably—grew up in a Western democracy.

No doubt Western countries have been immensely hypocritical in preaching freedom and equality for some while enforcing subservience and hierarchy on untold others. As an American citizen, I take part in political debates, vote regularly and criticize my government frequently in the hopes of fueling change. Yet the thought of living in a place where I’m unable to do even those things, meager or ineffective as they may be, gives me chills.

For all their inadequacies, open societies where people have at least basic freedoms are certainly preferable to totalitarian countries like China. Coming from the UK, Timmins ought to have been sensitive to that. Instead, she has produced work that is—to borrow a phrase George Orwell used to describe another gleeful propagandist of empire, Rudyard Kipling—“morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.”

Timmins is among a privileged few in world history who have had the relative freedom to say what they want and go where they please. She was even able to travel to Tibet, a place many Tibetans in the diaspora have never been able to see. And to get that access, all she had to do was betray the humane values of liberty, justice and civil rights.

Timmins did herself no favors with her attempted self-defense on Twitter, in which she deigned to “make it clear what my job is” and “what it isn’t,” as though merely stating that her role is to do what Xinhua tells her to makes what she did acceptable. If only Roisin would realize ‘I was just doing my job’ has never been a good excuse.

As I told Timmins on Twitter, no one was holding a gun to her head; she could have chosen to do something else with her life. (Relevant side note: Chinese troops have pointed guns at the heads of many Tibetans and Chinese, who do not have the array of life choices that Timmins has.) Perhaps Timmins enjoys the perks of her job, but there is likely something more insidious at play. Tom Grundy, editor-in-chief and co-founder of the Hong Kong Free Press, brought the subtext to the surface in a comment on one of Timmins’ tweets:

With respect to you, your western face is repeatedly being used as a party propaganda tool on issues where countless int'l rights NGOs have raised the alarm: https://t.co/KrcZwwmDZA
I think it's unlikely you misunderstand that.

— Tom Grundy (@tomgrundy) April 8, 2019

Though Timmins is now performing the role of social media victim, the backlash she has faced is purely of her own making. For me personally, I’m disgusted by her work in part because it seems she and I have as many commonalities as differences. We appear to be close in age; we are both from the West; and we both work as PR people for groups involved in the same contentious issue—except I acknowledge my role for what it is while Timmins calls herself a journalist.

When I decided to join ICT, I realized I was likely forfeiting the possibility of traveling not only to Tibet, but also to China unless major changes come to that country. Yet I was fine with my decision because I knew which side of the Tibet issue I wanted to be on. I knew I could criticize the Chinese government from the safety of the US without facing jail time and torture—something Tibetans surely cannot do. Even overseas, many Tibetan exiles feel unable to criticize China openly because they fear what Chinese authorities will do to their family members in Tibet.

Access to Tibet is a privilege conferred not by Tibetans themselves, but rather by the Chinese powers who continue to rule over their land. Timmins gained that privilege by dint of being a useful tool for the occupying forces. She could have opted to do countless other things for a career, but she made her choice of her own accord.

Sadly, given the glib, defensive posture she has assumed on social media, it seems unlikely Timmins will reverse course any time soon. But hopefully the controversy she ignited will lead others like her—and me—to use the tremendous privilege we have to speak up in support of the Tibetan people, not their oppressors.

“You’re not going to see something that’s like ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ anymore,” says Larry Shinagawa, professor at Hawaii Tokai International College, in a recent New York Times piece titled “How China Is Rewriting Its Own Script.”

That’s cause for concern, because when I was growing up, movies like “Seven Years in Tibet” and “Kundun,” both of which opened in 1997, helped introduce me—and surely many Americans in my generation—to the Tibetan issue. If such films are no longer made, how will kids today discover this important topic?

Hollywood screenwriters love a good-vs.-evil story. Twenty years ago, they found a great one in Tibet.

Just imagine this pitch to a producer: admirable but outnumbered protagonists follow a wise elder who teaches inner peace and spiritual growth. The antagonists, meanwhile, are an evil empire bent—as real-world events have shown—on actual global domination.

Not even George Lucas could do it better. So why, then, did Hollywood turn its back on Tibet?

The sad answer is that, for now, the evil empire is winning.

According to the Times report, written by reporters Amy Qin and Audrey Carlsen, “China wields enormous influence over how it is depicted in the movies Americans make and watch.”

The Chinese gained that influence by using many of the same tactics that every colonial power uses: invade when local institutions are weak, buy off the elites and spread fear to squelch dissent.

In the case of Tinseltown, the takeover was obviously less dramatic. But it largely followed the same script.

Hollywood studios were weakened by years of declining revenue and competition from online streaming. China swooped in with huge wads of cash and the promise of a blockbuster market for foreign ticket sales.

As a result, Hollywood executives today are simply too afraid to make a movie that could offend China. That means no more “Seven Years in Tibet” or “Kundun.”

Apparently, the release of those films helped provoke Chinese censorship in the first place. In the mid-1990s, Disney was just breaking into the Chinese market when the government in Beijing heard about “Kundun,” a beautiful film on the early life of the Dalai Lama directed by screen legend Martin Scorsese and written by Melissa Mathison, an International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) Board Member who died in 2015.

China’s leaders raged against the movie, Disney pulled back on its marketing campaign, and Disney’s CEO, Michael Eisner, traveled to China to apologize to the Chinese prime minister—and to negotiate a new theme park in Shanghai. (As a supporter of Tibet and an ardent cinephile, I took heart in this line from a 1998 Film Comment article: “You decide: who’ll be lucky to be even a footnote in movie history, Eisner or Scorsese?”)

Following that experience, it’s safe to assume that no studio today would greenlight a film like “Kundun.” But even when Tibetans come up organically in a story, Chinese pressure forces them out.

Case in point: the 2016 Marvel epic “Doctor Strange.” In the comic books, the titular doctor learned his craft from the Ancient One, a wise Tibetan sage.

But in the movie, the Ancient One is Celtic and played by Tilda Swinton, a white actress from Scotland. Although Disney—once again behaving as nefariously as any of the villains in its cartoons—claimed it was trying to avoid a stereotypical portrayal of Asians, the screenwriter shockingly admitted, “If you acknowledge that Tibet is a place and that [the character is] Tibetan, you risk alienating one billion people.”

Unfortunately, Hollywood, the land of make believe, is not the only place where China’s government has pressured Americans to pretend Tibet isn’t real.

The 2018 annual report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission notes that earlier this year, “the Shanghai branch of the Cyberspace Administration of China shut down Marriott’s Chinese website for a week as punishment for listing Taiwan as well as Hong Kong, Macau and Tibet as separate from China on a questionnaire for customers.”

Like its peers in La-La-Land, Marriott sheepishly apologized. ICT followed up with a letter to Marriott’s CEO, Arne Sorenson.

The Commission’s report also states that China doesn’t have to tell European diplomats not to mention Tibet; instead those diplomats simply choose on their own not to bring it up because they don’t want to face Beijing’s wrath.

The result is arguably the most insidious form of censorship: self-censorship. And it’s becoming more common on the issue of Tibet.

Unlike in the movies, good doesn’t always triumph over evil in real life. Hollywood, which once championed the Tibetan cause to kids like me, now shuns the Tibetan people.

Thankfully, there’s still hope for a better ending. Movie studios may fear getting banned by China, but Tibetan-Americans already face that reality. Although Chinese citizens are free to travel throughout the United States—and Chinese officials throw their weight around unimpeded in this country—China restricts Tibetan-Americans from visiting their homeland.

The Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act, which was passed by the House of Representatives in September and unanimously approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, aims to change that situation by denying US visas to Chinese officials who prevent Americans from entering Tibet.

According to Congressional Quarterly, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who introduced the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act in the Senate, said that Chinese authorities are “literally undertaking an effort to strip people of their identity.”

Although we can no longer count on our favorite movies to protect that identity, we can—and should—still lobby our government to do so.

Ten years ago this month, a bold documentary exposed the repression ordinary Tibetans faced under the Chinese occupation of their country.

A decade later, the situation in Tibet has only gotten worse.

The documentary, “Leaving Fear Behind,” features interviews with average Tibetans describing, in heart-wrenching detail, the inhumanity of Chinese rule, as well as their feelings about the then-upcoming 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

I started my new job as Communications Officer with the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) earlier this summer, and one of the first things my colleague John N., ICT’s Advocacy Officer, told me to do was watch “Leaving Fear Behind.”

It was a wise call: There was something uniquely moving about seeing the faces of the real people of Tibet and hearing them explain their own life experiences, and I felt inspired to work even harder to advance their cause.

If you haven’t seen the film yet, there’s information below about how to watch it. But keep reading, because the story of how “Leaving Fear Behind” came to be is almost as compelling as the documentary itself.

Plight of the Tibetan people

Appearing onscreen toward the end of the 25-minute documentary, the filmmaker, Dhondup Wangchen, says his goal was “not to make a famous or particularly entertaining film. This film is about the plight of the Tibetan people–helpless and frustrated.”

That frustration can be seen throughout the footage, with Tibetans decrying China’s severe restrictions on their freedoms and way of life.

Several of the people interviewed in the film talk about China’s efforts to force Tibetans off their land in order to steal Tibet’s rich natural resources.

The Tibetans also discuss their lack of religious freedom, as well as their desire to see the return of their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama was forced into exile in 1959 after China invaded Tibet, and he has not returned to his homeland since.

In a particularly poignant scene, an elderly Tibetan wipes away tears as the Dalai Lama is seen on TV receiving the United States Congressional Gold Medal in 2007.

Several of the Tibetans in “Leaving Fear Behind” say China’s hosting of the Olympics had done nothing to improve their situation. Indeed, a few months before the Games began, large-scale protests against China broke out across the Tibetan plateau.

“China was awarded the Games on the condition that the situation in China and Tibet would improve,” one monk says. “…However, after they were awarded the Games, there has been no greater freedom or democracy, and repression is getting stronger and stronger.”

Despite this repression, Wangchen says nearly all of the more than 100 Tibetans interviewed for the film agreed to have their faces shown: “Some said that we absolutely had to show their faces, otherwise it wasn’t worth speaking to them.”

Journey to leave fear behind

To create the documentary, Wangchen and Golok Jigme, a Tibetan monk and activist, spent about six months making a perilous journey through the eastern regions of Tibet.

After they finished shooting, both men were arrested, but they successfully managed to smuggle their footage out of the country.

On August 6, 2008, “Leaving Fear Behind” premiered in secret before a group of foreign journalists in Beijing, just days before the Olympics began.

Although the documentary reached the outside world, both Wangchen and Jigme were arrested for their attempts to exercise free speech. Wangchen was given a six-year sentence, and, after being subjected to close surveillance and mistreatment by Chinese police after his release, he decided to flee the country.

On Christmas Day 2017, Wangchen arrived in San Francisco and was finally reunited with his family in San Francisco. Earlier this year, he described his ordeals—including the depraved conditions in China’s jails—during his testimony to the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

Jigme was also arrested and severely tortured. He managed to escape and go into hiding, where he lived in constant fear until he was able to flee to India in 2014.

A few weeks ago, Jigme was in Washington, DC for the US State Department’s first Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. US Vice President Mike Pence praised Jigme in a speech during the event, saying “we are honored by your presence, and we admire your courage and your stand for liberty.”

Worsening situation

“Leaving Fear Behind” has been screened in several countries since its release, including at a 2014 showing in the European Parliament that ICT helped to organize.

In the US, the film can be watched on YouTube with English subtitles.

Although the film and the filmmakers made it out of Tibet, Jigme said in a recent interview with ICT that, “Basically, under the Chinese Communist authoritarian rule, under [Chinese President] Xi Jinping, the situation has become much worse” in Tibet since 2008.

“Leaving Fear Behind” was an act of extraordinary courage by ordinary Tibetans who simply wanted the world to know about the enormous repression they faced. As we mark the 10th anniversary of this brave film, all of us who care about human dignity must redouble our efforts to advance human rights and self-determination for the people of Tibet.