Commentary

A few months ago, the actor Simu Liu wrote something all too memorable in the most disposable medium. “If the only gatekeepers to movie stardom came from Tarantino and Scorsese, I would never have had the opportunity to lead a $400 million plus movie,” the “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” performer boasted on Twitter. “I am in awe of their filmmaking genius. They are transcendent auteurs. But they don’t get to point their nose at me or anyone.”

The potshots from Liu came in response to criticism two of Hollywood’s most prominent directors—Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese—made of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe,” of which Liu is a proud part. In an interview that premiered in November, Tarantino said Marvel’s stable of actors are “not movie stars.” “Captain America is the star,” he said. “Or Thor is the star.” It’s worth noting that Anthony Mackie, who actually plays Captain America, said much the same thing years ago. But Liu evidently felt he is a star and wanted the world to know it.

As for Scorsese, the eminent helmer of “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull” helped kick-start this whole controversy in 2019 when he told a British magazine that Marvel’s cinematic universe is “not cinema.” Scorsese elaborated: “It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

Scorsese is likely the most famous and accomplished director of English-language cinema in the world today. But that didn’t shield him from the ire of Marvel fans, who apparently felt they understood film better than the man who earned the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 1997. With his now wisely deleted tweet, Liu showed himself to be just as presumptuous.

There are so many things wrong with what Liu wrote. To begin with, Scorsese absolutely has the right to “point” his nose at others working in his form (I am not as familiar with the movies of Tarantino and am not here to defend him). A master in any field has the prerogative to critique an upstart.

There’s also Liu’s confusion about auteurism—a rare breed of filmmaking that expresses the personal vision of the director—versus the assembly-belt production of Marvel Studios. Liu basks in leading a “$400 million plus movie,” but he and Scorsese are after different goals. More on that later.

“Kundun” left unsaid

But the most egregious part of Liu’s remark was its obliviousness. He followed up his ill-conceived initial tweet by defending Marvel on the grounds of inclusion. “No movie studio is or ever will be perfect,” he said in another now-deleted tweet. “But I’m proud to work with one that has made sustained efforts to improve diversity onscreen by creating heroes that empower and inspire people of all communities everywhere. I loved the [Hollywood] ‘Golden Age’ too.. but it was white as hell.”

There’s no disputing the first or last part of that comment. But in the middle, Liu was being either embarrassingly ignorant or willfully deceitful. Perhaps he didn’t know—or didn’t want to acknowledge—“Kundun,” Scorsese’s sublime biopic about the current Dalai Lama of Tibet. “Kundun” just had its 25th anniversary last month, yet it remains one of the least seen, least accessible titles in Scorsese’s legendary filmography. That’s no accident: Disney, the same company that now owns Marvel, has deliberately tried to keep “Kundun” out of public view for the past quarter century.

Actually, Disney’s attempts to bury “Kundun” began even before its release date. In the 1990s, China was not the box office behemoth it has since become. The People’s Republic had only begun to open its market to foreign studios when Disney innocently went into production on “Kundun,” not realizing the furor it would provoke among Chinese authorities. But once China’s government started pulling Disney films and series from the country, Disney CEO Michael Eisner reportedly promised Chinese officials that “Kundun” would “die a quiet death.” He even recruited former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, an alleged war criminal, to assure the Chinese that Disney wouldn’t aggressively promote the movie and that it would bomb at the box office.

“Kundun” premiered in the United States on Christmas Day 1997. It brought in just $72,000 in its opening weekend, ultimately finishing with a total gross of $5.7 million. The following year, Eisner traveled to China, where he apologized to government officials for releasing “Kundun,” saying it was “a stupid mistake.” According to the records of China’s former Premier Rongji Zhu, Eisner groveled:

“[W]e released the film in the most passive way, but something unfortunate still happened. The film was a form of insult to our friends and it cost a lot of money, but other than journalists, very few people in the world saw it. The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it. Here I want to apologize, and in the future we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening. In short, we’re a family entertainment company, a company that uses silly ways to amuse people.”

Twenty-five years later, that’s still what Disney is, despite Liu’s self-important claims about “creating heroes that empower and inspire people of all communities everywhere.” (As a CBR headline wisely puts it, “Simu Liu Sided with the Wrong Gatekeepers in His Tarantino Response.”)

Continued erasure

Although Eisner is long gone, the current leadership at Disney is no less dedicated to ensuring that as few people as possible see “Kundun.” The studio has pumped a fortune into Disney+, but “Kundun” is not available there, and as far as I can tell, it’s not on any other streaming service either. I am a cinephile; watching great movies is an important part of my life. I am even part of a film group that gets together every month to discuss a classic movie. But we probably couldn’t add “Kundun” to our lineup because most group members wouldn’t be able to stream it. (Thankfully the good people at Kino Lorber offer a special edition Blu-Ray and DVD of the film. Link below.)

Disney’s effacement of the Tibetan people is not limited to the Dalai Lama and “Kundun,” however. In 2016, the Marvel Cinematic Universe gained a new main player with the release of “Doctor Strange,” yet another superhero spectacle. In the comic books, Doctor Strange learns his magic powers from the Ancient One, a Tibetan sage. But in the movie, the Ancient One is a Celt played by Tilda Swinton, a White actress from Scotland. Although Disney claimed it was trying to avoid a stereotypical portrayal of Asians, the screenwriter, C. Robert Cargill, shockingly admitted, “If you acknowledge that Tibet is a place and that [the character is] Tibetan, you risk alienating 1 billion [Chinese] people.” In contemporary discourse, I think that’s called erasure.

Marvel’s attempt to hide its invisibilizing of Tibetans behind false concerns of racism set the stage for Liu to brandish racial injustice to ballyhoo his own success and bodyguard the studio that pays him. That’s one of the things that annoyed me most about his tweets. As a person of color, I do not see “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” as some breakthrough, even though Liu obviously does. As a South Asian, I also couldn’t care less about “Ms. Marvel” or “Eternals,” both of which feature actors born in Pakistan. Instead, I’d rather watch the enriching cinema of the late Bengali auteur Satyajit Ray or the 2020 Marathi movie “The Disciple,” which is now streaming on Netflix. And I appreciate what I’ve seen from the Tibetan director Pema Tseden. Such films are the “cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

When Liu says that he “would never have had the opportunity to lead a $400 million plus movie” with Scorsese and Tarantino as gatekeepers, he’s in effect saying that people of color should have the same freedom as Whites to create trashy, dehumanizing entertainment. I suppose that’s only fair, but I’d like to think we can all set our sights a little higher.

Purifying effect

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

“Kundun” is a perfect example. There are no superhuman powers in the film; instead of pummeling his adversaries into submission, the Dalai Lama tries to negotiate with them, which he continues to do to this day.

There also isn’t any whitewashing. All the Tibetan characters are played by Tibetans. And rather than use a Western intermediary to guide the audience through the story, Scorsese and screenwriter Melissa Mathison—a late ICT Board Member—throw us right into the family home of Lhamo Dhondrup, a 2-year-old boy in a Tibetan outskirt who would soon be recognized as His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. From there, we see how the young reincarnate and his people lived their traditional lives before Communist China swallowed their homeland.

Shot on a budget of $28 million (still only about 1/8 of “Shang Chi’s” budget in today’s dollars), the movie generates more power and suspense in one roughly 15-minute sequence showing His Holiness’ escape to India than any green-screen battle Marvel has ever programmed into existence. Soundtracked by Philip Glass’ hypnotic score and edited by Scorsese’s longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, this climax of the film envisions the Dalai Lama’s perilous route to freedom as a sermonic spiritual journey.

That finale alone makes “Kundun” worth watching. Yet some of the moments that have stuck with me most are the quieter, more pacific recreations of the old Tibet. One scene that has a purifying effect on my mind involves the 5-year-old Dalai Lama playing with toy soldiers, the way any child might. His Holiness throws his figures at the soldiers of his playmate: a sweeper working in the Potala Palace. “I have more men!” he thunders. “I have smarter men,” the sweeper calmly replies, pulling the boy’s soldiers toward him. “I have all the men.” The Dalai Lama slumps. “Today you lose, Kundun. Tomorrow you may win,” the sweeper says as the camera zooms in. “Things change, Kundun.”

Need for preservation

It is this ancient culture of wisdom that all of us in ICT’s community of compassion and the wider Tibet movement are trying to preserve. That vital heritage has already been fractured by China and its assimilationist regime. But it has also been swept away by shameless corporations like Disney and Marvel, which will sacrifice anything of artistic or spiritual value at the altar of the almighty buck.

After 25 years, a film like “Kundun” would never even make it into production today. Instead, we get junk like “Shang Chi” and whatever the latest intellectual property iteration is from Disney and its brethren. But as our lives grow ever more digitized and soulless, we should seek out and preserve great art like “Kundun.” And as the modern world leads us further astray from compassion and nonviolence, we need the wisdom of the Dalai Lama, captured so expressively in “Kundun,” now more than ever.

Buy “Kundun” on Blu-Ray or DVD from Kino Lorber!

The Dalai Lama’s wisdom is also on vivid display in the soon-to-be-released book, “Heart to Heart,” illustrated by Mutts’ cartoonist Patrick McDonnell. Proceeds from the book will benefit ICT. Preorder your copy of “Heart to Heart” today!

According to magazines like The New Yorker, we are living in “A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction,” with readers drawn to stories that project their anxieties about a coming nightmare of surveillance, authoritarianism, climate destruction, inequality and disease. But in Tibet, under the rule of the Chinese government, many of the hallmarks of that horrific future are on full display right now.

Case in point, the recent report by Human Rights Watch finding that Chinese authorities are systematically collecting DNA from residents of the Tibet Autonomous Region (which spans most of western Tibet), including by taking blood from children as young as 5 without the consent of their parents.

“The Chinese government is already subjecting Tibetans to pervasive repression,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at HRW and an old friend of the International Campaign for Tibet. “Now the authorities are literally taking blood without consent to strengthen their surveillance capabilities.”

DNA collection

According to HRW’s report, the DNA collection is taking place in every prefecture and municipality of the Tibet Autonomous Region, with all residents—including temporary ones—forced to provide a sample.

“There is no publicly available evidence suggesting people can decline to participate,” the report says, “or that police have credible evidence of criminal conduct that might warrant such collection.”

The report adds that the DNA gathering is part of “ongoing efforts by Chinese authorities to establish police presence at the grassroots level throughout the region.”

Some of the report’s most disturbing findings involve blood collection from children. That includes the taking of blood from kindergarten students in Tibet’s capital of Lhasa, and the collection of DNA from all boys ages 5 and older in a Tibetan township of Qinghai province.

History of control

While mass blood testing of ordinary Tibetans is outrageous, it is not very surprising. Since China began its illegal occupation of Tibet over 60 years ago, it has subjected the Tibetan people to Orwellian levels of social control.

Although the Chinese government violates human rights across the territory it rules—and increasingly exports its repressive technology to countries around the globe—Tibet has been a laboratory for its evolving methods of subjugation.

From 2011 to 2016, Chinese official Chen Quanguo served as Party Secretary in the Tibet Autonomous Region, where he developed a system of constant mass surveillance, torture and militarization. That system included forcing Tibetans to spy on their neighbors, stationing Communist Party cadres in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and incentivizing Tibetan-Chinese intermarriage as a way to eliminate Tibetans’ distinct identity.

After his brutalization campaign in the TAR, Chen moved on to serve as Party Secretary in Xinjiang (which Uyghurs know as East Turkestan). There he led China’s infamous Uyghur genocide, showing how the Chinese government’s abuse of Tibetans spreads to other groups.

The virus

Although Chen has left the TAR, the surveillance state he helped build there has continued to grow. Most recently, the ongoing COVID outbreak in Tibet has exposed the brutal costs of China’s system of control.

For one thing, the outbreak itself appears to be a consequence of China’s failed leadership. I am not just talking about the fact that COVID-19 emanated from Wuhan; but also the fact that the current spread of the virus in Tibet is quite possibly the result of Chinese tourism to the region encouraged by the Chinese government. (It should be noted that this promotion of so-called “domestic tourism” stands in stark contrast to China’s near-total ban on visitors to Tibet from outside the People’s Republic of China.)

China’s policy failure hasn’t stopped it from using a predictably heavy hand to deal with the outbreak its own actions facilitated. After COVID-positive cases emerged in Tibet, authorities placed the entire population of 800,000 in the Shigatse (Chinese: Xigaze) prefecture-level city under a three-day complete lockdown. Authorities also imposed partial lockdowns in Lhasa, Nyingtri (Linzhi) and Lhoka (Shannan).

Since then, horrifying videos of police and health officials manhandling Tibetans have circulated on social media. One particularly disturbing clip shows a Tibetan policeman kicking and smacking a Tibetan herder who had come back into town not knowing about the outbreak while he was herding in the mountains. Another clip shows authorities dragging a screaming woman out of a restaurant and throwing her into a police SUV after she declined to show photo ID.

 

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To be clear, I am in full support of taking necessary steps to prevent the spread of COVID, including vaxxing, masking and testing. But many of China’s measures in Tibet have not only been needlessly violent but also seem highly performative. The Chinese government often claims its authoritarian approach is necessary to protect and uplift Tibetans (a claim that is predicated on racist and colonialist assumptions). Nevertheless, the Chinese government’s disastrous creation and handling of the outbreak in Tibet shows how wrongheaded its repression is on both a moral and a practical level.

Bleeding Tibet dry

China’s DNA collection in Tibet has added a vampiric cast to its surveillance and control state, but it is of a piece with decades of the Chinese government crushing Tibetans’ culture, religion, language and freedom. The end goal is not simply to bring Tibetans to heel, but to eliminate their identity altogether so that the Tibetan people no longer exist as a separate group deserving self-determination.

Moreover, as I mentioned above, China’s surveillance technology and other tools of repression are spreading from Tibet to other places, including Xinjiang and foreign countries. If that trend continues, Tibet’s dystopia may become a dystopian future for people across the globe.

The best way to prevent that from happening is to head it off where it’s happening now. That means pressuring China to recognize Tibetans’ self-determination through peaceful negotiations with Tibetan leaders.

You can play a part in that by signing ICT’s petition to your members of Congress, asking them to cosponsor the Resolve Tibet Act, which will recognize Tibet’s status as illegally occupied and add pressure on the Chinese government to restart negotiations for the first time in more than a decade.

Sign the petition!

Read Human Rights Watch’s report on mass DNA collection in Tibet.

Between 2002 and 2010, envoys representing the Dalai Lama repeatedly met with Chinese officials in order to find a peaceful solution to the Tibet issue. Since the last round of dialogue, which took place in January 2010, the Chinese side has ignored international calls to resume and conclude the negotiations.

There are multiple ways to view China’s decade-long refusal to return to the negotiating table with the Tibetans. For example, it can be seen as proof of China’s intent to resolve the Tibet issue through repression and forced assimilation instead of dialogue and compromise, as the result of Xi Jinping’s authoritarian outlook, or, within the Tibet movement, as a point of contention between different strategic approaches.

For the American government, this 12-year period without further dialogue should be seen as a failure to achieve one of America’s foreign policy goals. The Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 establishes that it is American policy to promote dialogue without preconditions between Tibetans and the Chinese government and to “explore activities to improve prospects for dialogue, that leads to a negotiated agreement on Tibet.”

The fact that negotiations have not been concluded, and in fact that they have not taken place since 2010, should, therefore, cue an effort to see what more can be done. The American government has consistently taken some opportunities to press China to resume dialogue; see the most recent Report to Congress on Tibet Negotiations for examples. But it is becoming very clear that the current efforts aren’t sufficient to revive the dialogue process. What the United States is doing now isn’t succeeding in bringing China back to the negotiating table, making it incumbent on the government to reevaluate its efforts and find new ways to pursue this policy goal.

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China’s latest hearing on Tibet examined the barriers to dialogue. ICT’s report on the hearing lays out some of the biggest takeaways, and it can be watched in its entirety here. In brief, the commission heard from Professor Hon-Shiang Lau on the falsehood of China’s historical claim to Tibet, from Tenzin N. Tethong on the Sino-Tibetan dialogue process, from Professor Michael van Walt van Praag on how China’s occupation of Tibet violates international law and from writer/activist (and ICT Board of Directors Member) Ellen Bork on the development of America’s Tibet policy.

Where the United States can go from here

Considering the facts raised at the hearing, I believe several steps are needed to bring the government’s actions in line with its policy goal of successfully concluding the dialogue process.

First, the United States should do no harm. For years China has been using American statements referring to Tibet as a part of China to undermine America’s policy goals for Tibet; Beijing insists that calling Tibet a part of China—even in a statement urging China to resume negotiations—commits a country to abandoning the Tibetan side. In 2014, for example, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Qin Gang criticized President Obama for meeting with the Dalai Lama, accusing him of reneging on American’s “commitment of recognizing Tibet to be a part of China.”

The best way to undercut this tactic is to stop referring to Tibet as a part of China. As Professor Lau points out, it isn’t true historically, and as Michael van Walt points out, it isn’t true according to international law. Each time the United States says it, then, it is strengthening China’s hand and weakening Tibet’s case. It’s worth noting that the State Department removed a sentence which called Tibet a part of China from the 2020 Human Rights Report, as Sens. Leahy and Rubio approvingly noted at the time, although it was disappointing to see it reappear in the 2021 Report to Congress on Tibet Negotiations. Congress, meanwhile, has passed legislative language intended to prevent the State Department from recognizing Tibet as a part of China in the absence of a negotiated agreement between China and the Tibetans.

Second, the United States should draw a clear line on Tibet and the Central Tibetan Administration. Before the Chinese invasion, Tibet was referred to as a country separate from China on multiple occasions by the United States government, and in the years after the invasion, the US continued to do so. Acting Secretary of State James Webb wrote in 1951 that the United States did not consider Tibet a part of China “except to the extent that it is occupied by Chinese Communist forces,” and Congress referred to Tibet as occupied in the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 1992 and 1993.

Beijing has not done anything since then to establish legitimacy for its rule in Tibet, and beyond merely declining to refer to Tibet as a part of China, the United States should not shy away from pointing this out. When the PRC claims that Tibet has been a part of China since ancient times, or refers to Tibet as an internal issue, the United States should be ready to refute both ideas and state unequivocally that Tibet’s future status remains an unresolved question that can only be settled through negotiations with the Tibetan side—which is to say, the Dalai Lama and the leaders of the democratically elected Central Tibetan Administration, who are legitimate representatives of the Tibetan people.

Finally, if the current level of pressure on China isn’t sufficient, the United States must adjust accordingly and find ways to increase this pressure. Beijing wants Washington to stop mentioning Tibet or, failing that, to do so either behind closed doors, perfunctorily, or both. Based on the most recent Tibet Negotiations Report it seems that neither President Biden nor Secretary of State Blinken pushed for a resumption of dialogue in private conversations with Chinese leaders; they certainly haven’t done so in public forums with the PRC. This clearly isn’t helping to promote America’s policy goal with Tibet.

Senior government figures should treat China’s refusal to conclude negotiations with the Tibetans like a problem they need to actively solve, not a foregone conclusion or a box to check off in statements. Beijing’s continued absence at the table is not a justification to put America’s policy goals for Tibet aside; it is, in fact, the very reason that the US adopted them in the first place. Reviving dialogue is a challenge that the White House, State Department and Congress must rise to meet.

Breaking down the barriers

As a candidate, Joe Biden promised that “a Biden-Harris administration will stand up for the people of Tibet.” He went on to specifically pledge that his administration would “work with our allies in pressing Beijing to return to direct dialogue with the representatives of the Tibetan people to achieve meaningful autonomy, respect for human rights, and the preservation of Tibet’s environment as well as its unique cultural, linguistic and religious traditions … and step up support for the Tibetan people.”

This promise is rooted in longstanding American policy, and now it is time to translate this policy and this promise into heightened pressure and stronger requests, incentives and engagement with Beijing on Tibet. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Jim McGovern recently promised new legislation designed to “encourage a peaceful resolution to the ultimate status of Tibet,” and the White House must interpret this legislation as a mandate for bolder action to end the occupation of the Land of Snows.

Michelle Bachelet’s trip to China is over, but it’s sure to live on in the annals of appeasement. Amid the publication of leaked police files showing horrific images inside China’s internment camps, Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, declined to condemn Beijing’s genocide of the Uyghurs. And despite Tibet now ranking as the least-free country on Earth alongside South Sudan and Syria, she avoided visiting Tibet altogether.

But the long-term implications of Bachelet’s trip might be even more worrisome. As Josh Rogin writes in a searing column for The Washington Post, Bachelet “undermined her credibility and the overall credibility of the UN system on human rights.” Indeed, Beijing has been throwing its weight around at the UN and other international institutions, seeking to bend global norms in its repressive direction.

In place of the concept of universal human rights to which all people everywhere are equally entitled, China is pushing a model of “human rights with Chinese characteristics” that, rhetorically at least, emphasizes material progress over personal freedom. By praising China’s “poverty alleviation and the eradication of extreme poverty” in her end-of-trip press conference, Bachelet appeared to validate this opposing vision.

But I’m not writing this blog post just to lambast Bachelet, who has already received stinging criticism from many advocacy groups, including the International Campaign for Tibet. Even the European Union and the US Secretary of State publicly raised concerns about her visit.

I’m also not writing simply to discredit China’s actual policy on human rights. Any policy that justifies sending 60-year-old Uyghur Tajigul Tahir to a concentration camp because her son doesn’t drink or smoke has no credibility in the first place.

Rights or duties?

Instead, I’m writing to address an underlying issue that, frankly, is much harder to dismiss. By promoting “human rights with Chinese characteristics,” the Chinese government is, however cynically, speaking to something that has troubled me for years: Are human rights truly universal, or are they just a Western belief system foisted on the world?

As someone born in the East, I am often inclined to believe the latter. In fact, due in part to my cultural background, the very concept of rights has never made a great deal of sense to me. Instead, like Mahatma Gandhi, I find the concept of duties far more practical. As Gandhi wrote in a letter to the Director-General of UNESCO in 1947:

“I learnt from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done. Thus, the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. From this one fundamental statement, perhaps it is easy enough to define the duties of man and woman and correlate every right to some corresponding duty to be first performed.”

My own mother is fully literate and a former schoolteacher, but she imparted similar lessons to me. Although I’ve lived in the United States for all but a few months of my life, the self-indulgence I often encounter in this country still strikes me as foolish and contrary to the ethics and values I was raised with. Moreover, the very idea of individual rights seems to conflict with my Buddhist beliefs—namely, the doctrine that says none of us exist as independent selves in this world, but rather live interdependently with one another. And, for my money, free speech is less valuable than the Buddhist ideal of right speech.

So cultural distinctions do exist. But Gandhi also recognized that the proliferation of rights inevitably runs into a dead end. In his classic text, “Hind Swaraj,” he scorned “in England the farce of everybody wanting and insisting on his rights, nobody thinking of his duty. And, where everybody wants rights, who shall give them to whom?”

Put another way, if we’re all too busy demanding and exercising our rights, who will perform the duty of ensuring the common good?

Personal liberty or economic subsistence?

That’s part of the argument China uses in its critique of Western human rights programs. The Chinese government contends that the success of the country should prevail over the liberty of individuals. Here, too, a valid point lurks within China’s propaganda.

In China’s vision of human rights, the right to development supersedes the rights to democracy and freedom. In many ways, China’s model is the reverse of the United States’. It’s telling that China has signed but not ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, while the US has signed but not ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Although Americans have a much higher level of personal freedom than people in many other societies, the US is also stretched to the breaking point by economic polarization. According to a report from the Council on Foreign Relations, “Income and wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country, and it is rising.”

This inequality undermines human rights—how free can you be in a society dominated by the sliver of the superrich?—but in many ways, it seems born out of the confused idea of freedom one finds in the US. Instead of Americans having a right to the economic equality required for meaningful participation in self-governance, corporations seem to have the nearly unlimited freedom to grow and make profits for their plutocratic owners.

Human rights or pretext for oppression?

This heedless vision of economic freedom—which, like other notions of rights, seems nothing more than a fiction to me—played a role in Britain’s invasion of Tibet in 1903-04. The British forces cited an agreement involving trading rights in Tibet that was signed not by Tibetans themselves, but by imperial China and imperial Britain.

With Tibet refusing to abide by the agreement, the British warned that “it would be absolutely necessary that we should insist upon our rights,” according to a paraphrase by Sir Francis Younghusband, the British Lieutenant Colonel who led the invasion. After overwhelming and massacring Tibet’s amateur troops, Younghusband compelled the Tibetans to sign a new agreement guaranteeing British trading rights—and charging Tibet an indemnity (though the Tibetans did not ultimately pay).

Britain’s claim about its “rights” in Tibet was a fabrication it used to further its colonial machinations in Asia. One century later, the United Kingdom was part of a US-led coalition that cited human rights concerns as part of its justification for invading Iraq—especially after the coalition failed to uncover weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Of course, the coalition forces themselves went on to commit numerous violations of human rights against the Iraqi people. The rationale for invasion had shifted from defending trading rights to protecting human rights, but in both cases, rights were invoked to achieve an unjust end.

Right or wrong?

These examples show not only the West’s hypocrisy on human rights—which China loves to point out when defending its own record—but also how human rights can serve to perpetuate Western hegemony. The era of the West’s colonization of the rest of the world has largely come to an end, but Western cultural imperialism can live on in part through the globalization of Western values.

As much as I appreciate many of those values, I am not so comfortable with propping up an imbalanced global order built on a legacy of oppression, racism and exploitation. Moreover, as a person of color and the child of an erstwhile imperial domain, I have no desire to be a handmaiden for Western chauvinism and white supremacy.

So, then, does China’s concept of human rights with Chinese characteristics provide a viable alternative to the Western model? No! Setting aside the self-serving, propagandistic elements of China’s claims, it’s also highly dubious that the suppression of personal freedom is necessary for economic growth. In fact, in decades past, the conventional view held that the two went hand in hand, as seen in the West.

But, even simpler than that, China’s illegal occupation of Tibet, its genocide of the Uyghurs and other Muslim groups, its attacks on democracy in Hong Kong and its repression of Chinese people are all the proof you need that Beijing’s defense of its human rights record as culturally appropriate is morally bankrupt. No amount of conceptual reframing can justify China’s brutality against the people it rules.

West or East?

Still, the illegitimacy of China’s approach doesn’t resolve the question of whether human rights are truly universal or just a Western imposition. For that, the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen is invaluable.

In the 1990s, during a similar debate over so-called “Asian values,” Sen delved into the history of freedom in both the East and West. His theories cover a lot of ground, but it’s important to note that while both some Easterners and some Westerners like to claim that human rights are a Western construct—the former to defend authoritarian rule and the latter to self-congratulate–Sen finds that respect for widespread personal freedom is relatively new even in the West. Universal human rights were not the norm in the Greco-Roman world, nor has the modern West refrained from racial-, gender- and class-based oppression.

Instead, Sen identifies elements of modern human rights in ancient Europe—but also ancient Asia. Take, for instance, China. Although diverse strands of thought (including Buddhism) influenced Chinese culture, Chinese leaders have often invoked Confucius to demand social harmony and conformism. However, Sen unearths examples that challenge this popular view of the great Chinese philosopher.

Once, when someone asks him how to serve a prince, Confucius responds: “Tell him the truth even if it offends him.” (“The censors in … Beijing would take a very different view,” Sen dryly notes.) In another instance, a Governor tells Confucius about a “man of unbending integrity” among his people who denounced his father for stealing a sheep. Confucius replies, “Among my people, men of integrity do things differently: A father covers up for his son, a son covers up for his father—and there is integrity in what they do.”

Human rights with human characteristics

While Sen does not claim that Confucius was a champion of dissent, these examples put the lie to the claim that China’s philosophical underpinnings are purely authoritarian. Moreover, the case of Taiwan, where ethnic Chinese have embraced democracy, shows “Chinese characteristics” may not be so incompatible with the Western take on human rights after all.

Sen also finds examples of the base elements of human rights elsewhere in the world, noting how Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first President, took inspiration from the democratic meetings he saw growing up in his hometown. “Everyone who wanted to speak did so,” Mandela writes in his autobiography. “It was democracy in its purest form.” On the other hand, Sen notes that the Western canon contains its fair share of illiberalism, writing that “it is by no means clear to me that Confucius is more authoritarian than, say, Plato or Augustine.”

Cultures around the world are intellectually heterogeneous, and while human rights are a relatively new concept that ascended in an era of Western dominance, support for them can be found in many traditions across the globe. For the reasons I state in this blog post, I believe that human rights are an imperfect vehicle for achieving human welfare, and I wish they were seen as expansive enough to include economic justice and corresponding duties.

Nevertheless, human rights are one of the strongest tools we have for holding regimes like China to account, and they can help advance many aims that people across the world support, including morality, justice and compassion. The Chinese government is trying to stymie those aims while hiding behind a falsely culturally specific position on human rights. But in so doing, China is running up against not just Chinese characteristics, but human characteristics, and its flouting of human nature will eventually doom its efforts to failure.

On the morning of June 4, 2022, I received the shocking news of the demise of Thubten Samphel la, a retired senior Tibetan official, at his residence in the Tibetan settlement in Bylakuppe in South India. It was shocking because he had no major health issues.

In our work at the International Campaign for Tibet, we found in Samphel la a resource bank and a strong admirer of our work. At our request, he had served as a judge in one of our Tibetan empowerment programs, namely the Light of Truth Essay Competition. We have also had him speak to ICT members and staff, both here in Washington, DC and in Dharamsala. He also was responsible for the English version of our publication, “Tibet in Chains: The Stories of Nine Tibetan Nuns.”

Samphel la was born in Tibet, grew up in India. He finished his high school from Dr. Graham’s Home in Kalimpong near the Tibetan border in eastern India and his undergrad and graduation studies from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University. He then worked for the Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala in various capacities from 1981 until his retirement in 2018. In between, when the US Department of State established a program (now known as the Tibetan Scholarship Program) to enable Tibetan refugees in the Indian subcontinent to do further study in the United States (ICT was involved in advocating for its establishment), Samphel la was among those in the first group to be sent. He studied journalism from Columbia University, New York. You can read more details of his life in this obituary by the Central Tibetan Administration.

My connection with Samphel la began while I was an undergrad student in Delhi (in Hansraj College) and he was finishing his graduation from the prestigious St. Stephen’s College. Subsequently, when I began working as a journalist for the Indian Express in New Delhi, it was a natural process of keeping in touch with him, as he had by then joined the Tibetan Information Office in Dharamsala. I would occasionally brief him on developments, and since he was editing the official journal Tibetan Bulletin, I started contributing articles and information for it. In one of his letters to me then, he addressed me as “Dear Mr. Reporter,” displaying his own unique sense of humor.

He wasn’t meant to be a bureaucrat and so was a misfit in the mandala of Gangkyi, the area where the Central Tibetan Administration offices were located in Dharamsala. I feel he felt constrained by the procedures that are part of any administration, including that of the Tibetans in exile. His usual way of expressing his disgust at the working of politicians was to squint his eyes (beneath his round rimmed glasses) and sigh out loudly, something like “oof” whenever we had to deal with a situation.

His calling was in scholarship and academics, and he displayed them when Dharamsala had to come out with lengthy reports on different aspects of the Tibetan issue. This can also be seen through his very many analytical articles during his time at the Tibet Policy Institute, including those dealing with aspects of Chinese policies on Tibet. Given his scholarship, some of us colleagues who worked in Dharamsala with him have knighted him, and he is referred to as “Sir Samphel.” Everyone who knew him, whether his senior or junior, respectfully called him Samphel la.

He was interested in analysis of society. I recall Marxist formulations like “base and superstructure” coming out of his mouth during some of our discussions then, but I have not seen him espouse any specific political ideology.

Every time I would meet him during my trips to Dharamsala in recent years, he would always commend the work of ICT, in particular the reports that we bring out. He was particularly impressed by an analysis of the impressions of Chinese visitors to Tibet that we published in 2014. On a few different occasions I recall him telling me how good this report was: “‘Has Life Here Always Been Like This?’ Chinese Microbloggers Reveal Systematic Militarization in Tibet.” It collected hundreds of images and messages from the Chinese microblogging site Weibo and documented perspectives of Chinese tourists on conditions in Tibet.

Gyari Rinpoche (Lodi Gyari as he is formally known), who was the Special Envoy of H.H. the Dalai Lama in Washington, DC as well as ICT’s Executive Chairman (under whom both Samphel la and I had worked in Dharamsala), understood his potential as a scholar. Among the efforts Rinpoche made to exploit this potential of Samphel la was to make efforts to place him as a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute in Texas in 2011. At that time there were plans to establish a formal relationship with the institute, given former President George W. Bush’s interest in H.H. the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan issue. Rinpoche thought that Samphel la’s presence as a research fellow at the institute would enable Samphel la to exercise his passion while placing the Tibetan issue before policymakers here in the United States. I was involved in some of the discussions that took place then. All preparatory work had been done on this, but somehow it did not come to fruition at the end.

It was only at the end of his working life that Samphel la was able to exercise his passion a bit more when he headed the newly established Tibet Policy Institute in Dharamsala. I can only imagine what the situation would have been had he been involved with a similar research institute from 1981 itself. In any case, over the years he was able to exercise his passion for writing. In addition to several articles (which he continued to do even after retirement), he wrote two novels. “Falling through the Roof” (“Novel based on the real pathos of Tibetan students studying in Delhi University and their political activities to liberate Tibet by forming Tibetan Communist Party”) and “Copper Mountain” (“A moving picture of Tibet’s natural beauty and rich historical tradition, Copper Mountain combines memorable characters with an environmental conspiracy and a shot of dark humour”). He is in the category of a handful of Tibetans who have ventured into the world of fiction writing in English.

He is survived by his wife, Namgyal Chonzom, and three children, daughter Tenzin Dekyong and sons Rabten Namgyal and Tenzin Yugyal. He has two siblings in Tibet and another one in exile, who was also a CTA official and predeceased him.

During his time on this earth in this lifetime, Sir Samphel has left his mark. We can celebrate his legacy.

For those working in the field of human rights, there are few occasions when we can feel our effort is having concrete and positive impact. This is particularly so when the issue concerns political prisoners as then there is the measurable output in the form of their release. Over the years the International Campaign for Tibet has taken up a number of cases with the United States Government as well as with the United Nations. There have been occasions when we have had the pleasure of seeing some of the Tibetan political prisoners not only released, but also sent abroad for a variety of reasons.

Such occasions arose for us in the early 2000s when the Chinese authorities released four Tibetan political prisoners between 2002 and 2004, who were subsequently sent to the United States. Since the International Campaign for Tibet was then providing support to the Special Envoy of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Washington, D.C. we were closely involved in arranging for the resettlement of the former political prisoners. Takna Jigme Sangpo was the second in the group, the others being (in order of their dispatch to the United States) ethnomusicologist Ngawang Choephel, Drapchi nuns Ngawang Sangdrol and Phuntsok Nyidron.

The process would be something like this: Special Envoy Lodi G.Gyari is informed by the State Department about the impending release of a Tibetan. ICT then steps in to work on the logistics; housing, medical treatment, long-term stay, etc. We would work with the individual to discuss future plans and how we could help realize them. Accordingly, from the four that were sent to the United States, Takna Jigme Sangpo and Phuntsok Nyidron opted to be resettled in Switzerland as it had also taken an active interest in their cases (we facilitated their interaction with the Swiss Embassy) while Ngawang Choephel and Ngawang Sangdrol (we assisted in their documentation) settled themselves in the United States.

Although in his seventies when he arrived in the United States, he was mentally very alert. One of the very first things he told us during our first meeting with him was how he noticed that we were all mistaken in calling him “Tanak” (which we were doing then) and that the correct form was “Takna” like it is in “Tiger’s nose”. Also, following his medical checkup at Georgetown hospital, he took it in his strides when the doctors kept him in an isolated room for a few days after they suspected him of having TB.

While John Kamm, American businessman and human rights campaigner, is to be rightly complimented for relentlessly taking up the cases of Takna Jigme Sangpo and the three other Tibetan prisoners who were released, his work was helped by strong support by the United States Congress and the Administration. In the case of Jigme Sangpo, Congressman Tom Lantos (since deceased) was among those who took a lead on his behalf.

Since then there have not been any more Tibetan political prisoners released to the United States by the Chinese authorities. In general, the four Tibetan political prisoners were released and sent to the United States not because the Chinese authorities felt that that was their right, but because they thought they would win the support of the United States, on this.

That was the period when President Jiang Zemin and his successor President Hu Jintao were desirous of improving relations with the United States to fulfil their own agenda for China. Similarly, the United States Congress and Administration were sending the right message to China. In a report on October 18, 2002, the Washington Post analyzed the circumstances leading to the release of prisoners by China saying:

“When President Bush last met with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, a senior State Department official passed a list of 13 jailed dissidents and other prisoners to a Chinese counterpart and delivered a message: If China wanted better relations with the United States, it should let these people go.

“The Chinese government responded in the following months by releasing two of the individuals on the list. They were Jigme Sangpo, a Tibetan teacher who was one of China’s longest-held political prisoners, and David Chow, a U.S. businessman jailed eight years ago on questionable fraud charges. Today, eight days before Bush and Jiang are scheduled to meet again, China released a third person on the list, a young Tibetan nun named Ngawang Sangdrol who was imprisoned in 1992 at the age of 15.”

So Takna Jigme Sangpo symbolized a few things. He symbolized the determination of the Tibetans in Tibet in standing up for their rights. The governmental support for his release symbolized the international community’s concern for the Tibetan people. His release and subsequent dispatch to the United States indicated the fact that if the Chinese Government is placed in a situation where it is in their interest to change their approach to issues relating to Tibet, they will do so.

Takna Jigme Sangpo passed away on October 17, 2020. This article was written for Swirling Red Dust, the story of Tibet’s longest-serving political prisoner, Blackneck Books in collaboration with ICT-Europe, 2017. Although China did not release any Tibetan political prisoners in a similar way in recent years, in a different circumstance, ICT had the opportunity to assist Dhondup Wangchen when he arrived in the United States in 2017.

“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.

During the last few months, we at the International Campaign for Tibet have been continuing our work in support of the people of Tibet and to oppose the systematic discrimination they suffer at the hands of the Chinese government.

A few days ago, like everyone living in America, I saw the images of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and I shared my thoughts about that tragedy on my personal Facebook page. Today, I want to share those thoughts with all of you who support ICT.

For a few days I had trouble watching the video of the killing of George Floyd. I could not stand hearing a man begging a policeman not to suffocate him, and seeing him succumbing.

Now, I think that this image represents something which is way bigger than the tragic loss of a precious human life. It represents the universal pain of all those who are oppressed by the arrogance of power.

The arrogance of power takes many, different forms: it’s institutional, it’s economic, it’s discriminatory, it’s racist, it’s intolerant and it’s bigoted.

That arrogance now needs to be stopped. With determination, but without violence, with strength and compassion for the opponent and with the indomitable will to overcome the obstacles.

Remember that when we accept injustice, we become complicit with it. Change is possible, and it starts with each of us saying that enough is enough.