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If I remember right, that change involved Hsieh Su-wei, a regular presence in Wimbledon singles and doubles whom I had seen year after year identified as a player from Taiwan. But on ESPN’s coverage this time, the announcers and the on-screen graphics said Hsieh represented something called “Chinese Taipei.”

At the time, I saw nothing nefarious in any of this. In fact I actually assumed “Chinese Taipei” was a more politically correct way of referring to Hsieh’s homeland. (In those days, I still believed in the myth of the world growing perpetually more inclusive and just.)

Today, as a tenured Tibet activist, I recognize the heavy hand of the Chinese government at work. While I’m not sure exactly why ESPN dropped “Taiwan” from its coverage that year, I’ve learned that Beijing objects to that word because it implies that Taiwan is a country, rather than a province of China.

To be clear, Taiwan is a country. But to assuage China, Taiwanese athletes compete in international events under the name “Chinese Taipei”—with a distinct Chinese Taipei flag to boot.

Tibet is not ‘Xizang’

I recalled that incident from Wimbledon’s grass courts recently as evidence grew of a new, increasing campaign by Beijing to replace the name “Tibet.” Rather than this internationally recognized term, China now wants the rest of the world to use the Chinese-language word “Xizang.”

Over the past few months, Chinese state media articles written in English have increasingly substituted “Xizang” for “Tibet.” The “Tibet Autonomous Region” is now the “Xizang Autonomous Region.” “Tibetan affairs” are now “Xizang affairs.”

Most notably, China’s new white paper on Tibet, released Nov. 10, is titled “[Communist Party of China] Policies on the Governance of Xizang in the New Era: Approach and Achievements.”

Imperfect name

Without a doubt, the right name for any country can vary by time and audience. For example, Taiwan’s leaders previously balked at using “Taiwan,” preferring instead the official title “Republic of China,” which supported their claim to be the legitimate government of China. Today, however, many young people in Taiwan are proud to call themselves Taiwanese and decline to identify as Chinese.

When it comes to Tibet, that word itself is not what Tibetan people use. Instead, Tibetans refer to their country as “Bod”—hence the motto, “Bod Gyalo,” meaning “victory for Tibet.” The term “Tibet” may be a corruption of Bod.

Thus, “Tibet” is not perfect word choice either. But, as far as I can tell, it’s the result of translation issues across languages and peoples, perhaps similar to how Americans say “Spain” instead of “España.”

Erasing Tibet

China’s use of “Xizang,” on the other hand, is a deliberate, political act. It’s a clear example of Beijing trying to “name it to tame it”—or, in this case, rename it to tame it—to make Tibet nominally Chinese in order to further crush any resistance to Chinese rule.

This effort is part of a broader campaign by China to “Sinify” Tibet—meaning to make it Chinese. Under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, Beijing has sought to replace the Tibetan language with Mandarin inside Tibet. It has ordered Buddhist monks to pledge loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party instead of the Dalai Lama. And it has even separated over 1 million Tibetan children from their families at state-run boarding schools that emphasize Chinese-language education and Chinese academic subjects.

The long-term goal of all these policies is to eliminate Tibetan as a distinct identity in order to eliminate the possibility of unruly Tibetans. The next step in that process is to replace “Tibet” with “Xizang,” a name change that implies that Tibet is not really Tibetan at all; it’s Chinese.

Logic similar to China’s refusal to let Taiwanese athletes use “Taiwan” is also at work. By replacing “Tibet” with a Chinese name, Beijing is trying to undermine the conceptual basis for recognizing Tibet as a separate country: If Tibet has a Chinese name, then it becomes easy to assume Tibet belongs to China.

More than mere words

That gets me back to my Wimbledon experience. When I saw “Taiwan” give way to “Chinese Taipei,” I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to realize the geopolitics at play. I just deferred to what I assumed was the new, proper way to label Taiwan.

I worry many people will react the same way if “Xizang” begins to slip into mainstream discourse. The Chinese government has already been wildly successful in getting foreign journalists, businesses and governments to describe Tibet as part of China, even though Tibet is a historically independent country that China is occupying against international law. Similarly, China seems to have gotten most people to use the name “Xinjiang” instead of “East Turkestan,” the English-language name preferred by Uyghurs.

An even bigger concern looms on the horizon. It’s no secret that once His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama eventually passes away, the Chinese government will try to replace him with its own hand-picked successor.

If that happens, will the average person be informed enough to recognize Beijing’s choice as a fake?

Pushing back

Clearly, Beijing is banking on the answer to that question being “No.” China thinks that its power and influence can force other countries, corporations and media to go along with its selection of a new Dalai Lama—and that the general public will be too distracted and disinterested to notice.

Thankfully, the US government is taking steps that can help prevent that from happening. In 2020, the US enacted the Tibetan Policy and Support Act, a bipartisan law that—among many provisions providing support to the Tibetan people—made it official US policy that only the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Buddhist community can decide his succession. If any Chinese officials try to interfere in that process, the US will sanction them.

The TPSA was a breakthrough in pushing back on China’s manipulations. But there’s more the United States can and must do.

Right now, Congress is considering another bipartisan bill, the Resolve Tibet Act, that will reject China’s lies about Tibet.

Resolve Tibet

The Resolve Tibet Act will pressure China to get back to the negotiating table with Tibetan leaders for the first time since 2010. This dialogue process is the best way to peacefully resolve China’s decades-long occupation of Tibet in a way that serves the long-term interests of both Tibetans and Chinese.

But the bill will also stand up to China’s falsehoods about Tibet. The legislation will empower the Office of the Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues to counter Communist Party propaganda about the history of Tibet, the Tibetan people and Tibetan institutions, including that of His Holiness.

The Resolve Tibet Act will also confront China’s misuse of the name “Tibet” in a different way. The Chinese government has long sought to portray the “Tibet Autonomous Region” (which it now calls the “Xizang Autonomous Region”) as the whole of Tibet, even though it spans only about half of Tibet’s historic territory.

Unfortunately, too many outsiders have gone along with China’s deception, casually using the word “Tibet” when they really mean just the Tibet Autonomous Region. But the Resolve Tibet Act will make it clear that Tibet includes not just the TAR but also Tibetan areas that are incorporated in China’s Gansu, Sichuan, Qinghai and Yunnan provinces.

There are many things all of us will have to do to fight back against China’s attempts to rename Tibet. Persuading Congress to pass the Resolve Tibet Act would be a good start.

Learn more about the Resolve Tibet Act.

I had the chance to talk with a group of writer friends about this recently. And some of my favorite writers—from crime novelist Dashiell Hammett to film critic Roger Ebert—use a plainspoken style.

I want to share a few ideas about how plain language can help our work on Tibet.

Let me start by saying what plain language is not. It’s not talking down to anyone. It’s not dumbing your message down either.

Yes, it calls for short words and no jargon. But the main goal of plain language is clarity: You want your reader to get what you’re saying without having to work at it.

When it comes to Tibet, that’s important because so few people understand the issue at all. To get them to care, we first have to make sure they can follow what we’re saying.

The politics of plain language

As you can probably tell, I’m trying to use plain language in this blog post. Maybe it’s sounded awkward so far. (That just shows how hard plain writing is, even for a “professional” like me.) But now I must use some less-plain words to talk about one of the more serious parts of this topic.

George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” is like holy scripture when it comes to plain writing. In it, Orwell talks about how “ugly and inaccurate” the English language had become.

This wasn’t due to the passing of time or some random event. Instead, bureaucrats, corporations, lawyers, academics and propagandists changed the language to their own ends, putting it out of reach of ordinary people—just think of the fine print at the bottom of a form, the dense prose of a college text, or the mutterings of the Chinese Communist Party.

This made it impossible for the average person to know what was going on and what most writing even meant.

China covers up the truth

I read “Politics and the English Language” for the first time almost 10 years ago. And one passage I’ve kept going back to since is:

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

It’s not hard to see how this relates to Tibet.

The Chinese government forces over 1,000 Tibetan nomads off a nature preserve, shoving them into urban encampments where they can no longer live the nomadic lifestyle their families have lived for generations. This is called “high-altitude ecological migration.”

China takes over 1 million Tibetan schoolkids away from their families, arrests and tortures Tibetans for having photos of the Dalai Lama, and installs surveillance cameras in Buddhist prayer wheels. This is called “a new way for world human rights development.”

The US passes a law saying only Tibetan Buddhists can decide what happens with the Dalai Lama’s succession. This is called “foreign interference in China’s internal affairs.”

How to talk plain

I always say that we Tibet supporters are not just fighting (nonviolently) to stop China’s oppression in Tibet. We’re also fighting a messaging war against the Chinese Communist Party.

Lucky for us, communists can’t seem to resist using leaden prose that lands with a thud. But we in the Tibet movement can still step up our game to reach people who don’t know or care what’s happening in Tibet.

Let me share a few tips for speaking and writing in plain English.

• First, never use a long word where a short one will do. When I was a student, I used a thesaurus to replace short words with longer, fancier ones. Today I do the opposite—and so should you.
• Use concrete words instead of conceptual ones. Talking about universal human rights or reciprocity makes sense for a lot of audiences. But for most people, talking about China’s prison guards sexually assaulting Tibetan nuns, or China refusing to let American journalists into Tibet, is going to hit harder.
• Avoid Latinate phrases. In English, Latin-origin words usually sound intellectual and upper-class, like “illuminate” rather than “light,” “terminate” rather than “end” or “sagacious” rather than “wise.” If you can pick between words like these, pick the non-Latin one.
• Choose verbs over nouns. A “hidden verb” is when you take a verb like “promote” and use its noun form, “promotion.” Rather than say, “Through the promotion of dialogue, we hope to peacefully resolve the Tibet-China conflict,” say, “By promoting dialogue, we hope to resolve the Tibet-China conflict peacefully.”
• Be positive! Instead of telling someone what they should not do, tell them what they should do. It’s better if I say, “Get rid of jargon” than, “Don’t use jargon.”
• Say “I” and “you.” This makes what you’re saying feel more personal. On that note, write the way you talk. Use contractions like “it’s” instead of “it is.” Cut out some of the formality.
• Get organized. I said earlier the main goal of plain language is clarity. That means making it easier for people to read what you put on the page. Write in short paragraphs (and short sentences while you’re at it). Break up your text with subheadings. Use bullet lists, like this one. Most important of all, organize what you say in a way your reader can understand.
• Write a second draft. To speak in plain language, you have to figure out what you actually want to say. That takes time. You’ll have to write and rewrite to get it right.

Why it matters

These are just some of the many tips for speaking in plain English.

Of course, there are also many exceptions to all these guidelines.

If you’re writing a legal document, for example, it’s possible none of this advice would serve you.

Also, in case this isn’t clear, I’m only talking about speaking in English (and mostly just American English at that). I have no idea if any of this would work for Tibetan or Mandarin or ancient Pali.

I also know that some of you might disagree with what I’ve said in this blog post. That’s fine. As you can see, I myself have broken some of the rules for plain writing in this very piece.

But still, I find plain English hard to deny. Not only is it easier to read, it’s also more urgent and forceful too.

And it serves a higher calling. Because plain language is supposed to be speech everyone can understand, it’s the language of democracy.

And since it avoids euphemisms, legalese and propaganda, plain language makes it easier to get the truth across. That makes a big difference.

As the Dalai Lama says: “We have the power of truth. Chinese Communists have the power of gun. In the long run, power of truth is much stronger than power of gun.”

The events of the past week show how the PRC campaign against the Dalai Lama in the West has reached new levels of sophistication. The PRC knew that an attack on the moral character of His Holiness, which is unimpeachable, would be hard. The fact that the public meeting that the excerpted clip was taken from was available online for more than a month prior to the clip being released shows that this was not some instant reaction to a specific event. An innocent interaction was taken out of context and weaponized against the Dalai Lama. It was planned and methodical.

The Chinese government is obviously much more in tune with the conspiracy theories of the day and how to capitalize on them. Surely they are aware of what happened in Washington several years ago. I live in walking distance of Comet Ping Pong, where a confused man was manipulated into believing children were being abused in a non-existent basement. My family and I ate lunch there two hours before he entered with an assault rifle, looking to ‘help’ those imaginary children. He is now in prison. One example of how a conspiracy theory was manipulated to a violent end.

The PRC played on the conspiracy theories of the day and knew that by manipulating social media and the news media, they would be able to capitalize on the irrational views held by some who have a loud megaphone. In Tibet however, this particular campaign seems to have backfired. The PRC lifted the ban on talking about the Dalai Lama in China, and he started to trend on social media. The video that the Chinese hoped would lead to Tibetans denouncing His Holiness in shame has led to an outpouring of emotion because they were finally allowed to view video of him publicly and without fear of reprisals. It has also galvanized the Tibetan community in exile to fight even harder now that the PRC has shown there is no bottom to its smear campaign against His Holiness.

The entire Tibet world was shocked by the swiftness of the media (both social and news) cycle that took off with one 40-second out-of-context and misleading video clip. It was especially disheartening that there was so little pushback from Western media saying that there might be a deeper cultural meaning or context to the interaction.

This lack of pushback on the video and failure to see the manipulation by the PRC came as a tremendous shock to me and other allies. This shock led to a delayed response by all of us in the Tibet world, something that made the situation worse and allowed a conversation to continue long after it should have been extinguished. These types of attacks are unexpected, but not just by Tibetans and their allies. The same is true of the US government. The Washington Post recently reported that there were four more Chinese spy balloons in addition to the three that were spotted earlier this year. The US military wasn’t even able to initially identify all the equipment that was being used on the balloons. This new approach to spying on the US (and other countries) is now one that the military is prepared for and will take action against when it happens again.

Fortunately, the narrative is beginning to turn, and people are realizing that only the PRC benefits from this baseless campaign against the Dalai Lama, and we as Tibet supporters will never be caught so unprepared again. The old saying is true—a lie did make it around the world before the truth could put its boots on. We are not going to let that happen again.

The spread of an edited video clip depicting an interaction between the Dalai Lama and a young Indian boy on stage at a recent teaching has provoked intense discussions of cultural differences, children’s rights, and the line between appropriate and inappropriate behavior. The tenor of the coverage of this clip and the discourse surrounding it has, in turn, been deeply distressing to many Tibetans and Tibet supporters, and activists such as Lhadon Tethong, Jigme Ugen, Dhardon Sharling, Tenzin Pema and Tenzin Tsundue have shared their eloquent thoughts on the issue.

I can’t help but notice that some commenters are using the clip as a pretext to advance unrelated attacks on Tibet, the Dalai Lama and the Tibet movement, though. My colleague Ashwin Verghese covered some aspects of this phenomenon in his recent blog post, but given the way the discussion of the video clip has developed this week I want to take a closer look at one commenter: Boots Riley, the musician and filmmaker. In doing so, I want to examine three of the misleading or false claims he’s advancing and explore where they come from and why they appeal to some people.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I didn’t pick Riley solely because of his relatively large reach. I’ve been a fan of Riley since 2009 when I heard Street Sweeper Social Club, his collaboration with Tom Morello. From there I found The Coup, his other band; their single “The Guillotine” has been a constant refrain for me in light of the political developments in the United States over the last few years. Riley’s film “Sorry to Bother You” was also a subject of some discussion in our office after it came out in 2018.

My intention is therefore not to criticize Riley personally but rather to look at how someone with genuine and heartfelt anti-imperialist and anti-racist sentiment can end up so firmly on the wrong side of this issue.

Distorted history

First, Riley has repeatedly advanced false claims about the social status of Tibetans before the Chinese invasion. It’s hard enough to come up with one word that covers the entirety of the very different systems that existed in different parts of Tibet; the lives of farmers in Tsang and nomadic pastoralists in Chabcha and town-dwellers in Dartsedo took place in vastly different political and social contexts.

As Riley tells it, though, pretty much all Tibetans were serfs. The issue of serfdom has been very thoroughly investigated and researched, and one of Robert Barnett’s chapters in “Authenticating Tibet” summarizes the results of this research:

Franz Michael and Beatrice Miller argued that the less loaded words ‘commoner’ or ‘subject’ are more accurate than the word ‘serf,’ [while] Dieter Schuh (1988) [shows] that in many cases they were not ‘bound to the land’ and so were not technically ‘serfs.’ W.M. Coleman (1998) has pointed out that in practice the Tibetans had more autonomy than appears in the written documents, and that Tibetans could equally well be described as peasants … Other scholars have noted that such social categories, Marxist or otherwise, are in any case rooted in European history and do not match the social system of pre-1951 Tibet, let alone the very different arrangements found among the people of eastern Tibet.

This may seem like splitting hairs; neither subjects nor serfs have the rights they deserve. But when you push a cartoonish claim that all Tibetans were serfs, meaningful criticism of the actual social hierarchy and human rights in Tibet becomes impossible. The real failings of the socioeconomic systems in Tibet—failings which have been critiqued by Tibetans themselves—fall to the wayside as peasants and nomads are transformed into serfs and then, in the most outlandish form, slaves. Who benefits from distorting the historical record in Tibet? It’s not Tibetans, nor is it Riley.

Second, Riley misstates China’s impetus for invading Tibet. In a tweet he claims that China had been pushing Tibet to reform its society prior to the invasion, but in fact Beijing’s rhetorical preoccupation with serfdom began only after the invasion was complete, and after their original justification—freeing Tibet from foreign imperialism—turned out to be untenable given the lack of major Western involvement in Tibet at the time.

There are keen ironies at play here. Ostensibly anti-imperialist Beijing was trying out and discarding various justifications for annexing another country, a classic imperial maneuver Americans will readily recall from the way the George W. Bush administration pivoted from weapons of mass destruction to ‘spreading democracy’ as a justification for the war in Iraq after finding that Saddam Hussein had, contrary to their claims, discarded his weapons of mass destruction programs. For their part, the only way Chinese occupiers could find armies of foreign imperialists in Tibet was by looking in a mirror.

Social reform as the impetus for invasion is also a poor fit for China’s actions after the invasion was complete. Instead of removing the Dalai Lama and addressing the conditions of Tibetan workers, Beijing gave the Dalai Lama and other senior clerical and aristocratic figures important positions in the new bureaucracy they established—a strange promotion to give someone they now claim was so greatly abusive.

In fact, it seems to be that the only major constituency Beijing was able to develop in Tibet during their first decade in power was among the top echelon of society itself, where some nobles and senior monks were swayed by China’s promises of preserving the status quo and a constant flow of silver. This, in turn, provoked derision and anger from common Tibetans who saw them as collaborators with an occupying force. Khenchung Sonam Gyaltsen, a monk official and to my knowledge the first official beaten to death by the Tibetan masses during the era of Chinese rule, was targeted not because of any social abuses but rather because of his cooperation with Chinese authorities.

Researchers like Benno Weiner and the Chinese writer Liu Xiaoyuan have documented how Beijing quickly alienated Tibetans, with policies formulated by Chinese leaders who had no understanding of Tibet’s culture and society – and little interest in learning. Who benefits from trying to recontextualize an imperial annexation into a war of liberation? Again, it’s not Tibetans, nor is it Riley.

Third, Riley misleadingly portrays Tibetan armed resistance as the result of CIA covert action. It’s well-known that the CIA provided arms and training to some Tibetan guerillas, but Riley’s claim elides the fact that grassroots Tibetan uprisings against Chinese rule in Tibet and the development of a unified resistance movement predated CIA involvement, which was fairly limited in scope. To attribute Tibetan armed resistance primarily to the CIA only serves to fundamentally misrepresent the nature of this resistance. Beijing would have you believe that lamas and aristocrats and CIA agents forced common Tibetans to take up arms, but there’s plenty of evidence that on the contrary many common Tibetans were in fact deeply frustrated that much of the ruling class seemed paralyzed by – or perhaps even permissive of – China’s invasion.

Tibetan guerillas display captured Chinese weaponry.

By late 1955 Tibetans in eastern Tibet had begun planning, without any support from the Tibetan government in Lhasa or any foreign power, to rise up against Beijing’s increasingly abusive rule. By 1956 fighting was widespread across Kham, and in 1958 local uprisings in northern Tibet—again, fueled by popular resistance to Chinese rule and without any assistance from outside parties—were put down with extreme bloodshed by Chinese authorities. The formation of Chushi Gangdruk, the unified resistance army, took place in summer 1958.

In contrast to the underground organizations and mass uprisings led by the Tibetans themselves, the CIA involvement began by training a half dozen guerillas in how to use radios, small arms and guerilla tactics. Although the numbers grew later and America continued to supply them with arms for some time to come, the great popular uprisings against Chinese rule in 1956, 1958 and 1959 were all started and sustained by Tibetans, mostly or entirely with weapons they had purchased themselves or stolen from Tibetan military bases.

If Riley were to ask Tibetans, he would find that there are a wide range of opinions about the CIA’s involvement, and plenty of them are guided by anti-imperialism. Some people are grateful for the supplies, which were put to use including during the Dalai Lama’s flight to India, but many other Tibetans are frustrated that the CIA gave the Tibetans just enough to irritate China but not enough to expel it, spending Tibetan lives in the process. In the words of Gyalo Thondup, one of the chief Tibetan interlocutors with the CIA:

For the twenty-five thousand resistance fighters on the ground in Lhokha, the CIA supplied about seven hundred guns. For the five thousand fighters active in Amdo, the CIA dropped maybe five or six hundred rifles. An area with two thousand fighters got maybe three hundred or four hundred … Had I understood how paltry the CIA’s support would be, I would never have sent those young men for training. Mao was not the only one to cheat the Tibetans. The CIA did, too.

If Riley wants to critique the CIA’s involvement in Tibet, there’s his angle – and straight from the mouth of a Tibetan. But accepting Gyalo Thondup’s perspective would require acknowledging widespread popular opposition to Chinese rule in Tibet, something he is conspicuously unwilling to do. Riley is clear that the CIA cheated the Tibetans. Can he admit that Mao did so, too?

When principles clash

I’ve asked who benefits from portraying pre-PRC Tibet as a uniquely abusive society, who benefits from framing the invasion of Tibet as a ‘peaceful liberation,’ and who benefits from depicting Tibetan resistance as something foisted on Tibet by outsiders instead of growing organically from the conditions on the ground. The answer to all three is the same: China.

It should come as no surprise that these narratives were developed and promulgated by the PRC, which has sought for decades to portray the annexation of Tibet in a manner consistent with the self-professed values of a government dedicated to “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and a country which was repeatedly victimized during the colonial era. To borrow one of Riley’s lines from “The Guillotine,” Boots didn’t write out these lies, he’s just quoting them.

Of course the PRC wants to explain their occupation of Tibet as a civilizing mission and a war of liberation. Empires have always sought to justify their looting and plunder as somehow being compatible with their values, and claiming that occupation and domination are actually beneficial for those who have been subjugated is a classic refrain. Similar claims were made about China itself during the Japanese occupation, but I don’t see Riley racing to endorse them.

And of course independent Tibet has to be portrayed as uniquely abusive, because Beijing hopes that every abuse it claims of the old regime—real ones and exaggerated ones and entirely fabricated ones alike—will encourage people who believe in communism and anti-imperialism to allow their support of the former to overrule the latter. For every human rights abuse they’re documented committing in Tibet, Beijing feels the need to present an equal but opposite abuse from the past which they can claim to have stopped.

In reality, Tibet also produced its own iconoclastic thinkers and political figures who leveled serious criticisms against the old systems, people like Gendun Choephel and Phuntsok Wangyal. Their existence is deeply inconvenient for supporters of Chinese imperialism because they show that Tibet had the potential to reform itself from within, a possibility that Beijing cannot acknowledge if it wants to justify Chinese rule in Tibet as a necessity. The idea that an independent Tibet in 2023 would look identical to Tibet in 1949 is completely absurd, but Beijing desperately wants the rest of the world to take it as a given.

Reconciling principles

I was planning to close by encouraging Riley to read about Phuntsok Wangyal, the founder of the Tibetan Communist Party. To my surprise, Phuntsok Wangyal actually came up on Riley’s twitter feed while I was writing, although unfortunately not in a way that accurately reflects his story.

In response to Tibetans begging Riley to consider their perspective on the occupation of their homeland, Riley shared a tweet from Carl Zha, a Chinese podcaster who is a steadfast supporter of the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Zha had quoted Phuntsok Wangyal’s early criticism of the Ganden Phodrang government, but there’s much more to his story than that quote might suggest.

Phunwang, as he was known, grew up idolizing the Tibetans who defended their lands from Chinese invaders and became a fervent believer in communism. He pushed for an independent eastern Tibet and later for a socialist revolution in central Tibet, and when the PRC invaded he set aside his Tibetan nationalist ideals to help them overturn the old order. After the invasion Phunwang had outlived his usefulness to the Chinese authorities, however, and he was sentenced to 18 years in solitary confinement in a Chinese prison after warning the Chinese leadership that the actions of one of their officials in Tibet was likely to spark further conflict. With Tibet firmly under Chinese control, they had little need for a homegrown revolutionary who firmly believed in Tibetan rights.

The cruelty Phunwang endured during almost two decades in solitary confinement was handed out not by lamas or Tibetan aristocrats but by the Chinese Communist Party, which turned on him as soon as he displayed signs of being a “local nationalist,” an imperial euphemism if I’ve ever heard one. If even the Tibetans who supported reforms found themselves purged and imprisoned – and Phunwang was not the only one to suffer this fate – it becomes very clear that there’s more to this story than Beijing’s cheery propaganda about “serfs rising up” would suggest.

Perhaps Riley is simply irritated by the Dalai Lama or the existence of his institution. He’s free to cast his judgment, but it’s a mistake to let his opposition to one man blind him to the reality of what Chinese rule has entailed for the Tibetan people. Communism and anti-imperialism are at the center of Boots Riley’s politics, and they sit in contradiction here for Riley and others who hold these values. Attempting to square that circle by praising China’s annexation of a neighboring country is a betrayal of anti-imperialism and an attack on a subjugated people who deserve solidarity.

It’s the customary tendency of imperialists to put forward a claim to someone else’s land, and it’s the duty of anti-imperialists to judge that claim and find it lacking—regardless of whether or not it’s phrased in a way you find pleasing.

Years ago, at a different job, a coworker asked if I had always been a contrarian. The question struck me like an apple falling from a tree. I had never seen myself as a contrarian, but perhaps that one word could explain why as a young man I so often felt at odds with the world.

Invigorated by the potential for self-understanding, I went to Barnes & Noble and began reading Christopher Hitchens’ “Letters to a Young Contrarian.” The book, Hitchens writes in the first chapter, is addressed to those who feel “a disposition to resistance, however slight, against arbitrary authority or witless mass opinion, or a thrill of recognition when you encounter some well-wrought phrase from a free intelligence.” My ego was tickled.

But a few pages later, I encountered a splash of iconoclasm that stopped me in my tracks. After assailing anti-Semites and racists and the atom-bombing of Japan, Hitchens shifts his aim to a very different target: the Dalai Lama. Quoting a speech in which the Tibetan leader relates his belief that we are all seeking happiness, Hitchens sneers: “The very best that can be said is that he uttered a string of fatuous non sequiturs.”

“[H]uman beings do not, in fact, desire to live in some Disneyland of the mind, where there is an end to striving and a general feeling of contentment and bliss,” Hitchens writes, adding: “Even if we did really harbor this desire, it would fortunately be unattainable.”

Suddenly, I was off the contrarian train almost as quickly as I’d hopped on.

Spared by the Dalai Lama

It turned out “Letters to a Young Contrarian” was not the only time Hitchens, who died in 2011, sicced his estimable wit on the Dalai Lama. In a piece for Salon in 1998, he dismisses His Holiness as a “[creature] of the material world.” Elsewhere, he maligns the Dalai Lama for claiming to be a “hereditary king appointed by heaven itself” and enforcing “one-man rule” in his exile home of Dharamsala (more on that later).

I, for one, don’t believe anyone is beyond reproach. Good-faith criticism can be made of the Dalai Lama—his words and actions, as well as his status and followers.

As one of those followers, I hold myself up for critique—though my behavior shouldn’t reflect on anyone else—in part because I see how far short I fall of His Holiness. I can’t deny I’m prone to pessimism and hand-wringing; I tend to be doubtful of attempts to improve the world while simultaneously mournful over the state of it. (I’m also too self-critical, if you haven’t noticed.)

And yet, even before I joined ICT, I never felt the need to doubt His Holiness. In fact, the Dalai Lama and figures like him—Gandhi and John Lewis come to mind—have helped spare me from a life of total cynicism. If it weren’t for them, I might not believe in anything. That’s not because I think they’re unimpeachable. It’s not even, for me, whether they achieved their overall goals or not.

Instead, the mere fact that a person like His Holiness exists in this world helps sustain my faith in humanity. From his humble living quarters to his transcendent wisdom to his innumerable displays of kindness—let alone his remarkable ability to forgive and seek reconciliation with his Chinese antagonists—His Holiness lives much the way you’d want everyone to live.

Who could ever be cynical about that?

Contrary to facts

It seems Hitchens was motivated to ‘take down’ His Holiness not just because Hitchens was an anti-theist and a libertine, but because His Holiness is a popular leader around the globe. The public generally loves the Dalai Lama, so Hitchens, driven by a need to look down on the herd, felt compelled to diminish its “witless mass opinion.” I can’t say that for certain, but it’s the impression I get reading Hitchens’ work and knowing other people like him.

There’s no denying Hitchens’ eloquence, and often, he trained his sights on deserving victims, especially politicians and people in government. But one of the problems with contrarianism—with preferring to disagree and express unpopular views—is that it prevents you from seeing things as they truly are (the same can be said of partisanship). Hitchens’ Salon piece, for instance, relies more on breezy suppositions and tendentiousness than on objective reporting.

Although Hitchens disdained religion, he was just as zealous as some fundamentalists in overlooking facts that got in the way of his faith. Take his claim about the Dalai Lama’s “one-man rule” in Dharamsala. That is simply, demonstrably false; ask the democratically elected Indian and Tibetan governments in the city if you have any doubt.

Hitchens’ assertion that His Holiness claims to be a “hereditary king appointed by heaven itself” is also easily refuted by the evidence. As Andrew Goodwin writes in Tricycle, the Dalai Lama

“has said, repeatedly and in plain language, that he is not a special person or a supernatural being, but an ordinary man. The second point of significance is his comment that if science proved Buddhist teachings incorrect in any way, then Buddhism would have to change. One might have expected that a book written by a well-informed journalist [Hitchens] who is appalled at the irrationality of religion would have found space to mention this.”

Hitchens is famous, among other things, for “Hitchens’s razor,” the belief that “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” Heaven forbid his razor should be applied to his own writing on the Dalai Lama.

Rebels without a cause

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Hitchens, who has been dead for over a decade. But unfortunately, his vapid views on the Dalai Lama have found voice in some contrarians of today.

Take, for example, media personality Max Blumenthal, who is almost comical in his contrarianism. Blumenthal doesn’t just criticize the US government—which is totally fair and appropriate, as I argue below—he actively defends the governments of Russia, Syria and, yes, China. In fact, he has appeared several times in Chinese state media to dispute accusations of atrocities by Beijing, including the claim of genocide against Uyghurs.

In a 2019 article in MintPress News, Blumenthal ahistorically describes the Dalai Lama as “the head of a relatively minor Buddhist sect until it was exploited by the CIA as a weapon against communist China.” He also asserts that “Tibetan Buddhists seek a return to theocratic feudal rule in the [Tibetan] plateau.”

That might be news to Tibetans in exile, who had a voter turnout of over 70% in 2021 when they elected Penpa Tsering the Sikyong (President) of the Central Tibetan Administration, the position to which His Holiness devolved political power in 2011 in line with his belief in the separation of church and state. Before China forced him into exile in 1959, the Dalai Lama even tried social and land reforms inside Tibet, but the Chinese blocked his efforts. It seems the Tibetan Buddhist leader does not seek theocracy or feudalism after all. (One gets the impression Blumenthal has never actually spoken to a Tibetan Buddhist in his life.)

Blumenthal is founder and editor of The Grayzone, a news website that’s also home to Aaron Maté, a fellow Chinese state media contributor and the son of world-famous doctor Gabor Maté. Blumenthal, for his part, is the son of a former senior advisor to President Bill Clinton, and he graduated from Georgetown Day School in Washington before matriculating to the Ivy League.

I don’t know Blumenthal or Maté or their motives, but it’s not surprising to me that two of the most aggressive apologists for China in US media are wealthy, White—Blumenthal’s claim about Tibetan Buddhists seeking feudal theocracy is racist and colonialist—children of famous parents. Part of contrarianism is rebellion, and these two sons of privilege fit the part of rebels without a cause.

Rewriting history

Sadly, a parade of contrarians, useful idiots and CCP shills have come out in full force recently in the wake of a misleading video clip showing His Holiness with a young boy in India. The video clip understandably provoked controversy and a flood of news coverage, and the Dalai Lama’s office quickly responded with an apology on his behalf.

As I write above, good-faith criticism of His Holiness is fine. But several commentators have sickly exploited this incident to rewrite history and justify China’s brutal occupation of Tibet. For some, that’s likely because it serves their brand to do so. But others seem to have genuinely let their critique of the United States blind them into drinking China’s Kool-Aid.

Indeed, long before the current headlines, I saw several self-proclaimed progressives write off Tibet as a vehicle for America’s foreign interference and imperialism, conveniently ignoring that China’s rule in Tibet is imperial. (In fact, it seems quite likely China lackeys helped engineer this recent controversy by purposefully spreading an out-of-context clip from over one month ago to manipulate the news cycle and discredit one of Beijing’s oldest foes without concern for the effect this would have on the young child.)

Don’t be a dum dum

No one can deny our leaders in the US have done horrible things and lied about them. Many institutions in this country—from government to media to banks to schools to houses of worship—have betrayed the public trust, leaving people feeling powerless and atomized. In this environment, it’s easy to give in to a nihilistic urge to tear everything down or an ego-wish for moral superiority.

I get the allure, but it is a siren call. I’m reminded of a statement from the late YouTube host Michael Brooks, who tragically died three years ago. I never met Michael in person, but I did interact with him a couple times online, and he was kind enough to engage me on Twitter, perhaps out of solidarity with Tibetans and perhaps because of his long interest in Buddhism. (One of his video clips inspired my previous blog post about human rights.)

Brooks was a true man of the left, but in one of his most enduring segments, he called out what he termed “the dum dum left”:

There is, unfortunately still, a dum-dum left who confuse moral posturing with revolutionary fervor. Who confused ahistorical throwing anything at the wall and endless whining about the Democrats for a real radical stance towards politics … And I get why that’s emotionally appealing to people because we live in absolutely disgusting times and the governing class of this country and the globe is disgusting. It’s abusive, it’s cruel, it’s abusive, it’s stupid, it’s arrogant, it’s insular and they need to be mocked, ridiculed, debunked, and they need to be taken out, to keep it simple. But not too simple. We need to keep it as simple as it can be, but not simpler than that.”

Working toward a vision

It’s too simple to think: America bad, therefore China good. It’s too simple to believe the whole world is bad, so let’s just blow everything up. You have to have some positive, humane vision to work toward. In my opinion, His Holiness and Tibetan Buddhist culture provide that.

In my own case, I don’t think I ever truly was a contrarian, just someone with a perspective shaped by an immigrant, minority, lower-income background. I have no problem holding contrary views on sacred cows like Winston Churchill, for instance. I am still skeptical of mainstream politics and business, along with a litany of other things.

But I am not so skeptical that I can’t recognize a good person, however imperfect, when I see one. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is a good person, to say the least, and Tibet is a good cause. There are many things in this world worth taking down, but the Dalai Lama’s vision is worth building up.

Instead of contrarianism that leads to cheerleading the invasion of Iraq (like Hitchens) or parroting Chinese government propaganda (like Blumenthal, Maté and other online critics of Tibet), His Holiness offers a superior radicalism for today’s world. As the Dalai Lama says: “Compassion is the radicalism of our time.”