Why Tibet Matters

IN A HIGH VALLEY FIVE HOURS BY truck from the nearest paved road, rural Tibetans live much as they did centuries ago, beyond the reach of Chinese power. The 80 monks of the Mgartse Monastery constitute, in effect, the local government. They run the school and manage everything else, from festivals to street-sweeping, and they collect taxes, in the form of donations, to pay for it all. When a visitor passes through the village, young lamas stop picking up trash to mug for his camera. A gruff ""police monk'' barks them back to work. The monastery's abbot, who is thought to be the eighth reincarnation of a local holy man, presides over marriages and divorces and steps in to thwart clan feuds. During an interview in his chamber, a herdsman bursts in to warn that two groups of nomads are quarreling over grassland. ""We're all Buddhists, and we're all Tibetans,'' he says, ""so we decided to consult you rather than brawl.'' The abbot agrees to mediate.

China's iron grip on Tibet is a source of growing consternation in the West. Last August, on a visit to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, Republican Congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia found what he described as ""unspeakably brutal conditions,'' including systematic torture and overt efforts by the Chinese to destroy Tibetan culture. Beijing has managed to extinguish much of Tibet's old theocratic order in the cities and along key highways. But out in the countryside, where perhaps 70 percent of the population lives, Tibetan traditions are regaining their old strength, and most of the Buddhist faithful can worship unfettered. Last month NEWSWEEK'S George Wehrfritz traveled without a government escort through Amdo, a mountainous Tibetan region of China (map), and found the population still overwhelmingly loyal to the Dalai Lama, the ruler and spiritual leader who fled into exile in 1959, when the Chinese completed their takeover. Said a typical monk: ""He is our sun.''

Tibet's leader and his cause are about to receive some powerful public support halfway around the world. This week brings the opening of ""Seven Years in Tibet,'' a lushly evocative movie starring Brad Pitt as a real-life Austrian mountain climber who became friends with the young Dalai Lama (review). The film reflects a rising tide of sympathy for Tibet in the Hollywood establishment. Stars like Pitt, Harrison Ford, Oliver Stone, Steven Seagal and Goldie Hawn have made Tibet chic. On the night Pitt's film opens, a candlelight vigil will be held outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington, and grass-roots demonstrations of support for Tibet are planned in 34 states and four Canadian provinces. ""We'll reach millions and millions of people, which we weren't able to do even in 1989, when His Holiness won the Nobel Peace Prize,'' says John Ackerly, director of the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), which is helping to organize the activities.

The initial target of all the fuss is Chinese President Jiang Zemin, who is scheduled to visit the United States at the end of this month for a summit with Bill Clinton and a seven-city tour. Jiang expects to be treated with all the deference due a Great Leader, U.S. officials say; apparently it hasn't yet dawned on him that he's going to be tarred and feathered, metaphorically, by an enraged mob of movie stars. When that happens, relations between Washington and Beijing--already strained over human rights, arms sales and other difficult issues--could take another serious hit. Richard Gere, one more prominent Hollywood friend of the Dalai Lama, plans to take on the Chinese with another new movie, ""Red Corner.'' With Gere playing an American lawyer caught in a frame-up, it portrays the Chinese as brutal and cor- rupt. Originally scheduled for Thanksgiving, the film now is expected to open the day Jiang arrives in Washington. And on the evening of the state dinner for him at the White House, Gere plans to hold a ""stateless dinner'' on behalf of Tibet.

The movie that has the Chinese most upset so far is director Martin Scorsese's ""Kundun,'' a dreamlike depiction of the Dalai Lama's early life. Last year, sensing an affront to its national pride, Beijing made it clear to the movie's distributor, the Walt Disney Co., that its business plans in China--including its hope to build a big theme park near Shanghai--could suffer if ""Kundun'' ever made it to theaters in the United States. Disney stood by Scorsese, and the film is scheduled for release in the Christmas season. But the director advises: ""I'd suggest going to see it as soon as possible. You never know what's going to happen.'' Disney, meanwhile, has hired Henry Kissinger's consulting firm as part of its effort to mend fences with Beijing.

""Kundun'' is not entirely unsympathetic to the Chinese, showing that they, too, suffered at the hands of colonial exploiters. But Tibetan exiles say the Chinese now are behaving just as badly. In the Indian border town of Dharmsala, the god-king's base in exile, refugees from Tibet bring horror stories with them. A woman named Damchoe describes how she was beaten by the Chinese and forced to stand rigidly at attention in a Lhasa police station. ""I asked them to stop because I was pregnant,'' she recalls. ""One of them said, "So what?' and they kicked me around the room some more before making me stand again.'' She collapsed, and four days later, she delivered a dead fetus. Her offense: helping to operate an underground press that printed quotations from the Dalai Lama.

Torture is now commonplace in China's Tibetan jails, human-rights monitors charge. And since the Chinese takeover in the 1950s, 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed, according to the exiles in Dharmsala, while hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns have been driven out of the monasteries. Tibetans are becoming aliens in some parts of their own country. Han Chinese settlers have been brought in to compete for resources with the 1.8 million Tibetans inside the Tibet Autonomous Region and the 4 million or so who live in traditional Tibetan areas absorbed by other Chinese provinces. (Beijing says there are 500,000 Chinese settlers; Tibetan exiles put the figure at 7.5 million.)

BUT TIBETANS ARE REMARKably resilient. Throughout Amdo, the mountainous Tibetan area that now belongs to China's Gansu and Qinghai provinces, there are signs of resurgent traditions and unhampered worship. Labrang, the largest lamasery still functioning in the Tibetan regions of neighboring China, contains about 2,000 monks, twice as many as Beijing's official ceiling. The monks were forbidden to worship during China's Cultural Revolution, but in the last two decades, they have rebuilt the monastery's temples and its famed scholastic system. Still, the lamas sometimes land in trouble. Last year police arrested four of them on suspicion of separatist activities. According to a classmate, their 30-year-old ringleader emerged from custody two months ago ""brain damaged and paralyzed'' from jailhouse beatings. The government's message is simple, says another inhabitant of the monastery: ""Don't cross the line into politics.''

That message is even louder in Rongbo, a 500-monk monastery long known as a separatist hotbed. Four monks have been jailed there for pro-independence activities since 1996, and last May Beijing sent in a 47-member ""work group'' to conduct re-education sessions. ""The whole point is to make us embrace the Communist Party,'' says a senior lama. ""We pledge loyalty. But in our hearts, we still follow the Dalai Lama.''

Long before Hollywood took up the cause, the Tibetan people proved to the Chinese that they cannot wipe out support for the Dalai Lama. The spiritual leader's birthplace at remote Taktser, or Roaring Tiger village, is something like a political barometer for conditions in Tibet. Beijing tore down his family home after he fled in 1959 but rebuilt it during negotiations for his return in 1986. Now, despite the failure of those talks, China still allows the caretaker, the Dalai Lama's cousin Gunbao Tashe, to entertain Buddhist pilgrims. Four thousand of them visit each year, Gunbao says, adding that Beijing's denunciations of his cousin have had ""no effect whatsoever'' on turnout. China has bitten deeply into Tibet, but it hasn't yet been able to swallow the hardy kingdom at the roof of the world.

POPULATION: 6 million Tibetans in china; 100,000 in India; 25,000 in Nepal; 2,000 in Bhutan; 2,000 in Switzerland; 1,500 in the United States and 600 in Canada.

RELIGION: 6,259 monasteries with 592,000 monks and nuns before the Chinese takeover; 1,700 and 130,000 today.

SOURCES: GOV'T OF TIBET IN EXILE, CHINESE GOV'T