The End of Tibet

Locked away from the world, Tibetans created a religion of otherworldly rituals and monumental structures. Even today, the gleaming white Potala Palace, home to generations of spiritual leaders, towers over Lhasa's modern skyline, its fifty-foot-high tombs of past Dalai Lamas covered in gold and gems. "The Potala looks and feels like no other building on the planet," writes the noted essayist Pico Iyer, who visits Tibet frequently. "But more extraordinary is its meaning: The Potala stood for a unique system in which administrators would be monks, political meetings would include prayers, and law and order was in the hands of a meditating clergy."

For Tibetans, devotion centers on the Dalai Lama, whom they regard as a living god. As Thurman notes, the Dalai Lama's spiritual connection to Tibetans is so great that, for his people, it's as if Jesus still wandered the Earth in person. In a modern world filled with war and consumerism, the current Dalai Lama -- who has lived in exile in Dharamsala, India, since China seized control of Tibet in 1959 -- has become a global icon, inspiring millions in the West. "With the quality of world leaders declining in recent years, the Dalai Lama has become even more important," says Robert Barnett, a Tibet expert at Columbia University. "He is one of the few morally inspiring leaders left."

But Tibet's time may be running out. In the past decade, China has waged a quiet but ruthless war on Tibetan society -- part of a deliberate and sophisticated campaign to strip "the Roof of the World" of any vestige of spirituality or political autonomy. Beijing has systematically replaced Tibet's holiest monks -- the center of Tibetan power -- with its own puppet leaders, torturing and killing those who refuse to submit to Chinese authority. It has flooded Tibet with thousands of Chinese immigrants, who have seized control of local businesses, driving many Tibetans into poverty and prostitution. And as Tibetans have become increasingly powerless in their own land, China has dragged out political talks with the Dalai Lama, causing some supporters to accuse their god-leader of caving in to Beijing. Increasingly, young Tibetans reject the Dalai Lama's commitment to nonviolence, engaging instead in the tactics of Palestinian militants. In a sharp break with the past, Tibetan rebels have stormed Chinese embassies and even cut the throats of Chinese migrants, dumping the corpses in the streets of rural towns as a warning to those they see as collaborators.

"I have no hope for the future," says Lhasang Tsering, one of Tibet's most famous activists. We are speaking in his home in Dharamsala, where he has lived in exile since fleeing Tibet more than two decades ago. "Time is running out," he tells me. "Every day, while we're sitting here praying for world peace, truckloads of Chinese are coming in, and trainloads of Tibetan resources are coming out. Once the Chinese have the land for themselves, they might have a few reservations for ethnic Tibetans, the way you Americans have Native American reservations."

Tsering puts his head in his hands. I look away. When I glance back, his shoulders are heaving with sobs.

Even the Dalai Lama himself, perpetually optimistic about his homeland, cannot help but fear for the future. "This is a critical period for Tibet," he tells me at an event in New York last fall, his face drawn with fatigue. "We don't know what will happen." This, in short, could be the end of Tibet. As the Dalai Lama has warned his people, "We are facing our own extinction."

When china annexed Tibet in 1959, it savaged the country, unleashing Mao's soldiers to tear apart monasteries, shell ancient structures and kill as many as 1.2 million people. Thousands were executed; many more died of starvation, forced to subsist on nothing but a thin gruel made of bark and leaves. "Their bodies became bloated," one senior monk recalled. "Then they lay down, and as the weeks passed, they died."

But such heavy-handed tactics failed to destroy Tibet's cultural identity. By the late 1980s, Tibetans fed up with Chinese oppression began to fight back, pouring into the streets of Lhasa by the thousands to demand independence. Hu Jintao, an obscure party bureaucrat with an Elvis pompadour, imposed martial law, dispatching thousands of soldiers to lock down Tibet. But the strong-arm tactics only served to rally international support for the Tibetan cause. In 1989, the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize, and his people's David-and-Goliath struggle appealed to Western artists and politicians as diverse as Richard Gere, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, and the U.S. Congress, which last year voted to award the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal.

Although the U.S. government officially recognizes Tibet as part of China, it has pressured Beijing to curb its human rights violations. Gregory Craig, who served as special envoy for Tibet in the Clinton administration, recalls a meeting at which then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright confronted Jiang Zemin, the president of China, with a list of Tibetan political prisoners. Jiang was not pleased. "He went on an uninterrupted twenty-minute monologue on the role of religion in China," Craig recalls.