The End of Tibet

Lodi Gyari, a Tibetan diplomat based in Washington who leads the Dalai Lama's negotiators, insists that the talks are essential for China. Tibetans will be furious, he warns, if their spiritual leader dies in exile without stepping foot in Tibet again. "The only person who can provide them with legitimacy is the Dalai Lama," Gyari says.

But others say privately that China is simply using the negotiations to co-opt the Dalai Lama and blunt international criticism. Despite five rounds of talks, the Chinese have offered nothing concrete, and a source close to Beijing policymakers tells me that China believes it has no need to make a deal. "The view in China among the leaders is still of the Dalai Lama as a traitor," says a scholar with close ties to Beijing. Even a senior U.S. official worries that "the Chinese are engaged in the dialogue just to please the U.S. -- they have no desire to do more than that."

China's strategy seems to have succeeded: When Hu Jintao visited America last year, the Dalai Lama quietly asked Tibetans not to protest. "The Chinese government has been very successful in convincing the Dalai Lama to exercise some control over Tibetan exiles," says Tenzin Dorjee, a leader of Students for a Free Tibet, a prominent activist group based in New York. Some furious Tibetans go even further, accusing their god-leader of unwittingly selling out to the Chinese. "There's anger and frustration and disappointment with the Dalai Lama's envoys," says Lhadon Tethong, head of the student group. "We don't support this appeasement line."

In the past, such blunt opposition to the Dalai Lama would have resulted in ostracism. But these days, such sentiments can be heard throughout the exile community in Dharamsala. One day, in the middle of a downpour, I drink tea with Tenzin Tsundue, a young Tibetan whose wispy goatee and intense stare give him a striking resemblance to Che Guevara. After the Dalai Lama, Tsundue has become the most prominent figure in the exile community. Unwilling to accept anything less than complete independence, he and his supporters have abandoned the Dalai Lama's peaceful approach, drawing inspiration instead from the Palestinians and other militant organizations. "Youngsters tell me they don't want to join a nonviolent protest," says Tsundue. "Youngsters feel nonviolence is getting nothing."

In Tibetan universities and monasteries, activists tell me, underground cells have formed to organize resistance to Chinese rule. In rural Tibet, Chinese truck drivers have been ambushed and killed. In the age of CNN and the Internet, says an associate of the Dalai Lama, young Tibetans "know about suicide bombers and Afghanistan and Iraq, and it doesn't take a lot of ingenuity for a small group of Tibetans to emulate these tactics. It's a powder keg."

"Young people are going to become more aggressive," agrees Sonam Wangdu, one of Tibet's most respected activists and writers. "They can see how other nations, like East Timor or the Soviet countries, were able to get their independence back. They will attack."

In India, young Tibetan activists have stormed Chinese embassies, clashing with guards. During a recent summit between India and China, a young Tibetan attempted to immolate himself near a luxury hotel in Bombay where Hu Jintao was staying. Several years earlier, another Tibetan named Thupten Ngodup burned himself to death. The Dalai Lama openly despaired that his message of nonviolence was not reaching Tibetans, but Ngodup became a martyr figure among young Tibetan hard-liners. Thousands of demonstrators attended his funeral in Dharamsala. "Self-immolation was very inspiring for the Tibetan people," says Kalsang Phuntsok, head of the Tibetan Youth Congress in Dharamsala. "It showed the younger people that they could sacrifice for the Tibetan people."

With his bushy hair, stilted English and trim suit, Phuntsok seems like a cartoon version of a 1960s British mod. But the group he leads is the largest Tibetan exile organization, with some 15,000 members. "It's my responsibility to tell people what will be the scenario when the Dalai Lama is no more," Phuntsok tells me, pounding his fist into his palm. I ask him about the Middle Way, and he emits a snarly laugh. "We are nullifying all we have achieved in the past forty-five years," he says. "We are admitting at the international level that Tibetan people, and the Dalai Lama, are happy in China. We need to educate Tibetans that attacking China is the only way. If you're willing to die, you have no fear."

Tibetan hard-liners are considering a range of possible targets, including the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the new train line to Lhasa. "The railway has been built, and it'll be there," says Tsundue. "Unless you bomb it, you'll get no attention."

Yet violence could play into China's hands, enabling Beijing to tar Tibetan activists as violent fanatics. "If they turn to violence," says Robert Thurman, "all their legitimacy would be gone." Taking advantage of the hysteria surrounding the war on terror, China has already claimed that Tibetan activists are terrorists and has held counterterrorism exercises in Tibet. The Panchen Lama selected by China is so despised in Tibet that he travels to monasteries under heavy guard, fearful that he will be murdered by the very people who supposedly worship him.

Discovered as the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama at age two, the current Dalai Lama had to assume responsibility for his people at a young age. Normally, a regent ran Tibet while a young Dalai Lama grew into manhood, but with Chinese troops approaching his land, the Dalai Lama assumed the power of head of state in 1950, while still a teenager. "I could not refuse my responsibilities," he has said. "I had to shoulder them, put my boyhood behind me."

Carrying a nation on your back never gets easier. On a recent morning in New York, I wait for the Dalai Lama in a small room above a conference room where he is scheduled to speak. On his visits to America, the Tibetan leader packs in dozens, even hundreds, of events; the previous day, he flew from New York to California and back, at the behest of Maria Shriver, for another appearance. Now, he sweeps into the room flanked by a small army of bodyguards. He sits across from me at a small table, his head down. Friends say the Dalai Lama cannot hide his feelings, and today his seemingly limitless energy and enthusiasm have been replaced by gloom and fatigue. Groups like Students for a Free Tibet have stepped up their complaints about his decision to abandon independence, and even his own brother recently contradicted him by declaring that China is giving no ground to Tibetans.