在全世界眼中的宗教使者，諾貝爾和平獎得主，達賴喇嘛，在中共口中是它指責的「恐怖份子」，和賓拉登同等級的，中共解決西藏問題的可能性，由此可見是很渺小的。
Chinese view of Dalai Lama bodes ill for its Tibet policy
By Howard W. French
Saturday, March 29, 2008
SHANGHAI: Across much of the Western world, the Dalai Lama is known as the beatific spiritual leader of a humble community of Buddhists, beloved in Hollywood, Congress and the White House, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Chinese leaders cast him in a different light. They call him a separatist and a terrorist, bent on killing innocent Han Chinese and "splitting the motherland" - an Osama bin Laden of the Himalayas.
That gap in perception, which has grown immeasurably wider in the two weeks since violent unrest rocked Tibet, is breeding pessimism that Chinese leaders are willing - or perhaps even able - to embark on a new approach to Tibet even as it threatens to cast a long shadow over its serving as host of the Olympic Games this summer.
President Hu Jintao, whose rise to leadership of China’s Communist Party was built partly on his record as party boss in Tibet during a period of unrest in 1989, has so far shown no signs of making a historic gambit for peace there. Rather, analysts say, he seems to be wagering that China can hunker down, keep a rein on Tibet through the Olympic Games and wait for the Dalai Lama, who is 72, to die.
"I would obviously like for there to be a policy debate, but I see no suggestion of one," said Wang Lixiong, a Chinese expert on Tibet who signed a recent petition by Chinese lawyers and scholars urging the government to resume discussions with the Dalai Lama. "There has been a big failure, but to see the government change its path or policy right before the Olympics isn’t likely."
The inflexibility in Beijing’s position leaves Western countries with a problem. President George W. Bush and a roster of European and Asian leaders have called for Hu to open a dialogue with the Dalai Lama as a first step toward reducing tensions in Tibet. If Hu declines to do so, those leaders seem likely to face pressure from their own constituents to take stronger diplomatic or political steps against Beijing at the moment it had expected to bask in the international limelight.
Already, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has suggested that he might consider using his presidency of the European Union this summer to organize a boycott of the opening ceremonies of the Games.
The call for some kind of Chinese-Tibetan talks continues to mount. On Friday, the Dalai Lama, speaking in India, made his most extended comments on the Tibetan violence, accusing the Chinese state-run media of trying to "sow the seeds of racial tension" there but calling for "meaningful dialogue" with Beijing about how to reduce tensions.
Speaking of the possibility that Hu might pursue diplomatic talks with Tibetan exiles, Bush said "it’s in his country’s interest." Standing by Bush’s side, Kevin Rudd, Australia’s newly elected, Chinese-speaking prime minister, who was visiting Washington, said, "It’s absolutely clear that there are human rights abuses in Tibet."
Hu told Bush during a phone call on Wednesday that he was willing to talk to the Dalai Lama, according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. But what was most striking about the exchange was the consistency of Beijing’s language on Tibet, which analysts say provides little reason to expect new initiatives.
Hu’s formulation, which has been used almost word for word since the time of Deng Xiaoping, said that China would resume contact with the Dalai Lama as long as he abandoned advocating Tibetan independence, stopped activities aimed at "splitting the motherland," and accepted that Tibet and Taiwan were inalienable parts of China.
The problem with Beijing’s formulation is that even when the Dalai Lama insists that he does not seek independence, as he and his representatives have repeatedly done, the Chinese government has merely repeated this trope, leaving little room for progress.
Hu Yan, a professor of social sciences at the party’s Central Committee School, expressed confidence in its ability to prevent further trouble before the Olympic Games even as he seemed to concede that Beijing made mistakes in handling the protests.
"I think we can control the situation before it spreads any further," he said. "We were too soft at the beginning, allowing them to destroy ambulances and rob banks without doing anything. We should have fired more tear gas, at least."
Robert Barnett, director of Modern Tibetan Studies at Columbia University, dismissed the Chinese contention that the protest amounted to little more than criminal riots, calling their spread through several provinces significant. "Nothing like this has happened for the last 40 years, and no Chinese leader is going to miss that," Barnett said. "They have lost the countryside, and they are going to have to work very hard to get win it back."
But Hu Yan hinted at what many believe is Beijing’s bottom-line thinking on Tibet. "This issue can only be resolved in the long term," he said. "It’s a long-term campaign, and we probably have to wait for the Dalai Lama to reincarnate."
Beijing’s long-term strategy, which the recent violence may have only reinforced, has been to wait for the Dalai Lama to die on the theory that it can control his successor as Tibet’s spiritual leader. A new Dalai Lama would most likely have little of the prestige, inside China or abroad, of Beijing’s current nemesis.
In 1995, Beijing arrested the Panchen Lama, the No. 2 in Tibetan Buddhism, a 6-year-old at the time. He has never been seen since. China then anointed another Tibetan youth as a replacement Panchen Lama, and has tightly controlled his education and public duties ever since. Under Tibetan Buddhism, traditionally the Panchen Lama names a new Dalai Lama, theoretically giving Beijing control over the present Dalai Lama’s succession.
To counter this approach, Tibetans have floated ideas about changing the rules of succession, allowing the Dalai Lama to anoint a Tibetan child who lives in exile, or an even more radical change, allowing Tibetans to select a new Dalai Lama by voting. Either of these measures would be certain to infuriate China, which reserves the right to control all organized religion.
The Dalai Lama has repeatedly promised that he has no desire to see Tibet break free of Chinese sovereignty. He has, though, pressed for what he calls "genuine autonomy" under Chinese rule for Tibet, which is defined by the Chinese as an autonomous region, though smaller than historical Tibet. He refers to the Chinese Constitution, which invokes the right of autonomy and self-government "in areas where people of minority nationalities live in compact communities."
Party leaders have resisted even that modest vision of enhanced self-government. Officials seem to fear that enhanced political autonomy could overload the circuits of the Chinese state, inciting demands from other ethnic or religious groups and unleashing centrifugal forces that could break up the country as surely as Tibetan demand for independence.
Zhang Yun, a scholar at the China Tibetology Research Center, said the Dalai Lama’s demands were impossible for the government to meet.
"If you look carefully at what the Dalai Lama says, the giving up independence part is really empty, while the demands for a greater Tibet and a high degree of autonomy are real," Zhang said. "A high degree of autonomy means giving up everything: our administrative system, our cadre system, and even party-led socialism."
文章定位：
