The great brawl of China

A Year in Tibet
By Sun Shuyun
HarperPress £20, 234 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
By Pico Iyer
Bloomsbury £12.99 288 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

Holder of the White Lotus: The Lives of the Dalai Lama
By Alexander Norman
Little, Brown £20, 446 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

Why the Dalai Lama Matters: His Act of Truth as the Solution for China, Tibet and the World
By Robert Thurman
Atria Books £16.99, 231 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

Modern China is at its most unsettling when its purpose and power give way to feelings of victimhood. Among Chinese, the inherited memories of humiliating imperial incursions have a powerful resonance, from the burning of the Summer Palace in Beijing by British and French troops in 1860, to the Japanese invasions of the 1930s. That the Communist party has deliberately and repeatedly fostered these emotions among its citizens doesn’t make them any less real.

Tibet is wrapped up in these stories of humiliation. The official Beijing line holds that Tibet was an integral part of the country until western powers began to bully and weaken China in the 19th century, and that China’s rightful sovereignty has since been restored. For them, the modern era in Tibet starts not with the arrival of Mao’s armies in 1950 or the Dalai Lama’s flight to India in 1959, but with the opium wars.

The intense scrutiny from around the world running up to next month’s Beijing Olympics was bound to provoke tension in a single-party state that permits no formal opposition. On March 10 this year, the anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s departure from Tibet, monks began protesting in Lhasa. This triggered more than 60 demonstrations across Tibetan regions, including a race riot in Lhasa against Han Chinese.

There are many explanations for the unrest. But events in March confirmed that Beijing’s attempts to win the loyalty of Tibetans through economic progress have floundered. To make such a point as a journalist, however, was to invite a storm of abuse. The government systematically blocked the foreign media from finding out what had happened yet denounced us for getting the story wrong. Under attack over the military crackdown on dissent, China again presented itself as the victim.

Alongside the hundreds of new books on the People’s Republic this year are a number on Tibet. They cover many genres yet all are political in some measure. And judging by the number of biographies of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan religious leader remains the most enticing subject matter.

Indeed, discussion about Tibet repeatedly returns to the ageing spiritual leader, now 73. But after this year’s protests, there seems no way through the impasse between Beijing and the Dalai Lama. It is difficult to read these books without a sense of foreboding for Tibet. Each new book on the Dalai Lama prompts the question of whether his global profile hinders or boosts the chance of finding a lasting solution. The Chinese government has repeatedly denounced the Dalai Lama for stimulating violence and trying to sabotage the Olympics – charges he vigorously denies. Yet, as these books make clear, he remains hugely popular among Tibetans, and his many supporters in the west, including several governments, believe he is a moderating influence. After all, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

Sun Shuyun, a Han Chinese writer, had the opportunity to explore daily life in Tibet and probe the myths surrounding the place. A Year in Tibet recounts her time researching a BBC documentary – a journalistic coup that prompted criticism about how such access was achieved. Foreign news organisations are typically allowed to visit Tibet only on short, stage-managed tours run by government officials who steer them away from “real” people. Sun gives occasional hints about the deal she struck – she pulls back from asking about the Dalai Lama at one point in case it ends filming. But a more frank acknowledgement of the terms of engagement would have bolstered the credibility of this perceptive book.

Living in the Tibetan town of Gyantse, she flirts with what the writer Pico Iyer calls the “Shangri-La syndrome”: the temptation to portray Tibet as a place of magical innocence and ancestral wisdom. Brought up to think of Tibetans as backward, she sometimes overcompensates. But Sun gradually becomes more honest about aspects that make her uncomfortable. She is charmed by the powerful hold of folk tradition but horrified by some of the results. She asks a doctor why infant mortality is so high and is told that pregnant women don’t come for check-ups because they fear arousing the jealousy of neighbours who will put spells on them. “They also think the clinic is full of evil spirits because babies die here,” the doctor says.

The resilient sense of Tibetan identity here doesn’t tally with the charge that China is conducting “cultural genocide”, an accusation the Dalai Lama regularly makes. Beijing did indeed attempt to obliterate Tibetan Buddhism, especially during the Cultural Revolution when thousands of monasteries and temples were destroyed. Despite ongoing human rights abuses in Tibet, however, some temples have been restored since the 1980s and religious observance permitted. Older traditions have reappeared: at one point Sun watches a shaman trying to ward off hailstones and new tangkas of the Buddha are being painted. The Communist party once tried to outlaw polyandry, a rural custom of brothers sharing a wife, but the four sons of the party official Sun follows all live with the same woman.

If cultural genocide overstates the case, however, the government’s efforts to manipulate and control Tibetan cultural life are clear. In recent years, the party has mounted “political education” campaigns forcing monks to denounce the Dalai Lama. Sun meets a monk who spent three years in jail for protesting against Beijing’s interference in choosing the Panchen Lama, the second highest religious figure. She watches her friends’ excited preparations for the Buddha’s birthday, which usually draws 30,000 to the local monastery. That year only a few thousand come after a nervous local government, fearing unrest, discourages attendance. Although this book isn’t specifically about Tibetan politics, she leaves no doubt as to the underlying political tensions.

A Year in Tibet is rare among Tibet books in not focusing on the Dalai Lama, whose global popularity seems to know no bounds. Tibetans believe the Dalai Lama is the incarnation of a Buddhist deity. The man we know as “the” Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is the 14th incarnation. Born to a poor family in eastern Tibet, he was enthroned in Lhasa when he was just four and was 15 when the Chinese marched in.

Given such beginnings, it seems extraordinary that the Dalai Lama has attracted so much attention. Yet this robed monk now straddles many roles: global guru, leader of an ancient religion, political activist. One recent book, written by a management consultant, explores the Dalai Lama’s views on market economics.

So how has a Buddhist reincarnation become so important? Robert Thurman claims a friendship of 44 years, yet his Why the Dalai Lama Matters is a rambling hagiography of this “true leader of world leaders”. Alexander Norman offers us The Holder of the White Lotus, an entertaining history of the institution of the Dalai Lama, mixing tales of sorcery and reincarnation with more worldly struggles that saw several young Dalai Lamas murdered. Norman shows how political the Dalai Lamas have always been, managing Tibet’s complicated relationships with Chinese and Mongolian empires, and a 1904 invasion by the British army. Among these tales of palace intrigue and exotic rituals, however, the benign, rock star celebrity of the current incumbent remains a mystery.

The author who goes furthest to probing the myths is Pico Iyer. The travel writer admits to being entranced from an early age. Growing up in Oxford near CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, the “fairy tale” that caught Iyer’s attention in 1959 was the true story of a teenage monk stealing out of his palace in Lhasa at night, dressed as a soldier, and walking for days over the highest mountains in the world to the safety of exile.

Iyer’s The Open Road is an affectionate portrait following the Dalai Lama’s path as a spiritual leader, drawing on 30 years of personal conversations. When the monk first visited the US in 1979, he delivered dense lectures on metaphysics. Now, Iyer notes, he is feted at Hollywood soirées and his speeches are played at London nightclubs.

In his clunky English, punctuated by peels of giggles, his words sometimes sound like New Age platitudes. Iyer argues that he has charted a new “global ethics”, however, which mixes the Buddhist emphasis on a simple life with insights into the connections that bind all humans together. Iyer is attracted by the idea that change, even in Tibetan politics, can come through small gestures and simple kindnesses: “Not enlightenment, not universal charity, not the golden rule or the wisdom of ages: just something I could do several times a day.” Wishful thinking maybe but this lyrical book will give even sceptics cause for reflection.

Yet Iyer admits that even after three decades, he’s still baffled by the esoteric side of Tibetan Buddhism. When the Dalai Lama decided to flee Tibet in 1959, he reveals, it was because his favourite oracle told him to do so. Even to his closest non-Tibetan friends, aspects of the Dalai Lama remain an enigma.

Drawing bigger crowds than most elected leaders across the globe, the Dalai Lama comes across as an anti-politician – “the global order’s godfather”, Iyer labels him. But he also leads a more conventional political cause – and this is what gives him such a wide audience. The last section of Iyer’s book considers what will happen when the Dalai Lama dies. He talks to members of the Tibetan Youth Congress in Dharamsala who openly criticise the Dalai Lama’s stance against violence and his abandonment 20 years ago of the idea of Tibetan independence. The unrest in March also demonstrated just how wide is the gap between the government in Beijing and many younger Tibetans living in China.

Given the huge loyalty he still commands among Tibetans, the Dalai Lama could provide a solution to this potential tinderbox. In recent months he has seemed almost desperate to strike a deal for greater autonomy for Tibet within China. But despite ongoing talks about talks between his envoys and low-level Chinese officials, Beijing has fallen back on crude rhetoric about “the Dalai clique”, parading the Olympics torch up the main street of Lhasa. Better to wait for the Dalai Lama to die, the dominant view holds, and hope that Tibetan nationalism withers. The Dalai Lama has yet to escape the central irony of his life: his global celebrity has helped keep the issue of Tibet alive but an insecure Beijing sees his fame as a humiliation – that word again – and every prize, every sold-out auditorium and every new book just adds to the sense of grievance.

Geoff Dyer is the FT’s Beijing bureau chief