The Dalai Lama: The humble giant who can revive democracy

As we celebrate the 90th birthday of the Dalai Lama, it is important to reflect on what he means to the world at a time when the values he embodies, such as democracy and universal human dignity, are more threatened than at any time since the days of World War II. In his powerful new memoir titled Voice for the Voiceless, he tells the story of his relentless 75-year struggle against the communist government in China “for my land and my people.”  In pursuing that struggle with non-violence and unswerving moral purpose, the Dalai Lama has become an inspiration not only to Tibetans, but also to people everywhere.

He was invested with the temporal duties of the Dalai Lama in 1950 when he was just 15, at the very moment Chinese forces were taking control of Central Tibet. He was 19 when he met for the first time with the Chinese ruler Mao Zedong, who told him that “religion is poison”. He grasped from the beginning that Tibet needed to modernise if it was to resist the communist attempt to uproot traditional Tibetan society through forced collectivisation, a programme that was already under way in the early 1950s under the Orwellian rubric of democratic reforms.

His commitment to democracy has been an unchanging feature of his leadership ever since he fled to India in 1959. Just months after he arrived in Dharamsala in 1960, elections were held for members of the Tibetan Assembly, later renamed the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile, marking the first time ever Tibetans were able to elect their own political leaders. A democratic constitution was soon promulgated and eventually political power was devolved to an elected prime minister, called the Sikyong.

But as the Dalai Lama established a model of Tibetan democracy in exile, Beijing tightened its repression over the vast majority of Tibetans who remained in China. It didn’t just deny Tibetans political freedom but is committing what the Dalai Lama has called “cultural genocide”, most egregiously by sending more than three-quarters of Tibetan children to colonial boarding schools where they are stripped of their culture, religion, language and identity.

Beijing has also broken off talks on resolving the conflict over Tibet’s political status, contemptuously dismissing the Dalai Lama as a “splittist” even though his conciliatory Middle Way Approach doesn’t challenge China’s territorial integrity but seeks only to secure Tibetan cultural and religious autonomy. It has said that there will be no dialogue whatsoever with the Dalai Lama until he acknowledges that “Tibet has been an integral part of China since antiquity”, something he cannot do since it contradicts the historical record that Communist China invaded and annexed Tibet in 1950. 

But the Dalai Lama is not one given to despair. In his new memoir he writes, “Today’s dark period of communist Chinese occupation may seem endless, but in our long history, it is but a brief nightmare. As our Buddhist faith teaches us, nothing is immune to the law of impermanence.” There is evidence in Chinese history that bears out the likely impermanence of the communist occupation.

Speaking in 2021 on the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, China scholar Perry Link compared CCP rule to two earlier “nasty-brutish-and-short-lived dynasties”: the Qin (221-206 B.C.) and the Sui (581-618).  He called the CCP’s totalitarian rule a third example of such brutish despotism, predicting that it, too, would be outlasted by Chinese civilisation. That economic stagnation would threaten the stability of the totalitarian system in China was foreseen by the late Communist Party general secretary Hu Yaobang, who was removed from power in 1987 for warning that unless the country’s economic modernisation was accompanied by reform and democracy, it would lead to political convulsions. 

Ironically, it was the outpouring of public mourning for Hu following his death in 1989, that morphed into the freedom protests that erupted in 400 cities across China. Those protests were crushed, but the aspiration in China for a more open society endures, along with the regime’s resistance to reform and opening.  As the Dalai Lama said, a moment of truth for the communists in China is just a matter of time.

He once said that he considered himself “the unluckiest Dalai Lama” for having spent more time as a refugee outside his country of Tibet, than inside. However, his exile has had the advantage of enabling the world outside Tibet to encounter the Dalai Lama and benefit from his moral example.  It has been his monumental achievement, in fact, to have transformed his exile into a platform from which he has defended and mentored his people, while also teaching moral and democratic values to the world.

At a time when democracy is on the defensive and cruel dictators assume they can act with impunity, the Dalai Lama stands out as a global leader of singular moral stature, a humble giant who has the capacity to revive the spirit of democracy and give hope to the world.

The author is the founding president of the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, DC.

A shorter version of this article has been carried in the print edition.