Recent News
Freedom for Religion
in China
In front of the most sacred temple in Tibet, the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, stands a stone tablet. The tablet, placed there in 822 A.D., records the perpetual treaty and boundaries of Tibet and China and calls for perpetual peace between the two nations. Unfortunately, neither those boundaries nor the peace proclaimed have endured.
On October 17, 2007, the United States Congress, with President Bush in attendance, bestowed upon His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama the highest civilian award Congress can bestow – the Congressional Gold Medal. The extreme rancor of recent Washington politics was set aside as more than two-thirds of the House of Representatives and the Senate co-sponsored this award. The first recipient of the award was George Washington in 1776. Recent recipients include Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Nelson Mandela, and Pope John Paul. The addition of the Dalai Lama to this esteemed list was long over due.
Despite the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950 and its continuing occupation since then, the Dalai Lama has been a stalwart advocate for peace. Forced to flee Tibet in 1959 he has worked tirelessly and peacefully on behalf of the six million Tibetans living in occupied Tibet and the more than one hundred thousand Tibetan refugees living in India and throughout the world. It is estimated that over one million Tibetans died as the result of China’s brutal invasion and occupation.
The thin skinned Chinese reaction to the award was to demand that the U.S. cancel the award and threatened that there will be a serious impact on Sino/US relations. So be it.
The near hysterical rhetoric coming from Beijing indicates that there is more going on – guilt comes to mind. Chinese guilt for raping and killing tens of thousands of men, women, and children as they “peacefully” liberated Tibet. Chinese claims to Tibet are at best contrived and more accurately described as revisionist history. At the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 the few Chinese actually living in Tibet were forced to leave Tibet. When Chairman Mao’s eighteenth army invaded Tibet in the Spring of 1950 there were no Chinese sons or daughters to return to “mother” China. And yet, the Chinese, masters of propaganda, insist that they “peacefully” liberated Tibet.
In a nation that has taken up economic freedom with as much gusto as the Chinese it is time that they take up freedom of religion as well. Currently, it is against Chinese law to have in your possession a photo of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of more than six million Tibetans. Imagine, if you will, your arrest and incarceration for merely possessing a photo of the Pope or Jesus or the Archbishop of Canterbury. Pope Benedict can’t even appoint Catholic bishops in China without prior Chinese government approval. Christians in China have gone underground – the “house church” movement keeps Christianity alive in China – and yet the leaders of this movement are often arrested and persecuted. That is the current religious situation with one of the US’s biggest trading partners - China.
The US and all freedom loving countries around the world need to demand that the Chinese allow that fundamental right given to mankind – the freedom to find and worship God in his or her own way - and to restore to the Tibetan people their spiritual leader.