Josh Rogin - Chaos Under Heaven

The conference was led by Lobsang Sangay, the elected president of the Tibetan government-in-exile, also known as the Sikyong. Sangay, a Harvard-educated, English-speaking man in his late forties, was only the second person to occupy this position since the Dalai Lama decided to relinquish political leadership of the Tibetan community and separate it officially from his spiritual post as the fourteenth incarnation of their living deity. Having led both parts of the Tibetan movement in India since he had fled in 1959, the Dalai Lama was attempting to leave this world with a sustainable model of governance in place.

It was clear that the Dalai Lama’s optimism was not shared by everyone. The conference’s name, the 5-50 Forum, was a reference to the idea that the Tibetan movement would spend five more years pursuing an increasingly dim chance of a negotiated solution to their quarrel with Beijing, aiming to strike what the Dalai Lama called his “Middle Way approach,” somewhere between Tibetan independence and China’s total brutal dominance over Tibet. If that failed, the Tibetan movement would need to pivot and hunker down for fifty years of struggle.

The odds were looking better for fifty years than for five. During Trump’s administration, the DC-based nongovernmental organtzation Freedom House scored Tibet as the second least free country in the world, a close second to Syria and only marginally freer than North Korea. But the plight of those two countries got covered in the international media because their conflicts are bloody or dangerous. Until 1971, there was a small Tibetan militia group supported by the CIA. But when Henry Kissinger went to Beijing in 1972, that aid was cut off and the militia was slaughtered. By the time of the 5-50 Forum meeting in 2017, the Chinese authorities in Tibet were bulldozing Tibetan houses of worship, changing the human demographics of the province in their favor by importing millions of Han Chinese, and industrializing the Tibetan Plateau in a way that threatens the integrity of an ice reservoir that feeds ten major rivers that spring out to billions of people all over Asia.

Before ascending to power, in 2011, Xi Jinping promised to “smash any plot to destroy stability in Tibet and jeopardize national unity” there. And since his rise to power, Beijing had turned the entire region into an open-air prison, hiring tens of thousands of police forces both overt and secret and forcing neighbors to spy and inform on each other under promise of bribes or threat of imprisonment. Xi was so impressed with the performance of the CCP’s top official in Tibet, Chen Quanguo, that in 2016 he moved Chen to be the top CCP official in Xinjiang, where he was tasked with creating a similarly Orwellian system of repression for ethnic minorities there, including the region’s millions of Uyghurs—a Muslim minority group that speaks a Turkic dialect and that had been under Chinese rule more or less since Xinjiang came under Chinese control during the Qing dynasty of the eighteenth century. After taking over following World War II, the CCP discovered huge reservoirs of oil, natural gas, and rare minerals in Xinjiang and began an ever-increasing program of encroachment and repression in order to facilitate its exploitation of these resources. By late 2017, reports were already emerging out of Xinjiang of a new network of prisons that were taking in innocent Uyghur civilians by the thousands. There was evidence of mass incarceration of other Muslim and ethnic minorities in a systemized way that was devastating entire communities. The stories of torture and political indoctrination inside these new prisons were harrowing. But the world had as yet done nothing to react.

The Tibetan government-in-exile, formally called the Central Tibetan Administration, speaks for the six million Tibetans cut off from the world in Tibet, suffering greatly at the hands of the brutal and systematic repression of the Chinese authorities that rule every aspect of their existence. The movement has remained nonviolent at the insistence of the Dalai Lama, but after he’s gone, Tibetans might rightfully conclude that their commitment to nonviolence has allowed the world to turn a blind eye to the extremely violent suppression their people inside Tibet are suffering with no end in sight. “The violence gets more coverage, more attention. Nonviolence gets less attention and less support,” Sangay told me.

The building of Tibet’s democracy-in-exile was in part an effort to convince the next generation of Tibetans that they had an alternative and options to continue after the Dalai Lama was gone. Their only hope was to hold out long enough for China’s campaign of totalitarian control to fail, which they were convinced it eventually would.

“For the time, there’s a sense of control. But you can’t control people based on mistrust and fear forever. Eventually it will not work,” Sangay said. “If you want to know China, you have to understand what is happening in Tibet.”

Counterprogramming

Back in Washington a couple of months after the conference in Dharamshala, I met the Tibetan president-in-exile again. Lobsang Sangay was in town to testify at a hearing on Tibet at the House Foreign Affairs Committee. There was still enough bipartisan support of the Tibet movement on Capitol Hill to organize a hearing every once in a while. There was legislation moving that would push for more international access to Tibet by linking it to Chinese officials’ access in the United States; it was another attempt to inject some reciprocity into the relationship. Sangay was in town to support its passage.

While we were catching up, Sangay told me that he had just come from Sweden, but his key meetings with Swedish officials were canceled at the last minute because a group of CCP officials had shown up the same day and pressured the Swedes to shun Sangay. That kind of thing was happening more and more, he said. CCP officials were following him everywhere he traveled, pressuring politicians in any country he visited not to meet him. Sometimes, they would arrange counterprogramming with propaganda events in the city he was in, to drown out his message.

I asked Sangay whether the CCP officials had followed him from Sweden to Washington and he said they had. He said that the CCP officials responsible for Tibet were in fact counterprogramming by holding a meeting in the US Capitol building that very day. That’s how I learned about how the CCP was working Washington from the inside, seeking to co-opt American elite voices to change the US discussion of China and deflect any efforts to criticize Beijing.

These influence operations were everywhere, but nobody in the government seemed to be in charge of countering them. So the response began in an unofficial and quiet way.

6

The Bingo Club

The trade negotiations between the United States and China dominated headlines as Trump’s first year in office gave way to his second. They also dominated the attention of the American president. But beneath the surface of the US government, tectonic shifts were taking place, of which a recalibration of US-China trade relations was only one part.

David Feith, who served in the Trump administration’s State Department, came up with a useful analogy to describe this period. Think of the trade negotiations as the weather, he said, but the US government’s strategy and the American people’s awareness of the challenge presented by China as the climate. The media has to cover the weather; it often gets the most attention. But climate change is more significant over the long run. “The ‘climate’ was that China has done hostile and malign activity across all domains at an enormous magnitude and we were waking up to it starting in 2017,” he said, “and turning the aircraft carrier that is the United States slowly but in important ways. The ‘weather’ was whether it was stormy or not that day in the trade negotiations.”