"Voice for the Voiceless," Dalai Lama - A Review

 

I have been working on a TOTD, which I had hoped to have out yesterday, but its complexities have caused a delay. We often know what we want to say, but finding the right words (and avoiding the wrong ones) is never easy. However, it should be ready by next Friday.

 

The Dalai Lama’s short book – the subject of this essay – I found fascinating, not only in his descriptions of his ongoing plight with China’s Communist rulers, but in his incredible patience and his persistence in his belief that non-violence is key to protests. The book may also, as it did me, prompt you to reference an atlas to better understand this country, where Mount Everest defines the border with Nepal.

 

My wife joins me in wishing everyone a Happy Easter.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Voice for the Voiceless, Dalai Lama

April 19, 2025

 

“However, as I have thought about it over the years, what is lacking in

Marxism is compassion. Its greatest flaw is the total neglect of basic

human values, and the deliberate promotion of hate through class struggle.”

 

For sixty-six years the Dalai Lama, the highest spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, has had to live as an exile from his ancestral lands. India accepted him as a refugee and thousands of other Tibetans in 1959, nine years after Chinese Communists first occupied his Country. Thus, Dharamsala has been his (and the Central Tibetan Administration’s (the government in exile), home for almost seven decades. In 2011, after a Tibetan Buddhist monk self-immolated, the Dalai Lama gave up his role as head of state. 

 

This is a short book – 222 pages, including 74 pages of appendices – that describe his experiences as a refugee and his attempts to reach some sort of a rapprochement with the Chinese government, including letters. Early on, he realized advocating for full independence would be futile. He wrote of a meeting in Switzerland in 1988: “I stressed at this gathering of Tibetans that the essence of what we aspired to – the ability protect our language, culture, religion, and our identity as a people – could be achieved within the framework of the People’s Republic of China” – a policy he termed as a “Middle Way” approach.

 

In the appendices he cites the relevant articles of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that would allow such freedoms. But China’s Constitution is written for show, not adherence. He spoke to the adoption by the United Nations, in December 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and of how, in 1976, it acquired a legal basis: “Almost immediately after the Universal Declaration of human rights was adopted, China began what has been more than seventy years of systematic abuse of the human rights of the Tibetan people.”

 

Throughout his years in exile, the Dalai Lama has been a strong advocate for non-violence in his people’s repudiation of Chinese enforcement, even as excessive mining, deforestation, and the burying of nuclear waste has devastated the Tibetan plateau. Over the years, the Dalai Lama visited with all of China’s leaders, beginning in 1950 when he was sixteen and met with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. After each visit, he felt assured that his wishes would be honored, yet time proved his hopes fruitless. “At its core,” he wrote, “the issue (for him and Tibetan Buddhists) is not about bread and butter. It is about the very survival of Tibetans as a people.”

 

This reader sensed a naivete on the part of the Dalai Lama, but on reflection realized His Holiness is driven by non-violence and the knowledge that six million Tibetans are no match against 1.4 billion Chinese. He is correct when he suggests that if China were to recognize the multiple nationalities that live within its territories, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) would achieve modern status. Sadly that won’t happen in a totalitarian regime intent on controlling the thoughts of its citizens.

 

As much as the book is evocative of the Dalai Lama’s devotion to his people, their culture and religion, it is also an indictment of the malignancy of China’s Communist Party.

"Communism, China & Senator Cotton's New Book"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Communism, China & Senator Cotton’s New Book”

March 28, 2025

 

“Last month, Senator Tom Cotton published what might

be the most important book of the 2020s on China.”

                                                                                                                Jimmy Quinn

                                                                                                                National Review, March 20, 2025

 

“I have seen the future, and it works” – words written by Lincoln Steffens following a visit to the newly formed Soviet Union in 1918. Last year, while in Shanghai for a store opening, Apple CEO Tim Cook was obsequious in his praise of China: “I think China is really opening up…it’s so vibrant and so dynamic.”

 

For more than a hundred years many, supposedly perceptive Western geopolitical analysts, journalists and business leaders, have chosen to ignore the evil that is Communism. In his 1919 book, Ten Days that Shook the World, American journalist John Reed, scion of a wealthy Oregon family, wrote sympathetically of the Russian Revolution that he had witnessed in Petrograd. Warren Beatty turned the book into a 1981 film, Reds, nominated for an Academy Award. In 1937, after spending months with Mao Tse Tung’s Red Army, American journalist Edgar Snow wrote Red Star Over China, a glowing portrait of life in Communist areas. He contrasted his experience with Mao and his Communist followers with his depiction of the gloom and corruption of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang’s government, which relocated to Taiwan in 1949.

 

For Americans, Communism has never approached the revulsion felt for Nazism, yet the similarities are far greater than their differences. In the February 5, 2018 issue of The New York Review of Books, Ian Johnson responded to an earlier article by Timothy Snyder, “Who Killed More, Hitler or Stalin?” Johnson wrote that the question was slightly off: “…it should have included a third tyrant of the 20^th Century, Chairman Mao. And not just that, but that Mao should have been the hands-down winner, with his ledger easily trumping the European dictators’.” According to his research, Stalin killed somewhere between 6 and 9 million people, Hitler between 11 and 12 million, and Mao between 35 and 45 million, most during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Nazism and Communism both practice(d) genocide, are (were) authoritarian, and have (had) no regard for individual rights or human life.

 

Repression and intimidation in China did not end with Mao’s death in 1976. While accurate numbers are not available, estimates of those killed in 1989’s uprising in Tiananmen Square range from a few hundred to several thousand. Since Xi Jinping became President of the People’s Republic of China in 2013 more than a million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang Province have been placed in internment camps. No one claims to know how many have died. The province has a population of 24 million, half of whom are Uyghurs, so almost one in ten Uyghurs have been confined. The BBC has reported that Uyghur women have been sterilized, and former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has called what has happened in the province “genocide and crimes against humanity.” In a review of Emily Feng’s book Let Only Red Flowers Bloom, Maura Elizabeth Cunningham wrote in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal: “Under Mr. Xi, the definition of what makes a person ‘Chinese’ has become increasingly narrow: someone who exclusively speaks Mandarin, marries Chinese and has two or three children, respects the leadership of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), accepts censorship and surveillance and recalibrates in accordance with each new political campaign…” In the Introduction to his new book, Voice for the Voiceless, the Dalai Lama wrote about Communism and Tibet, which he was forced to leave in 1959: “The issue is not about the matter of economic development…The issue is about a people’s need and right to exist with their distinct language, culture, and religious heritage.” An impossible dream for Tibetan Buddhists in China today.

 

China has a population of about 1.4 billion, of whom about 100 million (or 7%) are members of the Communist Party, the second largest political party in the world (in a one-party state!), but one not open to all. Officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) are members, but most enlisted soldiers are not. While China, according to official statistics, has the world’s second largest economy, as measured by GDP ($18.8 trillion versus the U.S. at $28.2 trillion, its GDP per capita is $13,400 versus the U.S. at $83,000. Indicative of its concentration of wealth, China has, according to the Hunan Global Rich List, 814 billionaires, more than the U.S. That number, according to the Washington Times, includes Xi Jinping, who has never worked in the private sector. Mr. Xi has been hailed for eradicating poverty in China, but, as Bitter Winter (a European magazine that focuses on religious liberty and human rights) has stated: “Xi Jinping is a master in the Orwellian art to redefine the meaning of words to suit his propaganda.” In 2021, he put poverty at below $2.30 per day. The issue of how many Chinese fall below the poverty line was raised before Xi Jinping’s presidency, in Will the Boat Sink the Water? by Chen Guidi’s and Wu Chuntao, published in 2004. 

 

China represents a clear and present risk to Western liberalism – economically, militarily and culturally. 150 countries, representing three quarters of the world’s population and over half of the world’s GDP have signed Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China’s banks – backed by the CCP – have funded projects, including railroads, ports and gas pipelines in countries in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Latin America. Sean Thomas, in the April edition of The Spectator, wrote: “China is now the biggest trading partner for virtually every South American nation, supplanting the U.S. in the last decade.” While their military budget is less than ours (assuming we can believe their numbers), their standing army is twice ours – the largest army in the world. China has constructed artificial islands and military installations in the South China Sea, through which travel one third of all global maritime trade. In the 2022-2023 academic year, American universities enrolled almost 290,000 Chinese students, while 800 Americans studied at Chinese universities.

 

It is with that background, and at the suggestion of an old skiing buddy, that I picked up and read Senator Tom Cotton’s short but information-packed book, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China. Reading it convinced me of what I long suspected – China is an evil empire and the U.S. needs to be prepared. In seven concise chapters, covering 170 pages, Senator Cotton instructs the reader on how China is preparing for war, how they wage economic war, how they infiltrate society and are coming for our kids, and how they might actually win. In a telling example, and quoting PEW Research Center, he relates that in 2020 9% of young American adults got their news from Chinese-owned TikTok; today, 39% do. He starts off chapter VII, “China Could Win:” “Most of us take American global dominance for granted, without thinking much about it; since at least World War I, that’s just the way it’s been.” Complacency has become nemesis.   

 

If you believe, as I do, that most people, regardless of heritage or cultural background, prefer liberty to dependency, this is a book you should read. The West, led by the United States, is an advocate for the former, while China exemplifies the latter. In the U.S., we command our fortunes, and we control our futures. The vast majority of Chinese, living under the tyranny of a dictatorship, control neither their fortunes nor their futures. We cannot let them win.

 

In the March 16, 2025 issue of The Telegraph, senior foreign correspondent Roland Oliphant wrote: “China, not Russia, is the only country on the planet capable of challenging the United States’ military, economic and political hegemony.” Caveat emptor should apply when dealing with Communist China.