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Can a 15-year-old boy upset, for better or worse, a standoff that is half a century old? Perhaps so, considering the treatment he is receiving in India. The Dalai Lama's government-in-exile has housed the Karmapa in an empty religious-studies center in Dharamsala, where he lives with a few helpers, a sister who preceded him into exileâand more than 30 guards. He doesn't get out often, and every trip has to be planned well in advance. His sect has a vibrant monastery nearby and a headquarters in the Indian state of Sikkim, but the boy's public life has been restricted to daily audiences open to the devout and the curious, including many Western tourists. His aides say his day is dull even by the standards of a Buddhist monk and that he is lonelier in exile than he was in China. He has made the passage that is familiar to all of those who have moved between the two Tibets, from the unfree homeland to the limbo of exile.
 Sakya monastery If Tibetan culture is to survive, time is of the essence. Beijing has flooded Tibet with Chinese settlersâTibetans may now be a minority in their major citiesâand cracked down on political activity, religious training and the teaching of the Tibetan language. "Tibetan culture has at least one more generation in it inside Tibet," says Ron Schwartz, a sociology professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland and author of a book on the anti-Chinese riots of 1987 and 1988. "Beyond that it would be difficult to say." In other words, a political miracle may be the only hope that there will be a Tibet for anyone to go home to.Tibet, particularly in its cities, is a bubbling mix of modernization, intimidation and a rapid influx of ugliness. Old neighborhoods are being demolished. Brothels with Chinese sex workers flourish. Signs posted at monasteries instruct the clergy to denounce the Dalai Lama. Tibetan study courses at Lhasa University have been largely droppedâthe few that remain are for students from abroad. Young Tibetans are becoming frivolous, parents complain, with the overnight import of consumerism. Portraits of the Dalai Lama have to be hidden from neighborhood spies.
In the other Tibet, life in exile is hardly paradise. The religious education in India is fineâsome monks come for training at the Sera Monastic University in the southern part of the country and return afterward to Tibet. But Dharamsala was meant to be a temporary refuge, and the wait has gone on too long. The old now doubt that they will ever achieve their dream of going home, and their progeny show more interest in motorbikes and migration to the West. Tashi Choezum, a 58-year-old refugee in Bylakuppe, a Tibetan settlement in southern India, says she put her nine children through school so "they would fight for Tibet." But most now live abroadâone more loose thread in a fraying community.
The past few weeks have been good for the Dalai Lama and, if you watched TV, splendid for the Tibetan cause. His Holiness had his sixth meeting with Bill Clinton, sandwiched between talks with U.S. congressional leaders and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. He spent time impressing backers on the West Coast. Late last week, the World Bank got caught up in the fray. It couldn't decide whether to lend China the funds to pay for the transfer of thousands of farmers onto fertile land in Qinghai province. Tibetan organizations abroad criticized the project as part of Beijing's plan to colonize areas populated by Tibetans. When it looked as if the World Bank might cancel the loan or impose new restrictions, China angrily said it didn't want the money and withdrew its request.
 Lhasa - Cora Within Tibet, Beijing has responded to the threat by launching one of the oddest and most extensive efforts at social engineering the world has seen. China says it wants to bring development and modernity to a historically backward land, and by some measures it has. Office and apartment blocks with blue tinted windows, ubiquitous throughout modernizing China, have sprouted around Lhasa, the spiritual cradle of Tibet. Discos and karaoke bars throb in the shadow of the Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama's former seat of power. Nearby is the new Lhasa Department Store, a sumptuous oasis in which wide-eyed monks experience their first, nervous escalator rides. Tibet's gdp rose 9.1% last year, according to official figures, which also show that the per-capita income of farmers and herdsmen jumped 7.9%. And Beijing insists that Tibetan traditions are being respected. It recently released a 29-page document extolling preservation efforts and detailing the sums spent: $36 million yearly to keep monasteries going, more than $6.6 million on repairs of the Potala Palace. Talk of an attempt to extinguish Tibetan culture, the report says, is "prattle."
Swamping Tibetan culture is probably a better description. In the so-called Tibetan Autonomous Region, ethnic Tibetans now number 6 million, or only 44% of the population, according to the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile. China disputes those figures, but its own census data is from 1990, before the most recent waves of Han Chinese immigrants. At the Sera Monastery outside Lhasa, novice monks still debate one another on Buddhist doctrine, a traditional training. But they do so at set times so that busloads of tourists, including many ethnic Chinese, can watch. On top of that are the police-state methods, highly evolved and ultra-vigilant, of smothering nationalism. Neighborhood spy networks operate as they did during the Cultural Revolution; there are political detainees and recurring reports of torture of prisoners.
China's hope, surely, is that economic development will take the steam out of Tibetan nationalismâand to a certain extent this is happening. Religion is fading as the central element of identity within Tibet, which has led to the appearance of what some foreign analysts call "secular" Tibetans. These are the urban folk who hang out at places like the Princess Bhrikuti Dancehall, a couple of blocks from the Potala Palace. On any given night the place is packed with businessmen, officials, Generation X-ersâall Tibetan, none Chinese. They have cut deals with their consciences to thrive in the neocolonial business atmosphere.
Nonetheless there is a hint of subversion in the air. Princess Bhrikuti, for whom the bar was named, was a wife of the Tibetan warrior king who introduced Buddhism to the Tibetan court. This is a jab: Chinese propaganda frequently mentions Songtsen's other wife, an ethnic Chinese princess, as evidence of the strong links between the two lands. On stage, a man belts out a song about two cranes, one that died and the other that flew away. That's an allegory: one crane is the Dalai Lama, the other the late Panchen Lama, his No. 2, who passed away in 1989. The conversation is very much about modern Tibet, and a visitor is reminded that China's spin regarding development should be received skeptically. According to the United Nations, the average local life expectancy is 60 years, compared with 75 in Shanghai. Tibet's grain output tripled from 1952 to 1980âbut has barely budged since. The U.N. Development Program's human development index ranks life in Tibet on par with that in Zimbabwe or Equatorial Guinea. The us-and-them feeling is pervasive at the Princess Bhrikuti, a bit like Prague during the cold war. But whether the complaints are jovial or bitter, they are always very discreet.
There are bars in Dharamsala, too, thousands of kilometers from Tibet but close to the headquarters of the Dalai Lama and the large, empty structure that is the Karmapa's new home. In those watering holes, the talk is hot-headed. "I want to go blow up a few bridges," says one young Tibetan, who has a college degree, loves mtv and has never seen his homeland. "The Chinese don't care because we don't do anything about it." It's a common refrain. Some young exiles, after a few beers, wonder aloud why Tibetans can't be as brutal as the separatist Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. But come daylight, most of their energies are directed toward more practical affairs, like getting visas for the U.S. There are 120,000 Tibetans in India: the majority were born there. "Two generations have been brought up in exile," says Tsten Norbu, president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, an exile group. "They don't have a sense of belonging to Tibet."
This alienation poses perhaps the biggest risk to Tibetans' hopes of regaining meaningful autonomy in their homeland. Many young exiles have no patience for the Dalai Lama's "middle path" of peaceful negotiation, and life in India doesn't offer many opportunities either. Politics is a controlled affair: much of the government-in-exile is run by the Dalai Lama's relatives. Religious leaders spend a lot of their time traveling to the West to gather sympathetic cash for their sect or monasteries. Even the Dalai Lama is worried. "Some monks," he said in a recent speech, "are becoming businessmen, selling dharma [divine law] for more dollars." The result is an exile community fast losing coherence.
 Lhasa A kind of miracle occurs every time a top Tibetan lama dies. His soul is reborn, and his followers, using premonitions and traditional divination techniques, seek out the new incarnation. Beijing has gotten involved in the last two major searchesâfor the Panchen Lama and the current Karmapaâcreating much consternation. To prevent that happening after his own demise, the Dalai Lama has said he will be reborn outside of China's bordersâso that Beijing can't control his successor's upbringing and training. For a people whose fate is in the hands of an elderly holy man and a teenage monk, that plan has actually brought some hopeâbut it is of the faint, fatalistic kind so familiar to the people of both Tibets.
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