Why China's Leaders Should Embrace Dalai Lama

A kung-an:

A communist party official asks his driver to stop so he may chat with a farmer who is struggling to get his ox unstuck from a muddy field. "Can I be of any help?" The official asked. The farmer turns and looks at the official as if he did not understand his words. The official gets out of his car and walks closer to the farmer. "Can I help you with this problem?" The official asks, speaking louder this time. The farmer smiles. The official walks even closer, now in the field, thinking the man is hard of hearing. "I can have my driver come and help you," the official says. The man sort of cocks his head but says nothing. The official moves even closer, but is now in the mud and realizes he can't get his foot unstuck. "Can I help you?" the farmer asks the official.

The Dalai Lama and Chinese leaders have actually been engaged in a long distance dialogue. The possibility that China's leadership might embrace a return of the Dalai Lama to Lhasa and more religious freedom for Tibetans (and others in China) is probably much higher today than it was ten years ago, given their willingness to dialogue and a general relaxing of regulation of religious activities. It might actually be in the interest of the Zhongnanhai leadership to find common ground with the Dalai Lama, who has argued that Beijing's guidance of economic and political development is not in question, but rather that the religious leadership should guide spiritual development. The Dalai Lama has no ties to foreign powers (despite the support and protection he has received from the Indian government) and his position at the apex of Tibetan Buddhism has none of the bureaucratic trappings of, say, a pope or even the leaders of protestant sects within Christianity. To the extent that people need spirituality to enrich their lives (or just deal with mortality), Buddhism provides an answer that is far less threatening to Chinese sovereignty than either Christianity or Islam, both of which have become dominated by hardline fundamentalism, which has become a tool for very narrow economic and political interests. So perhaps Beijing's leadership should recognize that if religion is needed by a significant subset of the population, then better to promote an independent and less ideologically extreme religion than to run the risk that religions dominated by foreigners, who are often hostile to "socialism," would fill the void.