"In 1951, he traveled to America and became the main source of information on Tibet for the United States Department of State.[6] America's Central Intelligence Agency promised to make Tibet independent from China in exchange for Thondup's support in organizing guerrilla units to fight against the People's Liberation Army, an offer which Thondup accepted."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/his-brothers-keeper-1431299979
His Brother’s Keeper
The Dalai Lama’s older brother deeply regrets accepting CIA aid. It ‘contributed to the complete destruction of Tibetan culture.’
‘The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong” is a fatuous and demeaning title for a fascinating and important book. Gyalo Thondup is the Dalai Lama’s older brother and former chief of staff. His life and work have been largely carried out in the shadows, but his book provides extraordinary insight into Tibet’s struggle against China to regain its independence.
In 1945, when he was 17, Mr. Thondup was sent from Tibet to China to be educated for his role as his brother’s chief adviser on temporal matters. The Dalai Lama’s guardian believed that the Chinese would have a growing influence on Tibet, then independent, and that it was essential to know how to deal with them.
The Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek appointed himself the young Tibetan’s guardian and patron, paid him a substantial allowance, and urged him to study Chinese history at Nanjing University. According to the author, Chiang Kai-shek said that if Tibet preferred to remain an independent nation “without foreign exploitation,” he was prepared to accept it. Tibet was China’s back door, he said, and the two countries would always have close ties.
The Communist victory in 1949 ended Mr. Thondup’s life in China. A year later the People’s Liberation Army invaded Tibet. Married to the daughter of a general in the defeated Nationalist army, Mr. Thondup made his way from Hong Kong to India, where his life as a diplomatic go-between began. To support themselves, he and his wife bought land on the outskirts of Kalimpong, close to a major border crossing into Tibet, and a noodle factory, hence the title of the book.
There are few heroes, Tibetan or foreign, in Mr. Thondup’s narrative of the decades that followed. The villains include not only China’s Communist rulers and greedy Tibetan aristocrats—who were only too happy to accept titles and well-paid jobs from the Chinese occupiers—but also Western secret intelligence services. The book reveals a catalog of lost opportunities to open a dialogue between the Tibetan government in exile in India and Beijing in search of a settlement that would allow the Dalai Lama to return home and provide Tibet with a degree of self-government. In each case the overtures were sabotaged by the CIA or India’s intelligence service, or they were brushed aside by Britain’s MI6. The British were concerned for the security of their Hong Kong colony and suggested that the Tibetans look to the Americans for military and political support.
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