Fred Frederikse: 'Better to die a good death'

Dr Lobsang Sangay, prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile

Millisphere, noun. A "sphere of interest" of roughly one-thousandth of the world's population. Around 7 million people, but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do. A lens through which to study human geography.

The Dalai Lama suggests: once a year go to some place you have never been before. This year that place was the Beach Haven Community Hall, in Auckland, to hear Dr Lobsang Sangay address a meeting organised by the New Zealand Friends of Tibet.

The meeting was opened by Ian Revell, the former National MP for Birkenhead/Northcote (1990-1999), who, at the time, had chaired the 40 member multi-party parliamentary lobby group for Tibet and in the 1990s, on a parliamentary trip to China, he had the temerity to bring up the subject of Tibetan autonomy with the Chinese deputy-foreign minister - who became very angry.

Dr Sangay told the meeting that he had been born in the Tibetan refugee community in Darjeeling, India, and grew up on "one acre, with chickens and two cows," before winning a Fulbright Scholarship to the US and gaining a PhD in Law from Harvard.

In 2011, when the ageing Dalai Lama stepped down from his political role, Dr Sangay was elected prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile. He is now in his second term as PM-in-exile and on his first trip to New Zealand.

Dr Sangay restated the case for an autonomous Tibet. "The Chinese are like our parents, showering us with gold and silver, but what they want is our minerals to dig up, trees to cut down and rivers to dam.

"In Hong Kong, where politicians are being co-opted and activists are disappearing, people are saying: 'We don't want to be like Tibet'," he said.

His message to New Zealand was: "It happened to us, it can happen to you."

There are about 7.8 million Tibetans world wide, about 7.5 million of whom live in China. What the Chinese call Xizang, or the Tibetan Autonomous Region, only has a population of 3.2 million (90% of whom are Tibetan).

The Tibetan people have uniquely evolved to live at high altitudes, but the Tibetan Plateau is a harsh place to live and the Tibetans have traditionally spilled off the plateau.
For Tibet to qualify as a millisphere we would have to extend its boundaries into the surrounding Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu, all of which have sizeable Tibetan populations.

The lowland Han Chinese have built a railway line, over permafrost, to Lhasa from Qinghai in the north; they are building their sixth airport on the Tibetan Plateau and have just completed their first dam on the Brahamaputra River.

Nearly all the major rivers of Asia have their sources on the Tibetan Plateau - the "water tower of Asia" - and there are now plans to divert some of their headwaters to China's parched, polluted north-east.

The Tibetan plateau has been described as "the third pole" because of the concentration of fresh water in its glaciers - which are now melting at an alarming rate. Chinese bottled water companies are harvesting water from melting glaciers (including Everest) - marketing its purity. There are now concerns about changes in the jet stream over Tibet, which in turn is causing heat waves in both Europe and China.

"Journalists without borders" say it is more difficult to get into Tibet than it is to get into North Korea and Freedom House ranks Tibet near the bottom, just above Syria. Recently all Tibetans, including nomads, have been issued with bio-metric ID cards which they have to swipe at the omnipresent Chinese checkpoints.

By 2006 nearly 300,000 Tibetan nomads have been forcibly relocated to villages and towns as part of "building a new socialist countryside," and under the communist "comfortable housing" program Tibetans are required to demolish their "substandard" traditional homes and rebuild, at their own cost, to the new communist standard.

Like the Buddhists monks in Vietnam in the 1970s, Tibetans are committing self-immolation as a protest again Chinese occupation (126 deaths so far, two this year). "Better to die a good death," Dr Sangay thought.

Next year - 2018 - would be "gratitude year," he said, to thank all those who had supported the Tibetan cause and his government-in-exile would continue looking for a middle path to true autonomy.

The present path was creating an environmental disaster, the alternative was to "be gentle with the earth," and work towards a compassionate, non-violent solution, which included supporting the Chinese democratic movement within China itself, Dr Sangay concluded.

*When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller.