The neighbour from hell

Blessings from Beijing will inform readers who know little about Tibet, and those who know a great deal will discover more. Both groups will be surprised. The newcomers especially will be disabused of any belief that Tibetans were always non-violent, deeply spiritual and unworldly.

Tibetanists and advanced students will learn that, decades after the Chinese conquest of Tibet in 1950 and the escape of the Dalai Lama in 1959, the diaspora of about 130,000 Tibetan refugees, battered by decades of Chinese oppression and ‘soft’ propaganda, is riven by confusion. Some cling to their hope that Tibet will again be sovereign and they will be able to return to their homeland.

Greg Bruno, modestly described on the book’s flyleaf as a journalist, is actually an expert on many aspects of Tibet’s history, Chinese oppression and persecution — ironically termed ‘blessings’ by the Dalai Lama — and most of all the conditions of the Tibetan diaspora and the deepening despair that rends it. ‘Many Tibetan refugees, pushed away by time, boredom, globalisation and a soft-power war with China, are moving on.’

Bruno has never visited Tibet in the many years he has been concentrating on the ‘blessings’ and the diaspora, but he has travelled around its borders and throughout the world to discover the condition of the refugees and to listen to their opinions and the judgments of their leaders, including the Dalai Lama. One of his most striking characteristics is his modesty; he never claims to know a thing about Tibet and the refugees that he has not learned first-hand. What he knows and what he suspects are kept distinct. But he sums up brilliantly: ‘The Communist party of China is the source of the Tibetan malaise; but Tibetans’ self-inflicted wounds have made China’s strategy more effective.’