The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 12 August 2024
by George N. Patterson
Since 1959, the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, has been living in exile, after fleeing an attempted kidnapping and subsequent violent repression of the Tibetan citizens of Lhasa. Born in 1935, his early years were dominated by Chinese political and military aggression against his admittedly feudal and politically naive country. There is any number of reasons to argue Chinese claims over Tibet, but the Chinese Communist repression of Tibetan culture is undisputable. As the decades pass, China's claims over Tibetan territory and resources becomes cemented in the complacency of time. For centuries China has manipulated Tibetan self-government by meddling in the religious selection of its leaders. When the most recent Panchen Lama died, his successor was spirited away, never to be seen again, while China put forth their own selection, indoctrinated on China's own narrative of Tibetan history. Surely, as they bide their time, they plan the same approach with the next Dalai Lama, no matter what the Tibetan community and government-in-exile do, in the event. It's a sorry situation, and a dark episode in the diplomatic history of the United Nations, and in the history of China's neighboring countries, most notable of which is India. International response to China's brutal suppression of Tibet, starting in 1950 and continuing in periodic upheavals to this day, was marked by official denials, ignorance, and downright neglect of a remote nation's suffering. Tibet was sacrificed to the global politics of the West vs. Communist Russia and China, and the waffling of so-called non-aligned countries. India, in particular, was very concerned with not offending the Chinese on their Himalayan doorstep. It is lucky, really, that Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim escaped invasion (though their borders continue to be manipulated to this day by China's casual incursions).
The history of that episode, the loss of Tibet to invasion and cultural genocide, has been told a hundred times in as many books and movies, etc. This book, written by a Scottish witness to the events of the invasion and Tibetan resistance, as well as to the political machinations of the Indian and Chinese governments, was first published in 1960, just a year after the Dalai Lama's flight across the Himalaya. That gives this book a powerful immediacy. It came at a time when the West was still trying to make sense of a culture that had kept itself, to its ultimate detriment, aloof and sequestered from the rest of the world. Patterson was an engineer and a missionary who had found his way into some of the higher eschelons of Lhasa government and society. As a result, he became a sort of political go-between for the Tibetan resistance movement, the press and even Indian government representatives. He risked expulsion from India at the time of the Dalai Lama's exile and endured constant criticism of his relays of information from Tibetan refugees on the brutality of the Chinese invasion, which some world leaders refused to believe or simply ignored. A brief history of Tibet along with a detailed relation of Tibet's resistance fill this brief book with a strong sense of place and this story's place in history. In that sense, it has an almost raw, almost enraged, and engrossing tone. Not now widely available, this book seems an important record of Tibet's ongoing downfall.