“Tibetan Question” and Tibetan Buddhism in China: Reforms and Conflicts

This article examines the “Tibetan question” in a broad historical context, the contemporary religious situation in Tibet and the Tibetan protest movement. It shows two diametrically opposed paradigms of the Tibetan issue — Chinese and Tibetan. The Chinese paradigm reduces the “Tibetan question” to the issue of the Dalai Lama’s status, while the Tibetan — to the issue of the Tibetan political status in relation to the Chinese state. Chinese authorities are trying to solve the problem through economic modernization, which they regard as the key to achieving stability and national unity. The author, however, shows the limits of the purely economic approach without taking into account the religious and political factors. The article deals with the escalation of the Tibetan protests in the form of the Buddhist self-immolations. The main cause of such escalation is a stalemate in the Sino-Tibetan dialog, further complicated by the Dalai Lama’s old age. As the prospect of a breakthrough is hardly visible, the old confrontation seems to be the most probable scenario: Beijing does not make concessions to the Tibetan issue, while Dharamsala continues to adhere to tactics of pressure on the Chinese government through the internationalization of the “Tibetan issue”.