Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion

Simultaneously my favourite and least favourite televisual experience. This is an incredible collection of film and recollections from people live in Heaven and who have been through hell. Watching this will affect you. It's long, but captivating and it's telling what may well end up being be the most important story of this century.

Some scenes are disturbing but necessary, and balanced with scenes of the beautiful side of the country and society.

If you thought what happened to the Native Americans or slaves or victims of the Natzi or Stalin regeims was bad, learn about how Chinese soldiers treat Tibetan Buddhist monks (men, women and children) and how the Buddhist focus on compassion keeps the population alive in the face of decades of abuse and oppression.

Chinese officials put their point of view: you can understand both, but the Chinese speak with belief, the Tibetans with Understanding. Ironically, the Chinese act in a 'religious' way (think Crusades) as they stamp out the 'religion' and culture of the last place on the planet with an autonomous culture that is no threat to the planet or any other culture.

Buddhists attain non-violence by education. China thinks it is modern, but like a school-yard bully it doesn't understand how desperately it needs education. After seeing this you'll want to help China learn how to be open, so that it understands how incredibly wrong it is about Tibet (and how it treats its own people).

If you have relations in China - find a way to help them see this. Help them learn and spread the word. Educate.

As this movie said, the practice of Tibetan Buddhism is allowed nowadays as long as they do no harm to the authority of Chinese government. A number of Tibetans were beaten and tortured because they want independence. Do you think seeking independence is right of freedom under any political authority? There is no evidence to show that Tibetans are 2nd class citizen in Mainland China. Yes, a number of Tibetans were bad treated. The reason is they want independence.

Is/was Tibet an independent country? Please give us evidence before you simply say YES. No country in this world ever recognizes that Tibet is/was an independent country. This is the truth. Those who think Tibet was an independent country before 1951 need a history book. Yes, Tibetan and ethnic Han speak different language and have different customs. But it is very normal nowadays for different ethnic groups to live under a same political authority.

Chinese government did a lot of bad things to Tibetans. Not only Tibetans but also other ethnic groups (mainly Han race) need democracy and freedom under China's communism authority. Seeking independence do no good to this cause. Even Dalai Lama does not want independence of Tibet now.

This film does a good job at depicting the atrocities following the Chinese invasion of Tibet, making a case for the cultural and spiritual autonomy of its people. It depicts the inflexible and arrogant Chinese position, even giving Chinese officials some uncommented screen time, obviously based on the assumption that they need no help in discrediting themselves (and being quite right about that). And it shows the complicity of the rest of the world, either through collaboration or inaction, with what is happening in Tibet. If you know little about Tibet, and want to get a decent summary of the contemporary Western position on this topic (not necessarily the official position of Western governments, perhaps, but the "politically correct" stand in educated Western society), you will find it in this film.

The thing that bothers me a little about this film is its unquestioning sympathy for the Dalai Lama and the former system of government in Tibet. A segment of the movie depicts the pre-invasion Tibet as something almost like paradise, citing the childhood memories of several old Tibetans in support of how harmonious and beautiful life was before the Chinese came and ruined it all.

Another perspective, which does not get much mention except in the otherwise rather distorted and hardly trustworthy statements of those Chinese officials, is that religious feudalism reigned pre-invasion Tibet, and the Dalai Lama is one of the last feudal lords still alive (along with, perhaps, the Saudi kings)---and that what escalated the situation to the point at which the Dalai Lama fled the country was not the invasion itself, but their subsequent land reforms (like those of most Communist regimes of the last century), which meant that the economical basis for the significant idle part of the society (the monks) suddenly disappeared.

As difficult as it is to find much sympathy for the Chinese, it is, from a modern secular perspective, not really easy to side with the Dalai Lama, either. I suppose it's main "selling point" to Westerners would be that the Tibetan people want him and whatever government he'd stand for, and that is certainly a key point. If it is, in fact, the case. It would have been interesting to dig a little deeper into this, and, for instance, ask some of those farmers that ended up owning the land that they had been working on after the land reforms. If the Chinese are right, then there should be lots of them who, after benefiting from their "liberation", would say many good things about it. Otherwise there wouldn't be, and we would hear other stories from those who now own the land, or perhaps find that the land was turned over to CCP functionaries.

However, instead of "following the land", we get to hear that story about how the PRC picked their own Panchen Lama, after finding the one that the Dalai Lama identified as the "right" incarnation unsatisfactory. The movie comments that it's strange for a Communist leader to nominate the incarnation of a Lama, and that is certainly correct. But, hey, it's strange either way because, and let us not lose sight of that, all this reincarnation stuff is superstitious nonsense.

After all, we should remember that even in former times identifying the next Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama was a highly political affair, not the least reason for which was the fact that it was connected with considerable economical and political benefits for the family and the people around them. All the spiritual stuff is a story that was told to the largely uneducated masses to justify the system, much as it was in medieval Europe. But that should be no reason for us, or our film makers, to buy into it, too.

As is common these days in the West, all these claims of "spirituality" are just unquestioningly accepted, to the point where some guy compares the insights about the "outside world" due to modern science to whatever those Tibetan monks figured out about the "inside world" during the ample time while they were not, unlike the vast majority of the people in that society, toiling the fields. Yeah, right.

So in summary, a pretty decent intro to modern Tibetan history and the atrocities committed by the Chinese, which could use a little less of a Richard-Gere-perspective and a bit more of what you'd find in, e.g., Melvyn Goldstein's "A History of Modern Tibet". If the movie whets people's appetite to learn more about this tragedy in our times, and read a book like Goldstein's to do so, it would be a significant contribution.

This is a great film & deserves wider acceptance.

About Tibetan Independence, I was very fortunate to spend several days at the Taipei National Museum in 1971, which had 2 rooms of exquisite Tibetan artifacts, listed as "Tributes from the Rulers of Tibet to the (Chinese) Emperor".

It was very clear that Tibet was both ruled by its' own King(s), but also that ~(naturally) the influence & importance of a vast neighbour empire was acknowledged. A bit like the USSR & (say) Czechoslavakia during the Cold War. Let's not split hairs here - Tibet had a culture and it is being destroyed.

Watch this film & Google on Tibetan News & make up your own mind.

One reviewer from Canada points out the "spiritual bias" in this documentary but that should surprise no one. True, the platform of the film is pro-Dalai Lama and anti-PRC in perspective but I did not share the impression that pre-invasion Tibet was ever portrayed as a paradise. The fact is, in spite of the silly protestations of another reviewer who, in badly written English, chimes that no government has recognized Tibet, which smacks of a sneaky PRC propaganda insertion. But, let's not lose sight of the film while we're sounding our favorite political war drum. If you want serious ethnography, read Mel Goldstein's books and if you want a snapshot view of the plight of Tibet and the netherworld into which Tibetan ex-pats have been shoved, this is the one. Maybe I'm getting senile but I labored under no impression that this documentation of the Chinese invasion and occupation of a region wherein lived people of a distinctive language and culture would be wholly objective or dispassionate in scope. My treat was seeing some marvelous footage of some of the most barren places on the planet and some pictures of what has been going on. Like any other viewer, I did not enjoy the graphic depiction of abuse and torture but, in my view, it needed to be shown.

As one who loves to read the reviews as much as seeing the film, I must observe that most were impressed by what they saw. One could go on and on about the politics of it all, but from the standpoint of art, I think this little film was a winner. See it for yourself and decide.