Word: stage
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...China has become more powerful, it has boosted its leverage on the world stage. Many nations, especially neighbors, are now reluctant to cross Beijing. India, which once welcomed Tibetan exiles, including the Dalai Lama himself, now restrains Tibetan protesters. Nepal has done the same, sometimes brutally, and has indicated that it will clear and secure the Everest route for the Olympic torch - thereby possibly pre-empting anti-China protests. Twenty years ago, when China was weaker, a boycott might have been possible, since other countries could ignore Beijing. Today, the world needs China, with all its warts, to help solve...
...Still, both sides may have an incentive to find a bridge over the gulf that separates them. In the short term, Beijing sees the Olympics as its symbolic entry onto the world stage, and is wary of any developments that could mar its triumph. In the longer term, Beijing needs to contain and manage those centrifugal forces that threaten to break off any part of China. Those concerns, as well as an overall desire to maintain social stability as growing inflation raises the specter of economic turbulence, weigh heavily against the Chinese leadership opting for the sort of brutal crackdown...
...Whether Beijing is prepared to recognize it at this stage or not, the Dalai Lama may represent its best hope of stabilizing Tibet without a bloodbath - persuading those Tibetans now tilting at the Chinese presence in their midst to voluntarily stand down. And, perhaps sensing that more militant Tibetans are embarking on a no-win path of confrontation, the Dalai Lama is, in fact, moving to restrain them. Threatening to resign his political post if the confrontations persist, he told his followers that "violence is against human nature." Clearly troubled by the images of Tibetans in Lhasa responding...
...were a doctor of the mind pledged to examine things only as they are, to come up with a clear diagnosis and then to suggest a practical response-is one of the things that have made the current Dalai Lama such a startling and tonic figure on the world stage. There are few monks in any tradition who speak so rarely about faith while rejecting anything that has been disproved by scientific inquiry; on his desk at home, he keeps a plastic model of the brain with detachable parts so that he can take it apart, put it together again...
...authorities and declared to be the 15th Dalai Lama, a Beijing puppet, will not be the true "Dalai Lama of Tibetan hearts." As practical and flexible as ever and holding to the Buddhist ideas of impermanence and nonattachment, he told me as far back as 1996, "At a certain stage, the Dalai Lama institution will disappear. But that does not mean that Tibetan Buddhist culture will cease. No!" Most Tibetans, however, cannot abide the thought of a future without their traditional leader...