The Ambitious 69th “Bhutan Abbot” of Sakya Ngor Monastery

Ngawang Yontan Gyatso (1902 – 1963) the disrobed abbot



By: Toby Lee

More than 50 years ago, before the practice of the enlightened Dharma protector Dorje Shugden was banned by the Tibetan leadership in 1996, there existed an extremely ambitious and gifted, but stubborn and destructive monk who courted the support of the Bhutan palace. As the 69th abbot of Sakya Ngor Monastery, he distinguished himself by creating a strong dislike for Dorje Shugden and the teachings of Lama Tsongkhapa, leaving a trail of schism and division behind him.

This was at a time when Dorje Shugden and Lama Tsongkhapa were popularly represented by the Gelugpa stalwart H.H. Kyabje Pabongka Rinpoche Dechen Nyingpo (1878–1941) who was not only highly respected by the monastic community but also the lay people of the Himalayas.

As a result of Ngawang Yontan Gyatso’s ambitious but sectarian actions, Dorje Shugden publications were destroyed and his practice halted at many Sakya and other monasteries that Ngawang Yontan Gyatso had control over or had underhandedly leaned on.

Ironically, his sectarian actions were justified by the Gaden Phodrang (Tibetan government) which had been established in the 17th Century by the 5th Dalai Lama, who had not only fought with the Sakyas but also banned the printing of Gorampa’s writings. Gorampa, as the 6th Abbot of Sakya Ngor Monastery, had been the fiercest critic of Lama Tsongkhapa in his time. Even the Mahasiddha and erudite master Je Tsongkhapa had his strong critics. With the passage of time, we can see that Tsongkhapa’s view and teachings really expanded globally, silencing his critics.

A statue of the 5th Dalai Lama (right) in the Jokhang Temple


Family influence makes a stubborn boy the Abbot of Ngor

As a child, Ngawang Yontan Gyatso is described as being intelligent and witty but also distressingly stubborn and independent, almost notoriously so. For example, it is recorded that when they were studying with their teacher (Ngawang Yontan Gyatso’s uncle, Lama Gendun), his distant cousin Dezhung Rinpoche never got beatings over the head with his teacher’s slipper, but Ngawang Yontan Gyatso did.

Through the influence of his family who were relatively well-to-do and could count amongst them a number of respected lamas of rank, he was accepted as a candidate from Khangsar Labrang for the abbotship of Ngor Monastery. Subsequently, he became its 69th Abbot. Unlike some of the other Ngor abbots who ascended the throne due to their hard work, studies and personal achievements, Ngawang Yontan Gyatso ascended the Ngor Abbot’s throne due to wealth and family position which is usually a recipe for disaster.

Ngor Monastery is one of the three main monasteries of the Sakya tradition. It was established by Ngorchen Kunga Zangpo (1382-1444) who is considered one of the Six Ornaments of Tibet due to his many written works (almost 200 titles), teachings, practice, and the monastic institution he established.

Ngor abbots were originally selected primarily for their spiritual attainments, without regard for familial ties or regional origins. However, in the following century after its founding, a few eminent abbots had amassed a great fortune, some of which was kept after their deaths by family members. This became the seed from the 16th century onward for the three oldest Labrangs of Ngor to control the abbotship of the monastery.

The present day Ngor Monastery located in India


A student disrespects his lama

Ngawang Yontan Gyatso may have been known for his intelligence, but respect for those senior to him was not counted amongst his positive qualities.

His main teacher, Dampa Rinpoche, was not a permanent resident of Khangsar Labrang and instead lived in places such as Sakya and Tanag. The lamas in permanent residence at Ngor were Zhalu Kuzhang Lama and Khensur Ngawang Khyenrab Jampal Nyingpo, who had been the 60th abbot of Ngor Monastery.

Ngawang Yontan Gyatso, unsurprisingly, failed to get along with this older abbot and this was the cause of many later problems. In the second year of his term, Ngawang Yontan Gyatso’s behavior had so disappointed the senior master that he was even temporarily removed from his abbotship. It appears that Ngawang Yontan Gyatso’s involvement in religion was for position, power, prestige and wealth. He was even disgracefully removed from the prestigious and sacred position of the abbot of Ngor Monastery. Being removed is a big disgrace.

Dezhung Rinpoche reported:

“The young zhabs-drung [now abbot] soon demonstrated not only a native intelligence and wit, but also a distressing stubbornness and independence. He soon quarrelled with the aged Khang-gsar mKhan-po. As a result of this conflict, he withdrew from the Khang-gsar Lama-palace and set up his own separate ecclesiastical palace.”

So, not only had Ngawang Yontan Gyatso disrespected a senior and older former abbot, but had gone so far as to leave the monastery to set up his own residence.

Sakya Monastery located in Tibet, China.


Spreading sectarianism

Having founded a residence of his own, Ngawang Yontan Gyatso now needed to find some way of funding his activities. In order to obtain patronage to boost his prestige at Ngor, he set out for Bhutan where he attracted the attention of the King who lavished upon him considerable wealth. He soon became the wealthiest of all the “ecclesiastical princes” of Ngor and became popularly known as the “Drukpa Khenpo” (“Bhutan abbot”). Following his success in Bhutan, he returned to Ngor where he remained a controversial figure.

Kyabje Pabongka Rinpoche Dechen Nyingpo in his younger days

Ngawang Yontan Gyatso also began to manifest intense dislike for the enlightened protector Dorje Shugden, represented by the very popular Gelug lama Kyabje Pabongka Rinpoche Dechen Nyingpo (1878–1941) at that time. Pabongka Rinpoche is the one who, in 1921 at Chuzang Hermitage near Lhasa, gave a historic 24-day exposition on the Lam Rim, or “stages of the path” that was attended by some 700 people. Many monks came from the three major monasteries in Lhasa (Ganden, Sera and Drepung), and many more traveled weeks from the Central Province of Tsang, and from as far away as Amdo and Kham just to receive teachings from Kyabje Pabongka Rinpoche. This included about 30 lamas and reincarnations of lamas, as well as many lay people.

Unlike many other lamas who became famous for their scholarship or practice, Ngawang Yontan Gyatso is perhaps best remembered for his crusade against Dorje Shugden. The writings that exist about him are predominantly related to his anti-Shugden activities, and his systematic targeting of monasteries and monks to dismantle the practice in and around Tibet. In the summer of the third and last year of his abbacy (1935), during the time of the rainy-season retreat, Ngawang Yontan Gyatso began to court open conflict with Dorje Shugden practitioners. He began by sharply criticizing the monks of Khangsar Labrang’s own community, calling them “thieves and breakers of sacred tantric commitments”.

He then set out for Kham where he embarked upon a crusade against Dorje Shugden, destroying images and ritual objects at Damthog Monastery. Around 1948, when his cousin and former classmate Dezhung Rinpoche was at Sakya on pilgrimage, he traveled to Dezhung Rinpoche’s monastery of Tharlam.

Gathering the monks together, Ngawang Yontan Gyatso told them of his crusade against Dorje Shugden and said that Dorje Shugden was not a protector of religion, but an evil spirit who would cause the doctrine to perish. He told the monks of Tharlam that in his previous incarnation as Phankhang Ngawang Kunga Tenpai Gyaltsen, this deity had caused him great obstacles and had caused his early death at the age of 36. He also elicited from the Tharlam monks their agreement to destroy the mask of this deity the next morning. Ngawang Yontan Gyatso’s actions showed his blatant disrespect for the previous holy Sakya Throneholders who had in their learning and wisdom installed Dorje Shugden within the Sakya tradition in the first place. But then, Ngawang Yonten Gyatso never had a penchant for respecting his seniors and the learned masters of the past, and was determined to exercise power and control in his focus to gain fame.

Hearing such words being uttered by someone of position, the monks were made sufficiently fearful and, although they were afraid of reprisals from the so-called angered deity, they felt duty-bound to follow the Ngor Abbot’s wishes.

Hence the following morning, after extensive prayers, Ngawang Yontan Gyatso led a procession of monks into the Protector Chapel. They removed a revered mask of Dorje Shugden from its shrine and carried it outside. Ngawang Yontan Gyatso then threw it into a fire, before drawing a pistol and shooting the mask several times. After the mask had been destroyed, he re-entered the Protector Chapel and removed all ritual articles associated with Dorje Shugden. He then had the monks carry the items down to the banks of the Kyichu River and hurl them into the waters.

The 342-mile Kyichu River in Lhasa


Reviving the Dharma out of spite

Ngawang Yontan Gyatso’s intense dislike for all things Dorje Shugden also manifested in the form of animosity towards the Gelug lama Kyabje Pabongka Rinpoche. Ngawang Yontan Gyatso claimed that in 1940, a year before Pabongka Rinpoche’s death, Pabongka Rinpoche carried out “sectarian machinations” by voicing to a Chinese Kuomintang governor his displeasure at the fact “Uncle Jamyang Gyaltsen” had published Gorampa’s works. He even claimed that Pabongka Rinpoche had criticized the exposition of the Thirteen Great Indian Buddhist Works.

“Uncle Jamyang Gyaltsen” here refers to Gapa Khenpo Jamyang Chokyi Gyaltsen (also known as Khenpo Jamgyal; 1870-1940) who played a pivotal role in the preservation and propagation of Gorampa Sonam Senge’s teachings. Gorampa had been the 6th Abbot of Ngor Monastery, and a contemporary of Lama Tsongkhapa as well as his biggest critic. His writings were banned by the Central Tibetan government who, for centuries, had ordered they be held under lock and key, outlawing their reproduction.

In claiming that Pabongka Rinpoche continued to be against Gorampa’s works, Ngawang Yontan Gyatso accomplished a number of things:

Kyabje Pabongka Rinpoche was a tremendous proliferator of Dorje Shugden’s practice

  1. He fanned the flames of sectarianism by claiming that Gelugpas (as represented by Kyabje Pabongka Rinpoche) were against the teachings of a Sakya lama (as represented by Gorampa). Ngawang Yontan Gyatso was highly sectarian as the evidence shows.
  2. He fanned people’s hatred against Dorje Shugden, just because Dorje Shugden was being heavily promoted by Pabongka Rinpoche. If Ngawang Yontan Gyatso could succeed in painting Pabongka Rinpoche as sectarian and therefore someone to be avoided, then anything else he propagated (i.e. Dorje Shugden) should also be avoided.
  3. This was an opportune moment to remind the laity that the Central Tibetan government, which was predominantly Gelug, had banned the teachings of a Sakya lama for centuries. The Gelugs were a convenient target now that he had gained the support of the Bhutanese palace because, whilst the Sakyas were friendly with Bhutan, the Bhutanese viewed the Gelugs as enemies stemming from the time of the 5th Dalai Lama’s Gaden Phodrang government.
  4. As the 69th Abbot of Ngor, by defending the legacy of the 6th Ngor Abbot, it would legitimize his other actions and reinforce his power base, therefore helping him garner support for his crusade against Dorje Shugden.
  5. Thus for Ngawang Yontan Gyatso, it suited him politically to be on the side of Gorampa and against Dorje Shugden and Pabongka Rinpoche. It was pure revenge which does not reflect well on himself. His vengeful tactics and sectarianism disqualify him as a spiritual master that can be relied upon.


An unremarkable end

Ngawang Yontan Gyatso eventually disrobed, took on a wife and lived the life of a “holy madman”. Even though he was a supposed high lama, he had not gain any sort of discipline. Even after a lifetime of monk-hood and his position as the abbot of such a prestigious monastery, he had no control over his desires, something which led him to disrobe and take on wife like an ordinary layman. Some time between 1959 and 1960, he was imprisoned by the Chinese, telling his remaining disciples, “I am going there, and will die after being tortured. If any of you have real faith and trust in me, come along with me!”

Ngawang Yontan Gyatso died in the early 1960s at about age 60 in a large prison near Siling (Xining), China, which held thousands of prisoners. His karma from persecuting others and destroying their religion finally caught up with him. Unlike other lamas who practice compassion, what Ngawang Yontan Gyatso practiced was the opposite. Genuine lamas make sure that their students do not suffer unnecessarily, but Ngawang Yontan Gyatso invited his disciples to join him in prison to suffer. During his death, he showed no extraordinary signs befitting a high lama, such as ‘thukdam‘ or death meditation, during which a lama remains in the deepest state of meditation when all bodily functions have stopped without physical decomposition occurring. There was a clear absence of rainbows, auspicious singing by celestial beings, or slight earth tremors that usually mark the birth and/or the death of a supreme high lama. There were no tears shed either. He died unceremoniously in prison and was never heard from again.

His legacy remains especially evident in Bhutan where, to this day, many people continue to view Gelugpas with suspicion in general, and Dorje Shugden with hatred in particular. Such is the effect Ngawang Yontan Gyatso’s hate has had on the Bhutanese people where centuries later, they continue to dislike Dorje Shugden even though he is deeply rooted in their history via the 4th Zhabdrung Rinpoche Jigme Norbu, the reincarnation of the lama who founded modern-day Bhutan

Fortunately, the younger generation of Bhutanese people are educated, can do research, discern and make their own decisions regarding the sacred practice of Dorje Shugden. Ngawang Yontan Gyatso’s negative legacy is fading. The new literate class of young Bhutanese can see that sectarianism is harmful and that the 4th Zhabdrung Rinpoche who was the highest incarnation in the land of Bhutan practiced and promoted Dorje Shugden. He even composed special prayers to Dorje Shugden as he knew that Dorje Shugden is beneficial for the Bhutanese people. The 4th Zhabdrung Rinpoche must have regarded Dorje Shugden highly in order to compose texts to him. Out of faith for Zhabdrung Rinpoche, there has been a resurgence in Dorje Shugden’s practice among the younger generation of Bhutanese as they can feel the swiftness in the efficacy of his practice. 

Dorje Shugden Tanag is a form of Dorje Shugden commonly practised within the Sakya tradition. Click to enlarge.

Observers will also find it contradictory that someone who was the abbot of a Sakya monastery could leave behind him such a trail of destruction and negativity, because real Sakya practitioners are upholders of Buddha Shakyamuni’s doctrine which can only lead to the development of attainments such as compassion and wisdom. Genuine Sakya masters are saintly and they benefit sentient beings. They never cause sectarian destruction.

Yet, neither wisdom nor compassion is associated with Ngawang Yontan Gyatso and when examining the course of his life, it is easy to see why. When someone can challenge an elderly former abbot of his own monastery, to the point that said abbot would try to remove him, such a negative legacy is no longer surprising. Hence, today, the Abbot of Ngor is mostly remembered for his schismatic campaign against Dorje Shugden; even in anti-Shugden literature, his actions are referred to as a “grudge”, a word one does not often associate with Buddhist lamas and Dharma practitioners.

It is worth noting that for all of Ngawang Yontan Gyatso’s campaigning against Dorje Shugden, Sakya’s reliance on Dorje Shugden continued well into the 20th Century. For example, the 41st Sakya Trizin was often seen engaging in Dorje Shugden pujas while living in the Tibetan refugee community in Buxa, North-East India back in the 1970s. All the high lamas of the four lineages lived in Buxa together and intermingled when they first went into exile back in 1959. It was well known the Sakyas practiced Dorje Shugden including the 41st Sakya Trizin, who later denied it most likely for political correctness at the height of the ban against Shugden. Many times, the high lamas met and shared their lineages together. Senior Gelugpa monks and Sakya monks attest that Dorje Shugden was practiced in Sakya as well as by the 41st Sakya Trizin while in Buxa. They were all in Buxa for a few years before resettling in various parts of India as designated by the Indian government. Similarly, to this day, there remains a Dorje Shugden mural prominently painted on one of the walls of Sakya Monastery in Shigatse.

Hence, if it was Ngawang Yontan Gyatso’s intention to scrub Dorje Shugden’s image and practice off the face of this planet, his own lineage’s continued connection with the deity makes it clear that he was wholly unsuccessful. So if there is one lesson to be learned from the life story of Ngawang Yontan Gyatso, it is how negativity, schism, division and disharmony never pay off in the end.


Relevant readings


A Saint in Seattle; The Life of the Tibetan Mystic Dezhung Rinpoche

Page 31 – 32

Lama Gendun served for about four years as khenpo of the seminary of Jyekundo after Shenga’s departure and was a stout defender of Sakyapa doctrines in local controversies. After that he went to Central Tibet and became head of the small seminary at Ngor. He also traveled widely with the Ngor Khangsar lama Dampa Rinpoche (1876-1953, his teacher and senior classmate under Shenga), receiving many teachings from him, and it was in Tsang at Sakya that he passed away in 1939 or 1940.

Dezhung Rinpoche had been instructed by Gatön to stay with Lama Gendun and was accepted by Lama Gendun as his personal pupil. At this time Lama Gendun had two or three young monks under his personal supervision, including Dezhung Rinpoche and the latter’s distant cousin, the future Ngor Khangsar abbot Ngawang Yontan Gyatso (1902-ca. 1963, Ngor abbot 1933-1936), later known as the “Druk Khenpo.” As a teacher Lama Gendun was so strict that both pupils were afraid of him. Once he asked Dezhung Rinpoche to go to another room and fetch a book and a vase of water. Afraid of some rebuke, Dezhung Rinpoche immediately ran off as requested and rushed back into the room, holding the two objects before him, staring intently into his teacher’s face to try to divine his next wish. In his nervous distraction, he held the vase over the book.

“What are you doing, careless fellow?” said Lama Gendun, snatching the book out of his hands and swatting him over the head with it. “You should never hold something over a book like that!”

Another time, after some mistake, Lama Gendun scolded him sharply, saying, “You a trulku? Hah! Maybe a vulture’s trulku!” But Dezhung Rinpoche never got beatings over the head with his teacher’s slipper, as his more obstinate companion, the future Khangsar abbot Ngawang Yontan Gyatso, Lama Gendun’s nephew, did.

A Saint in Seattle; The Life of the Tibetan Mystic Dezhung Rinpoche, page 31.
Click to enlarge.

A Saint in Seattle; The Life of the Tibetan Mystic Dezhung Rinpoche, page 32.
Click to enlarge.




Page 188 – 189, together with some relevant notes

During this period (ca. 1953-1954), Rinpoche’s distant cousin the Drukpa abbot Ngawang Yontan Gyatso (1902 – ca. 1963), an old classmate of Dezhung Rinpoche from the time of his youthful studies under Shenga and Lama Gendun, and now for many years the ex-abbot of Ngor turned tantrika, also visited Tharlam. He requested Dezhung Rinpoche to record the life story of Ga Lama Jamyang Gyaltsen, saying, “Since Jamgyal Rinpoche was your ‘maternal uncle’ and you studied under him for two years, you should by all means write his biography.” The Drukpa Abbot was a true paternal nephew of Jamgyal, being the son of Jamgyal’s younger brother Skal dga’ (Skal bzang phrin las). He was a well-known and almost notorious figure.

As Dezhung Rinpoche later recalled:

‘Brug pa Mkhan po… was born in Sga in Kham. His family was an old and honorable one, some of whose scions had achieved great prominence as religious figures of the Sakyapa and Nyingmapa sects. His uncle was the famous Sga Lama Jamyang Gyaltsen (1870-1940), the editor of the collected works of Gowo Rabjampa Sonam Sengge (1429-1489). He was related to the ruling houses of Nangchen and Derge. Through the influence of his family and because of his intelligence and wit, he was accepted as a shabdrung of the Khangsar Lama palace of Ngor and proclaimed to be the rebirth of Ngorpa Mkhan po Ngawang Kunga Tenpay Gyaltsen (1863-1899) of the Phan khang Lama palace.712

The young shabdrung soon demonstrated not only a native intelligence and wit, but also a distressing stubbornness and independence. He soon quarrelled with the aged Khang gsar Mkhan po Ngag dbang snying po . As a result of this conflict, he withdrew from the Khang gsar Lama palace and set up his own separate ecclesiastical palace. In order to obtain the wealth necessary to increase his prestige at Ngor, he set out for Bhutan where he attracted the attention of the King of Bhutan, who lavished upon him considerable wealth. He soon was the most wealthy of the ecclesiastical princes of Ngor.

Ngawang Yontan Gyatso, now known as the “Drukpa Khenpo” (“Bhutan abbot”), returned to Ngor and there began a crusade against the protector Rdo rje shugs ldan.713 Still later he returned to Kham and gave up his monk’s vows. Living mainly in Gapa, he was known there as “Lab kha Abbot,” so called from his family home near Tharlam on the opposite side of the Drichu. He is said to have died in the early 1960s in Kham, in Communist imprisonment.

712 – Ngag dbang kun dga’ bstan pa’i rgyal mtshan was the sixty-first abbot of Ngor and his tenure was from 1895 to 1898. During the second year of his term, the senior Khang gsar abbot at that time, Ngag dbang mkhyen rab ‘jam dpal snying po of the Zhwa lu Sku zhang family, was very disappointed at Ngawang Yontan Gyatso’s behavior and succeeded in temporarily removing him from the position of abbot, saying, “I put him up as abbot, and I can take him down!”

713 – According to Dezhung Rinpoche (as recorded in E.G. Smith, unpublished paper “Notes on the History of the Cult of Rdo-rje-shugs-ldan,” Inner Asia Colloquium, July 25, 1963, pp. 7–9), the ‘Brug pa Mkhan po lived as a sort of “holy madman” (chos smyon) and was subject to ecstatic trances in which deities would enter his person. On numerous occasions, when bestowing the initiation of Na ro Mkha’ spyod ma (Naro Kacho Vajrayogini), he would rise and begin dancing and whirling about. He intensely disliked the particular tradition within the Dge lugs pa represented by Pha bong kha pa, and his main wrath was directed against the cult of the protector Rdo rje shugs ldan. Sometimes it seemed as if he were physically struggling with another deity for the possession of his body. That deity was Shugs ldan. As Smith also recorded (pp. 7-8):

It was at Ngor that he began his “war” on Rdo-rje-shugs-ldan. One of the most important mgon-khang of Rdo-rje-shugs-ldan was the rTenmkhar at Ngor. Having made significant gifts to the various politically significant personages and to the monastic community, he assessed the climate to be ripe for the destruction of the mask of Shugs-ldan and the institution of the worship of a rival bstan-srung. His iconoclastic successes at Ngor made him only more eager for more victories against Shugs-ldan, whom, it seems, he actually viewed as a physical enemy.

He set out for Khams where he embarked upon a crusade against this deity. He visited the monastery of ‘Dam thog in Ldan rna and there destroyed the images and ritual objects of this cult. Then he came to Tharlam in about 1948, in the absence of Dezhung Rinpoche (who was at Sakya on pilgrimage). He called the monks together and told them of his crusade against Shugs ldan. He told them that Shugs ldan was not a protector of religion, but that he was an evil spirit who would cause the doctrine to perish. He told them that this deity had caused him great obstacles in his previous incarnation as the Phan khang Ngag dbang kun dga’ bstan pa’i rgyal mtshan (1863-1899), and that Shugs ldan had then actually caused his early death at age thirty-six. He proposed to destroy, if they would agree, the mask of this deity the following morning. Many of the monks feared the consequences of so provocative an act, and they were afraid of reprisals from the angered deity. But being the disciples of ‘Brug pa Mkhan po, they felt bound to follow his wishes. The next morning, after prolonged prayers, he led a procession of monks into the Protector’s Chapel (mgon khang). He took down a revered mask of the deity from its shrine and carried it outside. He then hurled it into a fire, and then drew a pistol and shot at the mask numerous times. After the mask had been destroyed, he reentered the Protector’s Chapel and removed all the ritual articles associated with that deity. These he had the monks carry down to the banks of the ‘Bri chu and hurl into the river.

After this, he reconsecrated the chapel to the deity Beg tse. He defied Shugs ldan to take revenge. When nothing happened, the frightened monks lost their faith in Shugs ldan and accepted the new protective deity.

A Saint in Seattle; The Life of the Tibetan Mystic Dezhung Rinpoche, page 188.
Click to enlarge.

A Saint in Seattle; The Life of the Tibetan Mystic Dezhung Rinpoche, page 189.
Click to enlarge.



Further reading

Lungta 14: Aspects of Tibetan History Spring 2001
Published by Amnye Machen Institute
Guest Editor: Roberto Vitali
Editor: Tashi Tsering
[Click to download a PDF copy]

Please support this website by making a donation.
Your contribution goes towards supporting
our work to spread Dorje Shugden across the world.

Related Topics: , ,

Share this article
43 total comments on this postSubmit yours
  1. I am sure Sakyas had many holy and genuine lamas, But this Ngawang Yontan Gyatso must be one of the fake, greedy, power-hungry lama of the Sakyas sect. What a shame it is. I am sure after dying in prison, he went to hell.

    What a fanatic Ngawang Yontan Gyatso was.


  2. Even this thangka of Ngawang Yontan Gyatso looks distorted with a big head, no neck and small body. He looks like some sort of imp. Even in this thangka of him, you can feel his negative energy coming out. His face and mustache is really ugly.


  3. This shameful Ngawang Yontan Gyatso after being a monk for a lifetime disrobes as he couldn’t control his desires and married a wife. He was abbot of Ngor Monastery and the seniors dethroned him because he was a very bad abbot with political motives. He was rude and disrespectful to the elders as Dezhung Rinpoche said. Because his career suffered due to all his intrigues, he disrobed and lost his reputation therefore he pretended to be a ‘mad yogi’ wandering around the countryside acting crazy. That didn’t work. Later he was imprisoned and demanded his ‘genuine’ students to follow him to prison and suffer with him. He had no affection for his students. What a shameful person he turned out to be. Totally a sectarian Sakya ‘Lama’.


  4. Ngawang Yontan Gyatso wanted only money and power. Seeing how popular Pabongka Rinpoche was, he must have been very jealous. Therefore, he started to spread rumours about Dorje Shugden so Pabongka Rinpoche’s popularity would decrease because Pabongka Rinpoche was a Dorje Shugden practitioner.

    He claimed he died very young in his previous life because Dorje Shugden created obstacles for him and caused him to die at the age of 36. This didn’t make sense at all, if the law of karma applies, one dies because of one’s karma, not because of spirits. If a spirit can cause a lama to die, it is maybe because the lama is not attained to protect himself from a spirit or it is his karma catching up on him.

    The schism created by Ngawang Yontan Gyatso had caused disharmony among different lineages, some people might have lost faith in Dorje Shugden and not practicing anymore, some might spread the rumours to more people creating even more negative influence and there is a risk of losing a pure lineage if this continues. In the end, Ngawang Yontan Gyatso died in the prison with no sign of attainment. Greed and jealousy lead us to the wrong path regardless of who we are, we have to be careful of our motivation so we don’t end up in a bad place.

    • This make absolute sense. If Dorje Shugden can cause his death at 36, then Ngawang Yontan Gyatso is not attained and subjected to his own karma. And then he goes on to create more negative karma ☠️👻As proven at his death, no special signs of his being anything but ordinary. Such arrogance to start his own monastery after removal as the 61st Abbot by the older former Abbot. And to destroy the Dorje Shugden’s mask and prayer items without permission at Dzehung Rinpoche’s monastery when he was away.










    30 Chinese NGOs all set to work in Nepal
    Kathmandu, July 30


    India uses rumor of Dalai Lama’s ill health to mend China ties
    YUJI KURONUMA, Nikkei staff writer
    August 07, 2018 17:02 JST
    With Tibet’s strategic value waning, India has moderated its stance.




    Trump and Allies Seek End to Refugee Status for Millions of Palestinians


    Tibetans ready to be part of China: Dalai Lama
    Indo-Asian News Service


  11. Dear Dalai Lama,













  12. Murderers, rapists, rabble-rousers and troublemakers! If you need protection, you will find refuge under the Crooked Tibetan Administration. For a fee, you will get carte blanche to exploit who and what you like. And with hundreds of years of experience under their belt in protecting your kind, you can be rest assured that under the Crooked Tibetan Administration, it will be business as usual for you!

    Tibetan disunity not in India’s interest
    John S. Shilshi
    Updated: August 7, 2018, 11:00 AM


    JUSTICE MARKANDEY KATJU (RETD) | 12 August, 2018
    The more important question is whether Chinese rule has benefited Tibet.
    The writer is a former judge of the Supreme Court of India

  15. It is all over the Indian media how the Dalai Lama insulted Prime Minister Pandit Nehru. How dare the Dalai Lama insult the very person who allowed him and his people to come to India in 1959 and grow fat and build their golden temples TAX FREE.

  16. Not all lamas are holy, whether in the past or present. This lama called Ngawang Yontan Gyatso was full of jealousy and greed. At that time, Pabongka Rinpoche was very famous, he was very jealous of Pabongka Rinpoche so he started to spread rumours about Dorje Shugden hoping that people would not go to Pabongka Rinpoche.

    His action of destroying Dorje Shugden publications was supported by the Gaden Phodrang, the then Tibetan government. IT is very similar to how the CTA imposed the Dorje Shugden ban. It looks like the Tibetan government has the tradition of mixing religion with politics.

    Ngawang Yontan Gyatso was very disrespectful and arrogant, later, he disrobed and married a woman. Even though his behaviour was bad, the Gaden Phodrang did not say a single word to warn the public or do anything to protect the public. If something is not to their advantage, the Tibetan government would not say or do anything. Again, this is very similar to the CTA, Recently, so many lamas were involved in sex scandals but the CTA is not saying or doing anything.

    Tibetan government has never been efficient, they are not able to run a country. Will the Tibet cause be successful? I don’t think so.

  17. Why does Bhutan’s lama Dzongsar Kyentse Rinpoche behave and dress in a way that makes people lose faith in Buddhism and it’s teachers? 😒

    Dzongsar kyentse tattoo




  19. This is a typical example of how Dorje Shugden ban is a result from one’s greed for power, money and fame. This lama is not even a real lama. he got his fame and power all because of his family and he did not do anything to earn it. Then, he proceed to harm the pure lineage of Dorje Shugden by simply putting a ban on it and gave a really shitty reasoning. He do not care about the lineage holders, the monks, the monasteries on how they will feel and the consequences of his actions.

    He is no real lama. He is not even Buddhist.

  20. It is bewildering that His Holiness the Dalai Lama mentioned that he had known of sexual abuse by Buddhist teachers since the 1990s, yet nothing was done to reprimand these Buddhist teachers. After all, such abuses inflict substantial damage to the reputation of Tibetan Buddhism as a whole as compared to smaller issues like Dorje Shugden.

    The Central Tibetan Administration was fervent in executing the Dorje Shugden ban, launching a documentary film, books, expelling monks, splitting monasteries and denying access to hospitals, clinics, schools, retail shops and so forth down to even publishing a hit list of Shugden activists in order to encourage violence and lynch mob. Yet, the damage done to Tibetan Buddhism by these lamas seems to be ignored and hushed. Why is the Central Tibetan Administration not doing more to warn the public about these sex offenders like posting a warning list on their website?

    Dalai Lama knew sex abuse by Buddhist teachers; it’s ‘nothing new’
    Agence France-Presse
    THE HAGUE, Netherlands – The Dalai Lama said Saturday that he had known of sexual abuse by Buddhist teachers since the 1990s and that such allegations were “nothing new.”
    The Tibetan spiritual leader, revered by millions of Buddhists around the world, made the admission during a four-day visit to the Netherlands, where he met on Friday with victims of sexual abuse allegedly committed by Buddhist teachers.
    He was responding to a call from a dozen of the victims who had launched a petition asking to meet him during his trip, part of a tour of Europe.
    “We found refuge in Buddhism with an open mind and heart, until we were raped in its name,” the victims said in their petition.
    “I already did know these things, nothing new,” the Dalai Lama said in response on Dutch public television NOS late Saturday.
    “Twenty-five years ago… someone mentioned about a problem of sexual allegations” at a conference for western Buddhist teachers in Dharamshala, a hill town in northern India, he added.
    The Dalai Lama, 83, lives in exile in Dharamshala.
    People who commit sexual abuse “don’t care about the Buddha’s teaching. So now that everything has been made public, people may concern about their shame,” he said, speaking in English.
    Tseten Samdup Chhoekyapa, a representative of the Tibetan spiritual leader in Europe, said Friday that the Dalai Lama “has consistently denounced such irresponsible and unethical behavior”.
    Tibetan spiritual leaders are due to meet in Dharamshala in November.
    “At that time they should talk about it,” the Dalai Lama said in his televised comments Saturday. “I think the religious leaders should pay more attention.”

  21. His Holiness the Dalai Lama as the Tibetan spiritual leader revered by millions of Buddhists around the world should ensure that the Tibetan spiritual leaders do more to denounce sexual misconduct and abuse of Buddhist teachers as there are far-reaching repercussions and negative impact on Tibetan Buddhism.

    While His Holiness the Dalai Lama has been consistent in reminding practitioners about not practising Dorje Shugden in lieu of the social and religious problems associated with it, despite the unsubstantiated claims or justifications, the indolence of the Central Tibetan Administration in taking action to pacify the public disgust against the misconduct of these Buddhist teachers is severely lacking and appalling. The bias in dealing with these issues related to religious matter has again proven the political nature and conspiracy behind the ban on Dorje Shugden.

    ‘Nothing new’: Dalai Lama says he knew about sex abuse by Buddhist teachers
    The Dalai Lama said Sunday he has known about sexual abuse by Buddhist teachers since the 1990s and that such allegations are “nothing new”.
    Agence France-Presse
    “Twenty-five years ago… someone mentioned about a problem of sexual allegations” at a conference for western Buddhist teachers in Dharamshala, a hill town in Himachal Pradesh, he added.
    The Dalai Lama, 83, lives in exile in Dharamshala.
    Tibetan spiritual leaders are due to meet in Dharamshala in November.

  22. When compared to the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) in Dharamsala that does not take any responsibility for their people like any proper government normally would, China is radically different and liberal for allowing sex abuse victims to express themselves on social media, despite its heavy censorship of the Internet.

    For people like Luo Xixi, whose online postings on sex abuse has garnered millions of views on Chinese social media, said that the government is gradually opening up to the #MeToo movement, a hashtag catch-phrase movement that encourages and empowers sex abuse victims to stand up against sex abuse. In China, those who are convicted of sexual abuse are severely dealt with by the law and laid off from work. The Central Tibetan Administration should take heed of how such cases are dealt with in China and not allow sex abuse perpetrators, especially Tibetan lamas to continue committing their crimes unchecked and without consequence.

    Social media gives sexual abuse victims in China voice to speak out
    By Violet Law, Special to USA Today
    BEIJING – After spending two months late last year nudging university officials to punish her former adviser for trying to pressure her and others into sex, Luo Xixi found unlikely help on China’s heavily censored internet.
    She published a post on Weibo, a popular microblog site similar to Twitter, to detail her own experiences and those of four others with the professor at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In a few hours, her post – initially targeting her less than 10 followers – garnered 3 million views.
    It had swift consequences in the conservative country, too: The professor was fired.
    “I don’t think the officials forgot to block me,” Luo told USA TODAY by phone from her California home, where she moved after graduation to work in software programming. “I can tell the government is trying to open the door to the #MeToo movement, little by little.”
    Sexual abuse scandals aren’t new in China, but they rarely have caused a stir in the past. In this deeply patriarchal society, women who spoke out before were often seen as airing dirty laundry in public and bringing shame upon their family.
    But with Luo’s post – the first by a Chinese to use her real name – the tide has turned and the floodgates to sexual misconduct allegations in China burst open.
    Other Chinese nationals living overseas began posting on various Chinese-language social media sites alleging sexual misconduct by academics. Since late July, every few days new victims and witnesses inside China have aired their accusations on chat groups or personal blogs against such prominent figures in philanthropy, the media, entertainment – including a national variety show host and a monk who heads the country’s Buddhist association.
    State censors have deleted some of the posts, though not before they percolated on cyberspace through re-posts and were amplified by local media reports.
    Much as the so-called Great Firewall has kept sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and most recently Reddit off-limits to China’s netizens, there is a plethora of popular homegrown sites.
    Also, as China’s censorship apparatus is known to employ AI, or artificial intelligence, to automatically block sensitive terms from posts and group chats, some netizens find a way around referring to #MeToo by using homophonic Chinese words that mean “rice rabbit.”
    “China has a contentious internet culture – people in China are used to taking their grievances online,” said Yang Guobing, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in online activism in China. “(Censorship) hasn’t really stopped the determined protesters.”
    For example, in April, five Chinese living abroad, including one on the faculty at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and another teaching at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, posted open letters online demanding that Peking University release specifics of a 1998 investigation into a former professor following their undergraduate classmate’s suicide: They believe he repeatedly raped her. Even as she took her own life, the professor held on to his position for more than a decade and won national recognition.
    They distanced themselves from the #MeToo movement knowing that Chinese officials often are quick to crack down on organized actions.
    “Before I came forward, I told our classmates we shouldn’t hitch ourselves to any movement or political demand,” the Wesleyan professor Wang Ao wrote on one of his blogs. “I tend to think I’m just an outsider and volunteer.”
    Following the recent wave of allegations, however, a few of the accused ended up apologizing online. After well-known environmentalist Feng Yongfeng was accused of harassing several women, he posted his mea culpa on WeChat, a social media-cum-messaging app.
    And the fallout has been particularly swift for professors identified as perpetrators – all were let go or resigned from their jobs.
    The latest to face consequences is Xu Gang, associate professor of East Asian studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. On at least two Chinese-language social media sites, Wang publicized his female colleagues’ accusations against Xu’s sexual harassment dating back two decades. He left his tenured position earlier this month.
    Meanwhile, Luo says she now embraces #MeToo, as she’s since realized the term is a rallying cry that resonates with the Chinese.
    “So more people can come forward,” she said. “So they know they’re not alone.”



    Should one be truthful about Islam when making pronouncements about it?
    September 20, 2018 Hugh Fitzgerald

  24. Transcript: Dalai Lama is a Racist Nazi

    Dalai Lama is a piece of shit and a disgusting scumbag. It is, it is insane this cunt comes to Europe and tells us that we should not accept more refugees. Is he fucking retarded? It is amazing, like you don’t expect from people like, like those to be Nazis and to support all the right. It’s just insane a spiritual leader is a fucking Nazi dude. Europe needs more refugees, way more than we already have. Do you understand? And this degenerate says that we should send refugees back to where they came from and that we should help the countries of the refugees. His suggestions are, it’s obvious, like obviously we should help the countries of the, of the refugees, of their origin, but we should not send anyone back. We need more refugees in Europe and we should not deport anyone. We should give money to the refugees so they can stay in Europe and live here. What this Dalai Lama is suggesting is very inhumane, that’s all what I wanted to say. Hopefully in future we will get more migrants in Europe. Hopefully we can help more people. Let’s hope, let’s hope for the better.

  25. The issue of Indian resentment towards the Tibetan refugees living on Indian soil is nothing new. The Tibetans have built comfortable lives for themselves in India and enjoy many privileges including exemption from paying tax. All of this is done without Tibetans showing genuine concern for the less fortunate in their host country.

    The story below, which took place over 24 years ago, is a reflection of how fragile the Tibetan situation is in India. When a Tibetan murdered an Indian following a dispute, chaos ensued, and the Dalai Lama had to consider moving out of Dharamsala. Tensions between the Indian and Tibetan community have not normalised and remain high in the area even until today.

    Hate campaign shatters calm of Dalai Lama
    TIM MCGIRK in New Delhi | Wednesday 11 May 1994 00:02
    THE Dalai Lama, the spiritual and political leader of Tibet, has threatened to move the headquarters of his government-in-exile from Dharamsala, in the Himalayas of northern India, after two local politicians incited Indians to go on a rampage against Tibetan refugees.
    The calm of Dharamsala, the forested retreat where the Dalai Lama and 8,000 other Tibetan monks and refugees have been living since 1960, was shattered on 22 April when an Indian youth, who belonged to a caste of shepherds known as the gaddis, was stabbed to death by a Tibetan in a fight which developed over an India versus Pakistan cricket match on television.
    During the funeral Krishan Kapoor, a politician belonging to the rightwing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), yanked the shroud off the corpse, reached into the cadaver’s open stomach, pulled out a length of intestine, and held it high. ‘This is what the Tibetans have done]’ he yelled.
    The mourners went berserk. Shouting ‘Death to the Dalai Lama]’ and ‘Long Live Deng Xiaoping]’ the mob stormed the compound of the Tibetan government-in-exile, smashed windows, set fires and destroyed furniture. They then looted Tibetan shops and beat up refugees.
    Not to be outdone by Mr Kapoor, the rival Congress politician, a shrill ex-princess named Chandresh Kumari, helped circulate a petition calling for the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans to get out of India. The Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, was abroad during these events, but in a statement he said: ‘To avoid a conflict becoming a major problem in the future, it is best that I move out of Dharamsala. I am very, very sad that an individual incident has, unfortunately, been allowed to be manipulated by local politicians and this makes it serious.’ He mentioned moving to Bangalore, in southern India, which would mean dismantling the government-in-exile’s offices, Tibetan medicine centres, libraries, monasteries and schools. In all, more than 100,000 Tibetan refugees are scattered around the country.
    In goading the gaddis against the Tibetans, both Mr Kapoor and Ms Kumari are aiming to pick up support from the poor but numerous shepherds’ community. Even before the stabbing, the gaddis’ resentment against the refugees was high. They blame them for driving up land prices and envy the prosperity of some Tibetan shopowners.
    One recent pamphlet warned: ‘If you Tibetans do not leave Dharamsala by 25 July, we will bomb you out.’

    Hate campaign shatters calm of Dalai Lama

  26. A Plot to Murder the Dalai Lama

    Deputy Chief Minister of Karnataka, South India, says there is a plot to murder the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

    Link to the original video:

  27. A plot to murder the Dalai Lama by a Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) terrorist named Kausar was recently uncovered. Kausar planned to cause the Dalai Lama’s demise and blow up Buddhist temples in the Indian State of Karnataka as revenge for the attacks on Rohingya Muslims by some Buddhists in Myanmar.

    Although Kausar’s plans are appalling and cannot be justified, it is a reminder that the Dalai Lama as a well-known Buddhist personality has a moral obligation to discourage religious persecution in any form. This even includes the discrimination experienced by Dorje Shugden practitioners.

    Bengaluru: JMB terrorists targeted Buddhist temples in Karnataka?
    Tue, Oct 2 2018 01:46:48 PM
    Daijiworld Media Network – Bengaluru (MS)
    Bengaluru, Oct 2: Explosive information about the plans of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) terrorist Kausar alias Muneer Sheikh alias Mohammed Jahidul Islam (38) has been unearthed in which he had targeted to blow up the Buddhist temples of the state.
    Earlier in the National Investigation Agency (NIA) investigation, it came to light that Kausar had planned to plant a bomb at the programme of Buddhist leader Dalai Lama that was held in the month of August at Ramanagara. Dalai Lama had participated in the programme that was held on August 13 at the Dalai Lama Institute of Higher Education, which is situated at the Bengaluru – Mysuru road. Kausar was arrested by NIA on August 7, barely six days before the programme.
    With regard to this information, the top officials of the CID department have held a meeting on Monday, October 1 and it was decided to conduct a separate investigation of this issue, as per the information given by home minister.
    It was also decided to gather information to know whether Kausar had visited the sites of important Buddhist temples in the state like Bailukuppe Tibetan Camp at Kushalnagar in Kodagu, Kollegal and the camp at Mundagod of Uttara Kannada district.
    It is confirmed from the interrogation that Kausar had planned to conduct acts of sabotage and explosions, targeting the Buddhists living in India, as a revenge to the attacks on Rohingya Muslims by the Buddhists in Myanmar. In addition, the investigating officers have also said that Kausar, who had lived in and around Bengaluru from 2014, had hatched a plot to kill Dalai Lama.
    NIA officials had arrested an accomplice of Kausar in the case of Bodh Gaya bombings. It is also confirmed that the JMB terrorists had planned in Kerala to carry out acts of sabotage in the state of Karnataka. It is learnt that a special team will be sent to Kerala also to know Kausar’s link there.
    One accomplice of Kausar still absconding
    NIA has so far arrested seven accused in the Bodh Gaya explosion case. However, Arif Hussain, one more accused and accomplice of Kausar is absconding. Arif is one of the members of the gang that kept IED explosives in the Kalachakra ground of Bodh Gaya. During the investigation, a shocking piece of information has come to light that Arif had met Kausar after the blasts and also discussed with regards to the failure of the intended plan.
    Expert in manufacturing IED explosives
    Kausar, the JMB terrorist is an expert in manufacturing IED explosives. He had come to India with his accomplice Muzafir Rehman from Bangladesh and had planned to carry out terrorist acts on a large scale. Kausar had also trained his accomplices with regards to the manufacture of IED.
    No information of intended bombings in state, says CM
    “No plot was hatched to kill Buddhist leader Dalai Lama in the state of Karnataka. Police are about to file charge sheet against the accused who have been arrested for the bomb blasts that took place in Bodh Gaya. However, I do not know why the name of Dalai Lama is mentioned in this issue. There is no relation between terrorist Kausar, who was caught in Ramanagara, and the attempt on the life of Dalai Lama. However, the police are going to conduct investigation in this angle also. The central government has not sought any information in this regard from the state government,” clarified CM Kumaraswamy to the media.
    Speaking on the issue, Dr G Parameshwar, DCM, said, “The officers of NIA are not sharing any information with us with regard to the plot hatched by the terrorists. They gather information at the international level and arrest the terrorists.”
    Former CM Jagadish Shettar accused the state government and said, “A comprehensive inquiry has to be conducted relating to the issue of the plot to kill Dalai Lama by JMB terrorists. The arrest of suspected terrorists by the NIA shows the utter failure of the state CID.”

    Bengaluru JMB terrorists targeted Buddhist temples in Karnataka



    [Thursday, September 20, 2018 18:01]
    By Tenzin Dharpo


  29. Sex Predator in a Monk’s Robes?

    In USA, Shambhala’s head Sakyong Mipham with his huge ceremonial hat, blue and gold brocades on a high throne. So much pomp and ceremony and underneath it all was a monster… a sexual predator in religious robes exploiting women and people. Such a disgusting shame. Sakyong should be barred from any activities in the future and go for counselling. He needs it badly. His father was Chogyam Trungpa who did the same thing to women and included drugs and orgies in the 70′s. Dalai Lama supports Sakyong Mipham as sizeable donations were given to the Dalai Lama’s office. Shame. We all thought Dalai Lama was clairvoyant and can see the hearts of sentient beings? Sakyong Mipham wears monk robes, shaves his head but has a wife and kids. Why keep wearing monk robes? He is wearing monk robes to look authentic as he is not authentic. Easier to swindle and fool people. Ontop of wearing robes, shaved head masquerading as a monk, has a wife and kids, he further attacks other women sexually. What kind of spiritual leader is this? Disgusting.

  30. China and India are becoming closer and in a recent meeting have agreed on some points. One of these points is that the Dalai Lama will not be allowed to carry out any more political activities against China on Indian soil. Being a spiritual leader, why is he so political anyway? The Indian leaders are slowly silencing the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans in India. The Dalai Lama and his Tibetan government in-exile regime had better make friends with China already. They should either go back to Tibet/China or become Indian citizens and remain silent.

    China will review new inputs on Azhar

    Delhi says no anti-Chinese activity will be allowed in India

    China has assured India that it will, in future, consider any additional information that is provided on Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar to designate him as an international terrorist.

    The assurance was given by Minister of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China, Zhao Kezhi, to Home Minister Rajnath Singh at a high-level meeting held in New Delhi last week.

    Dalai Lama’s visit

    On its part, India said its territory would not be used for any political activity against China, when Beijing raised the visit of the Dalai Lama to Arunachal Pradesh in 2016.

    The Doklam stand-off between the armies of the two countries at the China-Sikkim-Bhutan tri-junction last year, which lasted for over two months, was not raised by either side.

    China had blocked India’s proposal to designate Azhar as an international terrorist at a UN sanctions committee. “The Chinese Minister also promised action on United Liberation Front of Assam leader Paresh Baruah, who is said to be hiding in China. He said they would consider any fresh information provided by India on both Azhar and Baruah,” said a senior government official.

    China considers Arunachal Pradesh a disputed territory and has referred to Tibetan leader Dalai Lama as a “separatist.” China was categorical that no protests or demonstrations should be organised by the Tibetans here.

    ‘A spiritual leader’

    “They wanted to raise the so-called disputed status of Arunachal Pradesh, but we did not agree to include it in the agenda. The Chinese delegation was assured that no political activity against the Chinese will be allowed from any Indian territory and as far as the Dalai Lama is concerned, he is a spiritual Tibetan leader who was given shelter in India,” said the official.

    Beijing also raised the unrest in Xinjiang province and sought India’s cooperation on the movement of Uighur militants.

    ‘No Uighur militants’

    “There is no evidence of the movement of Uighur militants in India, but the Chinese raised the subject as they have an apprehension that they may use India as a transit. They were assured that no such activity will be allowed,” said the official.

    On October 22, India and China signed an agreement to “strengthen and consolidate discussions and cooperation in the areas of counter-terrorism, organised crime, drug control and other such relevant areas.”

    A Memorandum of Understanding had been signed in 2005 with China, but that lapsed two years ago.


  31. A powerful article, a must-read! Makes people wonder, why are they so biased against China when all the other countries are doing exactly what China is doing but behind the facade of ‘democracy’? 👎

    Opinion: In Search Of Historical Parallels For China’s Rise
    October 15, 20182:55 PM ET
    Alexis Dudden teaches history at the University of Connecticut and is the author of Japan’s Colonization of Korea and Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States. Jeffrey Wasserstrom (@jwassers) teaches history at University of California, Irvine, and is the author of Eight Juxtapositions: China through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo and coauthor of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.
    History can be helpful in making sense of what the Chinese Communist Party is doing within and beyond the borders of the People’s Republic of China. But when it comes to understanding today’s China, history is an imperfect guide. Neat parallels with the past aren’t possible. Certain aspects of China today are completely without historical precedent. And even when certain parallels do become possible, history isn’t helpful in quite the way that either Chinese President Xi Jinping or others promoting comparisons to the past may assume.
    Some have warned that as China threatens to displace the U.S. as a world power, war is inevitable — the so-called Thucydides Trap. While it may be tempting now to view the U.S. as Sparta to China’s Athens, this analogy does not stand up to scrutiny. There are more than just two major states locked in competition. Moves by Russia, the European Union, Japan and other powers will affect what does or does not happen next. The existence of international organizations and nuclear weapons alone makes it problematic to summon ancient Greek wars as templates for contemporary geopolitical tensions.
    Xi’s own ideas about the past are particularly significant, and similarly flawed. In promoting his outward-facing Belt and Road Initiative — an ambitious global infrastructure project — and his more domestically focused “Chinese dream” vision of national rejuvenation, he advances the idea that China should be seen as both rebooting and rejecting the past.
    In terms of rebooting, he presents the Belt and Road Initiative as putting a glorious new high-tech spin on the ancient Silk Road. In terms of rejecting, he presents China as breaking completely from the way two previous rising powers — the U.S. and Japan — behaved during the so-called “century of humiliation,” the period between 1839 and 1949 when they were part of an imperialist ganging-up on China.
    But there are no perfect historical analogies for the Belt and Road Initiative. It is not the modern version of the ancient Silk Road. That “road” was actually a set of roads, and they evolved organically, not via a top-down edict. In addition, Silk Roads also were defined by flows in different directions, with China being transformed by things moving into the country as much as by things heading out from it.
    Similarly, there are no perfect analogies to Beijing’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea or its creation of a vast network of indoctrination camps for Uighurs in Muslim-majority Xinjiang.
    As historians of China and Japan, what intrigues us, though, is that some of the most revealing imperfect analogies that come to mind lie precisely where Xi claims no precedents should be sought: in the actions and rhetoric of America and Japan between the first Opium War and the second world war — the period encompassing China’s century of humiliation.
    As America and Japan leapfrogged up the world’s geopolitical hierarchy, they each, as China does now, generated awe, anxiety and an admixture of the two. Much like China today, these two countries were associated with rapid economic development (facilitated by limits on the rights of laborers), technological advances (such as impressive new train lines) and territorial expansion (including, in each case, asserting control over islands in the Pacific Ocean).
    Leaders in Washington and Tokyo then, like those in Beijing now, often claimed to be breaking with the playbooks of previous empires. They asserted that their actions were motivated not by a naked desire for greater power but by a wish to improve the lot of people already under their control in borderlands or those being brought under their control farther away. When they used force, they claimed, they did so only to ensure stability and order.
    Beijing’s recent actions in Xinjiang and Tibet have echoes in Tokyo’s actions in Manchuria in the 1930s and Washington’s in the Philippines at the turn of the 19th century. Tokyo sent soldiers and settlers to Manchuria and exerted direct and indirect influence over the territory. Japanese official publications treated Manchuria’s people much in the same way as China’s Xinhua News Agency now treats those of Xinjiang and Tibet — as inhabitants of a backward and dangerous frontier that needed guidance from a government in a more advanced capital. In the Philippines, American proponents of expansion similarly celebrated the influx of new people and the importing of “modern” ideas, institutions and influences.
    History does suggest that Beijing’s leaders might consider doing things to make their actions less similar to the negative models of Japanese and U.S. expansion that loom large in China’s textbooks. They could grant greater agency to Uighurs and Tibetans in the path of their assimilationist development moves — allowing various languages to be taught in schools, for example — and reverse the trend in Xinjiang of disappearing people into camps, which conjures up other troubling historical analogies as well.
    In the South China Sea, Beijing is doing things that anyone steeped in the American and Japanese pasts will find familiar. But there are new twists.
    In the 1850s, the Japanese government built six Odaiba island fortresses in Tokyo Bay as a defensive strategy, primarily against the Americans. During an 1879 tour of China and Japan, former U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant boasted about his nation’s completion of the transcontinental railroad, which is notable in this context because it was a grand, “belt”-like project that, among other things, facilitated his successors’ annexations of Hawaii and the Philippines, as well as other islands.
    Beijing’s recent pressure on international airlines to shade Taiwan the same color as the mainland on their maps is a new turn. It does, though, recall schoolchildren’s maps in Japan being modified to include Taiwan in 1895, when Tokyo annexed the island into its growing empire. The same thing occurred again in 1910, when Japan subsumed Korea.
    One important difference between China’s expansionist moves and those of the United States and Japan is how they resonated at home. Until Japan took its dark turn in the late 1930s that resulted in the cataclysmic events of 1945, Japanese critics of Tokyo’s territorial ambitions could express their views in public.
    Mark Twain, a writer Xi admires, found it distasteful when the U.S. took control of the Philippines — when, as he put it, the “eagle put its talons” into new places with rapacious greed.
    Some Chinese citizens doubtlessly feel similarly about their government’s actions in the South China Sea, as well as its repressive moves in Xinjiang and Tibet. Unlike Twain or domestic critics of Japanese expansionism, though, it would be dangerous for China’s people to voice their concerns openly. That may be one of the most troubling comparisons from the past and present.


  32. “The bottom line is its not about whether anyone trusts or likes China but whether China can help these countries advance their own respective national interests. And the answer is yes. Correspondingly the question is whether any country can afford not to access China’s vast consumer market moving into the future. Not doing business is bad for local economies and no one will elect or re-elect a government that presides over a failing economy.”~NY Times

    How China Has Defied Expectations, in Canada and Around the Globe
    By Ian Austen
    Nov. 23, 2018
    In Saskatchewan, farming is done on a grand scale. So when I visited the Canadian Western Agribition in Regina this week for an upcoming story, I wasn’t surprised to find that the annual gathering of Western farmers is almost overwhelmingly large, luring 127,000 visitors last year to a city of 215,000.
    Like all agricultural exhibitions, the Agribition has a wide array of activities for city dwellers like me, including a rodeo, horse shows and cattle judging. But what started as a regional exhibition 48 years ago has grown into a global event. Cattle ranchers, many from distant parts of North America, parade their livestock to buyers from around the world looking to improve their herds.
    When I asked breeders where their customers come from these days, many of them said China.
    Canada, like the rest of the world, has not escaped the effects of China’s move from isolated backwater to a global economic and political force. For the past several months, more than a dozen New York Times reporters, editors, photographers and designers have been examining China’s dramatic rise in a project called China Rules, which launched this week.
    Phil Pan, our Hong Kong-based Asia editor, has worked in China for about two decades and returned to writing to produce the must-read opening essay on how China’s rise has defied expectations.
    Political shifts in Washington and Beijing helped influence the timing of the series. “One factor was certainly a sense at the beginning of the year that America under Trump was in retreat or withdrawing from the world,” Phil said.
    Under President Xi Jinping, China saw an opportunity to step up, he said. And in recent months, he said, “We began to see this fundamental shift in the relationship between the U.S. and China from engagement to competition.”
    While President Trump has attacked China and launched a trade war against it, Canada has taken an opposing track. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said repeatedly that his government is moving toward a full-scale free trade agreement with China, though that movement’s progress has been stately, at best.
    And Mr. Trudeau’s government continues to rebuff American security warnings about allowing equipment made from Huawei Technologies, the Chinese telecommunications company with research operations in Canada, into the coming upgrade of Canada’s wireless networks.
    I asked Phil if Canadians can, or should, trust China.
    “I think the debate in Canada and the United States probably will be much less about trust than about interests,” he said. “Is the fact that the Chinese political system is authoritarian a problem for our national interest?”
    Here, for your weekend reading pleasure, is more from our China Rules series:
    • The American Dream Is Alive. In China.
    • How China Made Its Own Internet
    • How China Took Over Your TV
    • How China Is Writing its Own (Hollywood) Script
    • The World, Built by China
    Among the stories still to come in the series is an examination of China’s authoritarian control of its citizens, as well as articles on how the country is challenging the global, liberal democratic order and why its economic rise left many Western economists red-faced.
    If after reading China Rules, you’d like to discuss the series, we have a new Facebook group: Examining China’s Reach With The New York Times.
    In Conversation
    Mark Thompson, president and chief executive officer of The New York Times Company, will join Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, in conversation at the University of Toronto on Tuesday, December 11. The two will discuss U.S.-Canada relations, foreign policy challenges and more. Details and ticket information are available here.
    And a final reminder that Sam Tanenhaus, a former editor of The New York Times Book Review, will moderate a panel on book reviewing on Friday, Nov. 30, also in Toronto. Use the code CANADALETTER for $5 off the ticket price.
    Trans Canada
    —The turmoil that followed the arrest of six teenagers accused of sexual assault during hazing rituals at an elite private school in Toronto is prompting some Canadians to question the value of all-boys schools.
    —Canada is pushing the United States to end steel and aluminum tariffs before the ceremonial signing of the replacement deal for Nafta. But Washington is considering another, similarly unappealing measure to replace the duties.
    —An art historian from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario is among the curators of an exhibit that uses imaging technology to peel back the layers of Bruegel’s complex masterpieces.
    —In Opinion, Amanda Siebert wrote that the legalization of recreational marijuana in Canada will allow medical research to blossom.
    —While the United States dithers, Canada has approved new regulations that will allow for the sale of cars with headlights that automatically adjust their beams, letting drivers see farther down the road without blinding oncoming traffic.
    A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the past 15 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.

  33. Everyone is expecting a communist China to fail. But in fact China is getting stronger and bigger and more powerful. China proves communism can work to the chagrin of ‘democratic’ countries such as the US who is jealous and threatened of their own status quo. China will continue to grow according to the New York Times.

    The Land That Failed to Fail
    The West was sure the Chinese approach would not work. It just had to wait. It’s still waiting.
    Photographs by BRYAN DENTON
    NOV. 18, 2018
    In the uncertain years after Mao’s death, long before China became an industrial juggernaut, before the Communist Party went on a winning streak that would reshape the world, a group of economics students gathered at a mountain retreat outside Shanghai. There, in the bamboo forests of Moganshan, the young scholars grappled with a pressing question: How could China catch up with the West?
    It was the autumn of 1984, and on the other side of the world, Ronald Reagan was promising “morning again in America.” China, meanwhile, was just recovering from decades of political and economic turmoil. There had been progress in the countryside, but more than three-quarters of the population still lived in extreme poverty. The state decided where everyone worked, what every factory made and how much everything cost.
    The students and researchers attending the Academic Symposium of Middle-Aged and Young Economists wanted to unleash market forces but worried about crashing the economy — and alarming the party bureaucrats and ideologues who controlled it.
    Late one night, they reached a consensus: Factories should meet state quotas but sell anything extra they made at any price they chose. It was a clever, quietly radical proposal to undercut the planned economy — and it intrigued a young party official in the room who had no background in economics. “As they were discussing the problem, I didn’t say anything at all,” recalled Xu Jing’an, now 76 and retired. “I was thinking, how do we make this work?”
    The Chinese economy has grown so fast for so long now that it is easy to forget how unlikely its metamorphosis into a global powerhouse was, how much of its ascent was improvised and born of desperation. The proposal that Mr. Xu took from the mountain retreat, soon adopted as government policy, was a pivotal early step in this astounding transformation.
    China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users, college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has fallen to less than 1 percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union.
    An epochal contest is underway. With President Xi Jinping pushing a more assertive agenda overseas and tightening controls at home, the Trump administration has launched a trade war and is gearing up for what could be a new Cold War. Meanwhile, in Beijing the question these days is less how to catch up with the West than how to pull ahead — and how to do so in a new era of American hostility.
    The pattern is familiar to historians, a rising power challenging an established one, with a familiar complication: For decades, the United States encouraged and aided China’s rise, working with its leaders and its people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one that has lifted both nations.
    During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.
    But neither happened. Instead, China’s Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.
    In late September, the People’s Republic of China marked a milestone, surpassing the Soviet Union in longevity. Days later, it celebrated a record 69 years of Communist rule. And China may be just hitting its stride — a new superpower with an economy on track to become not just the world’s largest but, quite soon, the largest by a wide margin.
    The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the American understanding of how the world works.
    There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
    Even as they put the disasters of Mao’s rule behind them, China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.
    China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.
    Many people said that the party would fail, that this tension between openness and repression would be too much for a nation as big as China to sustain. But it may be precisely why China soared.
    Whether it can continue to do so with the United States trying to stop it is another question entirely.
    Apparatchiks Into Capitalists
    None of the participants at the Moganshan conference could have predicted how China would take off, much less the roles they would play in the boom ahead. They had come of age in an era of tumult, almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world, with little to prepare them for the challenge they faced. To succeed, the party had to both reinvent its ideology and reprogram its best and brightest to carry it out.
    Mr. Xu, for example, had graduated with a degree in journalism on the eve of Mao’s violent Cultural Revolution, during which millions of people were purged, persecuted and killed. He spent those years at a “cadre school” doing manual labor and teaching Marxism in an army unit. After Mao’s death, he was assigned to a state research institute tasked with fixing the economy. His first job was figuring out how to give factories more power to make decisions, a subject he knew almost nothing about. Yet he went on to a distinguished career as an economic policymaker, helping launch China’s first stock market in Shenzhen.
    Among the other young participants in Moganshan were Zhou Xiaochuan, who would later lead China’s central bank for 15 years; Lou Jiwei, who ran China’s sovereign wealth fund and recently stepped down as finance minister; and an agricultural policy specialist named Wang Qishan, who rose higher than any of them.
    Mr. Wang headed China’s first investment bank and helped steer the nation through the Asian financial crisis. As Beijing’s mayor, he hosted the 2008 Olympics. Then he oversaw the party’s recent high-stakes crackdown on corruption. Now he is China’s vice president, second in authority only to Xi Jinping, the party’s leader.
    The careers of these men from Moganshan highlight an important aspect of China’s success: It turned its apparatchiks into capitalists.
    Bureaucrats who were once obstacles to growth became engines of growth. Officials devoted to class warfare and price controls began chasing investment and promoting private enterprise. Every day now, the leader of a Chinese district, city or province makes a pitch like the one Yan Chaojun made at a business forum in September.
    “Sanya,” Mr. Yan said, referring to the southern resort town he leads, “must be a good butler, nanny, driver and cleaning person for businesses, and welcome investment from foreign companies.”
    It was a remarkable act of reinvention, one that eluded the Soviets. In both China and the Soviet Union, vast Stalinist bureaucracies had smothered economic growth, with officials who wielded unchecked power resisting change that threatened their privileges.
    Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, tried to break the hold of these bureaucrats on the economy by opening up the political system. Decades later, Chinese officials still take classes on why that was a mistake. The party even produced a documentary series on the subject in 2006, distributing it on classified DVDs for officials at all levels to watch.
    Afraid to open up politically but unwilling to stand still, the party found another way. It moved gradually and followed the pattern of the compromise at Moganshan, which left the planned economy intact while allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.
    Party leaders called this go-slow, experimental approach “crossing the river by feeling the stones” — allowing farmers to grow and sell their own crops, for example, while retaining state ownership of the land; lifting investment restrictions in “special economic zones,” while leaving them in place in the rest of the country; or introducing privatization by selling only minority stakes in state firms at first.
    “There was resistance,” Mr. Xu said. “Satisfying the reformers and the opposition was an art.”
    American economists were skeptical. Market forces needed to be introduced quickly, they argued; otherwise, the bureaucracy would mobilize to block necessary changes. After a visit to China in 1988, the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the party’s strategy “an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency.”
    But China had a strange advantage in battling bureaucratic resistance. The nation’s long economic boom followed one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the party apparatus and left it in shambles. In effect, autocratic excess set the stage for Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, to lead the party in a radically more open direction.
    That included sending generations of young party officials to the United States and elsewhere to study how modern economies worked. Sometimes they enrolled in universities, sometimes they found jobs, and sometimes they went on brief “study tours.” When they returned, the party promoted their careers and arranged for others to learn from them.
    At the same time, the party invested in education, expanding access to schools and universities, and all but eliminating illiteracy. Many critics focus on the weaknesses of the Chinese system — the emphasis on tests and memorization, the political constraints, the discrimination against rural students. But mainland China now produces more graduates in science and engineering every year than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined.
    In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world. For many parents, though, even that is not enough. Because of new wealth, a traditional emphasis on education as a path to social mobility and the state’s hypercompetitive college entrance exam, most students also enroll in after-school tutoring programs — a market worth $125 billion, according to one study, or as much as half the government’s annual military budget.
    Another explanation for the party’s transformation lies in bureaucratic mechanics. Analysts sometimes say that China embraced economic reform while resisting political reform. But in reality, the party made changes after Mao’s death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant.
    The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets.
    These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability — and competition — into the political system, said Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “China created a unique hybrid,” she said, “an autocracy with democratic characteristics.”
    As the economy flourished, officials with a single-minded focus on growth often ignored widespread pollution, violations of labor standards, and tainted food and medical supplies. They were rewarded with soaring tax revenues and opportunities to enrich their friends, their relatives and themselves. A wave of officials abandoned the state and went into business. Over time, the party elite amassed great wealth, which cemented its support for the privatization of much of the economy it once controlled.
    The private sector now produces more than 60 percent of the nation’s economic output, employs over 80 percent of workers in cities and towns, and generates 90 percent of new jobs, a senior official said in a speech last year. As often as not, the bureaucrats stay out of the way.
    “I basically don’t see them even once a year,” said James Ni, chairman and founder of Mlily, a mattress manufacturer in eastern China. “I’m creating jobs, generating tax revenue. Why should they bother me?”
    In recent years, President Xi has sought to assert the party’s authority inside private firms. He has also bolstered state-owned enterprises with subsidies while preserving barriers to foreign competition. And he has endorsed demands that American companies surrender technology in exchange for market access.
    In doing so, he is betting that the Chinese state has changed so much that it should play a leading role in the economy — that it can build and run “national champions” capable of outcompeting the United States for control of the high-tech industries of the future. But he has also provoked a backlash in Washington.
    ‘Opening Up’
    In December, the Communist Party will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the “reform and opening up” policies that transformed China. The triumphant propaganda has already begun, with Mr. Xi putting himself front and center, as if taking a victory lap for the nation.
    He is the party’s most powerful leader since Deng and the son of a senior official who served Deng, but even as he wraps himself in Deng’s legacy, Mr. Xi has set himself apart in an important way: Deng encouraged the party to seek help and expertise overseas, but Mr. Xi preaches self-reliance and warns of the threats posed by “hostile foreign forces.”
    In other words, he appears to have less use for the “opening up” part of Deng’s slogan.
    Of the many risks that the party took in its pursuit of growth, perhaps the biggest was letting in foreign investment, trade and ideas. It was an exceptional gamble by a country once as isolated as North Korea is today, and it paid off in an exceptional way: China tapped into a wave of globalization sweeping the world and emerged as the world’s factory. China’s embrace of the internet, within limits, helped make it a leader in technology. And foreign advice helped China reshape its banks, build a legal system and create modern corporations.
    The party prefers a different narrative these days, presenting the economic boom as “grown out of the soil of China” and primarily the result of its leadership. But this obscures one of the great ironies of China’s rise — that Beijing’s former enemies helped make it possible.
    The United States and Japan, both routinely vilified by party propagandists, became major trading partners and were important sources of aid, investment and expertise. The real game changers, though, were people like Tony Lin, a factory manager who made his first trip to the mainland in 1988.
    Mr. Lin was born and raised in Taiwan, the self-governing island where those who lost the Chinese civil war fled after the Communist Revolution. As a schoolboy, he was taught that mainland China was the enemy.
    But in the late 1980s, the sneaker factory he managed in central Taiwan was having trouble finding workers, and its biggest customer, Nike, suggested moving some production to China. Mr. Lin set aside his fears and made the trip. What he found surprised him: a large and willing work force, and officials so eager for capital and know-how that they offered the use of a state factory free and a five-year break on taxes.
    Mr. Lin spent the next decade shuttling to and from southern China, spending months at a time there and returning home only for short breaks to see his wife and children. He built and ran five sneaker factories, including Nike’s largest Chinese supplier.
    “China’s policies were tremendous,” he recalled. “They were like a sponge absorbing water, money, technology, everything.”
    Mr. Lin was part of a torrent of investment from ethnic Chinese enclaves in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond that washed over China — and gave it a leg up on other developing countries. Without this diaspora, some economists argue, the mainland’s transformation might have stalled at the level of a country like Indonesia or Mexico.
    The timing worked out for China, which opened up just as Taiwan was outgrowing its place in the global manufacturing chain. China benefited from Taiwan’s money, but also its managerial experience, technology and relationships with customers around the world. In effect, Taiwan jump-started capitalism in China and plugged it into the global economy.
    Before long, the government in Taiwan began to worry about relying so much on its onetime enemy and tried to shift investment elsewhere. But the mainland was too cheap, too close and, with a common language and heritage, too familiar. Mr. Lin tried opening factories in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia but always came back to China.
    Now Taiwan finds itself increasingly dependent on a much more powerful China, which is pushing ever harder for unification, and the island’s future is uncertain.
    There are echoes of Taiwan’s predicament around the world, where many are having second thoughts about how they rushed to embrace Beijing with trade and investment.
    The remorse may be strongest in the United States, which brought China into the World Trade Organization, became China’s largest customer and now accuses it of large-scale theft of technology — what one official called “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
    Many in Washington predicted that trade would bring political change. It did, but not in China. “Opening up” ended up strengthening the party’s hold on power rather than weakening it. The shock of China’s rise as an export colossus, however, was felt in factory towns around the world.
    In the United States, economists say at least two million jobs disappeared as a result, many in districts that ended up voting for President Trump.
    Selective Repression
    Over lunch at a luxurious private club on the 50th floor of an apartment tower in central Beijing, one of China’s most successful real estate tycoons explained why he had left his job at a government research center after the crackdown on the student-led democracy movement in Tiananmen Square.
    “It was very easy,” said Feng Lun, the chairman of Vantone Holdings, which manages a multibillion-dollar portfolio of properties around the world. “One day, I woke up and everyone had run away. So I ran, too.”
    Until the soldiers opened fire, he said, he had planned to spend his entire career in the civil service. Instead, as the party was pushing out those who had sympathized with the students, he joined the exodus of officials who started over as entrepreneurs in the 1990s.
    “At the time, if you held a meeting and told us to go into business, we wouldn’t have gone,” he recalled. “So this incident, it unintentionally planted seeds in the market economy.”
    Such has been the seesaw pattern of the party’s success.
    The pro-democracy movement in 1989 was the closest the party ever came to political liberalization after Mao’s death, and the crackdown that followed was the furthest it went in the other direction, toward repression and control. After the massacre, the economy stalled and retrenchment seemed certain. Yet three years later, Deng used a tour of southern China to wrestle the party back to “reform and opening up” once more.
    Many who had left the government, like Mr. Feng, suddenly found themselves leading the nation’s transformation from the outside, as its first generation of private entrepreneurs.
    Now Mr. Xi is steering the party toward repression again, tightening its grip on society, concentrating power in his own hands and setting himself up to rule for life by abolishing the presidential term limit. Will the party loosen up again, as it did a few years after Tiananmen, or is this a more permanent shift? If it is, what will it mean for the Chinese economic miracle?
    The fear is that Mr. Xi is attempting to rewrite the recipe behind China’s rise, replacing selective repression with something more severe.
    The party has always been vigilant about crushing potential threats — a fledgling opposition party, a popular spiritual movement, even a dissident writer awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But with some big exceptions, it has also generally retreated from people’s personal lives and given them enough freedom to keep the economy growing.
    The internet is an example of how it has benefited by striking a balance. The party let the nation go online with barely an inkling of what that might mean, then reaped the economic benefits while controlling the spread of information that could hurt it.
    In 2011, it confronted a crisis. After a high-speed train crash in eastern China, more than 30 million messages criticizing the party’s handling of the fatal accident flooded social media — faster than censors could screen them.
    Panicked officials considered shutting down the most popular service, Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, but the authorities were afraid of how the public would respond. In the end, they let Weibo stay open but invested much more in tightening controls and ordered companies to do the same.
    The compromise worked. Now, many companies assign hundreds of employees to censorship duties — and China has become a giant on the global internet landscape.
    “The cost of censorship is quite limited compared to the great value created by the internet,” said Chen Tong, an industry pioneer. “We still get the information we need for economic progress.”
    A ‘New Era’
    China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other.
    The question now is whether it can sustain this model with the United States as an adversary rather than a partner.
    The trade war has only just begun. And it is not just a trade war. American warships and planes are challenging Chinese claims to disputed waters with increasing frequency even as China keeps ratcheting up military spending. And Washington is maneuvering to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, warning that a Chinese spending spree on global infrastructure comes with strings attached.
    The two nations may yet reach some accommodation. But both left and right in America have portrayed China as the champion of an alternative global order, one that embraces autocratic values and undermines fair competition. It is a rare consensus for the United States, which is deeply divided about so much else, including how it has wielded power abroad in recent decades — and how it should do so now.
    Mr. Xi, on the other hand, has shown no sign of abandoning what he calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Some in his corner have been itching to take on the United States since the 2008 financial crisis and see the Trump administration’s policies as proof of what they have always suspected — that America is determined to keep China down.
    At the same time, there is also widespread anxiety over the new acrimony, because the United States has long inspired admiration and envy in China, and because of a gnawing sense that the party’s formula for success may be faltering.
    Prosperity has brought rising expectations in China; the public wants more than just economic growth. It wants cleaner air, safer food and medicine, better health care and schools, less corruption and greater equality. The party is struggling to deliver, and tweaks to the report cards it uses to measure the performance of officials hardly seem enough.
    “The basic problem is, who is growth for?” said Mr. Xu, the retired official who wrote the Moganshan report. “We haven’t solved this problem.”
    Growth has begun to slow, which may be better for the economy in the long term but could shake public confidence. The party is investing ever more in censorship to control discussion of the challenges the nation faces: widening inequality, dangerous debt levels, an aging population.
    Mr. Xi himself has acknowledged that the party must adapt, declaring that the nation is entering a “new era” requiring new methods. But his prescription has largely been a throwback to repression, including vast internment camps targeting Muslim ethnic minorities. “Opening up” has been replaced by an outward push, with huge loans that critics describe as predatory and other efforts to gain influence — or interfere — in the politics of other countries. At home, experimentation is out while political orthodoxy and discipline are in.
    In effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture — and that to survive and surpass the United States it must.
    Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump’s America is in retreat while China’s moment is just beginning.
    Then again, China has a way of defying expectations.
    Philip P. Pan is The Times’s Asia Editor and author of “Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China.” He has lived in and reported on China for nearly two decades.
    Jonathan Ansfield and Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Beijing. Claire Fu, Zoe Mou and Iris Zhao contributed research from Beijing, and Carolyn Zhang from Shanghai.
    Design: Matt Ruby, Rumsey Taylor, Quoctrung Bui Editing: Tess Felder, Eric Nagourney, David Schmidt Photo Editing: Craig Allen, Meghan Petersen, Mikko Takkunen Illustrations: Sergio Peçanh

  34. India and China now pushing ahead with resolution of their border disputes. It looks like India is finally ready to officially drop the Tibet card.


    “India and China will have “early harvest” talks on their vexed border dispute as many agreements have been reached by both sides since their top leaders met in Wuhan, Beijing said on Monday”.

    Sino-Indian ‘early harvest’ spells scorched earth for Tibetan dreams.

    Too bad for Tibetans in India. Too bad for Tibetan leadership. Their karma coming back soon for all the harms they have done.

    India, China for ‘early harvest’ talks on border
    November 27, 2018
    Days after India and China pledged to intensify their efforts to resolve a decades-long boundary feud in their border talks, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that New Delhi and Beijing have agreed to authorise the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on border affairs to start “early harvest consultations.”
    The Ministry’s spokesperson Geng Shuang said India’s National Security Advisor and Chinese State Councillor had a constructive and forward-looking meeting at the 21st round of border talks last week.
    Asked what he meant by “early harvest,” Geng did not elaborate.
    “After the Wuhan summit between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the bilateral relations have made very positive progress and made new developments.
    Indo-Asian News Service

  35. Dear Lobsang Sangye and Tibetan Govt in exile in Dharamsala,

    How come after 60 years you are still not at the G20 meetings? How come you cannot get your country back? How come the world economies and power are shifting towards the East which is China? How come you cannot get Tibetan autonomy, or freedom or any leeway with China? How come your negotiations with China is a failure and you produced nothing?

    You run around begging for FREE MONEY from Europe, Australia, Japan, Canada, Taiwan and US for 60 years now but no one in your refugee community has made it big or successful? Where did all the money go? In your pockets? How come all your Tibetans from India/Nepal are going back to Tibet or leaving to the west. How come your schools in India are empty? How come Dharamsala is emptying out?

    How come you are getting weaker and more world governments are ignoring you? How come more are paying attention to China? Less governments are willing to pay attention to you and the Tibet cause? Where is all your rangzen groups? How come they are not effective? Maybe they are disillusioned with your corruption, lies and underhanded tactics and human rights abuses using religion to divide your own people?

    What happened to you? Why are you and your community your Tibetan ‘parliament’ such losers and failures? How come you cannot achieve anything?

    Are you going to continue to beg for more FREE MONEY to fund your trips, houses, children’s education, vacations, five star hotels, nice brocade chubas, expensive accessories, and properties. You know the ordinary Tibetan in India has gotten nothing in financial help of the hundreds of millions in aid for that last 60 years you Tibetan exiled government pocketed. Is that why your Tibetan people in India and Nepal are all leaving to back to Tibet and the west? You failed?

    Your policies and work are not effective.

    Too bad.

    China rises at the G20
    The global balance of power is shifting from West to East
    Tensions loom over Argentina, which plays host to the 2018 summit of the G20 which started on November 30. The G20 is an international forum of the EU and the heads of state of 19 major economies, which discusses global economic challenges. And the challenges are mounting.
    Globalization is in reverse, as the US threatens to escalate its trade war with China and other trading partners; and xenophobia is rife in many Western countries. These challenges are a threat to global prosperity, but what will shape much of the long-term evolution of the global economy is the rise of China and other emerging economies.
    Much of the focus at the G20 has been on Donald Trump and his series of sidebar meetings with other leaders, especially Xi Jinping. Trump has said that it is “highly unlikely” that he would postpone the planned increase in tariff levels from 10% to 25% on $200 billion of Chinese goods in January 2019.
    Of course, this may be bluster and a frequent refrain from apologists for Trump is: “Take note of what the president does, not what he says.” But we may be on the cusp of a full-blown trade war, which will not be confined to the US and China and which will reverse and reconfigure globalization. Entering foreign markets will be more costly and global supply chains will be disrupted.
    Globalization is not inevitable
    The notion that globalization is a natural phenomenon, akin to the change in the seasons or the weather or gravity, is a frequent refrain. During his tenure as prime minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair opined: “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalization. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” A pithy turn of phrase, but patently not true.
    The configuration and extent of globalization are shaped by public policy and technological change. When this changes, it can, in turn, accelerate, slow, or reverse globalization. In periods of severe economic crisis, it has been common for countries to become inward looking — blaming “others” for economic problems and resorting to protectionism and controls on immigration.
    In the interwar period, for example, the response to the Great Depression was a trade war and competitive devaluations as the Gold Standard unraveled. Similarly, since the 2008-09 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed, there has been a worldwide rise in protectionist measures and Trump’s interventions may lead to a new phase of “delocalization.”
    An evolving global economic order
    Major economic crises often reflect endemic flaws within the structure of the global economy and lead to major changes in global economic leadership. The crises and lessons of the interwar period led to the establishment of the Bretton Woods system, which managed the world economy during the post-war golden age of capitalism until the early 1970s. It was the system that created new international institutions (the IMF, World Bank, and GATT, which was the forerunner of the WTO) and this was underpinned by the dominance of the US economy.
    But the relative strength of the US (and the dollar) declined and the system unraveled in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This collapse, and a series of oil crises, led to another major economic crisis which temporarily stalled globalization and led to shifting reliance on the power of unfettered market forces.
    Liberal market capitalism may have been unleashed, but is still not ubiquitous in the world economy. The picture of a fully globalized world and the dominance of free markets is a partial distortion of a complex picture. The extent to which countries have embraced the global market agenda is highly variable.
    Although many developed countries have deregulated financial markets, capital controls and managed currencies are still highly prevalent in developing countries. In terms of trade, tariffs have been reduced since World War II but they have not been eradicated.
    Meanwhile, the use of non-tariff barriers has increased, with roughly 80% of all traded goods affected by these restrictive rules and regulations — and these are prevalent in developed countries. The ongoing chaos of Brexit illustrates that “free trade” is not a natural state but is negotiated, complex, and dependent on a litany of regulations and agreements.
    Deregulation, the hollowing out of the welfare state, and intensified global competition have led to rising income and wealth inequality in many Western countries. And many of those who have not benefited from globalization have also borne the brunt of the austerity policies that followed the financial crisis and the Great Recession. The resulting backlash against globalization helps explain the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit.
    The rise of China
    The G20 will focus on current instability but there are long-term structural shifts which are leading to a rebalancing of the global economy. The balance of power is shifting from West to East and we are in the early stages of transition to China as the dominant world economy.
    China is already the largest economy in the world (measured in purchasing power parity) and PwC (using World Bank data) estimates that by 2050, the Chinese economy will be 72% larger than the US. Further, by 2050, six of the largest eight economies will be countries that are still emerging markets.
    China is home to many of the world’s largest companies, including major tech companies like Alibaba and Tencent. It is investing rapidly in research and innovation and although the dollar remains the dominant world currency, the IMF has added the renminbi to its basket of global reserve currencies. It will only become more important as Trump’s policy of American isolationism continues.
    This year’s G20 summit will focus on maintaining some semblance of international cooperation and preventing a global trade war. The short-term noise will probably come from Trump. But China can play a long-term game as its position in the global economy is on the rise. In the face of the gales of the long-term shifts in the global economy, Trump can blow hard now — but as far as the future is concerned, he will be blowing in the wind.
    Michael Kitson is University Senior Lecturer in International Macroeconomics, Cambridge Judge Business School. This article previously appeared in Reuters.






    These are important points to remember:







  37. Differences between Dalai Lama and CTA president put Tibetan politics in a tailspin
    By Rajeev Sharma, November 27, 2018

    Tibetan politics is in a tailspin as there are signs of serious differences between the 14th Dalai Lama, unquestionably the supreme and undisputed leader of the Tibetans, and Lobsang Sangay, president of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA).

    The immediate provocation is the unceremonious cancellation of the 13th Religious Conference of the Schools of Tibetan Buddhism and Bon Tradition, which was scheduled between November 29 and December 1 year in Dharamshala. Insiders have revealed that the conference was cancelled by Lobsang without consulting the Dalai Lama.

    Even more intriguing is the timing of the move. Knowledgeable sources in the Tibetan establishment in India disclosed that Lobsang made the move while the Dalai Lama was travelling back from Japan, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop it.

    Tibetan politics is turning out to be a cloak-and-dagger mystery. According to sources, Lobsang waited until the Dalai Lama was on his way to the airport before ordering the Department of Religion and Culture to cancel the event. Interestingly, the cancellation of the conference is available by way of an announcement in English on the CTA website.

    The CTA’s Department of Religion and Culture announced that owing to the sudden demise of the supreme head of the Nyingma tradition, Kathok Getse Rinpoche, who passed away this week in Nepal and in respecting the sentiments of the followers of Nyingma tradition, the 13th Religious Conference of the Schools of Tibetan Buddhism and Bon Tradition was being indefinitely postponed.

    The department cited that many lamas and representatives of the Nyingma tradition were unable to participate because of Rinpoche’s passing away.

    On November 22, the CTA organised a prayer service to mourn the demise of Rinpoche, the 7th supreme head of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. Rinpoche passed away following an accident on November 19 in Pharping, Nepal. He was 64.

    Sources say the Dalai Lama is furious with Lobsang Sangay for trying to take credit for his negotiations with China about returning to Tibet.

    Sangay claimed that the Dalai Lama has failed for 60 years in negotiations with China, but he has the power and ability to succeed. This is also an indication of how weak the Dalai Lama’s current position is. Sangay knows that the Dalai Lama has been negotiating with China about returning and he’s trying to position himself to take credit for it. Had this happened a few years ago the Dalai Lama would have had him removed, but since his cancer has become terminal, Sangay has been consolidating his position among the exiled community. He controls the press department of the Tibetan government-in-exile and has done so since he ousted Dicki Chhoyang.

    For the record, the head of the department, which cancelled the conference, was appointed by Sangay.

    By the time the Dalai Lama returned to India the event was cancelled and announcements were issued to the media while he was still in the flight, which would have prevented a confirmation with the Tibetan leader and nothing could have been done to stop it. The reason given for the cancellation was the death of a senior monk.

    Sources said that the real reason for the CTA president to keep the Dalai Lama in the dark was because the latter would decide again whether to back the Karmapa as his successor. The Karmapa issue has been a major reason of discord between the Dalai Lama and the CTA president. Sources spoke about a telephonic conversation between the Dalai Lama and Sangay in this regard on November 22 when the former was in Japan.

    During this conversation, furious arguments broke out between the two. The Dalai Lama is said to have “shouted” at Sangay, saying that the Karmapa wouldn’t be chosen and that he wouldn’t be dictated terms by anyone. In this conversation, the Dalai Lama used some expletives in Tibetan language which he did not expect Sangay to understand as the CTA president doesn’t know the language. However, a Lobsang aide is said to have translated what the Dalai Lama said.

    This marks the most significant power play ever between the different factions within the Tibetan exile leadership. In other words, it’s now an all-out battle between the Dalai Lama and Lobsang Sangay over the future of the exile community, which may worsen in the days to come.

    (The writer is a columnist and strategic analyst who tweets @Kishkindha)



    This interesting article has much food for thought:

    1. Dalai Lama is angry and shouting expletives as Lobsang Sangay. Everyone knows the Dalai Lama is in full control. He claims he’s retired from politics but this is just to say what the west wants to hear so he can continue getting funding. It looks good to the west that he voluntarily gave up power and this makes him look progressive. But the Dalai Lama controls everything from behind and if you don’t agree with his decisions, he will be furious. Every Tibetan knows this well.

    2. Interesting the article mentions Dalai Lama’s cancer is terminal. Everyone knew this but the Dalai Lama tries to cover this point up. Why? Who knows? What is the problem if people knows he has cancer. Tibetan govt tries to play it down.

    3. Dalai Lama is angry as his successor will only be on his terms and no one else may dictate to him the terms as Lobsang Sangay tried to do so since it is not a democracy in practice. As all Tibetans know, the Dalai Lama is the Lama-King and he has full power and no one may contradict him. The face he shows the west (soft, friendly, diplomatic, easy-going, democratic) is all just for the west. The face Dalai Lama shows his Tibetan people (fierce, King, angersome, in charge and must be obeyed) is how it really is. Tibetans know the Dalai Lama controls everything and fully manages all politics. People are not happy with this but dare not speak up as there is no democracy.

    Writer Rajeev Sharma is telling the situation like it really is. Finally the truth is coming out. Tibetan government in exile is a regime in every sense of the world that depends on all the hundreds of millions of free dollars it has been taking from the west, Japan, Australia and so on. It exists on free money. It is not a good government and has failed all negotiations with China due to the Tibetan leaders’ arrogance. Why arrogance? They think the world will force China to do what Tibetans leaders want and that they are so important on everyone’s agenda. Tibetans are on no one’s top agenda and China is an economic and military super power. China will not and will never kowtow to the Tibetan demands. It is the Tibetans who must beg China to be friends and get some concessions if at all possible. No country has ever dared stand up to USA, but China has and China is growing in power yearly. Everyone is scrambling to be China’s friend and saying goodbye to the Tibetan cause. Tibetan cause is the thing of the past and no economic benefits to support Tibetan cause.

    These days every country votes in leaders that can better their country’s economy due to world recession. So every country has to do business and trade and aid with China to improve their economy. If you side with the Dalai Lama and Tibetan govt in exile in India, what do you get? Nothing! So leaders of every nation realize this now and will continue to make friends with China and say goodbye to the Dalai Lama. Dalai Lama on a personal level may be rich, famous and sells a lot of books, but that won’t get Tibet back. That won’t win the support of leaders of the free world and other nations.

  38. “What does Empress Cixi and the 14th Dalai Lama have in common?”








    Photos-Empress Cixi of China.




    Read more at:

    ‘Dorje no longer recognised by Indian govt as 17th Karmapa’

    Dorje no longer recognised by Indian govt as 17th Karmapa


  41. Dear Tibetan government-in-exile (Dharamsala),






  42. Pabongka Rinpoche was very famous and had many students, Ngawang Yontan Gyatso was jealous of it. Therefore, he started to spread rumours about Dorje Shugden so that Pabongka Rinpoche’s popularity would decrease as Pabongka Rinpoche was a Dorje Shugden practitioner.


    The schism created by Ngawang Yontan Gyatso had caused disharmony among different lineages, some people might have lost faith in Dorje Shugden and not practicing it anymore; some might spread the rumours to more people creating even more negative influence and it might cause a pure lineage to disappear. In the end, Ngawang Yontan Gyatso died in the prison with no sign of attainment. Greed and jealousy lead us to the wrong path regardless of who we are, we have to be careful of our motivation so we don’t end up in a bad place.

Submit your comment

Please enter your name

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter your message

Show More
Show More


Maximum size is 64MB

Contemplate This



© 2020 | All Rights Reserved
Total views:9,330,228