Why Tibet Matters

Torture is now commonplace in China's Tibetan jails, human-rights monitors charge. And since the Chinese takeover in the 1950s, 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed, according to the exiles in Dharmsala, while hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns have been driven out of the monasteries. Tibetans are becoming aliens in some parts of their own country. Han Chinese settlers have been brought in to compete for resources with the 1.8 million Tibetans inside the Tibet Autonomous Region and the 4 million or so who live in traditional Tibetan areas absorbed by other Chinese provinces. (Beijing says there are 500,000 Chinese settlers; Tibetan exiles put the figure at 7.5 million.)

BUT TIBETANS ARE REMARKably resilient. Throughout Amdo, the mountainous Tibetan area that now belongs to China's Gansu and Qinghai provinces, there are signs of resurgent traditions and unhampered worship. Labrang, the largest lamasery still functioning in the Tibetan regions of neighboring China, contains about 2,000 monks, twice as many as Beijing's official ceiling. The monks were forbidden to worship during China's Cultural Revolution, but in the last two decades, they have rebuilt the monastery's temples and its famed scholastic system. Still, the lamas sometimes land in trouble. Last year police arrested four of them on suspicion of separatist activities. According to a classmate, their 30-year-old ringleader emerged from custody two months ago ""brain damaged and paralyzed'' from jailhouse beatings. The government's message is simple, says another inhabitant of the monastery: ""Don't cross the line into politics.''

That message is even louder in Rongbo, a 500-monk monastery long known as a separatist hotbed. Four monks have been jailed there for pro-independence activities since 1996, and last May Beijing sent in a 47-member ""work group'' to conduct re-education sessions. ""The whole point is to make us embrace the Communist Party,'' says a senior lama. ""We pledge loyalty. But in our hearts, we still follow the Dalai Lama.''

Long before Hollywood took up the cause, the Tibetan people proved to the Chinese that they cannot wipe out support for the Dalai Lama. The spiritual leader's birthplace at remote Taktser, or Roaring Tiger village, is something like a political barometer for conditions in Tibet. Beijing tore down his family home after he fled in 1959 but rebuilt it during negotiations for his return in 1986. Now, despite the failure of those talks, China still allows the caretaker, the Dalai Lama's cousin Gunbao Tashe, to entertain Buddhist pilgrims. Four thousand of them visit each year, Gunbao says, adding that Beijing's denunciations of his cousin have had ""no effect whatsoever'' on turnout. China has bitten deeply into Tibet, but it hasn't yet been able to swallow the hardy kingdom at the roof of the world.

TAKING THE PULSE OF MODERN, OCCUPIED TIBET

POPULATION: 6 million Tibetans in china; 100,000 in India; 25,000 in Nepal; 2,000 in Bhutan; 2,000 in Switzerland; 1,500 in the United States and 600 in Canada.