Each year Pingry’s Holocaust Remembrance Assembly asks students to learn something from past horrific acts, whether the Holocaust or other cases of genocide. The focus of this year’s assembly, held on May 2, 2008, was China’s “cultural” and human genocide against Tibetans, particularly Buddhists. Guest speaker Ganden Thurman, executive director of Tibet House in Manhattan, shared his views on resolving the conflict.

Providing context for Mr. Thurman’s presentation, Pingry history teacher Maddie Landau outlined China’s oppression of Tibetans. “Since the invasion and occupation [of Tibet] by the Chinese nearly 60 years ago, one-sixth of the Tibetan population—more than one million people—has died in prison camps or by starvation. Six-thousand Buddhist monasteries, temples, and other cultural structures have been destroyed,” she said.

Thurman and Tibet House hope to stop this destruction and oppression. He describes Tibet, isolated high in the Himalayans, as “a giant, wintry library of Alexandria of classical Asian culture and Buddhist culture.” Thurman’s work at Tibet House is directed toward showcasing this cultural richness so that it may be preserved.

“It’s not really in opposition to China that I work at Tibet House," he explained. "But rather it’s for the sake of world heritage and for the sake of, obviously, the Tibetan people having a just situation to live in and being able to contribute to our emerging global civilization. And it’s also for the sake of the Chinese to have a better situation, where they truly can have—as they say they want to—a harmonious, multi-ethnic nation.”

In answering students’ questions, Thurman clarified that Tibetan independence does not require complete sovereignty from China. The Dalai Lama and others are advocating for a “Middle-Way Approach” in which Tibet would remain part of China, but its culture, religion, and identity would be legally safeguarded.

China’s current approach of controlling through force, Thurman argued, is misguided and impractical. “What [the Chinese are] doing now isn’t working. This is really one of the problems with empires . . . . [Y]ou can sustain them for a long time—you have to use a lot of force, you have to use a lot of resources . . . but it’s not really the most efficient way to go.” He elaborated that doing the right thing morally by giving Tibetans legal protections is more efficient, because it would result in a prosperous and happy Tibetan population. Strife between Tibet and China, on the other hand, simply costs too much in human and financial resources.

Thurman also pointed out that China’s resolution of the Tibetan issue would help them gain the respect of the world community. He concluded, “A peaceful resolution to the Tibet issue—a modern resolution of the Tibet issue—would be very much in China’s favor in terms of them being an enlightened society and getting credit for their millennia-old culture, which has a lot of beautiful things in it.”



© 2008 The Pingry School