About a boy

摘要

It has been 13 months since Ugyen Trinley Dorje gave his Chinese minders the slip, left his monastery in the outskirts of Lhasa, and made a perilous winter-time trek across the Himalayas to join the Dalai Lama's headquarters in exile at Dharamsala, in India. At the time, China's government insisted that the boy, the 17th incarnation of the Tibetan Buddhist Kagyu sect's Karmapa Lama, had not fled China at all, but merely went to fetch some religious relics, and some ceremonial hats, from a monastery in Sikkim. Never mind that he headed off 1,400 km in the opposite direction from Sikkim, complained about Chinese persecution as soon as he got to Dharamsala, and this week accepted refugee status in India—China still refuses to abandon its explanation of his departure. All this stretches credulity and might, on the surface, seem an act of pure self-delusion on China's part. But this response to the Kar-mapa's flight has been deeply pragmatic, serving China's interests well. For they concern both its rule over Tibet and its prickly relations with India.