THE HUMBLE GIANT WHO CAN REVIVE DEMOCRACY

As we celebrate the 90th birthday of the Dalai Lama, it is important to reflect on what he means to the world at a time when the values he embodies, such as democracy and universal human dignity, are more threatened than at any time since the days of World War II. In his powerful new memoir titled Voice for the Voiceless, he tells the story of his relentless 75-year struggle against the communist government in China.

- BY CARL GERSHMAN

He was invested with the temporal duties of the Dalai Lama in 1950 when he was just 15, at the very moment Chinese forces were taking control of Central Tibet. He was 19 when he met for the first time with the Chinese ruler Mao Zedong, who told him that “religion is poison”.

He grasped from the beginning that Tibet needed to modernise if it was to resist the communist attempt to uproot traditional Tibetan society through forced collectivisation, a programme that was already under way in the early 1950s under the Orwellian rubric of democratic reforms.