So the Dalai Lama was in my backyard a couple of weeks ago. Just about literally; across the street from my place is Qwest Field and the stadium’s north parking lot, and His Holiness came for a big event in Seattle and was there.

The whole Tibet/China thing has been flaring up recently. China is hosting the Olympics this summer and the pro-freedom-for-Tibet folks see it as a great opportunity to highlight their issues to the world. I can’t say that I blame them; if you have a chance to leverage your cause’s profile up several notches, you might as well take it.

The protests in Tibet have been turning more violent than before. The Dalai Lama urges peaceful demonstration, not rioting, but a combination of things have led to some of the protests turning into mini-riots. The Chinese government only knows one way to put down protests, and that’s with machine guns and thug-like behavior, so their heavy-handed response provokes more violence.

But there’s another factor at play. The Dalai Lama doesn’t have quite as much control over everyone as maybe he used to. Many of the younger protestors and expatriates are tired of his patient, peaceful approach; they want to more directly confront the Chinese government.

They’re spurred on by the fact that China is subsidizing the ethnic overwhelming of Tibet. The vast majority of China’s citizens are ethnically Han Chinese (hell, 19% of the people on EARTH are Han). The Chinese government refutes these claims, but the reality is that they encourage Han to move into Tibet and have been working towards outnumbering the Tibetans.

This demographic shift scares the Tibetan community, because they forsee a day when there are so many Han living in Tibet that the Tibetans won’t be able to legitimately point out the ethnic difference. They want action, and they want it now.

During the recent flareup, the Chinese government has repeatedly accused the Dalai Lama of encouraging the rioting and violence, and this is where I think lots of dialogue and exposure to both sides can help out.

I think it is very hard for the Chinese leaders to comprehend that the Dalai Lama is not encouraging violence. They spend virtually their entire lives in complete control over people, with secret police and armies ready to do their bidding. If they give an order, it’s followed.

Since they live like this, they can’t imagine the notion that the Dalai Lama (or any other western-style leader of free people) doesn’t utterly control his subjects. The idea that people might choose for themselves barely even enters their heads, and so they see the riots and conclude that the Dalai Lama must be encouraging them.

I think that we see this kind of thing frequently in conflicts between peoples, and one of the absolute best ways to defeat it is to set up and encourage exchange programs between nations and peoples and viewpoints as much as possible.

For example, after the monster earthquake in Kashmir, we had an excellent opportunity to influence Pakistan. While we did send lots of aid, we should have done two, five, ten times as much.

Imagine that these people, many of whom are told their entire lives that the United States is an evil Satan bent on destroying them, see us showing up in massive numbers with aid, housing, food, clothing, medicine. What conclusions might they draw from that? Even if we only influence 25% of them to think of us better, that might have a significant impact on things like the War On Terror, because Pakistan is a region where a lot of terrorists spring from.

Or imagine that more of the leaders of China had been able to spend time in, say, western Europe or even just hanging out with the Dalai Lama’s exile community in India. I know I’m a bit of a dreamer, but these kinds of programs CAN happen. They might realize that the control they have over people’s lives is not the same for everyone, and then they would be able to understand that the Dalai Lama can’t just snap his fingers and turn the protests in Tibet on or off.

It’s very hard work to have a true dialogue with someone you despise, or that you think despises you. It’s hard to think charitably of people you hate or who bug you, but if you can understand who they are and where they’re coming from and why they’re doing what they do, you can often move a lot closer to a solution than you could have before.