On a hillside above Dharamsala, a monk in maroon robes prostrated himself on the bare ground, and then stood up. He lifted a pole with a flag the size of a bath towel to his shoulder— the blood-red field with five yellow stars rampant could be clearly seen by the three bloggers and small gaggle of children who’d gathered a few hundred yards away to watch. A young monk held them back from approaching any closer. Up the slope, the monk with the flag turned his back on the crowd and began to walk, treading firmly and quickly over the hilltop and out of sight.
***
“The teachers seem on edge this morning—what do you think’s going on?” Mohali Khatoane—MK—asked the girl who sat across the wooden table, spooning hummus into a pita. Out the window an aspen grove framed a view of high mountains; the Satya Graha Institute sat in the hills above Colorado Springs along the front range of the Rockies
“That’s what it seemed like to me too,” Cass Goldfarb said. “Frantic, almost.” As she spoke, most of the cellphones in the small cafeteria began to buzz. “Urgent meeting in ten minutes in the Mandela room,” Cass read, looking across the table at MK. “Not a clue,” she said, standing up with her tray. “But let’s get good seats.”
***
Fu Zhang sat staring at a Dell monitor, one of two on his desk. The smoggy gray light filtered into the fourth story window of the squat concrete complex near Beijing’s Third Ring road, but most of the blinds were pulled, the better to see the screens on the long row of computers. Young people clicked quietly, investigating any references to Tianamen, or the Wuhan Flu, or the other “73 Bads,” a number updated regularly by their bosses in the Party’s political wing. Their job was to make sure that nothing controversial made it across the great firewall into the Chinese internet.
A Google alert for “Dalai Lama” sent Fu to an Instagram page; a slightly blurry picture of a monk on a hill with a Chinese flag appeared above a caption that read “DL Leaves on March for China,” with a link to Dharamsala.net. There, a one sentence post said only that the “Tibetan spiritual leader had left his Indian home-in-exile for a 2,000-mile pilgrimage to China, carrying a Chinese flag to show his lack of animosity to the Beijing government.” A quick check on SemRush showed Fu that the site had just 240 total visits in the last month; meanwhile, the Dalai Lama’s official website showed he was on a five-day silent meditation retreat. Fu—who’d been on the Dalai desk for three years—was used to nonsense, almost all of it originating with the DL’s Western devotees (only the month before dozens of websites had announced that the Potala Palace in Lhasa had briefly levitated). This was clearly more nonsense—there was no way the DL was walking to China, since he was very old and the Chinese would never let him in. He clicked the link that blocked the web page from showing up on Chinese screens. And then—just because it never hurt to be safe—he also sent the page on to his supervisor.
After which, he used his unrestricted global net access to check out air conditioner reviews on Amazon.com, printing out a sheaf of pages so he could take them when he and his girlfriend went shopping that weekend. As a matter of principle they never bought anything with less than a 4-star rating.
***
Maria Santos sat on the edge of a table a the front of Mandela Hall, watching puzzled people take seats, late arrivals standing around the glass-walled edge. She wore jeans, and a gray hoodie over a white t-shirt, and also a frown.
“If you look carefully, you will notice one of you is missing,” she said. “Matthias Persson. This is the reason.” The image from Dharamsala.net flashed onto a large digital screen behind her. “This story says that the DL has left on a walk for China, a pilgrimage,” she said. “As it turns out, that was not true. The man in the picture is named Lopsak Tuleng, and he’s not a monk, he’s a bald caterer’s assistant. We—to be exact, Professor Ramakrishnan—heard about this story from colleagues in Delhi this morning who are part of the Tibetan exile community. They were interested because we’d sent them Matthias’s paper from last term, and this seemed very close. You may recall Matti’s essay, because we distributed it to the whole school as an example of innovative thinking,”
She clicked a button on the computer, and the coversheet of a term-paper appeared on the screen. “The problem Matti tackled was that China’s communist government had effectively sidelined the movement for Tibetan freedom. They’d used their economic might to convince other world leaders to stop supporting the Tibetan cause, and were now basically waiting for the DL to die in the belief it would all fizzle out. Matti’s idea—the walk and the flag—was an attempt to reopen the issue, to simultaneously wake the Tibetan community and to disarm the Chinese. Our friends actually discussed the idea with the DL—and he was intrigued. But they knew this picture and report had to be a fake, because the Dalai Lama was spending this week on a med-itation retreat, and that in any event he would never have taken such a step without consulting the elders in his community. It took Professor Lee”—and here she indicated with a nod a young woman in the front row—“ten minutes of digging through dummy domain names to figure out that Dharamsala.net was paid for with bitcoin from the account of one Matthias Persson. It took 30 seconds for him to confess, and ten seconds after that for me to suspend him. And five seconds after that for me to decide to summon you all.”
She looked around at the room, saying nothing. Aina Aalto, from Helsinki, finally broke the silence: “But when Matti presented his paper to our seminar, you said it was one of the finest ideas for a campaign you’d ever heard. You said it had a ‘genius’ about it.”
“Which was my mistake, I guess,” she said. “It was a good idea. But an idea. It’s our work to have ideas—it’s not our work to put them into play. Mr. de la Cruz, what is the purpose of the SGI?”
“The purpose of the SGI is to serve as a training ground for a nonviolent future,” said a slight young man standing at the edge of the room.
“Correct. As you know, we sometimes fancy ourselves as a West Point of nonviolence. We think there’s as much potential—far more potential—in the forces unleashed by people like Gandhi as in the force gathered by all the armies on earth. And so we think the world would be well-served by research into non-violence, and by training exemplary people to know the arts of peace, just as every nation has an academy where the they teach the arts of war. But do students at West Point who come up with an exciting new idea for a flanking attack then launch a war in order to see if it works as well as they thought it might? They do not. Militaries—professional ones anyway—have a discipline and even an ethic that I’m afraid we have not built.”
“An ethic?” said a young woman standing near the door, talking in a rush. “An ethic? What about the ethic that got Tibet taken over? What about the ethic that got half its monasteries ransacked? It’s not like a military campaign—he’s not going to kill anyone. If Matti had asked me, I would have helped him.”
“I’m sure you would have, Ms Rupesinghe,” Maria said quietly. “And I’m glad he didn’t ask you, so we didn’t have to kick you out too. In the first place, not killing people is not the same thing as people not getting killed: earlier this evening elements of the People’s Liberation Army imprisoned the abbott and three novices at a monastery near Gyantse, and sent the pictures to the DL’s advisors in India. The Chinese know it’s a good plan too, or at least a new and unforeseen one, and they want to nip it in the bud. Second, we have no right to launch actions—non-violent movements come from the people who need to change the status quo. Our job is not to manipulate or foment; our job is to support and assist. We can suggest—that’s why we sent Matti’s paper on to our friends. But the forces we work with are too powerful for us to take them into our own hands.” She gazed at each corner of the room—few of the students, who had never seen her angry, met her stare.
“But my point in asking you here this afternoon is not to harangue you,” she continued. “I asked you to come because—because 3,000 people in Dharamsala rallied tonight in support of what they thought was the ‘Dalai Lama’s pilgrimage.’ Young people, mostly, the same young people who’ve been increasingly demanding guerilla armies and terror attacks to liberate Tibet. They seem intrigued by this new tactic instead. And when he heard what had happened His Holiness decided it was . . . worth a try. As of tomorrow morning—which is a few hours away in the hills of India—the genuine article will be walking with the flag. I want to warn you that your faculty may be distracted in the weeks ahead, applying our various specialties to help. And to tell you that if this gathers the force I expect it might, we will be drafting some of you with particular skills to help. And to insist that no one here will say a word about how any of this began. Am I understood?”
No one said a word. As they filed out, though, MK put her arm around Cass, who looked stunned. “It’s going to be okay,” she said, over and over.
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