American Encounters/Global Interactions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. xvii, 355 pp. (B&W illus.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5234-1.
In June 1908 the 13th Dalai Lama met with William Rockhill, the American ambassador to China. Rockhill was impressed with the lama and wrote an extraordinary letter to President Theodore Roosevelt. In the letter, Rockhill couldn’t contain his excitement about being the first American to meet with the Tibetan pontiff. Rockhill’s letter was almost mystical in its wording and sentiment. This meeting is the starting point of John Kenneth Knaus’s Beyond Shangri-la: America and Tibet’s Move into the Twenty-First Century. This book not only traces the history of American interest in Tibet but it is also a book that seeks to place Tibet as possessing a special significance to America and the American public. The author is not a disinterested observer; in the preface he makes it clear that he is writing the book as an insider. The author’s previous book recounts his role as a CIA officer who guided the late 1950s CIA involvement with Tibet. The author writes that during a meeting between President Ford and Deng Xiaoping in 1975, the Chinese leader commented that the Tibet issue “is like chicken feather and onion skin” (210), meaning it is a light issue of no importance. Despite the fact that Tibet will never be a core interest of the United States policy makers, the Tibet issue has high visibility at both the governmental and popular level in America. The author feels that in the late 1950s, America made a promise to Tibet but it was never fulfilled.
The book is divided into four themes; chapters 1 to 6 describe the American discovery of Tibet at the beginning of the twentieth century. During this period the American interest is described as “on the sidelines.” The main player in the region was the British. The second theme is America’s active engagement (chapters 7–16) in the second half of the twentieth century during the height of the Cold War. This was a period during which the US not only sponsored clandestine missions inside Tibet but also engaged in active diplomatic campaigns in international forums. The information provided in this book is not new, however, it does supplement existing knowledge through greater details of events and personalities. The third section of the book deals with what the author calls America’s “disengagement” (192) and “disavowal” (208) of Tibet. The author points out that American disengagement with Tibet began in the late 1960s before Kissinger and Nixon’s rapprochement with Beijing (chapters 17–19). The final section of the book deals with America’s re-engagement with the Tibet issue in the mid-1980s. This section of the book is most revealing. The author has done an excellent task of interviewing key US officials and what the author termed the “Tibet mafia” (238), composed of members of Congress and their staffers and influential business figures who make up the Tibet lobby in Washington, DC.
The conventional assumption is that Tibet is used as leverage by the US in its dealings with China. One of the book’s main strengths, and what would be of interest to scholars and the general public, is the author’s showing in great detail how the Tibet issue was forged in the United States. Apart from a brief period in the late 1950s, Tibet remained on the periphery of larger US concerns. The author shows that American interest in Tibet is not governed by strategic interest nor does the issue provide leverage in dealings with China. A few influential politicians in Congress and businessmen are the exponents of the Tibetan issue in the United States, who for personal reasons share a strong sentiment, that Tibet is a unique culture worth defending. The book highlights the role played by people such as Joel McCleary, who became the Democratic Party’s youngest national treasurer (217). McCleary was a Tibetan Buddhist and student of Geshe Wangyal, a Tibetan Buddhist Lama, and used his position to invite the Dalai Lama to the US in 1979. This was the first time the Americans had issued a visa for the Dalai Lama. In the 1990s, Senator Dianne Feinstein and her banker husband Richard Blum, who was consulted by the Chinese government in the setting up of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, took on the task not only of promoting the Tibet issue in Congress, but of using their personal connections with the Chinese leaders to act as “special couriers, delivering six messages from the Dalai Lama to Beijing” (275). The Tibetans make effective use of their allies in Washington, DC by the charm of the Dalai Lama and Tibet’s soft power.
The title of the books implies that the Tibet issue needs to move beyond the sentimentality of a few influential figures and the author sees the Tibetans’ right to self-determination as self-evident. The twenty-first century is very different from the twentieth century, when the US was the dominant power; today China calls “the shots on the international scene” (298). The Tibet issue will never be of core interest to the US, as Tibet lacks economic and strategic interest to US policy makers, yet Tibet will continue to exercise a deep fascination on America.
Tsering Shakya
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 145-146