[R-G] "Democratic Imperialism": Tibet, China, and the National Endowment for Democracy

[Anthony Fenton]

"Democratic Imperialism": Tibet, China, and the National Endowment for  
Democracy
by Michael Barker
Global Research, August 13, 2007
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6530

People familiar with Asian history will be aware that during Tibet’s  
popular uprising against their Chinese occupiers in 1959, his Holiness  
Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama (then aged 23), escaped from his  
homeland of Tibet to live in exile in India. Subsequently, the Dalai  
Lama formed a Tibetan government-in-exile, and to this day the Dalai  
Lama and his government remain in exile.  The Dalai Lama’s tireless  
efforts to draw international attention to the Tibetan cause received  
a welcome boost in 1989 when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and  
since then the Dalai Lama has been able to demand sustained media  
attention (globally) to his ongoing non-violent struggle for a free  
Tibet. This part of Tibetan history is fairly uncontroversial, but a  
part of Tibet’s story that less people will be familiar with is  
Tibet’s historical links to the US’s Central Intelligence Agency  
(CIA). Indeed, as Carole McGranahan (2006) notes “[t]he case of Tibet  
presents a mostly unexplored example of covert Cold War military  
intervention.”[1]

While in recent years far more information has been made available  
concerning the CIA’s violent linkages with Tibetan forces, to date  
only one article has examined the connection between Tibet’s current  
independence campaigners and an organization that maintains close ties  
with the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

A Brief History of CIA-Tibetan Relations

In 1951, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army entered Lhasa (Tibet’s  
capital) and proceeded to force the Dalai Lama’s government to sign a  
“Plan for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet”, which effectively  
ratified the Chinese occupation of Tibet. This action combined with  
the ensuing Chinese repression of Tibetan activists subsequently  
inspired a popular revolution, which owing to its anticommunist  
orientation drew upon strong support from the CIA.[2] As Jim Mann  
(1999) notes, “during the 1950s and 60s, the CIA actively backed the  
Tibetan cause with arms, military training, money, air support and all  
sorts of other help.”[3] Furthermore, as Michael Parenti (2004) has  
observed at the same time:

“… in the United States, the American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA  
front, energetically publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with  
the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role  
in that group. The Dalai Lama’s second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup,  
established an intelligence operation with the CIA in 1951 [although  
CIA aid was only formally established in 1956]. He later upgraded it  
into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into  
Tibet.”[4]

Indeed, according to formerly secret US intelligence documents  
(released in the late 1990s), it turned out that “[f]or much of the  
1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile movement with $1.7 million a  
year for operations against China, including an annual subsidy of  
$180,000 for the Dalai Lama”.[5] By 1969, however, it appears that  
covert support for the Tibetan cause had either served its  
geopolitical purpose (or it was decided that these operations were  
simply no longer effective), and the CIA announced the withdrawal of  
its aid for the Tibetan revolutionaries. That said, support for the  
Tibetan freedom fighters was still provided by the Indian and  
Taiwanese governments “until 1974, two years after President Richard  
Nixon normalized U.S. relations with China” (as were the U.S.  
subsidies for the Dalai Lama, which also continued until 1974):  
however, thereafter – especially once the Dalai Lama urged the  
fighters to put down their weapons – the violent resistance collapsed  
and the “CIA quietly paid to resettle the survivors”.[6] With the  
apparent end of CIA operations in Tibet, John Kraus (2003) observes  
that although:

“…President Ford ended the U.S. government’s involvement with Tibet as  
part of its Cold War strategy. The next phase of the U.S. relationship  
with the Dalai Lama and his people was to be cast in terms of a  
contest between human rights and political engagement with China.”[7]

Thus Kraus adds that in 1979 the Dalai Lama was “finally granted a  
visa by President Jimmy Carter… to visit the United States” and the  
“Tibetan cause then found new sponsors in a bipartisan group of  
senators, members of Congress, and congressional staff assistants who  
worked with the Dalai Lama’s entourage to focus the attention of  
successive U.S. administrations and a responsive world community on  
the Tibet situation”. As this article will demonstrate, a large part  
of this freedom work is presently being actively supported by the NED,  
so the following section will now examine this organization and it  
anti-democratic history.

The National Endowment for Democracy: Revisiting the CIA Connection

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was established in 1984  
with bipartisan support during President Reagan’s administration to  
“foster the infrastructure of democracy – the system of a free press,  
unions, political parties, universities” around the world.[8]  
Considering Reagan’s well documented misunderstanding of what  
constitutes democratic governance,[9] it is fitting that Allen  
Weinstein, the NEDs first acting president, observed that in fact “A  
lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by  
the CIA”.[10] So for example, it is not surprising that during the  
1990 elections in Nicaragua it is has been estimated that “for every  
dollar of NED or AID funding there were several dollars of CIA  
funding”.[11]

By building upon the pioneering work of liberal philanthropists (like  
the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations’) – who have a long history of co- 
opting progressive social movements – it appears that the NED was  
envisaged by US foreign policy elites to be a more suitable way to  
provide strategic funding to nongovernmental organizations than via  
covert CIA funding.[12] Indeed, the NED’s ‘new’ emphasis on overt  
funding of geostrategically useful groups, as opposed to the covert  
funding, appears to have leant an aura of respect to the NED’s work,  
and has enabled them, for the most part, to avoid much critical  
commentary in the mainstream media.

The seminal book exposing the NED’s ‘democratic’ modus operandi, is  
William I. Robinson’s (1996) Promoting Polyarchy, which as it’s title  
suggests, lays out the argument that instead of promoting more  
participatory forms of democracy, the NED actually works to promote  
polyarchy. Robinson argues that the NED’s active promotion of  
polyarchy or low-intensity democracy “is aimed not only at mitigating  
the social and political tensions produced by elite-based and  
undemocratic status quos, but also at suppressing popular and mass  
aspirations for more thoroughgoing democratisation of social life in  
the twenty-first century international order.” His book furnishes  
detailed examples of how the NED has successfully imposed polyarchal  
arrangements on four countries, Chile, Nicaragua, the Philippines, and  
Haiti; while similarly, Barker (2006) has illustrated the NED’s anti- 
democratic involvement in facilitating and manipulating the ‘colour  
revolutions’ which recently swept across Eastern Europe. More  
recently, both Barker and Gerald Sussman (2006) have provided detailed  
examinations’ of how the NED works to promote a low intensity public  
sphere (globally) through its selective funding of media organizations. 
[13] This article will now extend these three initial studies by  
critically examining the NED’s support for Tibetan media projects from  
1990 onwards.

‘Democacy Promoters’ and Tibet

The International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) was founded in 1988 and is  
a non-profit membership organization with offices in Washington, DC,  
Amsterdam, Berlin and Brussels. Their website notes that they  
“fundamentally believe that there must be a political solution based  
on direct dialogue between the Dalai Lama and his representatives and  
the People’s Republic of China.” ICT received their first NED grant  
(of the 1990s) in 1994 to:

“…enhance Chinese knowledge of Tibet by contributing articles about  
Tibet to newspapers and magazines within China and abroad; translating  
books about Tibet into Chinese; and facilitating a series of  
discussion meetings among key Chinese and Tibetan figures, focusing on  
bringing Chinese journalists and pro-democracy leaders together with  
Tibetan leaders in exile.”

Since then, the ICT has received regular support from the NED,  
obtaining subsequent grants in 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003  
(all for media work except the 1997 grant). Like many groups that  
obtain NED aid, ICT are not afraid to boast of their ‘democratic’  
connections, and in 2005 they even awarded one of their annual Light  
of Truth awards to the president of the NED, Carl Gershman.  
Furthermore, the year before (in 2004) ICT gave the same award to both  
Vaclav Havel (who had received the NED’s Democracy Award in 1991, and  
serves on the advisory board of the Project on Justice in Times of  
Transition), and also to one of the earliest ‘democracy promoting’  
organizations, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. (For a summary of the  
key ‘democratic’ connections of the Project on Justice in Times of  
Transition and all the other groups mentioned in this article see,  
Barker (2007) Hijacking Human Rights: A Critical Examination of Human  
Rights Watch’s Americas Branch and their Links to the ‘Democracy’  
Establishment. Due to this article’s heavy reliance on internet  
sources most links have been omitted from the paper, however, a fully  
referenced paper can be obtained from the author upon request.)

Some of ICT’s directors are also integral members of the ‘democracy  
promoting’ establishment, and include Bette Bao Lord (who is the chair  
of Freedom House, and a director of Freedom Forum),[14] Gare A. Smith  
(who has previously served as principal deputy assistant secretary in  
the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and  
Labor), Julia Taft (who is a former director of the NED, the former  
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and Special Coordinator for Tibetan  
Issues, has worked for USAID, and has also served as the President and  
CEO of InterAction), and finally, Mark Handelman (who is also a  
director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, an organization  
whose work is ideologically linked to the NED’s longstanding  
interventions in Haiti).[15] The ICT’s board of advisors also presents  
two individuals who are closely linked to the NED, Harry Wu, and Qiang  
Xiao (who is the former executive director of the NED-funded Human  
Rights in China).[16] Like their board of directors, ICT’s  
international council of advisors includes many ‘democratic’ notables  
like Vaclav Havel, Fang Lizhi (who in 1995 – at least – was a board  
member of Human Rights in China), Jose Ramos-Horta (who serves on the  
international advisory board for the Democracy Coalition Project),  
Kerry Kennedy (who is a director of the NED-funded China Information  
Center), Vytautas Landsbergis (who is an international patron of the  
British-based neoconservative Henry Jackson Society – see Clark,  
2005), and until her recent death, the “mid-wife of the neocons” Jeane  
J. Kirkpatrick (who was also linked to ‘democratic’ groups like  
Freedom House and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies).[17]

Next up is the Tibet Fund, who first received NED aid in 1990 to  
“produce audio cassettes that will bring world and Tibetan news into  
rural communities in Tibet.” They then received continued NED support  
for this work in 1994 and 1996, whereupon the distribution of the  
audio tapes was extended to Tibetan exile communities in India and  
Nepal as well as those in Tibet. In 1996, the Tibet Fund also received  
NED aid on behalf of the Tibet Voice Project, “for an educational  
initiative based in Dharamsala, India, aimed at raising the social,  
political, economic and environmental awareness of Tibetans through  
audio-visual media.” The NED notes that:

“Particular emphasis will be given to speeches of the Dalai Lama on  
the topics of democracy and human rights. In Dharamsala, it will  
continue a series of lectures and films emphasizing social issues,  
politics, the economy and environment for new refugees and Tibetans in  
exile; and will organize grassroots level dialogues between Tibetans  
in exile and Indian youth to increase awareness and support for the  
Tibetan cause in India.”

The Tibet Fund’s work with the Tibet Voice Project was continued in  
1998, and the Fund also received NED aid to run “an electronic media  
workshop for Tibetan journalists, and to introduce a bi-monthly  
Chinese language news magazine about Tibet.” Tenzing Choephel is the  
Tibetan scholarship program co-ordinator for the Tibet Fund, and it  
important to note that he previously helped “lay the foundation of the  
Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy [a group that was  
founded in 1996 and received NED funding in 1999], where he worked as  
an Office Administrator / English Researcher for three years in  
Dharamsala.” Finally it is interesting to observe that three people  
who are involved with the International Campaign for Tibet are linked  
to the Tibet fund, these are Lodi G. Gyari (who is the the executive  
chairman of the board of the ICT, and an emertius director of the  
Tibet Fund), Gehlek Rinpoche (who serves on ICT’s advisory board, and  
is a director of the Tibet Fund), and Tenzin N. Tethong (who serves on  
ICT’s advisory board, and is a founder and emeritus director of the  
Tibet Fund).

Another group that has received strong NED backing is the London-based  
Tibet Information Network (TIN), who between 1999 and 2004 received  
annual NED grants (excepting 2000) to “provide comprehensive, accurate  
information about political, social, and economic developments in  
Tibet to Tibetan audiences, the international community, human rights  
groups, and the media.” TIN was cofounded in 1987 by Nicholas Howen  
(who is now the secretary general of the International Commission of  
Jurists) and Robert J. Barnett. Robert J. Barnett was the Director of  
TIN between 1987 and 1998 and now works at the Weatherhead East Asian  
Institute, alongside fellow faculty member Andrew J. Nathan (who is an  
editor of the NED’s Journal of Democracy, and also serves on the  
advisory board for the NED-funded Beijing Spring magazine). It is  
important to note that between 1998 and 2002 – the time coinciding  
with the start of the NED’s support for TIN – the organization was  
directed by Richard Oppenheimer who incidentally had just spent 22  
years working for the BBC World Service. In 2002, Oppenheimer was then  
replaced by the world famous Tibetologist, Thierry Dodin, who left TIN  
in 2005 when it was announced that TIN “had to close down for lack of  
funds”, and he subsequently went on to direct the TibetInfoNet.[18]

The Tibetan Literary Society received NED aid between 2000 and 2005 to  
publish the Bod-Kyi-Dus-Bab (Tibet Times), a Tibetan language  
newspaper which was founded in 1996 and is published three times a  
month in Dharamsala, India. In 1998 and 1999 the newspaper itself also  
received direct support from the NED. Another group to receive NED  
support is the Tibet Multimedia Center, which received three grants  
from the NED between 2000 to 2002 to:

“…provide objective information about Tibet for Tibetans in the  
country and in exile as well as for audiences in China. The center  
will produce audio and videocassettes, organize debates among Tibetan  
high school students in exile and publish a Chinese language magazine  
to educate the Chinese public about the situation in Tibet and the  
struggle for human rights.”

Between 1999 and 2005 the Tibetan Review Trust Society received four  
grants to publish the Tibetan Review, a monthly English-language news  
magazine based in New Delhi, India, “that covers Tibet-related news  
and analysis.” The Tibetan Review was founded in 1968 and it’s  
precursor was Lodi G. Gyari’s (see earlier) The Voice of Tibet: in the  
early 1970s the Tibetan Review was published by Tenzin N. Tethong (who  
at the time headed the International Campaign for Tibet), and after  
passing through the hands of a number of other Directors it is now  
being edited by Pema Thinley (who is the former Executive Editor of  
Tibetan Bulletin, the “official journal of the Central Tibet  
Administration of His Holiness the Dalai Lama”).

Finally, in 2001 and 2002, the Voice of Tibet – a Tibetan-language  
shortwave radio station which was founded in 1996 – obtained NED aid  
to provide “regular news about Tibet, the Tibetan exile community, and  
the Tibetan government-in-exile, for listeners in Tibet and in exile  
in neighboring countries.” According to their website “[e]very day  
Voice of Tibet broadcasts a 30 minutes news service in the Tibetan  
language and a 15 minutes news service in Mandarin Chinese.” Voice of  
Tibet was founded by three Norwegian NGOs; the Norwegian Human Rights  
House, the Norwegian Tibet Committee and Worldview Rights. The final  
group is particularly interesting as it is also known as the Points of  
Peace Foundation, which is a “human rights organisation based in  
Stavanger, Norway, with a mandate to support Nobel Peace Prize  
Laureates in urgent need of media, dialogue and communication  
assistance in their home countries and internationally.” Crucially,  
the Points of Peace Foundation’s advisory board includes Jose Ramos- 
Horta, John Hume (who is a former patron of the British version of the  
NED, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy), Aung San Suu Kyi (who  
is a member of the international advisory board of the Democracy  
Coalition Project, and is an honorary director of the International  
Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance), Wangari Maathai  
(who is a member of the international advisory board of the Democracy  
Coalition Project, and is a trustee of World Learning), Mairead  
Corrigan Maguire (who is a member of the international council of  
advisors for the International Campaign for Tibet), and Muhammad Yunus  
(who is on the advisory board of Stockholm Challenge, where he sits  
alongside NED director Esther Dyson, and US Institute for Peace  
advisory board member John Gage). (Two other groups to receive NED aid  
for communication work in Tibet since 1990 for which no further  
information could be ascertained include the Tibet Justice Center  
(which received a single grant in 2002), and the Tibet Museum (which  
received NED support in both 2004 and 2005).)

Conclusion

This article has demonstrated the close ties that exist between the  
Dalai Lama’s non-violent campaign for Tibetan independence and U.S.  
foreign policy elites who are actively supporting Tibetan causes  
through the NED. This finding is particularly worrying given the high  
international media profile of many of the groups exposed in this  
article, especially when it is remembered that the NED’s activities  
are intimately linked with those of the CIA. This funding issue is  
clearly problematic for Tibetan (or foreign) activists campaigning for  
Tibetan freedom, as the overwhelmingly anti-democratic nature of the  
NED can only weaken the legitimacy of the claims of any group  
associated with the NED. In this regard it seems only fitting that  
progressive activists truly concerned with promoting freedom and  
democracy in Tibet should first and foremost cast a critical eye over  
the antidemocratic funders of many of the Tibetan groups identified in  
this study. Only then will they be able to reappraise the  
sustainability of their work in the light of the NED’s controversial  
background. Once this step has been taken, perhaps progressive  
solutions for restoring democratic governance to Tibet can be  
generated by concerned activists, so that Tibetan people wanting to  
reclaim their homeland will able to be more sure that they are  
bringing democracy home to Tibet, not polyarchy.


Michael Barker is a doctoral candidate at Griffith University,  
Australia. He can be reached at Michael.J.Barker at griffith.edu.au


References

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[2] Conboy, K. and J.Morrison. The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet.  
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Deane, H. “The Cold War in Tibet.” Covert Action Information Bulletin  
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Knaus, J. K. Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle  
for Survival. New York: Public Affairs, 1999.

[3] Mann, J. “CIA Funded Covert Tibet Exile Campaign in 1960s.” The  
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[4] Parenti, M. “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth (Updated).” Jul.  
2004. 21 Jun. 2007. <http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html>.

[5] Mann, J. “CIA Funded Covert Tibet Exile Campaign in 1960s.” The  
Age (Melbourne), 16 Sept. 1998. 21 Jun. 2007. <http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind9809c&L=archives&P=14058 
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[6] Knaus, J. K. Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan  
Struggle for Survival. New York: Public Affairs, 1999.

Salopek, P. “The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet.” Seattle Times, 26 Jan.  
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[7] Knaus, J. K. “Official Policies and Covert Programs: The U.S.  
State Department, the CIA, and the Tibetan Resistance.” Journal of  
Cold War Studies, 5 (3), (2003), p.78.

[8] Reagan, R. W. “Address to Members of the British Parliament.”  
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[9] Rasmus, J. The War at Home: The Corporate Offensive Against  
American Workers and Unions from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. San  
Ramon, CA: Kyklos Productions, 2006.

[10] Ignatius, D. “Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups.”  
The Washington Post, 22 September 1991.

[11] Robinson, W. I. and J. Gindin. “The Battle for Global Civil  
Society.” Venezuelanalysis.com, 13 Jun. 2005. 21 Jun. 2007. <http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1477 
 >.

[12] Barker, M. J. “Taking the Risk Out of Civil Society: Harnessing  
Social movements and Regulating Revolutions.” Refereed paper presented  
to the Australasian Political Studies Association Conference,  
University of Newcastle 25-27 September 2006. 21 Jun. 2007. <http://www.newcastle.edu.au/school/ept/politics/apsa/PapersFV/IntRel_IPE/Barker,%20Michael.pdf 
 >.

Roelofs, J. Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism.  
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.

[13] Barker, M. J. “The National Endowment for Democracy and the  
Promotion of ‘Democratic’ Media Systems Worldwide.” Communication for  
Development and Social Change: A Global Journal (In Press).

Barker, M. J. “Democracy or Polyarchy? US-Funded Media Developments in  
Afghanistan and Iraq Post 9/11.” Media Culture Society (In Press).

Sussman, G. “The Myths of ‘Democracy Assistance’: U.S. Political  
Intervention in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe.” Monthly Review, Dec.  
2006. 21 Jun. 2007. <http://www.monthlyreview.org/1206sussman.htm>.

[14] Barker, M. J. “A Force More Powerful: Promoting ‘Democracy’  
Through Civil Disobedience.” State of Nature, Mar. 2007. 21 Jun. 2007.  
<http://www.stateofnature.org/forceMorePowerful.html>.

[15] Fenton, A. “Canada’s Growing Role in Haitian Affairs (Part I).”  
Znet, 21 Mar. 2005. 21 Jun. 2007. <http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7496 
 >.

[16] For a detailed examination of both individuals strong ties to the  
NED see Barker, M. J. “Promoting a Low Intensity Public Sphere:  
American Led Efforts to Promote a ‘Democratic Media’ Environment in  
China.” A paper to presented at the China Media Centre Conference  
(Brisbane, Australia: Creative Industries Precinct, 5-6 July 2007).

Also of interest is Barker, M. J. “Hijacking Human Rights: A Critical  
Examination of Human Rights Watch’s Americas Branch and their Links to  
the ‘Democracy’ Establishment.” Znet, August 3, 2007. <http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=80&ItemID=13436 
 >.

[17]Grandin, G. Empire's workshop: Latin America, the United States,  
and the Rise of the New Imperialism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.

[18] Robert, P. “Tibet Information Network Closes as Funds Dry Up.”  
Tibet Information Network, 13 Sep. 2005. 21 Jun. 2007. <http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=10679&t=1&c=1 
 >.