Tibet’s only weapon, really, is that it is the rare freedom movement that hasn’t resorted to violence yet (as he told me years ago, it doesn’t have oil, and is never going to engage the West). China has no reason to give up a region two-thirds the size of western Europe and strategically placed at the centre of Asia, which is traditionally known in Chinese as the “Western Treasure House”. And as a realist, he realises that it is important to support Tibet’s rightful needs for basic human rights, but in doing so not to devastate – or to demonise – Chinese individuals, who have the same rights.

China’s claims, moreover, that it has brought material developments and much-needed modern facilities to a land that had been dangerously cut off and impecunious are not entirely baseless, and the Dalai Lama often stresses, as he did to me last November, that Tibetans have much to gain from remaining a part of the People’s Republic. This is one reason he has not called for independence from China for more than 20 years, and seeks only autonomy, whereby China could control Tibet’s foreign affairs and defence so long as Tibet could control its domestic matters. And when Beijing talks about feudalism in old Tibet, it is echoing something the Dalai Lama himself implied when, arriving in exile, he lost no time in making up a new democratic constitution for Tibet for the first time in its history. Tibet was never perfect, he is the first Tibetan to say, and was certainly full of divisions of its own – but does remedying its imperfections require such brutality and oppression, wiping out religion and freedom along with real backwardness?

Part of what makes the Tibetan situation so archetypal and so potent, in fact, is that it turns upon a universal clash of values, represented by a monk on the one side and stock markets on the other. For Beijing, “liberation” means freeing Tibet from the remoteness and material underdevelopment that certainly afflicted it; yet for a Buddhist, liberation has only to do with freeing oneself from the ignorance and delusion that lead to needless suffering. No one can perform this function for you, Tibetans classically believe, and all the material progress in the world, the Dalai Lama often stresses, is not going to help you if you remain impoverished (isolated or confused) within.

The poignancy and frequent tragedy of the Tibetan situation turns around the fact that China’s leaders clearly see that the Dalai Lama has forms of authority (moral, spiritual and invisible) that they lack, and all the growth rates and skyscrapers they amass can’t quite reverse that lack. Stalin once famously asked: “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?”, thus trying to bypass the more central fact that the Pope speaks for the opposite of divisions (for communion, in effect, and peace). When we listen to Beijing call the Dalai Lama, a champion of interdependence, a “splittist”, and refer to him as an “enemy of the Tibetan people”, when we hear Chinese leaders call him, as one did this March, a “jackal in monk’s robes and an evil spirit with a human face and the heart of a beast”, we realise that they have to trade in schoolyard taunts because they have no legitimate moral case to bring against him. All the world fears Beijing, even as much of the world listens to and supports the Dalai Lama.