Voice for the Voiceless: Over Seven Decades of Struggle with China for My Land and My People – A New York Times Bestselling Memoir of Spiritual Exile and Freedom by Dalai Lama XIV
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Confession: I am a fan of the Dalai Lama. I have had the privilege of attending, along with maybe thirty others, one small audience with him in 1986 in Macleod Gang, and a second time at much larger public event in Sydney in 2010. I have not read many of his spiritual works, but what I have read, I liked. So this review is not unbiased.
Voice for the Voiceless is not a spiritual book. Far from it. It is a political autobiography, primarily of the Dalai Lama’s dealings with the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. The Dalai Lama fled when the CCP invaded Tibet in 1951, was persuaded to return, but fled a second and final time after the crackdown in 1959. He has lived in exile ever since.
This account restricts itself to his political interactions with the CCP, both in the initial period after the invasion, and in the later period of his exile. He had direct dealings with many of the leaders of the CCP, both directly (Mao Tse-dong, Chao En-lai, Deng Xiao-ping) and indirectly. The events leading up to, and the agreements that followed these meetings are meticulously documented, and book includes some of them in whole in the endnotes.
In this telling, the CCP did not honour any of them, and in many cases their dealings with the Dalai Lama come across as duplicitous. It is a sad and cautionary tale, not just of Tibet, but of dealing with any regime which regards – as Marxism does – history not as facts, but as a tool.
Nevertheless, this book is dry. For those who follow Tibetan history, it is a very useful companion. Although none of the material was new to me, but it is well-organised and presented in a simple and accessible manner. However, for those seeking spiritual insight, this book is best left on the shelf.