Despite recent national and on-campus tension, the four panelists who spoke at Wednesday night's "A Conversation on Tibet," sponsored by the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, stressed overcoming divisive issues and looking for a practical solution to an issue of global significance.
Gang Yue, a Chinese citizen and chair of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, spoke about the importance of trusting in the sincerity of the Dalai Lama. He also warned against racial tensions that he said the Tibetan riots had created.
"Do not fight racism with racism. If you do that you play right into the hands of extremists on both sides," he said. "Racism is contagious and no one is immune to that disease."
Sisters Losang Rabgey, an explorer for National Geographic, and Tashi Rabgey, lecturer and director of the University of Virginia's Contemporary Tibetan Studies Initiative, both emphasized the importance of preserving Tibetan culture through educating the region's children, rather than focusing on recent talk of an Olympic boycott.
"The Olympics will come and go and we'll still be stuck with this problem," Losang Rabgey said, "The most important stakeholders are the people who live in Tibet and the children who will inherit the political mess we're creating."
Scott Savitt, Trinity '85 and a former reporter for United Press International and the Los Angeles Times in China, said it was important to separate Chinese policy from Chinese people.
"The Chinese government is doing this, not the Chinese people," he said. "It is so important to make this distinction. These words are what are hurting people. We all have to be so careful of the words we use."
Freshman Vince Taweel, who said he decided to participate in last week's rally for Tibet after watching the actions of pro-China protestors, said he thought the panelists worked to pacify all of the audience members.
"It wasn't what I expected at all," he said. "The panelists were definitely trying to avoid major issues that could have caused tension in the audience."
Others said they also thought panelists avoided potentially controversial topics.
"I felt the panelists skirted around issues for the sake of political correctness," freshman Jack Zhang said. "There were a lot of empty acknowledgments on both sides."
Panelists did disagree on whether or not the Chinese government was committing "cultural genocide" in Tibet. Tashi Rabgey criticized the Chinese government for excluding the Tibetan language from school systems.
However, Yue said no genocide was occurring, noting that thousands of languages had disappeared naturally in the past century.
"I think most Americans got their idea of cultural genocide from 'Seven Years in Tibet,'" he said.
The panelists recognized the suffering of the Tibetan people and the importance of resolving the issue for individuals whose lives had been affected by the recent riots.
"These are human-scale problems and we need human-made solutions," Tashi Rabgey said. "We need the best of Tibetans, the best of Chinese, the best of people all around the world."
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