Gyalo Thondup

Gyalo Thondup

Gyalo Thondup (Tibetan: རྒྱལ་ལོ་དོན་འགྲུབ, Wylie: rgyal lo don 'grub ; Chinese: 嘉乐顿珠; pinyin: Jiālè Dùnzhū, born 1928) is the second-eldest brother of the 14th Dalai Lama. He often acted as the Dalai Lama's unofficial envoy, and was involved in various political controversies around the Tibetan diaspora.^[1]

Biography

In 1928, Gyalo Thondup was born in Ping'an District, Qinghai province. In 1939, he moved with his family to Lhasa. In 1942, at the age of 14, Thondup went to Nanjing, the capital of Republican China, to study Standard Chinese and the history of China. He often visited Chiang Kai-shek at his home and ate dinner with him.^[2] In 1948, he married Zhu Dan, the daughter of a Guomindang general. In 1949, before the Communist revolution of that year in China, Thondup left Nanjing for India via British Hong Kong. In 1951, he traveled to America and became the main source of information on Tibet for the United States Department of State.^[3] America's Central Intelligence Agency promised to make Tibet independent from China in exchange for Thondup's support in organizing guerrilla units to fight against the People's Liberation Army, an offer which Thondup accepted.^[2][4][5] Thondup maintains that he did not inform the 14th Dalai Lama about the CIA's actions,^[6] and this support ended after the 1972 Nixon visit to China.

With the permission of the Dalai Lama, Thondup met Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979 for open political talks, which Thondup terminated in 1993, feeling them to be useless.^[2] In the 1990s, Thondup made several official visits to China, acting as the Dalai Lama's unofficial envoy.^[1] In recent years, Thondup has repeatedly stated that dialogue is the only way to achieve progress with China.^[7] In 1998, the Central Tibetan Administration (the political arm of the Dalai Lama's anti-China diaspora faction) criticized Thondup for not letting the Dalai Lama know about the CIA's involvement in Tibet.^[6] Over a decade later, Thondup accused his sister's father in law of embezzling money from the Central Tibetan Administration.^[8]

Publications

• (with Anne F. Thurston), The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong: The Untold Story of the Dalai Lama and the Secret Struggle for Tibet, PublicAffairs, 2015

References

1. "Dalai Lama's Older Brother Visits China". Voice of America. October 26, 2009.
2. "Gyalo Thondup: Interview Excerpts". The Wall Street Journal. Feb 20, 2009.
3. Goldstein, Melvyn (2007). A History of Modern Tibet: The Calm Before the Storm, 1951-1955. University of California Press. pp. 236–240.
4. On the CIA's links to the Dalai Lama and his family and entourage, see Loren Coleman, Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).
5. Sautman, Barry (1 March 2010). "Tibet's Putative Statehood and International Law". Chinese Journal of International Law (Oxford University Press) 9 (1): 127–142. Indeed, after the 1962 war, B.N. Mullik, India's Intelligence Bureau Chief, told Gyalo Thondup, the Dalai Lama's brother and a top CIA asset, that India supported Tibet's “eventual liberation”.
6. "Tibet rules out Lama links with CIA". The Indian Express. October 3, 1998.
7. "Former Minister Gyalo Thondup Says Weiqun Ignorant of Deng's statement on Tibet". Voice of America. Retrieved 3 November 2013.
8. Mishra, Pankaj (2015-12-01). "The Last Dalai Lama?". The New York Times. Retrieved 2015-12-15.