I'm pretty sure the dalai lama said:
For many reasons, I have decided that I will not be the head of, or play any role in the government when Tibet becomes independent. The future head of the Tibetan Government must be someone popularly elected by the people. There are many advantages to such a step and it will enable us to become a true and complete democracy. I hope that these moves will allow the people of Tibet to have a clear say in determining the future of their country.
He has also said that he would be more than happy having Tibet remain an autonomous state of China for reasons of economics.
link to the quote?
I am sure a Hong Kong style autonomy would benefit them but is hard to see the Communist party handing out semi-democracy like candy to whoever asks.
Yeah, I'll have to hunt around to find the citation. I heard it in a speech he gave in NYC about 10-11 years ago following the release of Kundun.
searches around a bit http://www.dalailama.com/news.220.htm Here is a recent-ish post by His Holiness.
thanks
Yup!
Google Tibetan history and see what sorts of "religious order" he wants to implement in Tibet. Chinese are an occupying force there, sure, but the Dalai Lama, if he was no the leader of Tibet, would absolutely deserve a coup and summary hanging.
Earlier visitors to Tibet commented on the theocratic despotism. In 1895, an Englishman, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote that the populace was under the “intolerable tyranny of monks” and the devil superstitions they had fashioned to terrorize the people. In 1904 Perceval Landon described the Dalai Lama’s rule as “an engine of oppression.” At about that time, another English traveler, Captain W.F.T. O’Connor, observed that “the great landowners and the priests… exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal,” while the people are “oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft.” Tibetan rulers “invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition” among the common people. In 1937, another visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, “The Lamaist monk does not spend his time in ministering to the people or educating them. . . . The beggar beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth.”24 As much as we might wish otherwise, feudal theocratic Tibet was a far cry from the romanticized Shangri La so enthusiastically nurtured by Buddhism’s western proselytes.
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html