A Lion King With Instincts of a Hyena

Beijing, which all but declared war on Mickey Mouse over a film about the Dalai Lama, hasn’t the slightest sense of humor about Tibet. It views that Himalayan country as a historical part of China. In 1959, after crushing an internal uprising there, it exiled the Dalai Lama, who is regarded as a living Buddha by Lamaists. Despite world condemnation, Beijing brooks no contradiction on the issue--even from Mickey.

All that the Disney people were trying to do was to make a buck, in the best capitalist tradition. But although Beijing’s bosses haven’t seen “Kundun,” a relatively small-budget Martin Scorsese flick still in production, and even though there are no hopes for its distribution in either Tibet or China, they don’t want anyone else to view it either. So China threatened the Walt Disney Co. with massive commercial retaliation if its involvement in the film, now being shot in Morocco, continued. Frowned Beijing: “It is intended to glorify the Dalai Lama, so it is an interference in China’s internal affairs.”

Disney, involved in financing and distribution of the $6-million film, could hardly back down after it was publicly threatened. Especially with half the world and everyone in the politically plugged-in Hollywood community, including Lama aficionados Richard Gere, Steven Seagal and Harrison Ford, watching for the first twitch of the mouse tail.

So on with the show, says Mickey; even Walt Disney himself--somewhere to the right of Attila the Hoover in the eyes of Hollywood liberals--would have been proud. Then again, would he ever have done business with Communists?

Beijing’s blast at Mickey should not have struck anyone as an unexpected plot twist. In September, Beijing nearly went ballistic when Australian officials allowed the touring Dalai Lama into their country.

Now the Dalai Lama bodes to visit Taiwan, and in the works is a lollapalooza even bigger than Scorsese’s--a $60-million Dalai Lama epic with box-office powerhouse Brad Pitt improbably cast as the oppressed religious leader’s legendary European tutor. Guesses one industry source: “That film could be a blockbuster, like [the 1982 Oscar-winning] ‘Gandhi.’ It just might turn world opinion against China.”

Hype aside, films may not change history. But wise leaders can. Too bad there don’t seem to be enough of them in Beijing, which should directly negotiate with the Dalai Lama. He himself proposed in 1988 a “middle way”--a Tibet that, while still part of China, would be granted internal autonomy on many domestic matters. In fact, China’s own leader-in-name, the dying Deng Xiaoping, now 92, made nice noises about negotiations in 1979. But are the wise heads in charge in China? Are decisions being made by the cosmopolitan set that would prioritize economic development over all else and stick grievances on the back burner? Or by the rougher-cut crew that will only do business on China’s terms? A lot of Chinese stomachs will go empty if Beijing gets too full of itself. China requires Western capital to keep going forward and Asia requires a contented China in order to sleep at night.

Opines China expert Orville Schell, the new dean of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism: “This incident is not the end, but just the beginning. The message has gone out to the media that China does not shine kindly on stories--news or feature films--that don’t toe the line that Beijing wants. Assume that the Disney case is going to be used as an emblem of things to come.”

Let’s not. I favor the measured optimism of a senior executive at Disney, who prefers not to be identified: “In due course, when the Chinese confront this kind of issue again and again, I think they will learn to look the other way. They have gone so far into this globalized, commercial world; they’ve got to find some way to ignore these artistic clashes if they want to do business in the real world.”

That is to say: If you want to be the lion king, it’s a mistake to act like a hyena.

For its part, a wise America will be a very patient one. As MIT professor Rudi Dornbusch wrote recently, “The U.S. has paid an enormous amount of attention to Russia, but China policy has been left to the bean-counters. . . . America should start a new relationship built on accepting China as it is and realizing that the march toward democracy will be slow.” Henry S. Rowen, of the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford, agrees. Writing in the National Interest, he boldly calculates that China will become a democracy “around the year 2015 . . . Americans sustained the Cold War with the Soviet Union for 45 years until victory came. The prospect of a 20-year . . . effort to help the Chinese people become free . . . is a much less daunting prospect.”

Plans for visits by high-level Chinese and American officials, announced with fanfare at the recent Asian trade summit, come not a moment too soon. And President Clinton, considering a successor to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, could do much worse than to nominate someone who actually knows something about China. Nothing on the world stage today is likely to approach China for dramatic unpredictability. Beijing’s transpacific tantrum over a single movie shows just how tortured relations may become before they get better.