Tragedy in Crimson: How the Dalai Lama Conquered the World but Lost the Battle with China

Author Tim Johnson will give a book talk at the University of Washington.

As the Dalai Lama enters the twilight of his life, what is the future for Tibetan leadership, the Tibetan people, and the Free Tibet movement? What does China’s rise on the global stage mean for the Tibetan people and the future of Tibetan culture? As China rapidly emerges as the world’s newest superpower, what can we learn from China’s approach to Tibet?

Tim Johnson, journalist and author of Tragedy in Crimson: How the Dalai Lama Conquered the World but Lost the Battle with China, gives an account of the cat-and-mouse game embroiling China and the Tibetan exile community over Tibet. Johnson reports from the front lines, trekking to nomad resettlements to speak with the people who guard Tibet’s slowly vanishing culture, and he travels alongside the Dalai Lama in the campaigns for Tibetan sovereignty. Johnson details how China is using its economic power around the globe to assail the Free Tibet movement and covers how the Chinese are also working to dilute Tibetan culture within Tibet itself. He also takes a sympathetic but unsentimental look at the Dalai Llama, who is often idolized in the West, but seen as a failure by many Tibetans.

Tim Johnson is an award-winning journalist who has spent the last twenty years as a foreign correspondent. He is currently the Mexico Bureau Chief for McClatchy Newspapers in Mexico City. He was the Beijing bureau chief for Knight Ridder and McClatchy from 2003 to 2009, with responsibility for China and Taiwan. He previously worked for 14 years for the Miami Herald, covering U.S. policy toward Latin America. He served as a foreign correspondent for The Herald through most of the 1990s in Central America and the Andean region. Johnson won the 1996 Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University for "courageous and valiant reporting" from Latin America, and was a 2000-2001 Knight Fellow at Stanford University. Johnson is among the few U.S. journalists to report from Hermit Kingdom, North Korea.
Registration for the event begins at 6:30.  Please pre-register online or by calling the World Affairs Council at (206) 441-5910.

Click here to watch a video of the presentation.