For an opening gambit, what do you feel are the stereotypes that people hold of Tibet and how can we counter them?

As the conversation about Tibet slowly develops, particularly in the West, stereotypes proliferate, which at least means that there is wider range to choose from than in the past. They tend to depend on whom you’re talking to and their predilections. There is the western Buddhist approach – a view of Tibetan Buddhists as peaceful, harmonious and spiritually elevated, even mystical and esoteric. Another view is of Tibet as a society that was somehow eternally happy, like the idea of Shangri La in [the 1933 novel] Lost Horizon. That seems to be the view of those who have anxieties about modernity, and look to Tibet as a kind of haven.

More important now is the political perception of Tibetans as victims who have suffered great abuses heroically and non-violently, or the Chinese stereotype of Tibetans as brutally oppressed serfs who are rejoicing at liberation. These are just some of the stereotypes that abound, so there is some variety but it’s still a very one-dimensional picture. Whichever stereotype you take it leads you down a political cul de sac, and you end up demeaning Tibetans and not seeing them as intellectual or moral equals. These images tend to evaporate if you read serious writing produced by Tibetans within Tibet, or if you are able to talk in depth with people from there.

Give us a word, if you will, on the current situation in Tibet. Several monks self-immolated last year, and 2012 has already seen two confirmed deaths in Tibetan areas of Sichuan during clashes with police.

From a news and a political point of view, the situation in Tibet is reaching another trough, with significant instances of political unrest, violence and death. The last period like that was [with widespread riots] in 2008, and before that with protests in the 1980s. So these cycles are recurrent and seem to happening more frequently.

These events are partly a response to a very clear decision by China in 1994 to demonise the Dalai Lama. They had of course attacked him politically for many decades, since shortly after he fled Tibet in 1959. But it wasn’t until 1994 that they decided to attack him ad hominem, in a personal and religious manner – saying that he is not a true leader of Buddhism, he is personally responsible for the problems of society, and so on – and are still demanding now that all monks, nuns and officials formally denounce him.

That decision has led to what has been China’s second loss of Tibet, the first since it began the reform period in the 1980s, which introduced more open and relaxed policies. Now we are seeing the export of that anti-Dalai Lama policy from central areas around Lhasa – where the Chinese have been heavy handed in their policies for some 25 years now – to the eastern Tibetan areas. Those areas had enjoyed relatively relaxed policies and had been quite calm over the last 30 years, until the decision in the last decade to gradually force anti-Dalai Lama policies on them and their monasteries.

What do you envisage for the future? We hear chants of “Free Tibet”, but anyone who has been to or studied Tibet knows that is sadly unrealistic.

I hate to say this, but we have to learn from Wittgenstein and think of words not as a label that describes just one thing but as a signpost that points in various directions depending on the context. I think a lot of the people talking about freedom in Tibet, and outside of it, are not necessarily thinking of independence, or not only of independence. The more desperate the situation becomes, the more many Tibetans see the key issue as policies that erode their culture and identity, and for those, the idea of freedom probably is reduced to simply any kind of relaxation by the current regime – anything that diminishes the dominating role of Chinese in their everyday lives.

So for many of Tibetans the dream of independence and the memory of past independence is certainly strong, but may now take second place to more pragmatic aspirations. We can’t be sure of this, and it could change at any time, but it looks like a lot of Tibetans, perhaps most of them, would accept a compromise solution if the Dalai Lama could get one from China. Some would still like independence – it seems is that a rapidly increasing number view Tibet as having been independent in the past – but in the minds of many people almost anything is better than the policies in Tibet now.

Has the game changed with Lobsang Sangay at the political helm?

That’s a rather complicated story. Lobsang Sangay is a young man with a self-proclaimed “American” style of brash, pushy campaigning and loose rhetoric that is somewhat different from earlier Tibetan efforts to maintain careful, nuanced diplomatic relations with their foreign allies, or even from their more bullish attempts to push China to re-enter talks. But his ascendancy is symbolically very important for Tibetans, especially inside Tibet, because it confirms that the Dalai Lama has kept his fundamental commitment, unlike China, to complete the process of democratisation and to give over the role of government to an elected democratic leader.

In addition, Sangay is young, he is not from an aristocratic background, and he’s not even from central Tibet. He could do a great deal to improve the quality of Tibetan exiles’ education, administration and morale, but he probably can’t achieve that much with China, which has always, not surprisingly, refused to negotiate with an exile government that neither it nor any other country recognises. In terms of the bigger issues of Tibet-China relations, realistically these will still remain with the Dalai Lama. But they depend entirely on whether the Chinese will agree to resume talks. It’s been two years since they last agreed to meet, and now they say that the self-immolations are a form of pressure on them instigated by exiles, and so use them as another reason to delay the dialogue process.