Leaders: The Dalai Lama's visit with President Bush and congressional medal remind us of China's expansionism and oppression, and a land brutalized by another where true freedom is a figment of the imagination.

The Congressional Gold Medal given on Wednesday to the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, isn't the highest award Tibet's spiritual leader has ever received. But it's well deserved. In 1989, when the Nobel Peace Prize was occasionally awarded to those who actually worked for peace, he was the worthy recipient.

The press release announcing that prize said: "The (Nobel) Committee wants to emphasize the fact that the Dalai Lama in his struggle for the liberation of Tibet consistently has opposed the use of violence." Unlike the People's "Liberation" Army, which invaded Tibet in October of 1950.

Foreign interference and occupation are common in Tibet. In 1912, it expelled the last of the Chinese troops then in the country, and the Dalai Lama declared its formal independence. Tibet functioned as a sovereign state from 1912 to the 1950 invasion, conducting its own foreign affairs, maintaining its own army, etc.

In March 1959, the Tibetan people rose up against their Chinese oppressors. As in Tiananmen Square, they were met with the full force of the Chinese military. The Dalai Lama and 100,000 Tibetans fled into exile.

The Iron Curtain may have lifted from the slave states of the Soviet Union, but it has not lifted from Tibet. The Tibet section of the State Department's new human rights report states that Chinese authorities continue to "commit serious human rights abuses, including torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, house arrest and surveillance of dissidents, and arbitrary restrictions on free movement."

China has even set rules giving it veto power over the choice of the next Dalai Lama, not unlike Moscow's attempt to co-opt the Catholic Church and its selection of bishops and cardinals in Poland and Eastern Europe.

Tibetans believe eminent monks such as the Dalai Lama are reincarnated after death. "No outside organization or individual (exiled Tibetans and the current Dalai Lama) will influence or control the reincarnation of living Buddhas," one rule states. Another says reincarnations must be approved by the Chinese government.

In 1995, the Dalai Lama chose 6-year-old Gendun Choekyl Nyima as the 11th Panchen Lama, the most exalted figure in Tibetan Buddhism after the Dalai Lama himself. The boy and his family disappeared soon after and have not been seen since.

On Oct. 10, Tibetan exiles stormed the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi in protest over the new religious edicts, spray-painting "Free Tibet" on the embassy walls. In August, thousands of Tibetan marched through the Indian capital protesting Chinese plans to have the Olympic torch carried through Tibet in 2008.

No matter how fast our trade with China, we're still dealing with a country that threatens us and Taiwan, a land in which Tiananmen Square is not an isolated incident, where religions are suppressed, Internet police are active and forced abortion is state policy. And a nation that occupies the independent country of Tibet.