Tibet

Map of China with the so called Tibet autonomous region in red.

The flag of Tibet.

Tibet is a mountainous region between India and China proper. At the time when it was invaded by troops of the Chinese People's Liberation Army in 1949, Tibet was de facto an independent state. Within the People's Republic of China, the name is used to refer to the Tibet Autonomous Region, which includes about half of cultural Tibet.

Occupation

In 763 C.E., soldiers of the Tibetan Empire marched into the then capital of China and occupied it for 15 days - obviously the acts of a vicious imperial regime unappreciative of the benevolent culture of the Sinosphere.

In the 1910s, during the fall of the Qing Dynasty, which had more-or-less controlled Tibet, the Tibetans - mellowed somewhat by a few centuries of theocracy - kindly showed the Qing troops in the region the way out. China had its own problems to deal with, with the Warlord Era, the Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and World War II and whatnot, so Tibet remained de facto independent for a number of decades.

Before the Communist Party took full power in China in 1949, it began asserting claims that Tibet was part of Chinese territory and that its people were crying out for "liberation" from "imperialist forces" and from the "reactionary feudal regime in Lhasa". One of the first things that Chairman Mao did when he came to power was to send some of his experienced troops to annex Tibet, which was fiercely anti-Communist^{[citation needed]} and had nearly killed him and his little buddies on the Long March of 1934-1935, but the Chinese Civil War was actually still underway after the declaration of PRC's founding, and the campaign for Tibet formed a part of it. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) defeated the Tibetan army in a battle at Chamdo on October 7, 1950, marking the beginning of Beijing's campaign to integrate Tibet into the People's Republic of China. The PRC government calls this operation a peaceful liberation of Tibet, as delegates of the 14th Dalai Lama and of the PRC government signed a Seventeen Point Agreement affirming Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. It is called an invasion by the Central Tibetan Administration (the Government of Tibet in Exile), by the US Congress, by military analysts by media sources and by NGOs such as the International Commission of Jurists and the Center for World Indigenous Studies, as the defeated Tibet had little choice but to sign the agreement. Regardless, the Tibetan delegation had not been given authority to sign by their government and so (along with doing so under Chinese duress) the deal is deemed invalid under international law. The 14th Dalai Lama has repudiated it many times since.

Recently, unrest in Tibet has become more vocal and obvious. Riots started in Lhasa starting on March 14, 2008, and lasted until 2008 - instigated (according to the Chinese) by the Dalai Lama. In reality, it was the 49th anniversary of the invasion, and the Tibetans knew the eye of the world was on China anyway so local dissidents had a few field days slashing and burning people (Chinese, Hui-Chinese Muslims, and dirty, dirty Tibetan collaborators) to death.

Human rights

“”Tibet seems like as a celestial paradise held in chains, but the west's tendency to romanticise the country's Buddhist culture has distorted our view. Popular belief is that under the Dalai Lama, Tibetans lived contentedly in a spiritual non-violent culture, uncorrupted by lust or greed: but in reality society was far more brutal than that vision.

—Sorrel Neuss, What we don't hear about Tibet.

TL;DR: What China did was shit; this does not mean that Tibet was a Shangri-La prior to Chinese intervention. It was still pretty shit.

History

Some people defend the Chinese invasion of Tibet (Battle of Chamdo) by alleging that the human rights situation has improved. They claim that under occupation, the quality of life for the average Tibetan has greatly improved in comparison to the time of the feudal, theocratic government of the Lamas, when the aforementioned human rights (with the possible exception of self-determination) were also denied, often to a much greater degree. Sorrel Neuss writes in The Guardian's Comment is Free section:

“”Until 1959, when China cracked down on Tibetan rebels and the Dalai Lama fled to northern India, around 98% of the population was enslaved in serfdom. Drepung monastery, on the outskirts of Lhasa, was one of the world's largest landowners with 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. High-ranking lamas and secular landowners imposed crippling taxes, forced boys into monastic slavery and pilfered most of the country's wealth – torturing disobedient serfs by gouging out their eyes or severing their hamstrings.

—Sorrel Neuss, What we don't hear about Tibet.

While this is certainly a valid criticism of the old feudal government, using it to excuse the Chinese abuses could be considered an example of the tu quoque (or in some cases the not as bad as) fallacy. Lhadon Tethong, of Students for a Free Tibet, compares the defense of the occupation with the arguments used in favor of 19th-century European colonial endeavors:

“”The crucial subtext of Beijing's condemnation of Tibet's "feudal" past is a classic colonialist argument that the target's alleged backwardness serves as a justification for invasion and occupation. These are the politics of the colonist, in which the "native" is dehumanized, robbed of agency, and debased in order to make occupation more palatable or even necessary and "civilizing." China has no more right to occupy a "backward" Tibet than Britain had to carry the "white man's burden" in India or Hong Kong.

In its historical context, the invasion into Tibet is an extension of the Chinese Civil War – a class war/mob action which does not base its intentions on culture, ethnicity or religion, but wealth. It is still questionable whether the Communist People's Liberation Army is entitled to mount an offensive into a territory its enemy does not hold de facto, but they believed they were liberating fellow workers and peasants regardless of any borders.

Modern day

Human rights abuses documented in Tibet include the deprivation of life, disappearances, torture, poor prison conditions, arbitrary arrest and detention, denial of fair public trial, denial of freedom of speech and of press and Internet freedoms. They also include political and religious repression, forced abortions, sterilisation, and even infanticide. Since being recognized at a young age, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima (recognized by the Dalai Lama as the 11th Panchen Lama) has along with his family been kept in isolation since 1995 under house arrest. Attempts outside the Chinese government to confirm his health and well being have been attempted by Mary Robinson, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights; Harold Koh, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor; and Raymond Chan, the Canadian Secretary of State for Asia and the Pacific, but each have been denied access. Human Rights Watch estimates that there are approximately 600 known political prisoners in Tibet, mostly clergy; Tibetan students studying abroad have also been detained upon return.

In addition, there is also a degree of animosity between ethnic Tibetans and Hui Muslims. This dates back to the 1930s, when Hui Muslim warlord Ma Bufang waged a series of wars against the 13th Dalai Lama, in the former's attempts to create a Muslim enclave in nearby Qinghai province, which forced many Tibetans off their lands. Tensions were suppressed by the CCP government after the 1950 invasion, but resurfaced in the 1990s, after the economic liberalization of China relaxed many travel restrictions, which led to many Muslims migrating into Tibetan areas. Sectarian violence had flared up in the following decades, particularly during the 2008 Tibet riots, and as a result, many Hui Muslims tend to support the Chinese government's repression of Tibetan separatism.

The Chinese government does not support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or guarantee these rights to any of its citizens. While living conditions in Tibet may be worse than in most of the country, citizens throughout PRC do not enjoy full freedom of speech, assembly or movement. Beijing's line is that human rights are China's internal affair.

However, it is important for Westerners to keep in mind that pre-1959 Tibet was emphatically not the peaceful, egalitarian Shangri-La nation of happy monks that Richard Gere and other white Buddhists try to portray. The Dalai Lamas of old did in fact rule Tibet with an iron fist, and most people, if not serfs or slaves outright, were nonetheless oppressed under a caste system that privileged wealthy elites and monks over ordinary peasants (and this is not counting the many people, especially in U-Tsang, who were agricultural slaves). Fighting Chinese propaganda with hippy-dippy western Buddhist propaganda will not do anything to solve the human rights problems in this region of the world and, in fact, only serves to infantilize the Tibetan people into some idealistic pipe dream of how a few ignorant, privileged people think a quaint, happy mountain people ought to behave.

In 2023, China was accused of committing genocide against Tibetans by the Central Tibetan Administration (the Tibetan government in-exile) and the Tibet Bureau in Geneva. The accusation of genocide was based on China's forcing 800,000 Tibetan children to be educated in boarding schools, where they are forced to study in the Chinese language and indoctrinated to have loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.

See also

• Kashmir, another area (partly) occupied by China.
• Buddhism

References

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