With all the negative press that China and Tibet has been receiving lately, we thought we would include some information about Tibet that has been conveniently left out of all new coverage from western media. Before you bash China for its treatment of its Tibetan people, first consider if your country has no dark spots in its history, and consider if your remarks would be helpful for the Chinese people, the Tibetan people and the world. For the US, we would have you consider your treatment of the Native American peoples. What if the whole world would require that you give back all of the lands stolen from them before attending the Olympics in the US again? Such a request would be met with laughter, and considered illogical and irrational. Each country has its own issues, and peoples that it must deal with. We should let each country handle it in the best way it knows how, and have outside countries, who know nothing or little about the history, culture or wishes of another country’s people, leave each country to its own destiny. Witness the crimes against humanity that have occurred in Iraq as a lesson in the amount of loss of life and destruction of country that could happen when a world leader decides what is best for another country. Image what would happen if another country decides what is best for the US, invades the USA, and not only removes the President from power, but assassinates him (or her) and continues to destroy the country. Sounds crazy, but it is exactly what the US has done in Iraq, at the cost of countless lives and homes.
Beijing (as well as sympathetic Western scholars such as Michael Parenti, Tom Grunfeld and Anna Louise Strong) asserts that “pre-liberation” Tibet was a medieval, oppressive society consisting of “landowners, serfs and slaves.” Tashi Rabgay, a Tibetan scholar at Harvard, points out that these three alleged social classes are arbitrary and revisionist classifications that have no basis in reality.
There were indeed indentured farmers in old Tibet. There were also merchants, nomads, traders, non-indentured farmers, hunters, bandits, monks, nuns, musicians, aristocrats and artists.
Tibetan society was a vast, multifaceted affair, as real societies tend to be. To try to reduce it to three base experiences (and non-representative experiences at that) is to engage in the worst kind of revisionism.
No country is perfect and many Tibetans (including the Dalai Lama) admit that old Tibet had its flaws and inequities (setting aside whether things are better under Chinese occupation).
But taking every real or imagined shortcoming that happened in a country over a 600-year period and labeling it the “way it was” is hardly legitimate history. Any society seen through this blurry lens would come up short.
And in many ways, such as the elimination of the death penalty, Tibet was perhaps ahead of its time. The young 14th Dalai Lama had begun to promote land reform laws and other improvements, but China’s take-over halted these advances.
It is instructive to note that today the Tibetan government-in-exile is a democracy while China and Tibet are under communist dictatorship.
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.
Tibet was not perfect before the chinese took it. Nobody has denied that there was a need for change and modernization – not even the Dalai Lama.
It would be interresting to see a documentary on chineese TV about the democratization and modernizations that has taken place exile under the leadership of the exile government.
That would be a good way to get an objective clue as to what “the Dalai clique” would be up to.
HAHA. this is a joke. Look at their eyes. we can tell that they were lying. Do you know because of Mao 100 million of people died??? Can you mention that too please.