About this user
"China's Favorite Propaganda on Tibet
...and Why It's Wrong"
By Lhadon Tethong
"...Luckily for Tibetans, Beijing's Orwellian rants - for example labeling the Dalai Lama a 'serpent' and a 'wolf in monk's robes' - have bordered on the hilarious...
'Tibet has always 'belonged' to China'
This is Beijing's favorite argument, though the exact moment when Tibet supposedly became 'part' of China keeps changing:
· The seventh century: Beijing used to claim that the marriage of Tibet's King Srongtsen Gampo to Chinese Tang Dynasty Princess Wencheng in 641 A.D. marked the 'union of the Tibetan and Han Chinese nationalities.' It stopped claiming this when it was repeatedly pointed out that Wencheng was junior to Srongtsen Gampo's Nepali wife, Princess Brikuti, and that the Tang emperor was forced to give his daughter because of the strength of the Tibetan empire. In fact, the Tibetan army sacked and briefly occupied the Tang capital in 765 A.D., and the 822 A.D. peace treaty forced the Chinese to treat the 'barbarian' Tibetans as equals.
· The 13th century: Beijing claims that Tibet became part of China during the Yuan Dynasty in the mid-13th century. The Yuan was actually a Mongol empire, with Chinggis Khan and his descendents conquering China and nations from Korea to Eastern Europe. For China to claim Tibet based on this would be like India claiming Burma since both were part of the British Empire. The Mongols never ruled Tibet as an administrative region of China, and Tibet was given special treatment because Tibet's Sakya lamas were the religious teachers of the Mongol emperors. By the fall of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, Tibet had again become in charge of its own affairs.
· The Qing Dynasty (1644-1911): The Manchu rulers of China were Buddhists, and Tibet's Dalai Lamas and the Manchu emperors had a special priest-patron relationship called Cho-Yon whereby China committed to providing protection to the largely demilitarized Tibetan state. Chinese nationalists may see this as sovereignty, but it wasn't. As the relationship became strained, China at various times exercised influence and sent armies into Tibet - but so did Nepal during this time. China expanded its influence in Tibet after 1720, as a powerful country dealing with a weaker neighbor. It later tried to occupy Tibet by force, violating the Cho-Yon relationship, but with the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, Tibetans expelled the Chinese and the 13th Dalai Lama proclaimed Tibet's complete independence...
'Old Tibet was a backwards, feudal society and the Dalai Lama was an evil slaveholder'
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 ...{*fascist}... 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."
Interests
*For more information, the resources below are good places to start:
Tibet: Proving Truth from Facts, http://www.tibet.com/WhitePaper/index.html
Tibet - Its Ownership and Human Rights Situation- http://news.xinhuanet.com/employment/2002-11/18/content_633181.htm
Regional Ethnic Autonomy in Tibet, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-05/23/content_1485519.htm
http://www.tibetjustice.org/materials/index.html
Non-governmental organizations:
http://www.tibetinfo.net
