Seeing The Tibet Situation Clearly: Old Tibet and Democracy for a Future Tibet

There is always two sides to every story and the same is true about the unrest in Tibet. The state operated Xinhua News issued an editorial today entitled, Don't See Tibet Through Tainted Glasses, which argues that Tibet is better now than it was before it came under the control of China. The basic argument is that people who view the Tibet situation through rose-colored glasses intentionally distort facts and deny that Tibet is experiencing its best era of development and stability and Tibetans are enjoying the broadest human rights ever. China Daily also ran an article today entitled, CNN: What's Wrong With You, detailing how the western media has been distorting the facts about the number of people injured during the rioting, the motives of the Tibetan rioters, China's response, and the history of Tibet.

According to the Tainted Glasses editorial, before China took control of the region the Tibetan people were "politically oppressed, economically exploited and frequently persecuted. A saying circulated among serfs: 'All a serf can carry away is his own shadow, and all he can leave behind is his footprints.' It is perhaps safe to say that Tibet's serf system represents the worst systematic abuse of human rights in human history."

Serfs? I had never heard of serfs in Tibet before. Articles like the one on China Confidential entitled, No Shangri-La: Life in Old Tibet, accurately summed up my western idea of old Tibet as a paradise. My musings about old Tibet pictured an idyllic religious retreat in the mountains with pleasant and content people living in harmony with each other and the rest of the world. However, it appears I was wrong. The Tibetan people lived in a feudal system before China took complete control of the region in 1959, and descriptions of life in Tibet before the Chinese occupation portray it as a country that consisted of slavery, oppression, and unimaginable human rights violations.

An article by Michael Parenti entitled, Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth (2007), presents a synopsis of Tibet's feudalism, theocratic despotism, and the Chinese occupation. He gave the following summary of life in feudal Tibet:

Religions have had a close relationship not only with violence but with economic exploitation. Indeed, it is often the economic exploitation that necessitates the violence. Such was the case with the Tibetan theocracy. Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that “a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches.” Much of the wealth was accumulated “through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.”

Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.”

Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” In fact. it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.

Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine. The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.

In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care, They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord's land--or the monastery’s land--without pay, to repair the lord's houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location.

As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.

One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.” Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed.

The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery.

The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.

Parenti gave the following summary of the Chinese taking complete control of the region, which appears to have been provoked by the CIA in a Bay of Pigs type of debacle:

What happened to Tibet after the Chinese Communists moved into the country in 1951? The treaty of that year provided for ostensible self-governance under the Dalai Lama’s rule but gave China military control and exclusive right to conduct foreign relations. The Chinese were also granted a direct role in internal administration “to promote social reforms.” Among the earliest changes they wrought was to reduce usurious interest rates, and build a few hospitals and roads. At first, they moved slowly, relying mostly on persuasion in an attempt to effect reconstruction. No aristocratic or monastic property was confiscated, and feudal lords continued to reign over their hereditarily bound peasants. “Contrary to popular belief in the West,” claims one observer, the Chinese “took care to show respect for Tibetan culture and religion.”

Over the centuries the Tibetan lords and lamas had seen Chinese come and go, and had enjoyed good relations with Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek and his reactionary Kuomintang rule in China. The approval of the Kuomintang government was needed to validate the choice of the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama. When the current 14th Dalai Lama was first installed in Lhasa, it was with an armed escort of Chinese troops and an attending Chinese minister, in accordance with centuries-old tradition. What upset the Tibetan lords and lamas in the early 1950s was that these latest Chinese were Communists. It would be only a matter of time, they feared, before the Communists started imposing their collectivist egalitarian schemes upon Tibet.

The issue was joined in 1956-57, when armed Tibetan bands ambushed convoys of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army. The uprising received extensive assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including military training, support camps in Nepal, and numerous airlifts. Meanwhile in the United States, the American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA-financed front, energetically publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in that organization. The Dalai Lama's second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation with the CIA as early as 1951. He later upgraded it into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet.

Many Tibetan commandos and agents whom the CIA dropped into the country were chiefs of aristocratic clans or the sons of chiefs. Ninety percent of them were never heard from again, according to a report from the CIA itself, meaning they were most likely captured and killed. “Many lamas and lay members of the elite and much of the Tibetan army joined the uprising, but in the main the populace did not, assuring its failure,” writes Hugh Deane. In their book on Tibet, Ginsburg and Mathos reach a similar conclusion: “As far as can be ascertained, the great bulk of the common people of Lhasa and of the adjoining countryside failed to join in the fighting against the Chinese both when it first began and as it progressed.” Eventually the resistance crumbled.

The Government of Tibet in Exile website presents a different account of these facts. In an article entitled, National Uprising, the website presents this version (I've only provided excerpts):

The Chinese Government tries to depict the popular resistance of Tibetans as the work of a few disgruntled aristocrats who wish to restore the old system of exploitation and oppression of the Tibetan masses. It depicts 95 per cent of the Tibetans as having been serfs, brutally oppressed by a small number of aristocrats and lamas. What China cannot explain is why these allegedly oppressed masses never rose up against their masters, despite the fact that Tibet did not have a national police force and for most of its history had no strong army. Yet, these same Tibetans did rise up, and still do today, against the massive security apparatus and army of China, knowing the tremendous risk they take. If we look at the social composition of the Tibetans involved in the successive uprisings and demonstrations, more than 80 per cent of them are not aristocrats and high lamas. Furthermore, more than 85 per cent of Tibetans in exile belong to what the Chinese would call "serf class".

***

On 28 March 1959, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai issued an Order of State Council "dissolving" the Government of Tibet. The Dalai Lama and his ministers, while still en route to India, reacted promptly by declaring that the new administration installed in Lhasa, which was totally controlled by the Chinese, would never be recognised by the people of Tibet. Upon his arrival in India, the Dalai Lama re-established the Tibetan Government in exile and publicly declared, "Wherever I am, accompanied by my government, the Tibetan people recognise us as the Government of Tibet."

Within months, around 80,000 Tibetans reached the borders of India, Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim after arduous escapes. Many more could not even make it to the border.

China's White Paper tries to portray these events as the work of a handful of Tibetan reactionaries who, with the help of the CIA, created an armed "rebellion" which was "resolutely" opposed by the masses. The Dalai Lama was "carried away under duress" to India, the White Paper states. The resistance, they claim, amounted to no more than 7,000 "rebels," and was put down easily in two days.

This view is hardly credible and has been contradicted even by the Chinese authorities themselves. Chinese army intelligence reports admit that the PLA killed 87,000 members of the Tibetan resistance in Lhasa and surrounding areas between March and October 1959 alone. [Xizang Xingshi he Renwu Jiaoyu de Jiben Jiaocai, PLA Military District's Political Report, 1960] The CIA's half-hearted assistance to the Tibetan resistance started in earnest only after the uprising, and, though welcomed by Tibetans, amounted to little. All the evidence shows that the uprising was massive, popular and widespread. The brutal repression which followed in all regions of Tibet only confirms this.

The Government of Tibet in Exile website has another article entitled, Traditional Society and Democratic Framework for Future Tibet. The article argues that "China has always justified its policy in Tibet by painting the darkest picture of traditional Tibetan society." It goes on to say that the Tibetan people, including serfs, had access to courts of law and the "right to sue their masters and carry their case in appeal to higher authorities." It also states that the maltreatment and suppression of peasants by landowners was forbidden, capital punishment was banned, and punishment by mutilation was outlawed in 1898 (except in cases of treason or conspiracy against the state). The article also outlines the democratic reforms that the exiled government has undergone and the system of democratic government that will be put into place when (and if) Tibet is independent once again. The article ends by saying, "The Tibetan struggle is, thus, not for the resurrection of the traditional system as the Chinese claim."

Neither version of old Tibet sounds like Shangri-La to me. Is the promise of a democratic Tibet rhetoric that is simply meant to garner support for a "free" Tibet? It seems unlikely that Tibet could ever regress to a feudal system again after the citizens have known the prosperity that has come from the last twenty years. I'm a fan of democracy, and I'd be interested to see Tibet as an independent, democratic nation. However, I doubt China's government feels the same. Perhaps in time we'll see China transform into a more democratic state...but that is a different discussion. For now, I feel like I am functioning with a more detailed picture of the Tibet situation than before and that should benefit any analysis of the situation even if it is still not clear to me.

Comments

[Thomas Chow]

Travis:

Thanks for the post. It does a good job cobbling together many of the resources that I have already seen, but many of my colleagues have not. I will refer them here to get an idea of a more neutral perspective.

Tom

[Travis Hodgkins]

Thanks, Tom. I kept seeing this information on different blogs and websites and I thought I'd put it together. I'm glad someone else appreciates it.

Best,
--Travis

[Chelsea]

It is a tricky job to sift through the different sides of the past with this issue. Thanks for doing so.. The history whether seen from either side does not hide the fact that present day Tibetan people are still being driven out of their own country as refugees, mysteriously disappearing and/or put into prison for simply speaking out. There are thousands of orphaned Tibetan children living in Dharmasala. I don't see how present day Tibet is any closer to democracy now under China's heavy handed censored rule. It is time for China to give Tibet back to the Tibetans!

[Abi]

Absolutely! (With regards to your "more information" comment). That was one of the more informative posts/items/articles I have read in a long time. Apparently I don't read enough because I haven't come across all these points of views and arguments. I admit that I too had an idyllic idea of what Tibet was like pre-China.
And no, neither version sounds very much like Shangri-La.
I am left wondering though, whether or not Tibet was better off before China came, would that justify oppression? Assuming, of course, that China is oppressive of course.

[poetryman69]

All nations, and especially the US, should boycott the open ceremonies. I believe it is the best compromise position. The athletes still get to compete but China gets exposed to the full measure of world displeasure with their horrible human rights abuses.

[Stephan Jockheck]

Thanks for the overview about the different points of view. It is very helpful for everybody who wants to form a differentiated opinion about the crisis in Tibet. As always the truth is the first victim in such a conflict but with your compilation of the information you help everybody to imagine what the truth is. I'm quite sure it lies somewhere in the middle.

[Kathy Podgers]

Thanks for weaving all this together. Let me see if I can understand what is going on here. Dalai Lama, a title conferred by Chinese Government had an opportunity when he accepted the 17 point agreement in 1951, and recieved the Chinese peacefully in Lhasa, to have Atonomy, and work with China to improve the life of 95% of the Tibetan people.

But, behind the back of the Chinese Government, he worked with his two elder brothers, both paid CIA agents, to plan a covert opperation that would include a staged "resurection" and his Highness himself voluntarily leaving Lhasa?

The CIA paid the Dalai Lama $180,000 yearly stipend, and 1.7 mill, yearly for support of his "supporters. The other wealthy slave owners? Then, when the staged uprising didn't succeed in getting the Tibetan people to join in, after all they had just been emancioated by the Chinese, the CIA with the blessings of the Dalai Lama set up terrorist camps in Mustang, Nepal, wor the purpose of conducting violent raids across border. This ended in 1974 when Nixon recognized China. But Congress continued to fund the destabelising efforts, and by the 2000's were paying 2.2 million for the Dharmasala outfit, which employed most of ther Dalai Lama's family members.

Meanwhile, back in the Tibet, China built schools for the children of tghe now free serfs and slaves, and for the first time in histroy they were able to learn to read. China also built roads and hospitals, as well as geothermal greenhouses so folks could have vegies to eat?

The life expectancy in the Dalai Lama's era was 35 years, but has now risen to 68 years, and the fertility rate is the highest in China.

All of this "progress" is called hunman rights abuses? I am supposed to feel some kind of sympathy for the Free Tibet movement. Please, give me a break!

The only reason why China brings up the condition of Old Tibet is to show how much progress has been made to correct the human rights abuses that existed before the Dalai Lama took the money and ran. Not to denegrate the Dalai Lama. But, when most people realize what life was like in Lhasa, they are horrified, and rightly so.

Now we have a US designed and funded riot in Lhasa with the horrific loss of innocent life, and the western media screems bloody murder, except they want to blame China. But oversees Chinese have been shocked and offended by the biased and unfair news "reports." So they have cinducted, on the net, an ad hoc invistigation, and outed the US privitized CIA network. At the same time, Xinhua is beefing up their reporting of the Chinese progress in human rights.

LOL

Meanwhile, in Nepal, 100 thousand refugees prepare to be relocated to third countries, 60 thousand to come to the US, because the "peaceful" Tibetan Buddhist leaders drove them out of Bhutan over the past 17 years in one of the worst examples of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen.

Happy Mother's Day. And if I was a mother in Tibet today, I would want my ethnic Tibetan kid to go to school, get a good education, and have a bright future in China, not to be enthralled by more Dalai Lama intrigue.Modernization is not cultural genocide. All people, yes, even Tibetan people, have a right to embrace a worthwhile future.

[Jack]

Well, looking at Nepal and how the sherpas are used like mules and cattles, I wonder, is it better to be Chinese mules or western mules? Just what exactly is a free Tibet suppose to bring? A change of master?

And since when is Dalai THE spiritual leader? Ban and Zen represents the 2 most sacred words in Buddaism, and the BanZen lama is regarded as the greater spiritual leader, and yet Dalai was presented as THE spiritual leader(Granted, Banzen died in 1990 and the reincarnate needs to be picked by Dalai), I suppose only the "free" leader is the true leader?

That being said nobody ever mentions the fact that Tibet was always governed by imerial China since the mongolian conquest (Dalai itself was a mongolian title bestowed by an Emperor), and as such was indeed feudal.

The sad fact is most people know shockingly little of Tibet (addmitedly, that includes me), but it is rather ludicrous to think that such romantic stories of paradise are anything but a fantasy. Much like the realities for knights in the past, there are exceptions, but generally not very romantic at all.

Tibet is history, and I've learned the hard way that, History can not be changed (it can, however, repeat itself).