If you have genuine interest in peace and the well being of the Tibetan people, please take time to read the following....Background to the problems in Tibet The ordinary people throughout the world who are concerned about Tibet are well intentioned. However, they have been subverted and manipulated by powerful Western interest groups in the past 50 years or more, whose interest is not the Tibetan people but to use the Tibetan region to undermine China to achieve their global political and economic interests. The Western powers, in particular the USA, have a well-documented history in the post Second World War years of organising "internal" rebellions within sovereign states for regime change, failing which they have resorted to fermenting, covert and overt, unrest in the name of "democracy and human rights", throughout the world
The situation in Tibet is very much more complicated than the simplistic view propagated very successfully by Western groups with narrow self-interests that China suppresses the Tibetan people. Over the years such propaganda have become common "facts" that are accepted at face value by well-intentioned people.
Yes, China did commit mistakes, some severe mistakes, in Tibet. However, objective foreign commentators have acknowledged that China has brought huge social, economic and educational progress to the people of Tibet.
We should ask a few simple questions: Why have the Western powers ignored the plight of the Tibetan people who, until the 1950s, had lived in a semi-slave and medieval society where the majority of them were treated by their Tibetan masters as slaves, serfs and beasts of burden with no human rights or democracy? Please read and study the real history of the lives of ordinary Tibetans before the late 1950s. How was it that the "freedom" of the Tibetan people became such a great concern of the Western powers, the USA in particular, only from the Cold War years in the 1950s?
Tibetan society Tibet was for centuries, right up to the mid-twentieth century, a form of a mix of slave-owning and serf society. The Tibetan theocracy was very much part of the Tibetan feudal establishment. Up to the 1950s, 200 to 300 noble families and the monasteries owned 60 percent of the land, the rest owned by the feudal Tibetan government. About 90 percent of Tibetans were serfs including the Thralpas and Dudchhong who had no land or personal freedom. They were chattels of their feudal lords. 5 percent of the Tibetans were house slaves called Nangzan. The serfs and slaves, who accounted for over 95 per cent f the population, were bound for life to the land of the feudal lords, ordered about and enslave! d from generation to generation. They were freely given away as gifts or dowries, sold or exchanged for goods. Shackled by feudal serfdom, the population of the Tibetan ethnic group showed little growth and production stagnated.
In the time of imperial China and during the brief rule Chiang Kai Shek, it was not in the interest of the Chinese feudal establishment to undermine the feudal slave-owning serf society in Tibet. The Chinese Communist Government from the very early 1950s started a programme of gradual transformation of the feudal slave-owning serf society.
However, during the land reform throughout China in the early 1950s, excesses were committed by sections of the Tibetan serfs who had a deep hatred and bitterness against oppressive feudal systems. These excesses were encouraged by the hardcore extreme left sections among the Chinese communists. This brought to surface the deep divisions within the Tibetan society which have been simmering for centuries and which became more acute following the establishment of the Chinese Communist Government
Dalai Lama's flight from ChinaThe CIA and British intelligence wanted to use strategic parts of Tibet to spy on China, especially the Xinjiang region where China was developing its nuclear capabilities in response to Western and Soviet Union nuclear armaments in the 1950s. They also wanted client states that border western China so as to target and to encircle China as they have Taiwan in the East for similar purposes.
The CIA working in collaboration with British intelligence infiltrated and subverted sections of the ruling Tibetan feudal and theocracy establishment in Tibet. Large sections of the ruling Tibetan feudal and theocracy establishment were anti the Chinese government because the Chinese government, in reforming Tibetan society, was freeing the Tibetan serfs and slaves. The reform challenged and undermined the economic and political dominance of the Tibetan feudal and theocracy establishment. An armed uprising, covertly planned, organised and armed by the CIA and British intelligence, against the Chinese and those patriotic Tibetans who were in favour of the reforms in Tibet failed. This resulted in the flight of the Dalai Lama to India.
The Dalai Lama, at that time in his early youth and surrounded by "advisers" from the anti-Chinese sections of the Tibetan feudal and theocracy establishment, was supported and used as a pawn by the Western powers. India in the 1950s was a covert ally of the West and gave refuge to the Dalai Lama.
India, in recent years has its own secession problems in Punjab and Kashmir, and is alleging Pakistan of involvement in the Kashmir. India, today, with its own secession problems, has not allowed the exiled Tibetan community in India to overtly ferment Tibetan secession from China. Please also note that in the early to mid 1950s the CIA and British intelligence organised a coup in Iran against a vastly popular democratic government and installed Reza Pahlavi as the notorious autocratic anti-democratic Shah of Iran who is renowned for his absolute abuse of human rights. This was to secure Western oil interests.
Unfortunately, the excesses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which adversely affected the whole of China and not just Tibet, have done much damage to the relationship between Tibetan and Han Chinese. This damaged relationship has been exploited by anti-China groups to stir further resentment against the Chinese government
Dalai Lama Today The Dalai Lama is the religious leader of the Tibetans and a holy man. Over the years, he has gradually been doing his utmost to prise himself from being the pawn of anti-China groupings. However groupings in the West that have their own economic and political agenda are still using the Dalai Lama to further their cause in China.
The Dalai Lama has denounced publicly the use of violence by all concerned, including the anti-China elements of the Tibetan community. He has also said that the Tibetans and the rest of China have to learn to live together in peace.
Current disturbances in TibetThe recent disturbances in Tibet is the work of a combination of some Tibetans who are dissatisfied with or/and are against various aspects of the Chinese policies in Tibet (which dissatisfaction they are entitled to), and elements covertly encouraged and supported by forces in the West whose purpose is to create violent protests in an attempt to damage China's image and reputation.
The Iraq war has shown how unreliable the "free press" of the West are, in particular Fox News in the USA, with their reporting of international news. Except for some minority news channels and CCTV, the Western TV news channels did not report and show events in Tibet where:
1. Rioters in Lhasa in groups of 30 to 40, including some dressed in monks' robes and some armed with knives and rods, gathering before the start of the riots. There were no public security personnel around.
2. The rioters throwing stones, beating and knifing passers-by on foot and motorcycles. Rioters tearing down shop fronts and looting, and flipping over vehicles, slashing and beating ordinary people on the streets. In these incidents no security forces were around.
3. Individual policemen that were around were attacked, stoned and beaten. When security forces finally arrived, they were attacked.
4. More than 200 sites were set on fire, 300 homes and buildings burnt and destroyed. Schools and hospitals were attacked. Six girls, some of them Tibetans, were trapped by the rioters on the second level of a shop, of whom five died.
5. Tibetan doctors said they were beaten when they tried to evacuate or treat the wounded.
It is interesting to see on the China Daily news website that the Washington Post had used a photo of a Nepal policeman beating a man in Katmandu as a scene of the Lhasa riots.
The above were not peaceful protests and demonstrations but organised violent rioting along different gathering points on ordinary peaceful streets. The rioters were armed. The dead and wounded were ordinary people and security people.
It is clear that the riots were pre-planned and not spontaneous. It is very likely that they were concerted and backed by external forces, with the Taiwan elections and the Olympics on the horizon. It is in the light of the above that the Dalai Lama condemned the violence and repeated what he told Jonathan Mirsky of the Observer newspaper, London, more than fifteen years ago, that if the majority of the Tibetans in Tibet resorted to violence in their freedom struggle, he would have no option but to resign as spokesperson of the Tibetan people. On the issue of independence, he reiterated that what he is seeking is meaningful autonomy for the Tibetan people. See the official website of the Dalai Lama.
In the light of the above there are still Tibetan dissidents who claim they are followers of the Dalai Lama, agitating including violent protests, with the support of interest groups in the West, for the "independence" of Tibet.
Tibet as part of China Is Tibet historically part of China? Tibet was spiritually linked to China from about 1370 in a "priest-ruler" relationship.
Traditionally Tibet's Lamaist Buddhist theocracy had recognised the ultimate temporal power of China's emperor, while the emperor recognized Lhasa's spiritual primacy and autonomy.
Lhasa became the Vatican for the Mongol Empire and its successor, China's Ming Empire. In 1913, while China was in chaos, the British Empire took advantage of the chaotic conditions and fermented the declaration of independence of Tibet. This was part of the British design to carve up China.
The Chinese Nationalist Government of the Republic of China from 1911 and the People's Republic of China (PRC) from 1949 did not recognise or accept the British-inspired independence. The PRC, citing historical records and the Seventeen Point Agreement signed by the Tibetan government in 1951, reunited Tibet as a province of China.
Currently every country in the world recognizes China's sovereignty over Tibet. The Dalai Lama does not reject China's sovereignty over Tibet and has on record stated that he wants autonomy not independence for Tibet
Carving up ChinaIn the past 200 years, the West with Japan have been attempting to carve up China to serve their economic and political objectives.
The first and second Opium Wars (Britain attacked China for boarding British ships in Chinese harbours and destroying opium that the British was selling in China) in the mid-eighteenth century saw the direct assault on Chinese territories resulting, in the British taking over Hong Kong as a prize of war and the occupation of Chinese "treaty" ports by European powers.
In as recently as 1900, following the Boxers Rebellion in China, which was substantially a Chinese uprising in protest against foreign intervention in China, eight nations, (USA, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Austria and Japan) invaded China. The West did not come to the assistance of China when Japan invaded China in 1931. It was only following the outbreak of the Second World War, when Japan invaded the European colonies in Asia and attacked Pearl Harbour, did the West then join in the war against Japan.
The attempts to weaken China by vested interest groups so as to penetrate and dominate the country have not slackened even in the present time. The approach has changed from crude, outright, overt violent intervention and invasion to covert subversion. The new approach is to ferment agitation for so-called democracy in order to undermine Chinese central authority and to create different spheres of power under the patronage of foreign interest groups within China.
The "pro democracy" movement in Hong Kong before and immediately after Hong Kong was rightly returned to! China, the campaign for independence by a vocal sizable minority in Taiwan, and the disturbances in Tibet are all part and parcel of the relentless, present-day strategy to carve up China We should be alert as groups with a sinister agenda for economic and political domination of China and far right religious groups will be attempting to manipulate well intentioned but misinformed people around the world to carry out anti-China agitation as we drawer nearer to the Beijing Olympics.
Stephen Chang, London 23 March 2008 "As fire in wood, as ghee in milk, the Luminous one lies hid within. First fix the churning stick of love, pass round the cord, intelligence, then twirl and God will bless thy sight" Saint Tirunavukkarasar
