Why tibet should not be free

Chinese officials labelled Sangay a terrorist for his previous involvement in a Tibetan separatist organisation. The channel, which has 5, subscribers, was initially set up to facilitate communication that would help bring people and resources where they were needed.

Hanna was detained on 28 October and held in pre-trial detention in Minsk. Ihnat Sidorchyk is a film director, actor and poet. Ihnat was released to await an appeal hearing, but he was re-arrested in June to begin serving his sentence.

November 9, November 8, November 5, Tibet in the 20th Century Tibet's status following the expulsion of Manchu troops is not subject to serious dispute.

What ever ties existed between the Dalai Lama and the Manchu emperors of the Qing Dynasty were extinguished with the fall of that empire and dynasty. From to , Tibet successfully avoided undue foreign influence and behaved, in every respect, as a fully independent state. Tibet maintained diplomatic relations with nepal, Bhutan, Britain, and later with independent India.

Relations with China remain strained. The Chinese waged a border war with Tibet while formally urging Tibet to "join" the Chinese Republic, claiming all along to the world that Tibet already was one of China's "five races. As the British delegation reminded his Chinese counterpart, Tibet entered the conference as "independent nation recognizing no allegiance to China.

It was, nevertheless, significant in that Anglo-Tibetans friendship was reaffirmed with the conclusion of bilateral trade and border agreements. In a Joint Declaration, Great Britain and Tibet bound themselves not to recognize Chinese suzerainty or other special rights in Tibet unless China signed the draft Simla Convention which would have guaranteed Tibet's greater borders, its territorial integrity and fully autonomy.

China never signed the Convention, however, leaving the terms of the Joint Declaration in full force. Tibet conducted its international relations primarily by dealing with the British, Chinese, Nepalese, and Bhutanese diplomatic missions in Lhasa, but also through government delegations travelling abroad. When India became independent, the British mission in Lhasa was replaced by an Indian one.

Tibet never maintained extensive international relations, but those countries with whom it did maintain relations treated Tibet as they would with any sovereign state. Its international status was in fact no different from, say, that of Nepal. Thus, when Nepal applied for United Nations' membership in , it cited its treaty and diplomatic relations with Tibet to demonstrate its full international personality.

After defeating the small Tibetan army and occupying half the country, the Chinese government imposed the so-called "Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet" on the Tibetan government in May Because it was singed under duress, the agreement lacked validity under international law. The presence of 40, troops in Tibet, the threat of an immediate occupation of Lhasa, and the prospect of the total obliteration of the Tibetan state left Tibetans little choice.

As the resistance to the Chinese occupation escalated, particularly in Eastern Tibet, the Chinese repression, which included the destruction of religious buildings and the imprisonment of monks and other community leaders, increased dramatically. By , popular uprising culminated in massive demonstrations in Lhasa.

By the time China crushed the uprising, 87, Tibetans were dead in the Lhasa region alone, and the Dalai Lama had fled to India, where he now heads the Tibetan Government-in-exile, headquartered in Dharmsala, India. In , the Dalai Lama promulgated a constitution for a democratic Tibet. It has been successfully implemented, to the extent possible, by the Government-in-exile. Meanwhile, in Tibet religious persecution, consistent violations of human rights, and the wholesale destruction of religious and historic buildings by the occupying authorities have not succeeded in destroying the spirit of the Tibetan people to resist the destruction of the national identity.

But the new generation of Tibetans seems just as determined to regain the country's independence as the older generation was. Back to Top Present Situation In the course of Tibet's 2,year history, the country came under a degree of foreign influence only for short periods of time in the 13th and 18th centuries. Few independent countries today can claim as impressive a record.

As the ambassador of Ireland to the UN remarked during the General Assembly debates on the question of Tibet, "for thousands of years, for a couple of thousands years at any rate, Tibet was a free and as fully in control of its own affairs as any nation in this Assembly, and a thousand times more free to look after it own affairs than many of the nations here.

It is an independent start under illegal occupation. Neither China's military invasion nor the continuing occupation by the PLA has transferred the sovereignty of Tibet to China. As pointed out earlier. It shortens your life. There is no medical evidence to support such a belief; indeed, in a heavily polluted country like China, where one of every four deaths is attributed to lung disease, the high, clean air of Tibet is probably tonic.

Nevertheless, this perception adds to the sense of sacrifice, and it is encouraged by the government pay structure, which links salary to altitude: the higher you work, the higher your pay. Even so, his salary is two to three times what he would make as a teacher in rural Sichuan, and he is able to send half his earnings home to his parents, who are peasants.

It's good money by Chinese standards but seems hardly a sufficient incentive for a young man to be willing to shorten his life. From the Chinese perspective, Tibet has always been a part of China. This is, of course, a simplistic and inaccurate view, but Tibetan history is so muddled that one can see in it what one wishes. The Chinese can ignore some periods and point to others; they can cite the year , when the Qing Emperor sent a Chinese army to help the Tibetans drive out the invading Nepalese, or explain that from to there were Qing ambans, imperial administrators, stationed in Lhasa.

In fact the authority of these ambans steadily decreased over time, and Tibet enjoyed de facto independence from to An unbiased arbiter would find Tibetan arguments for independence more compelling than the Chinese version of history—but also, perhaps, would find that the Chinese have a stronger historical claim to Tibet than the United States does to much of the American West.

Most important, China's reasons for wanting Tibet changed greatly over the years. For the Qing Dynasty, Tibet was important strictly as a buffer state; ambans and armies were sent to ensure that the region remained peaceful, but they made relatively few administrative changes, and there was no effort to force the Tibetans to adopt the Chinese language or Chinese customs.

In the Qing view, Tibet was a part of China but at the same time it was something different; the monasteries and the Dalai Lamas were allowed to maintain authority over most internal affairs. In the early twentieth century, as the Qing collapsed and China struggled to overcome the imperialism of foreign powers, Tibet became important for new reasons of nationalism. Intellectuals and political leaders, including Sun Yat-sen, believed that China's historical right to Tibet had been infringed by Western powers, particularly Britain, which invaded Tibet in to force the thirteenth Dalai Lama to open relations.

As Tibet slipped further from Chinese control, a steady stream of nationalistic rhetoric put the loss of Tibet into a familiar pattern—the humiliation by foreign powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Hong Kong went to the British, Manchuria and Shandong to the Japanese, Taiwan to the U. By the time Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China, in , Tibet had figured into the nation's pre-eminent task: the reunification of the once-powerful motherland.

Tibet thus changed from buffer state to a central piece in Communist China's vision of itself as independent and free from imperialist influence. Orville Schell, a longtime observer of China, says that even today this perception is held by most Chinese.

This issue touches on sovereignty, it touches on the unity of Chinese territory, and especially it touches on the issue of the West as predator, the violator of Chinese sovereignty. The irony is that China, like an abused child who grows up to revisit his suffering on the next generation, has committed similar sins in Tibet: the overthrow of the monasteries and the violent redistribution of land, the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, and the restriction of intellectual and religious freedom that continues to this day.

And as in any form of imperialism, much of the damage has been done in the name of duty. When the Chinese speak of pre Tibet, they emphasize the shortcomings of the region's feudal-theocratic government: life expectancy was thirty-six years; 95 percent of Tibetans were illiterate; 95 percent of the population was hereditary serfs and slaves owned by monasteries and nobles.

The sense is that the Tibetans suffered under a bad system, and the Chinese had a moral obligation to liberate them. Before traveling to Tibet, I asked my Chinese friends about the region. Most responded like Sai Xinghao, a forty-eight-year-old photographer: "It was a slave society, you know, and they were very cruel—they'd cut off the heads of their slaves and enemies.

I've seen movies about it. If you were a slave, everything was controlled by the master. So, of course, after Liberation the rich lords opposed the changes [instituted by the Chinese]. It's like your America's history, when Washington liberated the black slaves. Afterward the blacks supported him, but of course the wealthy class did not.

In history it's always that way—it was the same when Napoleon overthrew King Louis, and all of the lords opposed Napoleon because he supported the poor. My friend is not an educated man, but many Chinese intellectuals make the same comparison. President Jiang Zemin made a similar remark during his visit to the United States although he correctly identified Lincoln as the Great Liberator. The statistics about Tibetan illiteracy and life expectancy are accurate.

Although the Chinese exaggerate the ills of the feudal system, mid-century Tibet was badly in need of reform—but naturally the Tibetans would have much preferred to reform it themselves.

Another aspect of the Chinese duty in Tibet is the sense that rapid modernization is needed, and should take precedence over cultural considerations. For Westerners, this is a difficult perspective to understand.

Tibet is appealing to us precisely because it's not modern, and we have idealized its culture and anti-materialism to the point where it has become, as Orville Schell says, "a figurative place of spiritual enlightenment in the Western imagination—where people don't make Buicks, they make good karma.

But to the Chinese, for whom modernization is coming late, Buicks look awfully good. I noticed this during my first year as a teacher in China, when my writing class spent time considering the American West. We discussed western expansion, and I presented the students with a problem of the late nineteenth century: the Plains Indians, their culture in jeopardy, were being pressed by white settlers.

I asked my class to imagine that they were American citizens proposing a solution, and nearly all responded much the way this student did: "The world is changing and developing. We should make the Indians suit our modern life. The Indians are used to living all over the plains and moving frequently, without a fixed home, but it is very impractical in our modern life We need our country to be a powerful country; we must make the Indians adapt to our modern life and keep pace with the society.

Only in this way can we strengthen the country. Virtually all my students were from peasant backgrounds, and like most Chinese, the majority of them were but one generation removed from deep poverty. What I saw as freedom and culture, they saw as misery and ignorance. In my second year I repeated the lesson with a different class, asking if China had any indigenous people analogous to the Plains Indians.

All responded that the Tibetans were similar. I asked about China's obligation in Tibet. The answers suggested that my students had learned more from American history than I had intended to teach. One student replied, "First, I will use my friendship to help [the Tibetans]. But if they refuse my friendship, I will use war to develop them, like the Americans did with the Indians. Regardless of China's motivations, and regardless of its failures in Tibet, the drive to develop the region has been expensive.

According to Beijing, more than , Han workers have served in Tibet since the s. Taxes in Tibet are virtually nonexistent; Tibetan farmers, unlike those in the interior, receive tax-free leases of land, and a preferential tax code has been established to encourage business. Low-interest loans are available, and business imports from Nepal are duty-free. Despite the dearth of local revenues, government investment is steadily developing a modern infrastructure.

It is estimated that more than 90 percent of Tibet's government revenue comes from outside the region. This investment of both human and financial capital complicates the issue of Tibet in ways that few outsiders realize. Foreign reports often refer to the exploitation of Tibetan resources as a classic colonial situation, which is misleading.

Although Beijing is certainly doing what it can with Tibet's timber and mineral reserves, China spends an enormous amount of money in the region, and if self-sufficiency ever comes, it will not come soon. Tibet does have significant military value: the Chinese do not want to see it under the influence of a foreign power such as India, but not even this would seem to merit the enormous investment.

One foreign observer who has studied the region puts this in perspective: "For that same year the United States gave a total of eight hundred million dollars in aid to all of Africa.

That's all of Africa—we're talking about hundreds of millions of people. In Tibet there are only two and a half million. So if they become independent, who's going to be giving them that kind of money? In this sense Tibet needs China. But that's not to diminish the hideous savageness with which China has treated Tibet. Almost every aspect of Chinese support has two sides, and education illustrates the point well.

I met a number of young Han teachers like Mei Zhiyuan, who were imbued with a sense of service: they were conscientious, well-trained teachers, and they were working in places with a real need for instructors.

One volunteer was teaching English at a middle school where the shortage was so acute that many students had to delay the start of their English studies until the following year, when additional Han teachers were expected to arrive. I visited one district in which out of secondary-school teachers, sixty were Han, and many of the Tibetan instructors had been trained in the interior at the Chinese government's expense. Such links with the interior seem inevitable, given that the Chinese have built Tibet's public education system from scratch.

Before they arrived, in , there were no public schools in Tibet, whereas now there are more than 4, Likewise the schools I saw were impressive facilities with low student fees. In one town I toured the three local middle schools; two of them were newly built, with far better campuses than I was accustomed to seeing in China.

Unlike students at most Chinese schools, those at the local No. Everything possible was being done to encourage students to stay in school: a student's tuition and boarding charge were cut in half if only one parent worked, and transportation to and from the remote nomad areas was often free. In a poor country such policies are impressively generous; essentially, Tibetan schools are better funded than Chinese schools.

And this funding is sorely needed: the adult illiteracy rate in Tibet is still 52 percent. Only 78 percent of the children start elementary school, and of those only 35 percent enter middle school. But Chinese assistance must be considered in the context of what's being taught in the schools—a critical issue for Tibetans. One morning I visited an elementary school on a spacious, beautiful campus, with new buildings and a grass playground that stretched westward under the shadow of a 14,foot mountain.

Most of the school's students were Tibetan. I paused at the central information board, where announcements were written in Chinese. Next to this was a notice telling students to "remember the great goals.

Beside these goals was a long political section that read, in part,. It was heavy stuff for elementary school students and indeed, if I were a Chinese propagandist, I would think twice before exhorting Tibetan children to resist imperialism , and it indicates how politicized the climate of a Chinese school is. Despite all the recent economic changes in China, the education system is still tied to the past. This conservatism imbues every aspect of education, starting with language.

Two of the schools I visited were mixed Han and Tibetan, and classes were segregated by ethnicity. The reasons here are linguistic: most Tibetan children don't start learning Mandarin until elementary school, and even many Tibetan high school students, as the Han teachers complained, don't understand Chinese well.

This segregation leads to different curricula—for example, Tibetan students have daily Tibetan-language classes, whereas Han students use that time for extra English instruction. To the Chinese, this system seems fair, especially since Tibetan students have the right to join the Han classes. But Tibetans feel that there is an overemphasis on Chinese, especially at the higher levels, which threatens their language and culture.

All the classes taught by Han teachers are in Chinese or English, and most of the Tibetan teachers in the middle and high schools are supposed to use Mandarin although the ones I spoke with said they often used Tibetan, because otherwise their students wouldn't understand. In any case, important qualifying exams emphasize Chinese, and this reflects a society in which fluency is critical to success, especially when it comes to any sort of government job. Another, more basic issue is that Tibetan students are overwhelmed.