Jump to navigation. Today, this culture is under threat from mass Chinese immigration and the strict control of all expressions of Tibetan culture and national identity. China boasts of huge investment in Tibet but its economic development is primarily intended to cement its hold on Tibet and enhance its ability to exploit Tibet's natural resources. Economic development has improved conditions for some Tibetans but overwhelmingly it favours Chinese migrants, continuing to disadvantage Tibetans economically.
Along with other countries around the world, Tibet has changed greatly over the past 70 years. However, Tibetans continue to work to preserve their culture and resist oppressive policies on a daily basis. Tibet has a long and rich history as a nation existing side-by-side with China while political power in Asia shifted between empires and kingdoms.
Following China's Communist revolution in , it invaded Tibet in Overwhelmed, Tibet was forced to give up its independence. Since , China's government has exercised total political control over Tibet, using all the tools of repression to deter and punish Tibetan resistance.
See timelines of key dates in Tibet's history. Note: A number of borders are disputed in the area surrounding Tibet. Free Tibet has no position on these disputes and the borders represented on this map are provided simply to be indicative of the position of historical Tibet in relation to its neighbours. Religious practice and Buddhist principles are a part of daily life for most Tibetans.
Monks and nuns play a key role in their communities, providing guidance and education. They are often very active in protecting and promoting Tibet's environment, language and culture. Almost all Tibetans are deeply devoted to the Dalai Lama and his exile and treatment by the Chinese government are sources of grief and anger.
Tibetans' allegiance to the Dalai Lama and to Tibetan Buddhism is seen as a danger to the occupying Chinese state and, as a result, all aspects of religious practice are closely monitored and controlled.
Simply possessing an image of the Dalai Lama can result in arrest and torture. Monks and nuns are frequently targeted by security restrictions and they make up a significant proportion of political prisoners in Tibet. China plans to replace the current Dalai Lama with its own puppet when the time comes. Please take action now to resist this plan and protect religious freedom in Tibet.
But the allegiances of many Tibetans lie with the exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, seen by his followers as a living god, but by China as a separatist threat. International attention was focused on the territory in during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.
Fatal clashes between anti-Chinese protesters and the authorities in Tibet were given wide publicity and the torch relay in London, Paris and San Francisco was dogged by pro-Tibet protests and stunts. Tibet has had a tumultuous history, during which it has spent some periods functioning as an independent entity and others ruled by powerful Chinese and Mongolian dynasties.
China sent in thousands of troops to enforce its claim on the region in Some areas became the Tibetan Autonomous Region and others were incorporated into neighbouring Chinese provinces. In , after a failed anti-Chinese uprising, the 14th Dalai Lama fled Tibet and set up a government in exile in India.
Most of Tibet's monasteries were destroyed in the s and s during China's Cultural Revolution. Thousands of Tibetans are believed to have been killed during periods of repression and martial law. Under international pressure, China eased its grip on Tibet in the s, introducing "Open Door" reforms and boosting investment. Beijing says Tibet has developed considerably under its rule. But rights groups say China continues to violate human rights, accusing Beijing of political and religious repression.
Beijing denies any abuses. Tourism and the ongoing modernisation drive stand in contrast to Tibet's former isolation. But Beijing's critics say Tibetans have little say in building their future. China says a new railway link between Lhasa and the western Chinese province of Qinghai will boost economic expansion.
The link is likely to increase the influx of Chinese migrants. Buddhism reached Tibet in the seventh century. The Dalai Lama, or Ocean of Wisdom, is the leading spiritual figure; the Panchen Lama is the second most important figure.
Both are seen as the reincarnations of their predecessors. The selection of a Dalai Lama and a Panchen Lama has traditionally followed a strict process. But the Dalai Lama and Beijing are at odds over the 11th incarnation of the Panchen Lama, having identified different youngsters for the role. The Dalai Lama's choice, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, has not been seen since his detention by the Chinese authorities in There have been intermittent and indirect contacts between China and the Dalai Lama.
The exiled spiritual leader advocates a non-violent, negotiated solution to the Tibet problem and accepts the notion of real autonomy for Tibet under Chinese sovereignty. China has questioned his claims that he does not seek independence. 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. One Han teacher told me that his students came primarily from nomad areas, where their families lived in tents; yet during the course of an average day they might have classes in Tibetan, Chinese, and English, three languages with almost nothing in common.
Political and religious issues are paramount. In Lhasa I met a twenty-one-year-old Tibet University student who was angered by his school's anti-religious stance, which is standard for schools in Tibet. But of course most of the students still believe in religion—I'd say that eighty to ninety percent of us are devout. Such complaints reflect the results of recent education reforms. A series of them made in , characteristically, represent both the good and the bad aspects of Chinese support.
On the one hand, the government stepped up its campaign against illiteracy, and on the other, it resolved to control the political content of education more carefully, in hopes of pacifying the region. There has certainly been some success with this approach: I met a number of educated Tibetans who identified closely with China.
Tashi, Mei Zhiyuan's roommate, seemed completely comfortable being both Tibetan and Chinese: he had studied in Sichuan, he had a good job, and he had the government's support to thank. When I asked him what was the biggest problem in Tibet, he mentioned language—but not in the way many Tibetans did. They need to study harder. Most Tibetans seemed less likely to accept Chinese support at face value.
But it was clear that politically they were being pulled in a number of directions at once, and my conversations with educated young Tibetans were dizzying experiences. Their questions ranged from odd "Which do you think is going to win, capitalism or socialism?
0コメント