|
In
Western countries, the movement to 'free Tibet' from
Chinese occupation is very popular among the 57 different
varieties of liberals and human rights campaigners.
The media generally presents a very positive image
of Buddhism, the Dalai Lama is hailed as a modern
saint, and an idealized image of Tibet before the
Chinese take over is given. However, it is worth examining
what sort of place Tibet was before the Chinese intervention,
who benefited and who lost from it, and who the people
campaigning for 'free Tibet' are (1).
In
Tibet, prior to the Chinese take over, theocratic
despotism had been the rule for generations. An English
visitor to Tibet in 1895, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote
that the Tibetan people were under the "intolerable
tyranny of monks" and the devil superstitions
they had fashioned to terrorize the people. In 1904
Perceval Landon described the Dalai Lama's rule as
"an engine of oppression" and "a barrier
to all human improvement." At about that time,
another English traveler, Captain W.F.T. O'Connor,
observed that "the great landowners and the priests
. . . exercise each in their own dominion a despotic
power from which there is no appeal," while the
people are "oppressed by the most monstrous growth
of monasticism and priest-craft the world has ever
seen." Tibetan rulers, like those of Europe during
the Middle Ages, "forged innumerable weapons
of servitude, invented degrading legends and stimulated
a spirit of superstition" among the common people
(Stuart Gelder and Roma Gelder, The Timely Rain:
Travels in New Tibet, New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1964, 123-125). In Tibet, slavery was the rule.
The
following account was written by Sir Charles Bell,
who was the British administrator for Chumbi Valley
in 1904-05: "'Slaves were sometimes stolen, when
small children, from their parents. Or the father
and mother, being too poor to support their child,
would sell it to a man, who paid them _sho-ring_,
"price of mother's milk," brought up the
child and kept it, or sold it, as a slave. These children
come mostly from south-eastern Tibet and the territories
of the wild tribes who dwell between Tibet and Assam.'
(Charles Bell, Tibet: Past and Present, Oxford,
1924, pp. 78-79. Taken from http://www.faqs.org/faqs/tibet-faq)
In
1953, six years before the Chinese takeover, the greater
part of the rural population (some 700,000 of an estimated
total population of 1,250,000) were serfs. Serfs and
other peasants generally received no schooling or
medical care. They spent most of their time working
for the monasteries and high-ranking lamas, or for
a secular aristocracy that numbered not more than
200 families. They were in practice owned by their
masters who told them what crops to grow and what
animals to raise. They could not get married without
the consent of their lord or lama. A serf might easily
be separated from his family should the owner send
him to work in a distant location. Serfs could be
sold by their masters, or subjected to torture and
death (for more details see http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html).
Whatever
wrongs and new oppressions introduced by the Chinese
in Tibet after 1959, they did abolish slavery and
the serfdom system of unpaid labor. They started work
projects, and greatly reduced unemployment and beggary.
They built the only hospitals that exist in the country,
and established secular education, thereby breaking
the educational monopoly of the monasteries. They
constructed running water and electrical systems in
Lhasa. They also put an end to floggings, mutilations,
and amputations as a form of criminal punishment under
Buddhist rule. Chinese rule in Tibet has often been
brutal, however its extent has often been exaggerated.
The
accusations made by the Dalai Lama himself about Chinese
mass sterilization and forced deportation of Tibetans,
for example, have remained unsupported by any evidence.
Both the Dalai Lama and his advisor and youngest brother,
Tendzin Choegyal, claimed that more than 1.2 million
Tibetans are dead as a result of the Chinese occupation.
This figure is more than dubious. The official 1953
census, six years before the Chinese take over, recorded
the entire population of Tibet at 1,274,000. Other
estimates varied from one to three million. Other
census counts put the ethnic Tibetan population within
the country at about two million (Pradyumna P. Karan,
The Changing Face of Tibet: The Impact of Chinese
Communist Ideology on the Landscape, Lexington,
Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1976, 52-53).
If the Chinese killed 1.2 million then entire cities
and huge portions of the countryside, indeed almost
all of Tibet, would have been depopulated - something
for which there is no evidence. The Chinese military
force in Tibet was not large enough to round up, chase,
and exterminate that many people even if it had spent
all its time doing this.
It
is worth examining who is behind the 'Free Tibet'
movement. The former elites lost many of their privileges
due to the Chinese takeover. The family of the Dalai
Lama lost no fewer than 4000 slaves! It is thus not
surprising that feudal lords should campaign against
the social gains of Maoism. Their campaign has found
an international echo thanks to the CIA. Throughout
the 1960s the Tibetan exile community received $1.7
million a year from the CIA, according to documents
released by the State Department in 1998. The Dalai
Lama's organization itself admits that it had received
millions of dollars from the CIA during the 1960s
to send armed squads of exiles into Tibet to undermine
the Maoist revolution. The Dalai Lama's annual share
was $186,000, making him a paid agent of the CIA.
Indian intelligence also financed him and other Tibetan
exiles (Jim Mann, "CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles
in '60s, Files Show," Los Angeles Times,
15 September 1998; and New York Times, 1 October,
1998). Today, mostly through the National Endowment
for Democracy and other conduits that are more respectable-sounding
than the CIA, the US Congress continues to allocate
an annual $2 million to Tibetans in India, with additional
millions for "democracy activities" within
the Tibetan exile community (See Kenneth Conboy and
James Morrison, The CIA's Secret War in Tibet,
Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2002,
for example).
Also,
while presenting himself as a defender of human rights,
the Dalai Lama supports more than dubious causes.
For example, in April 1999, along with Margaret Thatcher
and George Bush senior, the Dalai Lama called upon
the British government to release Augusto Pinochet.
While
Chinese rule is resented by many in Tibet, people
are also afraid to loose the social gains of Maoism.
A 1999 story in the Washington Post notes that
the Dalai Lama continues to be revered in Tibet, but
"few Tibetans would welcome a return of the corrupt
aristocratic clans that fled with him in 1959 and
that comprise the bulk of his advisers. Many Tibetan
farmers, for example, have no interest in surrendering
the land they gained during China's land reform to
the clans. Tibet's former slaves say they, too, don't
want their former masters to return to power. "I've
already lived that life once before," said Wangchuk,
a 67-year-old former slave who was wearing his best
clothes for his yearly pilgrimage to Shigatse, one
of the holiest sites of Tibetan Buddhism. He said
he worshipped the Dalai Lama, but added, "I may
not be free under Chinese communism, but I am better
off than when I was a slave." (John Pomfret,
"Tibet Caught in China's Web," Washington
Post, 23 July 1999)
(1)
This article has benefited greatly
from much of the information contained in http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html.
Index: Current Articles + Latest News and Views + Book Reviews +
Letters + Archives
|
